Tag Archives: 1970s

Rasputin in America

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Early in the morning on Thanksgiving, I dreamed about a TV sitcom, Rasputin in America, that I either was watching or had created. Considering that it was my dream, both are fitting. The Mad Monk, updated to the 21st century but with the same wild eyes and hair (but no beard, oddly), runs afoul of the authorities in Putin’s Russia and comes to America to live with relatives. Namely, Valerie Bertinelli. Hilarity ensues.

It was only a dream, but no worse than a lot of sitcom conceits. Ms. Bertinelli was either Rasputin’s aunt or his niece. The thing about her is that while the actress might be in her 50s now, she’s also always in her teens, at least in the sitcom universe.

I was also reminded of Ivan the Terrible. Not the tsar or the Eisenstein movie, but a TV show I expect almost no one remembers. It came to mind after the dream. I hadn’t thought of it in many years, but I did see it.

The show was a summertime replacement that didn’t catch on. Here’s part of the Wiki description of it: “Ivan the Terrible is an American sitcom that aired on CBS for five episodes during 1976… Set in Moscow, the sitcom starred Lou Jacobi as a Russian hotel waiter named Ivan Petrovsky, and the day-to-day misadventures of Ivan’s family and their Cuban exchange student boarder, all of whom live in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment… Harvey Korman appeared as a Soviet bureaucrat in an uncredited cameo at the close of each episode.”

Items from the (Very Large) Dustbin of TV History

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I happened across a YouTube video the other day called “11 Intros to Tacky 80s Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV,” and decided to watch it. Not sure that “tacky” is the right word. Maybe “short-lived” or “justifiably obscure” or some such. But the thing that surprised me — though it shouldn’t have — is that not only had I never seen any of them, I’d never heard of any of them.

That might sound like bragging. Actually, I will brag a little. I didn’t own a TV in the 1980s, and with certain exceptions, such as the last episode of M*A*S*H or the airing of The Day After, I didn’t watch much. I’m certain I’m better for it.

(Then again, the ’80s had no monopoly on TV SF failure: these are intros from 1975-80, all of whom failed. I watched much more TV then, but only vaguely remember Time Express and Buck Rogers, and watched Battlestar Galactica for a short while, until its stupidity got to be too much to take. Whoever complied the video left out Quark.)

The 11 shows in the video from the 1980s are Automan, Manimal, The Wizard, Wizards and Warriors, Misfits of Science, Shadow Chasers, The Phoenix, Powers of Matthew Star, Starman, Outlaws, The Highwayman. I wonder what kind of coke-bender decision-making allowed some of them to go on the air, just judging from some of their ridiculous — that’s the word, “ridiculous 80s Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV” — intros.

I recognized a handful of the actors. The Wizard’s David Rappaport was easily the best-known dwarf actor of his generation, and I remember he did a good job in the underrated Time Bandits (need to see that again; maybe I overrated it 30 years ago). Glad to know Rappaport had his own TV show, even one that didn’t last long. Sorry to learn that he didn’t last long, since he shot himself to death in 1990.

Robert Hays is instantly recognizable in Starman, though there’s no way he’s getting away from Ted Striker and his drinking problem.

Among the 11, the prize for most ridiculous concept (according to me, and it’s a tough competition) goes to Outlaws, whose intro explains that a gang of Texas outlaws from 1899 is magically transported to the late 20th century, along with the sheriff who was chasing them. More than time travel magic, too, since they somehow or other ended up on the right side of the law in the 1980s. You’d think they’d take to knocking over convenience stores and passing bad checks in our time. Also, one of them is black, perhaps the most improbable plot element of all. Played by Richard Roundtree, who will never get away from John Shaft.

The prize for bad intro writing goes to The Highwayman. They are supposed to be supernatural guardians of the world, or something — and if so, why did the producers pick a word that means bandits on the road? Anyway, the intro, which sounds like it’s read by William Conrad (a job’s a job), goes like this:

“There is a world, just beyond now, where reality rides a razor-thin seam between fact and possibility. Where the laws of the present collide with the crimes of tomorrow. Patrolling these vast outlands is a new breed of lawman, guarding the fringes of society’s frontiers. They are known simply as Highwaymen, and this is their story.”

The “razor-thin seam between fact and possibility”? Whoever wrote that was trying for Rod Serling, and failing.

A McGovern Postcard

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Here’s another recently acquired postcard, one from a very specific moment in U.S. history, a good many elections ago.

