Losing Patty

I'm so sorry to hear that actress Patty Duke has passed away at age 69. She was a fixture of TV reruns during my childhood.



READ MORE: “R.I.P., Patty Duke,” by Ken Levine; “Godspeed Patty Duke,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts); “The Hat Squad—Remembering Patty Duke,” by Toby O’B (Inner Toob); “Disastrous Demise: Patty Duke, 1946-2016” (Poseidon’s Underworld).

Just My Type

In case you didn’t know (and I’m confident you are surprised, as I was), February is International Typewriter Appreciation Month. There are still occasions when I miss the clack-clack and vigorously tossed-back carriages of typewriters. But then I remember how much paper I used to go through, trying to create clean copies of my articles, and I am glad to be working before the glow of a computer screen.

Journalist-blogger Bob Sassone has put together a list of “great typewriter-related sites you should check out” this month.

READ MORE: “A Brief History of the Typewriter,” by Bryan Dugan (Mental Floss).

Chasing After Fame

It was 50 years ago today that The Fugitive, the drama series created by Roy Huggins and starring David Janssen, debuted on ABC-TV. That program about a physician accused of his wife’s murder, and his subsequent struggle to track down the One-Armed Man he’s convinced holds the answers to her slaying, eventually ran for 120 hour-long episodes over four years, becoming one of the most respected small-screen productions in history.

Stephen Bowie opines in the A.V. Club blog that it “may be the perfect television drama.

That’s not to say that The Fugitive is superior to today’s best dramas, or even to its finest contemporaries, like The Defenders and Ben Casey. But The Fugitive achieved a perfection of form that was unique: It was part crime procedural, part action-adventure, and part character-driven melodrama. It was fusion TV. The push and pull between the contrasting generic elements meant that episodes were highly varied, but with so many different traditions to draw from, nearly always satisfying. The Fugitive achieved a phenomenally consistent level of quality--which makes this a particularly tough list to compile.

You will find my own tribute to The Fugitive--posted four decades after its final episode aired, on August 29, 1967--by clicking here. And in celebration of today’s 50th anniversary, Bowie provides an interesting alternative ending to Richard Kimble’s saga here.

At Sea with the Captain

At the height of their renown, The Captain & Tennille perform “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

I almost never remember my dreams, but last night I dreamt that I had to drop something off at a small downtown business which turned out to be operated by the once-famous, 1970s musical duo The Captain & Tennille.

I was surprised and amused to discover who ran this office, but the friends who were with me apparently had no idea who The Captain & Tennille were, and I didn’t seem able to explain the pair’s cultural significance or what they had accomplished. It seemed that I was the only one left in the world who remembered The Captain & Tennille. At one point in our conversation, I tried to persuade “Captain” Daryl Dragon to don his billed skipper’s hat, hoping that this would clear things up for everyone, but he didn’t have the headwear with him. Besides, he and wife Toni Tennille were less interested in impressing my friends than they were in buying my copy of the fall 1976 edition of TV Guide, in which their short-lived ABC variety show was previewed. (See below.) What made this dream all the more absurd was that Dragon turned out to be a fount of jokes about bears.

I woke myself up laughing.



READ MORE: “Captain & Tennille Divorcing: Love Couldn’t Keep Them Together--Exclusive” (RumorFix); “Reports: Captain and Tennille are Divorcing,” by Trey Barrineau (USA Today).

Come Fly with Me

This has certainly turned out to be a television-nostalgia-focused week. In addition to my posts about prime-time series introductions, I must note that it was 50 years ago today that the futuristic animated sitcom The Jetsons debuted on ABC-TV.

To a certain extent, the Space Age world that George Jetson and his small family inhabited--perched at nose-bleed heights above any sort of land in the year 2062, in aerodynamically designed buildings that looked like nothing so much as Seattle’s iconic Space Needle--was a nightmare. The numerous machines that were so integral to the lives of humans kept breaking down, and even that far-flung future seemed plagued by the same sorts of social and economic issues familiar to the early ’60s.

