Print

[profh0011]

FLASH GORDON: THE GREATEST ADVENTURE OF ALL was intended to be Filmation's masterpiece.  And I think it was. Well-written, a loving tribute to the Alex Raymond strip, with lots of rotoscoped spaceships and very little repeated animation.  They even revealed the never-seen "engines" that drove the planet Mongo across space, something I'd have thought someboyd should have looked into decades before.

It was, apparently, intended for theatres, but they could not find a distributor-- anti-cartoon sentiment was so powerful in the US, the fact that it was not a "kiddie cartoon" sunk their chances.  But Dino DeLaurentiis' company picked up the foreign rights, and got it into theatres in Europe.  Dino had never seen FG before.  he was so impressed, he got inspired to do one of his own.  I'm not kidding! Less than a year later, Dino's FLASH GORDON was in theatres.  Who in Hollywood could have accomplished such a feat at the time? Of course, I always felt it could have benefitted from a little more work on the script...  (I've read totally conflicting reports about the making opf the film in recent years, but the above is what I read BACK THEN. I'm beginning to think a lot of people love re-writing history after-the-fact, usually in very self-serving ways.)

Filmation cuit up their feature and added a ton of new material to flesh it out to 13 episodes for Saturday morning. Lots of the feature did not wind up in the serial version at all. But 3 YEARS later, NBC ran the feature intact on a Friday night.  I was stunned.  It was so much better than what I'd seen on Saturday morning.

[Menticide]

I remember a Flash Gordon tie-in toy play set that I had at the time, it was among my favorite toys back then. Right up there with my Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, and superhero toys.

[bowers]

Some good stuff on TV this week. Really enjoyed the finale on "Whitechapel"- am eagerly awaiting more! "Bedlam" is getting spookier, and the ghosts are getting bolder and more vicious as the plot develops. At last! A new (to us) season of "Primeval". " The Mentalist" is starting to bounce back from a weak premiere, and it's about time. It seems to me that network TV is starting to gain ground on the cable channels. Not because their programming is all that great, but because cable is going into a real slide. History Channel has gone to an all UFO, prophecy, and Bermuda Triangle format, Arts and Entertainment and The Learning Channel have gone pretty much all-reality, SciFy produces absolutely ludicrous movies, and the list goes on. AMC and TNT are the two bright spots, producing some fairly decent original programming. Cheers, Bowers.

[josemas]

Some good stuff on TV this week. Really enjoyed the finale on "Whitechapel"- am eagerly awaiting more! "Bedlam" is getting spookier, and the ghosts are getting bolder and more vicious as the plot develops. At last! A new (to us) season of "Primeval". " The Mentalist" is starting to bounce back from a weak premiere, and it's about time. It seems to me that network TV is starting to gain ground on the cable channels. Not because their programming is all that great, but because cable is going into a real slide. History Channel has gone to an all UFO, prophecy, and Bermuda Triangle format, Arts and Entertainment and The Learning Channel have gone pretty much all-reality, SciFy produces absolutely ludicrous movies, and the list goes on. AMC and TNT are the two bright spots, producing some fairly decent original programming. Cheers, Bowers.

I just watched the start of the second story (about the Krays) on Whitechapel a couple of hours ago.  Looks to be as good as the first. 

I too was glad to see the latest season of Primeval finally show up over here in the States. 

I still like such shows as Haven, Warehouse 13 and Alphas on Syfy but agree that many of their movies can be on the goofy side (although I don't necessarily find that a bad thing all of the time).

I'd add FX to your list of cable channels with some good programming.  I very much enjoy Sons of Anarchy and Justified and am recently getting into American Horror Story.

Best

Joe

[josemas]

FLASH GORDON: THE GREATEST ADVENTURE OF ALL was intended to be Filmation's masterpiece.  And I think it was. Well-written, a loving tribute to the Alex Raymond strip, with lots of rotoscoped spaceships and very little repeated animation.  They even revealed the never-seen "engines" that drove the planet Mongo across space, something I'd have thought someboyd should have looked into decades before.

I must confess I too had never heard of the Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All but it certainly sounds like its worth a watch from your description.

It was, apparently, intended for theatres, but they could not find a distributor-- anti-cartoon sentiment was so powerful in the US, the fact that it was not a "kiddie cartoon" sunk their chances.  But Dino DeLaurentiis' company picked up the foreign rights, and got it into theatres in Europe.  Dino had never seen FG before.  he was so impressed, he got inspired to do one of his own.  I'm not kidding! Less than a year later, Dino's FLASH GORDON was in theatres.  Who in Hollywood could have accomplished such a feat at the time? Of course, I always felt it could have benefitted from a little more work on the script...  (I've read totally conflicting reports about the making opf the film in recent years, but the above is what I read BACK THEN. I'm beginning to think a lot of people love re-writing history after-the-fact, usually in very self-serving ways.)