McGovernObvMcGovernRevIt was never used for its intended purpose, namely being put in the mail in the service of the McGovern campaign. Not that it would have made any difference to the outcome; not that a million such cards, all mailed, would have made any difference.

I don’t think I’ve seen any presidential campaign cards in recent years, or ever, come to think of it, but more local races still use them. I’m already getting postcard-based claims and counterclaims from candidates for the Illinois State House. I expect more in the coming months.

A particularly memorable example of postcard campaigning was in 2004. As I wrote then, “[Phil Crane] was also the subject of one of the most brilliant direct-mail campaigns I’ve ever seen in politics. Almost every day for about 10 days before the election, we received a large postcard, paid for by the state Democratic Party, all featuring the same picture of Rep. Crane photoshopped onto a variety of backgrounds.

“Each card had a different headline, and backgrounds to match, along with Phil in the foreground in a different outfit: GREETINGS FROM COSTA RICA (tropics, him in a floral t-shirt)… SCOTLAND (golf course, him with clubs)… ROME (Coliseum, him with a camera around his neck)… etc. The point being that Rep. Crane was fond of junkets at lobbyists’ expense. ‘Junket King’ was on several of the cards, too.”

Former Rep. Crane died in 2014. One thing I didn’t know about him was his role in Singapore easing its ban on chewing gum, which was in effect when we were there.

Adieu, Victoria Station

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Late last week, despite the fact that I recently inherited a good many hundred postcards, I bought a some more. I couldn’t resist. I found a box of old cards at a resale shop that, in my experience, seldom offers any for sale. A dime each. Looks like someone was cleaning house after an elderly relative died. Or maybe the box represented a number of households with caches of cards, all stripped of their small-value debris at about the same time.

A few of them are used, but most are blank. Such as this one, which made me wonder, Whatever happened to Victoria Station?

VictoriaStationObvVictoriaStationRevTurns out there’s an entire book devoted to that question. (A song advertising Victoria Station starts playing when you open that page, which would normally be annoying, but the singer is Johnny Cash.) Anyway, the short answer is, as a darling brand of the ’70s, the chain’s time passed in a big way in later decades. Apparently the 99 locations at its peak shrunk to exactly one in our time, located in Salem, Mass.

Its web site says, “We are proud to continue the Victoria Station name and continue to pay close attention to the historic and nostalgic atmosphere with a new approach and even higher standards than today’s customers demand. We specialize in classic New England cuisine with a fusion of the once great Steakhouse and still offer Victoria Station’s signature slow roasted Angus Prime Rib and ‘All you can eat’ Salad Bar.” Well, good for them.

I can’t remember whether I ever ate at a Victoria Station. At first I thought yes, but then realized I was confusing it with Spaghetti Warehouse, so maybe not. Could be the confusion was because that chain always featured a trolley car in its restaurants.

For its part, Spaghetti Warehouse was an early adaptive reuser of old space that might have otherwise been destroyed. Say, whatever happened to Spaghetti Warehouse? Its contraction wasn’t as thorough as Victoria Station. Reportedly 14 are still in operation.

One more thing about Victoria Station. A chain of that name still exists in Japan, operated by Zensho. More specifically, there are 45 locations, most in Hokkaido, as this site makes clear (provided someone in your house can interpret the page).

Thursday Trifles

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One more picture from Navy Pier.
Navy Pier, July 30, 2016Saw about a half-dozen ASK ME sign holders on Saturday, and I did ask one which way it was to the tall ships entrance. He told me.

Oh, God, Not that!Occasionally I still flip through TV channels, just to see what I can see. A few weeks ago I was doing so, and happened to have my camera handy. Here’s something I found.

By gum, it was original cast Three’s Company. Accept no substitutes. I spent all of about a minute watching it. Enough to get the gist of that week’s comedy of errors: a holiday show that saw Jack and the girls wanting to get away from the Ropers to attend a more interesting Christmas party, while the Ropers were doing their best to bore their young guests, so they could attend a more interesting Christmas party. The same one. Har-dee-har-har.

Yep, it's thatThen I became curious about Man About the House. It occurred to me that I’d never seen it. In the age of YouTube, there’s no reason not to, so I watched Series 1, Episode 1 (since removed, but it’ll probably be back). It was no Fawlty Towers, or even Steptoe and Son, but it wasn’t that bad. It had a couple of advantages over its American counterpart, such as better comic acting, especially the part of the landlord, and no Suzanne Somers. Remarkable how much of a difference that makes. Well, not that remarkable.