Yet, that was really the series’ point: that no matter how technologically advanced the world might become, it would still likely be hampered by entropy, human failure, and the psychological limitations of tradition. Whether children of the Kennedy era understood all of the nuances of The Jetsons wasn’t for certain; they probably did not. Surely, the social commentary passed over their noggins. But then, The Jetsons, like The Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and other cartoons of the time wasn’t meant exclusively for prepubescents. In fact, this program debuted during television’s prime-time evening schedule, when both adults and children would be watching.

The Jetsons, a Hanna-Barbera production, had an original run of 24 episodes; another 41 were created for syndication in the mid-1980s. An 82-minute theatrical release, Jetsons: The Movie, came out in 1990 (though I never saw it), and there’s still talk of developing a live-action film version of The Jetsons. All of which demonstrates the appeal of the future, even if it’s a pretty laughable place and--except maybe for the flying cars and undependably servile robots--isn’t so very different from the world around us today.

READ MORE: “50 Years of the Jetsons: Why the Show Still Matters,” by Matt Novak (Paleofuture); “Eep Opp Ork Ah Ah,” by James Lileks (Star Tribune); “Meet the Jetsons,” by Bob Sassone.

Griffith’s Tough Second Acts

As every Limbo reader undoubtedly knows by this point, American actor Andy Griffith died earlier today at age 86. He was best known for starring in two very different TV series, a half-hour comedy called The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968) and the legal drama Matlock (1986–1995). But in between those, Griffith started his own production company and appeared in several considerably less-successful series: The Headmaster, The New Andy Griffith Show (1971), Adams of Eagle Lake (1975), Salvage 1 (1979), and The Yeagers (1980). I don’t remember much about those short-lived programs. But thanks to the wonders of the Web, we can revisit most of them, if only briefly.

Headmaster (1970-1971, CBS): As Wikipedia explains, this was a half-hour comedy-drama in which Griffith played “Andy Thompson, ... the headmaster of a prestigious California private school, the Concord School. His wife, Margaret (Claudette Nevins), was an English teacher; his best friend was the school’s main athletic coach, Jerry Brownell (Jerry Van Dyke). Mr. Purdy (Parker Fennelly) was the school’s caretaker.” Below, Griffith talks about The Headmaster in a 1970 CBS Fall Preview Special:



The New Andy Griffith Show (1971, CBS): Tumbling ratings for The Headmaster convinced both its star and CBS to replace it with this program, a situation-comedy notably akin to The Andy Griffith Show, in which Griffith played Andy Sawyer, a family man who returns to his hometown of Greenwood, North Carolina, and “instantly becomes the town’s new mayor pro-tem.” Lee Meriwether (who would later go on to portray Catwoman in the 1966 Batman movie, Dr. Ann MacGregor in The Time Tunnel, and widow/private detective Betty Jones in Barnaby Jones) played Griffith’s wife, Lee. The opening sequence from The New Andy Griffith Show is embedded below:



Adams of Eagle Lake (1975, ABC): As Marty McKee explains in the International Movie Database (IMDb), this hour-long police drama cast Griffith as Sam Adams, the “sheriff of the bucolic ski-resort town of Eagle Lake, California, where, despite gorgeous mountain scenery and a homespun atmosphere, murder, escaped cons, hidden gold, and other sinister threats reared their evil heads.” It was the modified offspring of a 1974 television movie called Winter Kill, which had been a series pilot. “When it failed to sell,” Wikipedia says, “the main character of Sheriff Sam McNeill was renamed and used as the lead character in Adams of Eagle Lake.” Unfortunately, Adams was cancelled after only two episodes. Griffith didn’t abandon the concept easily, though; in 1977, he came back with two teleflicks--The Girl in the Empty Grave and Deadly Game--in which he played essentially the same character, this time named Abel Marsh. I haven’t found any videos from Adams of Eagle Lake, but I did discover this NBC promo for Deadly Game:



Salvage 1 (1979, ABC): This is certainly the most unusual series for Andy Griffith. He played Harry Broderick, who “owns the Jettison Scrap and Salvage Company, and is a specialist in reclaiming trash and junk in order to sell that as scrap.” The well-received, January 20, 1979, pilot film found him building “a space ship from his scrap pile in order to retrieve valuable parts left on the moon by American astronauts.” According to this site, subsequent episodes of Salvage 1 had Broderick’s Southern California-based enterprise involved “in such exotic missions as retrieving old B-52s from a jungle, oil from dried-out oil wells, diamonds from an active volcano and icebergs from the polar ice cap (which he could steer to a drought-stricken island).” Isaac Asimov was heralded as a technical adviser on this show, so you have to figure the scientific details were spot-on. Below is a teaser for one of the episodes (in which you’ll see that gasoline in 1979 cost 34 cents a gallon!), plus the series’ introduction:



The Yeagers (1980, ABC): A YouTube user gives this brief synopsis of the series: “Set in MacKenzie County, Washington, [it] follows the life of Carroll Yeager (Andy Griffith), the owner of the Yeager Logging and Mining Company, and his family, as they struggle to operate and maintain the family business.” It’s hard to tell how many episodes of The Yeagers were broadcast. At most there were four, though it’s just the first one, “Only the Strong Survive,” that earns any kind of attention on the Web. The TV Guide site provides this brief synopsis: “Carroll (Andy Griffith), his daughter-in-law and grandsons are stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash.” If anyone out there in Limboland can say more about The Yeagers, please leave a note in the Comments section of this post. For now, here’s the series’ opening:



After watching all of these videos a few times, I’m glad Matlock was a hit. Griffith sure needed one by the mid-1980s.

READ MORE: “Warner Archive: The Girl in the Empty Grave,” by Stacia Jones (She Blogged by Night).

In the Swim of Things

Click on this image for an enlargement

I grew up in Portland, Oregon, so I’m very familiar with the Jantzen swimwear company. Images of its iconic “Jantzen Girl” were everywhere to be found in the 1960s, especially around Jantzen Beach, the giant amusement park that opened at the city’s north end (on Hayden Island in the Columbia River) in 1928.

When I was boy, my father, mother, younger brother, and I would frequently drive up to that pleasure ground during the warm summer months. We’d go swimming in the mammoth pools, maybe ride the rickety old Big Dipper Roller Coaster or one of the merry-go-rounds, and swallow as much buttery popcorn as our bellies could hold. When Jantzen Beach finally closed in 1970--to be replaced by yet another characterless shopping center--it was like a chapter of my life closed as well. I have never been able to drive by the Jantzen Beach site since, without recalling for whoever is in the car with me what things used to look like there.

So I was delighted to see that Leif Peng, who writes the design blog Today’s Inspiration, has posted a selection of pin-up-style bathing-suit advertisements from the 1940s and ’50s, all illustrated by Pete Hawley (1916-1975). My favorite among Peng’s collection has to be the ad at the top of this post, with its “sextette” of fun-loving summer-fashion models (which appeared in the June 18, 1951, edition of Life magazine). But the rest of the ads in Today’s Inspiration are worth seeing, too. There are still more examples of Hawley’s work for Jantzen to be appreciated here and here.

Memories of Mystery and Murder

After an unplanned hiatus of several months, The Rap Sheet’s succession of 40th-anniversary tributes to the 13 shows that made up The NBC Mystery Movie (1971-1977) resumes today with a look back at Madigan, the short-lived Richard Widmark series spawned by director Don Siegel’s 1968 movie of the same name.

You’ll find that post here.

And in case you haven’t been keeping up with these tributes, here are the programs I’ve covered thus far:

• Columbo, starring Peter Falk
• McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver
• McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James
• Banacek, starring George Peppard

Please stay tuned in the coming months as I look back at such series as Cool Million, Hec Ramsey, Tenafly, and Quincy, M.E.