Back in the 1970s Phoenix was a popular market for doing advance test screenings of films.  I remember that DeLaurentiis' Flash Gordon was one of those and I tried to go see it but the crowd was so large that I couldn't get in.  A friend of mine did though and talked to him later after the final cut premiered and he mentioned that it had been tinkered with quite a bit between the test showing and its premiere.

Best

Joe

[josemas]

Saturday mornings in the 70's were a wasteland. The censors had a field day, and totally gutted it of anything fun, exciting, etc. It's a miracle anything watchable got on the air at all. This is something you have to remember when looking at the STAR TREK cartoons. Believe it or not-- at the time-- it was, by a wide margin, the BEST damn thing on!!!  And, it actually did manage to capture the look and feel of the original show, between the writing, the actors, the design of the ship (something the Gold Key comics never bothered with), and even getting some real science-fiction writers involved (something that was few and far between in the 3rd season, and virtually non-existent on ST:TNG).

But you also have to realize it was Filmation. The same company that did ARCHIE, and JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Try watching that show, and you'll see that by comparison, on every level, STAR TREK was a real masterpiece.

To be honest after the early 1970s, as I entered my teens, I found myself watching less and less Saturday morning shows.  The animated Star Trek was one of the last that I watched regularly.  It was the fact that the shows were generally well written that did keep my interest.

Some of the episodes were disappointing, but I feel in general they had better stories than most of the 3rd season. For a ST fan almost from the word go, it was a real treasure.

I tend to think that you are correct and that the animated series had a higher degree of good scripts than did the 3rd season of the original ST.

My biggest disappointment was that they only did 16 episodes the 1st year-- and then, only 6 the 2nd.  (6 !!! Cheap B******s!!!)  Did studios and networks really think kids were happy to just keep watching the same few stories over and over and over??

Actually it was pretty common for Saturday morning shows back then that ran more than one season to have less shows produced in succeeding seasons.
Here's a few examples of Filmation's other shows that illustrate my point-

Shazam-  S1-15, S2-7, S3-6
The Secrets of Isis- S1-15, S2-7
Sabrina and the Groovie Ghoulies-  S1-13, S2-2
Jason of Star Command  S1-16, S2-12

Filmation's biggest success was Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids which ran from 1972-1985 (13 seasons) and only produced a total of 59 episodes!  14 episodes the first season and never more than 8 episodes in any season to follow with some seasons seeing no new episodes produced at all!

So to answer your questions- Yes, the studios and networks did expect kids to keep watching the same shows over and over again.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

Best

Joe

[profh0011]

"Sabrina and the Groovie Ghoulies-  S1-13, S2-2"

2 !!!  Why did they even bother?


By comparison, when the WB BATMAN premiered, I understand they did 65 the first year. Not sure how many in succeeding years. Sadly, I got fed up with the show after one season, because of the way they kept scheduling it. Anytime there was any continuity betwen stories, they always ran them out of sequence.  And they kept interspersing reruns with new episodes, which made it very difficult trying to tape the new ones, as day after day (sometimes for weeks) it was nothing but reruns, and you never knew when the new ones would turn up.

There's a lot of people getting paid really good money to do work that bad...

[josemas]

[

By comparison, when the WB BATMAN premiered, I understand they did 65 the first year. Not sure how many in succeeding years. Sadly, I got fed up with the show after one season, because of the way they kept scheduling it. Anytime there was any continuity betwen stories, they always ran them out of sequence.  And they kept interspersing reruns with new episodes, which made it very difficult trying to tape the new ones, as day after day (sometimes for weeks) it was nothing but reruns, and you never knew when the new ones would turn up.

There's a lot of people getting paid really good money to do work that bad...

Batman-the animated series worked out to- S1-60, S2-10, S3-10, S4-5 (a total of 85 episodes) plus a couple feature length movies along the way in there somewhere. 

I can sympathize about trying to follow and record such a show.  After the first twenty episodes the scheduling of new episodes started getting increasingly erratic and after the forty fifth episode -Good Luck- on trying to catch when ever they would schedule a new one! 

It has become so much easier these days to just wait for a whole season of a show to come out on DVD or become available online somewhere. 