Some of the Man About the House lines were so very completely, breathtakingly British. The last line of the episode, for instance. Off camera, the brunette roommate persuaded the landlord to let the male character move in, as he was on camera in the kitchen with the blonde roommate. When the male character asked her how she did that — the landlord was gone by this time — she said, “I told him you were a poof.”

An announcement on Wednesday from the IOC: “The… IOC today agreed to add baseball/softball, karate, skateboard, sports climbing and surfing to the sports programme for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.”

What, no tug-of-war? Skateboarding, but not tug-of-war, a sport that’s easy to understand, telegenic and opens up the possibility of beach tug-of-war?

First-Season M*A*S*H

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A few months ago, I noticed that Netflix on demand has all of the episodes of M*A*S*H (why isn’t there an asterisk after the H?). At first I didn’t feel the need to watch any of them.

Then it occurred to me that I’d missed the first season, and maybe part of the second, when the show was on the air. I was too young to be interested, and picked it up sometime in junior high, maybe when it was part of the extraordinary Saturday night prime-time lineup on CBS during the ’73-74 season: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, The Carol Burnett Show.

By the time the scriptwriters dropped Henry Blake into the Sea of Japan (March 18, 1975), I was surprised along with the rest of the country, since I’d been watching a while by then. After 1979, I didn’t watch it much anymore. Not only had the quality declined, I didn’t watch much TV at all, though I made a point — like the rest of the country — of watching the finale on February 28, 1983.

So I decided recently to take a look at the first season at least, one every week or two. On the whole, it holds up well enough. I liked it then and I still do, though it’s not the best television, or even the best show in a sitcom-like format (arguably, it’s not a sitcom anyway). As for the first season, it’s good to see the original cast, complete with Trapper John and Henry Blake, both of whom were better than their replacements.

Also of note is first-season Radar O’Reilly, who is a bit more nuanced than he would be later. Besides his longstanding anticipation of events, and that he knew more about what was going on that Col. Blake did — an old joke, that — Radar drank alcohol, helped Hawkeye cheat at cards, traded weekend passes for favors, and was perfectly willing to ogle nurses as they walked by or spy on them in the shower, things he’d be too timid to do later. His evolution in the series into a naive Iowa farm boy did no favors to the character. There’s an essay waiting to be written about the infantilization of Radar O’Reilly.

And what happened to Spearchucker Jones, the talented African-American surgeon? He makes appearances in the first season but not later that I remember. Admittedly, that nickname wouldn’t have gone down well even in the 1970s, but it could have easily been dropped, while the character could have been developed, even as a supporting one. Apparently the producers decided otherwise.

M*A*S*H also suffered from the strictures of network television. One good example: Hawkeye and Trapper emerge from surgery, bitching about spending 12 or 14 hours or whatever operating, and there’s not a drop of blood on them. One of the salient visuals of the movie M*A*S*H is in complete contrast to that: there’s blood all over the place in the meatball operating room, and on the doctors too. Of course, had the TV show depicted that much blood, the audience of the time wouldn’t have noticed anything else. That was before splatter movies and cable TV shows inured people to that kind of thing, after all.

Speaking of cable, I couldn’t help thinking that M*A*S*H would be better — in competent hands, whoever that might be — on cable. More visible blood, dirt, and skin, for one thing, though it would be easy to overdo those aspects. More importantly, the characters could be fleshed out a good deal more. Once, just once, I’d like to see Hawkeye, after a long stretch of stressful surgery, and at the provocation of (say) a Korean character, explode in a tirade of ethnic slurs. Later he’d regret it, and drink himself blind to forget. That’s something a cable version of M*A*S*H could handle with aplomb.

Thursday Bits

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A lot of rain on Sunday and then more on Monday, creating a week of puddles and mud as temps never quite made it down to freezing during the day. My kind of winter. No risk of slipping on ice, though I did nearly slip on a patch of mud in the yard the other day.

One more picture from Saturday: a street band at the corner of Washington and Wabash who call themselves Chicago Traffic Jam.

Chicago Traffic Jam Dec 12, 2015Jam is right. When we saw them, they were jamming, doing a bang-up job on a ’70s instrumental that I recognized, but couldn’t remember the name of. I pitched a dollar coin in their bucket.

I saw a trailer for Gods of Egypt on YouTube not long ago. From the looks of it, the title’s not quite right. CGI Egypt might be better. Could be one of those movies in which “tell a good story” is about fourth or fifth on the list on the director’s list of things to do, while “make it look badass” is first. Without more information, there’s little chance I’ll spend money to find out. Just another benefit of not being 15 anymore.

