Give Telly A Cigarillo And A Gun & He’ll Sing You Sexy Love Songs, Baby

Who loves ya?

We Need A Buddy-Cop TV Series Based On This Photo

There’s always a cool one & a wacky one, after all.

Possibly The Greatest Cast Ever Assembled

Let’s park ourselves on the sofa for tonight’s entertainment, shall we?

Sweet! Another cop-gone-bad early ’50s crimefest, with tough talkin’ fedora wearin’ men and dangerous dames.

Our cop gone bad finds a dark alley, shoots a numbers runner in the back and lifts the twenty five grand he carried. And then he starts the big cover up, claiming the guy ran on him and a shot went bad.

You can tell the bad cop by the Bill Belichick scowl and ciggie… none other than Edmond O’Brien, stalwart character actor found across genres. His former protegé, now Det, Sgt, is John Agar, who’d go on to appear in tons of westerns and some notably awful scifi like Attack of the Puppet People.

So why did O’Brien murder for money? Well, to afford his 1950s dreams of domestic suburban bliss, you dummy! Can’t do that on a cop’s salary, ya chucklehead. Watch him take his good-girl squeeze to the model house in the new neighborhood.

A swell modern living room.

Yes, a fully furnished model! None of this real estate-staging BS for these two. A place where you can dream that every dinner party has the candelabra for that Liberace feel.

The innocent girlfriend is Marla English in her first credited role. She’d do a few more minor films in the ’50s before getting married for real and leaving the biz behind. I’d like to think she got an actual living room like that.

But outside…. our crooked cop is hiding the dough.

And it goes from there.

Exactly

To quote Sgt. Nick Yemana, “Very well put.”

RIP, Harlan Ellison

Died in his sleep, according to a family announcement today. He was 84.

As he said, “For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time, I mattered.”

Ellison is one my favorites. I wrote this about him many years ago, so I’ll link it here.

Must-See TV

Vic Tayback racing Dune Buggies AND The San Diego Chicken??

PUT DOWN THAT REMOTE, BABY, WE’VE COME HOME!!!!

Not to mention Cathy Lee Crosby, Erin Gray, Jayne Kennedy, Connie Sellecca, Victoria Principal and a bunch of soaking wet LA Rams cheerleaders, I’m pretty positive high school me would’ve been front row center back when this monstrosity aired, wondering where Adrienne Barbeau was.

Now, of course, the years of feminist enlightenment have taught me not to objectify women celebrities. I’ll be switching over to the Lifetime Movie channel instead.

Yeah, right.

I’ll be downloading this off some Ukranian torrent and watching it in slow motion with the sound off until I pass out. And that should take about fifteen seconds at my age.

I’m old and tired.

Perhaps I need Robert Conrad to be my coach. Now you & I know damn well he must have taken this WAY too seriously and screamed at those guys on his team for not pushing harder.

Well, maybe not that should-have-been-a-buddy-cop-show teaming of Louis Jourdan and Pat Harrington. See? Jourdan is the suave police detective on loan from Paris, while Pat plays his wacky informant who is a master of disguise…

This fall on CBS! We’re looking good!

But scream at Leif Garrett? Well, shit, who wouldn’t scream at Leif Garrett? Even the San Diego Chicken screamed at Leif Garrett.

It’s all cool in the end.  Conrad ordered up a big round of drinks at the bar afterwards and stuck Jamie Farr with the bill when he didn’t believe Farr’s “half the family dying, other half pregnant” story.

And is it just me, or is Connie Sellecca as a pool hustler the sexiest thing on there?

My pool cue is “Flying High,” Bevis…

 

Must See TV

I thought the Yankees had a great line-up, but Dorothy Hamill’s got it beat.

Whenever I see Avery Schreiber and Professor Irwin Corey, I think “disco ice dancing,” I’m sure you do as well. Unless the Hamill Camel comes to mind.

Right Next To The Dog Faced Boy

It might be the 23rd century, thousands of light years from Earth, but I love that Kirk packs his things in a clunky American Tourister model, circa 1966.

I knew they were tough when gorillas bashed them around, but who knew they’d last the centuries?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m a smartass Trek nerd. Maybe I should have been a mechanic. Then I could treat little tin Gods like you…

Here’s director Ralph Senensky on the episode I’m talkin’ ’bout…

It’s also one of my favorite closing scenes, and lines, of any of the series. Senensky directed nearly all the episodes where Spock (or Nimoy) got to show emotion, too. They both handled it well.

Khan Is Tired Of Your Shit

You TASK him….

Face it, you’re screwed. He’s got five times your strength, can quote Milton and Melville, and also has this little bastard in the wings waiting for you.

Ugh…. just drop them off on Ceti Alpha 5 and wait for its orbit to shift. Then, fuck ’em. You’ve got bigger things to think about, you know?

Wonderful Behind The Scenes TV Stories From Prolific Director Ralph Senensky

I’d forgotten that Don Rickles once played a villain on The Wild Wild West, and rewatched that episode today. And then in looking up some stuff about it online, hoping to find perhaps links to outtakes and blooper reels where he became Don Rickles and commented on the mystical evil magician dialogue he’d been given or on Robert Conrad and Ross Martin, I came across this behind-the-scenes story on the filming of the episode written by its director, Ralph Senensky.

Senensky directed TONS of television from the 1960s thru the 1980s, logging episodes of so many of yours & my favorite shows that’s there’s too many to mention here – and it turns out he’s been blogging for years on his memories of them, and has a fantastic website containing all that material, organized by show and episode.

This site is a GOLD MINE! Senensky writes beautifully about what working in television was like back in the days of my favorite old reruns. He brings to life assorted names you’d see on numerous credits of numerous shows – Gene Coon or Quinn Martin and so forth – as well as including interesting stories dealing with both the technical limits & possibilities of the industry all those years ago.  His entries on specific episodes (and check out that sidebar menu for the sheer volume of ’em) include scans of script pages with rewrites & director cues…. amazing stuff, especially for photographic memory geeks like me who can replay the episode in my mind while I’m reading.

And not just the Star Treks he did, either. I can do a lot of the others because ALL I DO IS WATCH TV.

For anyone interested in TV history, or just the old shows & stars & writers you follow in your little nerd-heart-of-hearts, this stuff is indispensable. I can’t believe I didn’t know about it until now.

To quote Spock: “Fascinating.”

Oh, and Rickles? He didn’t disappoint…. Senensky tells us that inbetween takes, he went the full Vegas act on everyone, even making Billy Barty jokes about Conrad’s height. Rickles remains my fuckin’ hero.

And it looks like Ralph Senensky celebrated his 95th birthday a week ago. Happy Birthday, Director!