Best

Joe

[josemas]

Last month, after years of using dial up service,  I upgraded my ISP and have started checking out places I can watch videos online (something that was excruciatingly difficult to do with dial up)..

I thought I would mention some of the neat 1950s and 60s shows I found recently at Hulu.com

Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot-  the entire series-  I'm finally getting to see this one and it is a hoot!

Highway Patrol-  Season One (39 episodes) & Sea Hunt-   Season One (39 episodes)   I used to watch these two 1950s series regularly as a kid in the 1960s but haven't seen much of either since the early 1970s.  Very cool revisiting them.

My Mother the Car-  the complete series-  possibly both the nadir and the epitome of 1960s sitcoms.  Kinda' like watching a terrible disaster -  fascinating and repelling at the same time.

Man With a Camera-  the entire series-  Charles Bronson as a tough guy reporter/photographer in this 1950s series.

Others I have seen there but haven't yet checked out include Alfred Hitchcock Presents,The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Bat Masterson, The Buccaneers, The Cisco Kid, The Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, One Step Beyond, The Roy Rogers Show, Tales of Tomorrow, The Addams Family, Adam 12, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Bewitched, The Big Valley, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dragnet (60s version), Gigantor, Green Acres, I Dream of Jeannie, Ironside, Land of the Giants, Lost in Space, McHale's Navy, Milton the Monster Show, Mister Ed, Night Gallery, The Outer Limits, Prince Planet, The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

I'm sure there are other vintage shows that i haven't spotted there yet too.  They also have a number of current and more recent series.  You can search alphabetically or by decade or by genre.

I should also mention a neat modern serial that they have there.   The Mercury Men-  a recent production that is a fun update of those wonderful fun old black and white, low budget chapter-plays.  I'm just over halfway through it's 10 episodes.  Chapters run about six-eight minutes each.

Enjoy

Joe

[profh0011]

"Batman-the animated series worked out to- S1-60, S2-10, S3-10, S4-5 (a total of 85"

Utterly ridiculous!!!

But this means I actually do have most of them... (sheesh) And all these years I thought I must be missing a ton of them...

[Menticide]

I finished watching the new version of A Better Tomorrow this morning. Wow, not as good as the original. But, what remake is? This is a very good movie, if you ignore the original, and pretend it's not a remake. I do not mean that as a swipe, because this movie works, but it has its faults, just like the original, and it has some moments that will hit you square in the gut. It's great if you watch it on the right level, it has its short-comings too, but in the end, it works, and it's pretty cool. Check it out...

[profh0011]

"Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot-  the entire series-  I'm finally getting to see this one and it is a hoot!"

I only got to see it once.  Channel 17 in Philly ran all 25 episodes (I read online there's 26, but I only saw 25!! I woudln't put it past them to have SKIPPED one) once, then yanked it off.  (Rumor has it it was seen again around here, but, again, if it was, I sure as hell never knew about it.)

I always thought of this as a sort of parody of ULTRA MAN, SPACE GIANTS, and of course, GIGANTOR. I mean, the villains were so funny, the monsters were just plain ridiculous in design, and you had the insane mixture of a little kid hero and tons of violence (so many machine-guns!!). I bet the parents censor groups in the late 60's had heart attacks over this one.

I couldn't help but notice that (as far as I could tell) some of the episodes were blatently run out of sequence.  You had Dangor The Executioner, who was obviously the same character as Fangor, only before some horrible mutilating accident.  And Fangor appeared first.

I've only seen most of these once, except for the 5 episodes that were edited together in the absurdly-titled VOYAGE INTO SPACE compilation film.  I've got a bad copy of that, and have seen it many times!  It never fails to put a big smile on my face.


Jerry Mano reminds me a bit of Jimmy Woo from THE YELLOW CLAW series, while the "Nucleon" monster reminds me a lot of the "Octo-Sapien" from a HULK episode in TALES TO ASTONISH.

[narfstar]

Never seen Johnny Sokko

[profh0011]

THE DEVIL'S BRIDE
HOUSE OF USHER
PIT AND THE PENDULUM
THE PREMATURE BURIAL
THE CHURCH

[paw broon]

I found episodes of Man With a Camera on the internet and have watched some - they are very enjoyable.
Once you start looking, lots of stuff turns up but some sites wont let anyone outside N.America view some programmes.
We have been watching a new show here and, although it's not gritty, serious and dark - quite the opposite, in fact - it's great entertainment.  Death in Paradise stars Ben Miller (Primeval and one half of Armstrong and Miller) and it's set on a W. Indies island which used to be French and is now British.  There is a murder and Scotland Yard send an Inspector.  A wee bit of a Doc Martin character but quite funny and diverting.  Also, in some episodes you can wallow in Don Warringtons amazing voice.  Danny John Jules, the cat in Red Dwarf, also stars.
We now have the new Mentalist episodes - so-so, we'll see how it goes.

