It's always on in the wee hours on the west coast. I remember seeing it a long time ago and thought it should have been a hit.Originally Posted by Sturgeon's Lawyer
It's always on in the wee hours on the west coast. I remember seeing it a long time ago and thought it should have been a hit.
Last edited by 3LockBox; 10-01-2024 at 12:57 PM.
Watching Svengoolie.....The Dead Of Night, with Patrick McGoohan.
Been watching Highway Patrol and Dragnet. Highway Patrol is one of those shows I've heard about for decades, because even in the 80's and beyond, comedians were doing impressions of Broderick Crawford as Dan Matthews. I remember the "juvenile delinquent" segment in It Came From Hollywood had a bit with Dan Aykroyd doing Crawford, and David Letterman was fond of launching into a Crawford impression, usually whenever he had Matthew Broderick or his girlfriend/wife/whatever-she-is. "Punks like you are a dime a dozen!"
Anyway, never seen the show before FETV started running. It's an ok show, it's a very early cop show (mid 50's), so it doesn't quite have the panache that a show like Dragnet or Adam-12. I think it may have been one of the first shows to be shot on location, as there's a lot of outdoor stuff. It's also interesting to watch to see how many people we now recognize were on the show. Clint Eastwood plays a biker in one episode. Leonard Nimoy plays a crook in another. I forget who else I've seen on the show.
Dragnet, I remember watching when I was little, because my mom would watch reruns on the USA channel back in the 80's. THen I didn't really see much of it for about 30 years, then I started seeing it on one of the cable channels circa 2016, and I watched it for a bit. Now FETV has it, and I'm basically through my third go round with it. I like Dragnet, but it's obvious that whoever wrote the show (maybe even Jack Webb) clearly didn't understand, and presumably didn't like, youth culture of any way, shape, or form. And the "marijuana leads to more serious drugs" mantra that pops up regularly gets tedious, boring, etc. There's at least one episode where Friday says something like "Heroin users always start with marijuana" (actually, most of them start with alcohol, asshole, but I guess you can't bad mouth something that's legal, can you?). But aside from the propaganda bullshit, it's a good show. I like the interaction between Webb and Harry Morgan, and again, you sometimes see people you recognize. And it had the best Xmas episode ever.
You think Dragnet and Adam-12 have panache?????
Years ago, I saw some analysis of the argument that marijuana is a gateway drug. Using lots of examples from movies and instructional videos, that argument was actually veiled racism, since "good, middle-class, white kids" didn't use drugs and because those drugs were also stereotypically associated with jazz and black musicians or Latinos.And the "marijuana leads to more serious drugs" mantra that pops up regularly gets tedious, boring, etc. There's at least one episode where Friday says something like "Heroin users always start with marijuana" (actually, most of them start with alcohol, asshole, but I guess you can't bad mouth something that's legal, can you?)
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white zone."
"The Lost Art of the Sitcom Opening"
https://thecontinentalcongress.subst...sitcom-opening
Substack essay about '70s sitcom intros.
They strike me as being more sophisticated than Highway Patrol. You don't like Dragnet or Adam 12?
I don't know nothing about that kind of stuff. I just know that these days, addiction experts actually say that alcohol was the primary "gateway drug" for most users.Years ago, I saw some analysis of the argument that marijuana is a gateway drug. Using lots of examples from movies and instructional videos, that argument was actually veiled racism, since "good, middle-class, white kids" didn't use drugs and because those drugs were also stereotypically associated with jazz and black musicians or Latinos.
Without readnig it, I'd point out TV show intros in general are a "lost art", not just sitcoms. I remember someone posting a video on Youtube, which was their (presumably facetious) take on what the Rockford Files intro would be like if it had been done today. You got about three rings of the phone, while the show's title appears, followed by just the intro of theme music/montage, and none of the actual "head" arrangement. That's it! Over and done in like 10 seconds. Or maybe you might have the answering message, and then just the intro of the theme. And you wouldn't get things like the intros to I, Spy or Mannix, either.
Rockford was by no means a sitcom, but a lot of the time it was funnier than most sitcoms.
Go ahead and read it; it includes youtube clips.
Yesterday watched Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein on TCM. Classic!