Then again, I don’t remember rushing off to any fool movie when I was 15. But the industry was different then.

I missed the obituary of Gene Patton earlier this year, but here it is. RIP, Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. Looks like you had a fun 15 minutes of fame.

More Moo Goo Gai Pan

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Back again on November 29. A good Thanksgiving to all. The snow, which has been melting all day, ought to be gone by then, leaving cold mud. But snow will be back before long. Never mind the snows of yesteryear. There’s always plenty more this year.

Sand, as I’ve noted before, is good for adding traction to icy driveways and sidewalks. Something I’ve learned this year: playground sand isn’t what you want. At freezing temps it tents to stick together, which makes for lousy spreading. Tube sand, which I’ve long used, is the thing.

It’s been 40 years since the original broadcast of “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the episode of The Bob Newhart Show in which Emily’s out of town for Thanksgiving, so Bob spends the holiday with Howard and Jerry and Mr. Carlin watching a football game. They get blotto and order an excess of Moo Goo Gai Pan from a Chinese restaurant.

How much pretend-drunk comedy is there now? Not much, I think, though I don’t spend a lot of time watching sitcoms any more. I’ll leave it to others to tease out the social implications of that. It’s enough for me to note that there’s no equivalent of Foster Brooks on prime time that I know of. Then again, there’s not really any such thing as prime time any more.

Arnn Pictures, 1973

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In June 1973, we had an unusually large number of relatives visit for an afternoon — 13 are in a picture I took, but I know that’s missing a few. I’m not sure how it was all arranged, only that hadn’t happened before, and it never did again. Mostly people came over in small groups.

One of the visitors was my uncle Kenneth Arnn, down from Oklahoma with my aunt Sue and cousin Ralph. I knew them better than any of the others, since we’d see them every year or every other year, and of course I still visit Sue and Ralph.

I took a picture of Ken standing near one of the kitchen doorways at my mother’s house.

KenJune1973He was impressed enough with the quality of the shot to ask for a copy sometime later. I look at it now and think, even my cheap Coolpix could take a better picture than that. But all I had then was a Kodak Instamatic 104, and I was 12, so I suppose that’s a pretty good image for all that. Also, if you took a shot from the same position now, most of the background would be the same, except for the arrangement of hats and the Magic 8 Ball.

Here’s the startling thing: in 1973, he was the same age as I am now. Chronologically, I understand. He was born in 1919. But it’s still hard to wrap my mind around that.

A few basic facts about Uncle Ken (unless I’m misremembering, which is entirely possible): he hailed from Childress, Texas; was a U.S. Army staff sergeant in the European theater in WWII — a cook in Patton’s army; did a stint as a teacher in Barrow, Alaska, in the 1950s with my aunt, whose older sister is my mother; and for most of his career he worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in South Dakota and later Oklahoma.

The last time I saw him was in Ardmore, Okla., in late 2001. He’d suffered a stroke by then, and so was frail, but still mentally lively, as always. We were on our way back home from Thanksgiving in Dallas, and I’m glad we stopped in (he got to meet Lilly, among other things). He died a few days before Christmas in 2002.

Here’s another picture I took during that visit in 1973: cousin Ralph, age 10, jumping off the swing set we had in the back yard at the time.

RalphJune1973Ralph’s a sales executive these days, a resident of San Antonio with a wife, grown stepdaughter and two teenaged daughters. I’ve always liked this kinetic picture of him.

The Very Early ’70s

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Of the five group photos of my elementary school classes, I only put the exact date of the picture on one of them — the third grade shot. Why I did that, I can’t remember. But there it is: March 17, 1970. Forty-five years ago.

March17.1970Not the first time I dated an image from that grade, either. I also wrote everyone’s name, though I did that every year. Glad I did. Among other things, it preserves a sample of mid-century children’s names, most of them common, but not all. I always had the least common name.

Top row: Lester, Dees, David, Jerry, David, Ellen.

Next row down: Susan, Jack, Karen, Tom, Cole.

Next row down: Marie, Ruth Ann, Gary, Luis, Renee, Leslie.

Bottom row: Shirley, Mariann, Art, Maura, Steven, David.

Few surprises there. For example, according to the Social Security Administration, David was the no. 2 popular boys’ name for the 1960s. Everyone in the picture except for Mrs. Bigelow would have been born in 1960 or ’61.