[bowers]

Will be watching for "Death in Paradise"- sounds pretty good. Always glad to see Ben Miller and Danny John Jules. I didn't want to give any spoilers when I earlier gave a poor review on the new season of "The Mentalist". Now, I have to ask wasn't the season premiere pretty awful? The first few episodes seem to depict Jane as being  more smug and self-righteous and not as charming. Why do writers have to mess with a successful character? Anyway, the later episodes are better. Happy Thanksgiving to all and don't get trampled on Black Friday! Cheers, Bowers

[profh0011]

TALES OF TERROR
THE RAVEN
MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM

[profh0011]

Tonight:  Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley, Lloyd Bochner & Sam Jaffee in...

GIDGET GOES TO HELL

[josemas]

Tonight:  Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley, Lloyd Bochner & Sam Jaffee in...

GIDGET GOES TO HELL

aka The Dunwich Horror.

Weird your bringing this up now as I'm right in the middle of reading a collection of Lovecraft stories.

On the other hand I don't always associate Dee with Gidget as I have never seen any of the movies where she plays the character but instead have Sally Field etched into my mind from her portrayal of Gidget in the 1960s TV series.

Best

Joe

[profh0011]

THE DUNWICH HORROR is one of many films that at the IMDB has provoked almost violent contrasts of opinions. Most of the negative opinions, it seems to me, are from younger people who are absolutely OBSESSED with the singular idea that a movie is good or bad based solely on whether it's faithful to the book or not. I find this an increasingly narrow point-of-view to take. It would certainly make it almost impossible for anyone to enjoy any James Bond, Edgar Allan Poe or Jules Verne films.

Trivia: there's 3 "Battlestar Galactica" connections in this film.  No kidding!  The Director, Daniel Haller, directed one of the very best BG stories, the 2-part "War Of The Gods"; Lloyd Bochner played "Commander Leitner" the the Nazi-like "Eastern Alliance" (in the episodes "Greetings From Earth" and "Baltar's Escape"); and Ed Begley's SON was a regular on the show!

[profh0011]

HEAVY METAL   (1981)

"This is great. Eighteen years of nothin', and now twice in one day! What a place."

...and...

"The rising moon climaxes our love, Den. It is a sign."
"YES. A SIGN."
("I had no idea what she was talking about!")

...and...

"But WHY can't we get married?  We laugh, we have a lot of fun together, we have highly proficient sex..."
"Look, let's just say we're different and leave it at that, okay?"
"Whatta ya mean-- different?"  ("SPROING!")

[profh0011]

TARZAN FINDS A SON!  (1939)

This may be the greatest film ever made starring a 5-year-old actor. Honestly, people who don't like "Boy" are crazy. What a kid!

Only 2 things really bother me about this film. First is Henry Stephenson's character getting shot in the back, the same way the "comic relief" guy did in the previous film. 2 films in a row where the most symnpathetic character is killed by someone they knew. That ain't right. Sure, the person who did it came to a bad end, but that's not enough...

Also, I think they missed a real bet here. MGM never gave their Tarzan an "origin" story. Along comes "Boy" who is said to be the nephew of "Lord Greystoke". Just imagine if, halfway thru the film, Henry Stephenson's character had recognized that TARZAN was actually Lord Greystoke!! That would mean HE had as much legal right to keep Boy as the greedy relatives. It would have supplied a more complex dynamic with all the other characters, as well. (It seems absurd that in the MGM series, both Jane and Boy are heirs to great estates-- but Tarzan is a complete mystery.)

Henry

[josemas]

I enjoyed last night's episode of Leverage which concentrated on the ladies and had Jeri Ryan returning as Tara Cole.  A nice little break from the usual.  I like to see them both guest star Ryan and try something a bit different (like this episode) more often.

Best

Joe

[josemas]

I just read that two lost episodes of Dr. Who have been found.

More at this blogsite.

http://from-the-archive.blogspot.com/

Best

Joe

[paw broon]

Great news.  It was an item on news this morning and they managed to forget to tell us which episodes they were.  Typical.
Death in Paradise keeps up its standards and, because we were on holiday, we have a couple of episodes to catch up on.