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I saw a movie yesterday on Movie! Channel........
Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Horrible, cheap, crap sci-fi. Obviously an Alien type of crappy sci-fi. Jonie Cunningham is in the movie. . Loads of fun.
Perhaps because of a bigger budget? Not that Dragnet or Adam-12 had large budgets. But I don't know; I've never seen that show.
I didn't like Dragnet as a kid. But then, I grew up in the late '60s/'70s and it was considered "square" – because it was. I got into Adam-12 for a few months as a kid but grew tired of it pretty quickly.You don't like Dragnet or Adam 12?
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white zone."
Right? A movie's job is to entertain you. It's not about how 'good' or 'bad' or 'relevant' some critic deems it. Did it entertain you, is always priority one, in my book.
And yes, that is a great little exploitation b-movie, says I.
Neil
"Just know that even if we listen to the same bands, I listen to them BETTER than you" - Gene Meyer
I'm sure that we probably rented that* 40 or so years ago, though I have no specific memory of it.
* - on βeta
Yeah there was some cleavage and a dead naked girl in it.And yes, that is a great little exploitation b-movie, says I.
^^^ Not to mention Robert Englund and Ray Walton -- pretty good star power for a Roger Corman film!
Impera littera designata delenda est.
And Edward Albert, Eddie "Green Acres" Albert's son.
Yeah, Erin Moran was kinda hot in that picture! That picture had a really cool cast, with Edward Albert, Ray Walston, and I think Sid Haig was in that one too.
That's also got that famous since where the other lady crewman is...well, if you've seen the movie, you know what happens to her. They had to re-edit that scene to avoid an X rating, and unfortunately, the excised footage was eventually lost. From what I gather it's just a couple seconds anyway.
Love the synth score. Michael Hoenig did some work on that, though I'm not sure if he played the music or just did sound effects.
Another bit of trivia connected to that film is, one of the crew was a young James Cameron. There's a scene where they wanted a bunch of maggots to wiggle around, but couldn't get them to do so. Cameron is said to have suggested putting them on a metal plate, attach a couple wires to said metal plate, and run a mild electrical current through the wires. Worked like a charm, the maggots wiggled around the way the director wanted.
Supposedly, this was the reason Cameron got hired to direct his first (and in my opinion, his best) feature film, which was a picture called Piranha II: The Spawning (starring future Star Trek escapee Tricia O'Neal, and Lance Henriksen). The story that's always been told is that Cameron got fired off the picture after about two weeks, because he kept getting into arguments with the producer. But I suspect Cameron probably directed at least 3/4's of the picture, with whatever stuff wasn't helmed by him being limited the bits with the two Penthouse Pets who end up getting chomped (oh, c'mon, that's not a spoiler! Women who look like that always end up dead in these movies!) and the sort of "comic relief" scenes on the beach during the first act of the picture.
Cameron's told conflicting stories about whta happened after that. At one point, he was saying he broke into the editing bay at night, and recut the picture to his liking. Another time, he said he was only kidding when he said that, but in fact, he made a deal with a video distributor to let him edit the picture before it was issued on home video (that might explain the absence of one of the scenes with the Pets, the one where they're both topless and the one girl is giving the bullshit soliloquy about being bad ass pirates "giving no quarter and asking for none" or whatever...seducing a dorky resort cook into providing you with provisions, and then tricking him into taking a fall into the water, while you sail away, is not piracy, especially not in an exploitation movie, that's just setting yourself up to be part of the body count).
Edward Albert seemed to do a lot of exploitation pictures. I remember he was in one called The House Where Evil Dwells, where he plays an American businessman, who moves into a house in Tokyo (along with his wife, played by the super hot Susan George) where, a century and a half earlier, a samurai murdered his wife and her lover (then committed suicide), and the ghosts are still haunting the house. His wife eventually has an affair with another American (played by Doug McClure), and you can probably imagine where the story goes from there, with history repeating itself.
I also remember him in an early 90's picture called Sorceress, which also had Linda Blair, Julie Strain, Michael Parks, and William "Blacula" Marshall.
They got crabs.
Not just crabs, but also what Frank Zappa once referred to as an "unpronounceable disease".