In Tune with Crime

YouTube poster “Mokwella” offers watchers a quick trip back to the 1970s, using the opening themes from 20 of that decade’s best-remembered TV cop and detective shows.

Ruffling Feathers

This news comes from Entertainment Weekly:

With Comcast officially taking control of NBC Universal this week, the corporate office has unveiled a new company logo [left] that seems to be missing something. Actually, it’s missing just about everything. It’s just text. And, most strikingly: There’s no peacock.

Yikes! The peacock has been a part of NBC-TV’s logo ever since the 1950s, demonstrating the network’s commitment to color broadcasting. There was an earlier time when it disappeared, during the mid-1970s--which I recall as the high point of my boob tube viewing--to be replaced by a stylized “N” logo made up of two trapezoids. But the faithful peacock was restored to branding dominance in the fall of 1979, and has continued to symbolize the network ever since. That Comcast should choose to jettison that heritage in favor of an extremely boring new logo just demonstrates its disregard for the rich history of what used to be (in my opinion) America’s best source of nighttime entertainment.

Below are NBC logos dating back to the “microphone logo” of the 1940s and continuing up to the pre-Comcast version.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

READ MORE: “The History of the CBS Eye Logo,” by Dan Wagstaff (The Casual Optimist).

So Long Ago, So Near to My Heart

Top row (left to right): Jeanne Denker, Annie Dudley, Reed Darmon, Pat Vivian, Bill Clark, Beata Scheffler-Wiggin, Marty Urman, Pamela Gold, Stacy Fowler, Mili Smythe, Jeff Pierce. Bottom row (left to right): John Blank, Jane Jouett, Rupert Kinnard, Alice Scherer, and Kim Roadruck.

I came across this photograph while digging through a box of dusty newspaper clippings in my basement, looking for something completely different. It shows the production department staff at Willamette Week, Portland, Oregon’s “alternative newsweekly,” back in what I estimate was late 1980. An amazing 30 years ago! I was fresh out of college (you can spot me in the upper right-hand corner of this shot, with a full beard), and working my first professional job.

I had served as a newspaper editor during my last few undergraduate years, and developed a taste both for journalism and for publication design. During my final months in college, I’d freelanced for Willamette Week, and after graduation I joined that broadsheet’s production staff, while continuing to contribute to its editorial product. (I was subsequently hired on as a staff writer, just as I had hoped to be.) I must include those years as some of the best my life has had to offer. I enjoyed my bachelor independence, did lots of reading and joyful carousing, discovered what it meant to really be loved by women, and found that I wasn’t so inept in the friend-making department as I’d once feared. Although I long ago lost touch with everyone shown in this black-and-white image (taken by WW staff photographer Cathy Cheney), they--and some who came before them on the staff--left me with memories I shall never cease to cherish. I was very honored to work with the editorial staff at WW, but it was the production personnel who really embraced me.

With help from some old Willamette Week staff lists, I’ve sought to make sure that the people shown above are properly identified. But there were a couple of cases (involving individuals I knew less well than others) where I had to take my best guess at matching names with faces. My apologies to anyone who’s been mislabeled.

Click on the photograph for an enlargement.

From the Boyhood Memories File

A post-Summer of Love, pre-“Me First” commercial for Coca-Cola, with a song that became a hit recording. A considerably less interesting version was made in 2006.

READ MORE: “Man Behind World’s ‘Most Famous Ad’ Dead at 89,” by Kate Seamons (Newser).

From the Boyhood Memories File

From the Los Angeles Times:

Neal Hefti, a former big band trumpeter, arranger and composer who worked with Count Basie and Woody Herman and later composed the memorable themes for the movie “The Odd Couple” and the campy hit TV series “Batman,” has died. He was 85.

Of course, now that I've posted this bit of obituary, I can't get the Batman theme out of my head.