Yep she was cute. A shame the way her life ended.Yeah, Erin Moran was kinda hot in that picture!
I wish that I was still in contact with a friend of mine, because he was actually the underwater cinematographer on Piranha II. Going by memory, I think he told that the original director got fired after a few weeks, and that was when Cameron stepped up and lobbied to take over and got the job. He never mentioned Cameron subsequently getting the boot, but again, he told me that story a long time ago.
Neil
"Just know that even if we listen to the same bands, I listen to them BETTER than you" - Gene Meyer
Yeah, I forgot about that, but you're right. Originally, a director named Miller Drake was brought in to work on the picture. When Drake was involved, they wrote up a script that was more a direct sequel to the first brought back both Kevin McCarthy and Barbara Steele's characters (even though McCarthy had apparently died in the first one). But at some point, that script got thrown out, Drake was fired, and Cameron got promoted to directing.
But yeah, the thing about Cameron also getting sacked was something I remember hearing multiple times over the years, dating back to when I first got on the internet, and I started finding websites devoted to exploitation pictures and B-movies. My impression was that he and producer Ovidio Assontis did a lot of arguing, which is why he was let go. Cameron was on, I think 60 Minutes a number of years ago, I guess around the time Avatar came out, and they brought up Piranha II, and I remember he specifically mentioned the presence of the two Penthouse Pets as point of contention on his part. I've more recently read that while he was shooting all the main plot stuff on one side of the island, working with the main cast (e.g. Tricia O'Neil, Steve Marachuk and Lance Henriksen), Assontis was on the other side of the island, with a "second unit" team shooting the stuff with the Penthouse Pets, and possibly, the "comic relief" stuff, also. Supposedly, when Cameron learned of this, because apparently he hadn't been told they were gonna have topless Pets or comedy in the picture, he went through the roof, and that's where a lot of the trouble started.
Also, i think another point of contention was most of the crew were Italian, and virtually none of them spoke English, so I guess that probably caused some issues too, though I gather from the fact that they had experience working in this genre, Cameron was still able to get his point across to them about what he wanted them to do.
And I agree, it's too bad you're not still in contact with that friend, because I'd love to hear any stories he might have had about working on that picture. I kinda have a thing about movies with scuba sequences (that's the reason I stayed up that Friday or Saturday night, to 2:00am, to watch it on the local ABC affiliate the first time), so it'd be interesting to hear what he could tell about shooting those scenes.
One story I do remember hearing, from Tricia O'Neil herself, is that bit near the end, where she and Steve Marachuk are trying to escape from the killer fish, and they're swimming through these air ducts in the sunken ship, at one point, they were swim through this one shaft, come to a grating that leads to open water. If you've seen the picture, the two actors remove their scuba gear, and she swims up to the grating (Marachuk's character perishes, when his weight belt gets caught on part of an air duct and he gets chomped). The grating was apparently a lot harder to get open than it was supposed to, and she nearly drowned while filming that shot. When she's shown throwing all of her weight against the grating to get it open, there was a lot less acting involved in that than an actual real life response to the situation (as per Veronica Cartwright's performance in Alien, when we see the first chestburster, she geniunely freaked because neither she nor any of the other actors besides John Hurt and Tom Skerritt knew what was gonna happen).
Last edited by GuitarGeek; 10-12-2024 at 12:32 PM.
Pretty much the king of B-movies back in the 70s, especially the Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations. He made a ton of money. Was he in anything considered great?
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
I was just reading about him recently. He was one of the first character actors I knew by name as a kid. Probably because I saw him in a ton of stuff on TV in the '70s.
Depends on your definition of great. A better question might be, "was he in any bigger budget movies?" And the answer to that question is yes:Was he in anything considered great?
South Pacific (bit role, probably uncredited), Gidget, The Unforgiven (w/Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn), Shenandoah (second billing, behind James Stewart), Beau Geste (second billing), Cannonball Run II, and 52 Pick-Up (w/Roy Scheider and Ann Margaret). And he had a cameo in the Mel Gibson remake of Maverick.
He was also in an episode of the miniseries Roots.
Disclaimer: The only one I actually remembered was Shenandoah. The rest I saw in his filmography on Wikipedia.
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white zone."
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