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Post by badwolf on Nov 11, 2021 16:21:01 GMT -5
Millennium was good, although I didn't follow it as avidly as I did The X-Files.
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Post by berkley on Nov 11, 2021 23:05:51 GMT -5
Millennium was good, although I didn't follow it as avidly as I did The X-Files.
I tried to get into it but it never seemed to get going for me. It looked good, with the same high production values and nice photography of the X-Files, and I like Lance Henrickson a lot, but for some reason all these promising elements never quite came togerher into a satisfying whole. Maybe I should give it another try some time.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 12, 2021 0:18:08 GMT -5
Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren is great (UK detective series), as is Touch of Frost. Both begin around the time frame you mentioned.
For 90s comedies, I would throw out Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, starring Steve Coogan, as well as the sequel, I'm Alan Partridge.
The Vicar of Dibley is another good comedy, with Dawn French.
Also highly recommend the Sharpe series, with Sean Bean. He gets to survive this series! Early series are the best, though it is mostly good right up to Waterloo. You can catch a young Paul Bettany in Sharpe's Waterloo. Sharpe's Eagle has a guest role from Chuck Cunningham, himself, Gavin O'Herlihy (son of actor Dan O'Herlihy, aka The Old Man, in Robocop). Also has Pete Postlethwaite in a pair of excellent episodes, as a real scumbag, named Obadiah Hakeswill (great name!).
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Post by berkley on Nov 12, 2021 14:02:29 GMT -5
Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren is great (UK detective series), as is Touch of Frost. Both begin around the time frame you mentioned. For 90s comedies, I would throw out Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, starring Steve Coogan, as well as the sequel, I'm Alan Partridge. The Vicar of Dibley is another good comedy, with Dawn French. Also highly recommend the Sharpe series, with Sean Bean. He gets to survive this series! Early series are the best, though it is mostly good right up to Waterloo. You can catch a young Paul Bettany in Sharpe's Waterloo. Sharpe's Eagle has a guest role from Chuck Cunningham, himself, Gavin O'Herlihy (son of actor Dan O'Herlihy, aka The Old Man, in Robocop). Also has Pete Postlethwaite in a pair of excellent episodes, as a real scumbag, named Obadiah Hakeswill (great name!). Thanks, some possibilities for me there. I've seen Prime Suspect but not Touch of Frost. The Alan Partridge stuff is definitely on my list, having seen only a few things here and there over the years. Look forward to watching all the different shows that character appeared in from the beginning - I might even try to find the radio series where it started, apparently.
Sharpe, I'm undecided on because I might want to read the books someday and would rather not be spoiled. Some of the detective series pose the same dilemma. Tempting, though.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 12, 2021 22:29:13 GMT -5
Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren is great (UK detective series), as is Touch of Frost. Both begin around the time frame you mentioned. For 90s comedies, I would throw out Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, starring Steve Coogan, as well as the sequel, I'm Alan Partridge. The Vicar of Dibley is another good comedy, with Dawn French. Also highly recommend the Sharpe series, with Sean Bean. He gets to survive this series! Early series are the best, though it is mostly good right up to Waterloo. You can catch a young Paul Bettany in Sharpe's Waterloo. Sharpe's Eagle has a guest role from Chuck Cunningham, himself, Gavin O'Herlihy (son of actor Dan O'Herlihy, aka The Old Man, in Robocop). Also has Pete Postlethwaite in a pair of excellent episodes, as a real scumbag, named Obadiah Hakeswill (great name!). Thanks, some possibilities for me there. I've seen Prime Suspect but not Touch of Frost. The Alan Partridge stuff is definitely on my list, having seen only a few things here and there over the years. Look forward to watching all the different shows that character appeared in from the beginning - I might even try to find the radio series where it started, apparently.
Sharpe, I'm undecided on because I might want to read the books someday and would rather not be spoiled. Some of the detective series pose the same dilemma. Tempting, though.
There are several books they didn't adapt and they took liberties (Sharpe was from London; but, because of Sean Bean, he was made a Northerner, in the series and Cornwell adjusted things, later. The books have more going on; so, not too much spoilage, there. Cornwell's a damn good historical writer and also has a series (Starbuck Chronicles) set in the American Civil War, a King Arthur series, one that covers the early Saxon king, one set during the American Revolution, and a couple of others, last time I looked. His stuff is up there with CS Forester's Hornblower series and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. The battles are a bit sparse, due to budget; but they improve as they go along. The earliest series were filmed in the Crimea, using Russian soldiers as extras and even stuntmen. Sharpe's Regiment had the luxury of filming in England and has a ton of re-enactors involved. |
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Post by brutalis on Nov 14, 2021 12:07:17 GMT -5
Classic television watchers can add another channel for viewing pleasure. MeTv+ has now premiered this week here in Phoenix. It has been put for awhile so check your scanning or listings. A quick look through and for weekday morning they have family shows then police/detective through the rest of the days and then some western shows late night early morning. Weekends are westerns all day Saturday and Sunday morning with the afternoon showing the Gerry Anderson puppet shows then some sci-fi for the night.
To mention some shows: the Rookies, Mod Squad, Police Woman, Streets of San Francisco, Mission Impossible, Vegas. Hawaii 5-0, Will Wild West, Highlander, Lost in Space, Space:1999, War of the Worlds, Cheyenne, the Rebel, Daniel Boone, Trackdown and others.
Along with the Gerry Anderson shows MeTv+ also runs the Toon in with me hour long hosted cartoon show at 9pm Mon-Fri and Sunday night 7p-109 a 4 hour block of cartoons. Plenty of classics to enjoy!
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Jan 19, 2022 11:02:21 GMT -5
I watched the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, which is the first instalment of the Kolchak series, last night.  I can't remember how I first heard about Kolchak: The Night Stalker, but it was definitely through comic culture. The series and main character mean nothing over here in the U.K., and I'm not even sure if it was ever shown here. This first TV movie finds Kolchak, a down on his luck journalist, on the trail of a serial killer in Las Vegas, who it seems might just be a real live (dead?) vampire. Kolchak himself (played by actor Darren McGavin) is a hugely likeable protagonist, and the supporting cast are also great -- particularly Carol Lynley as Kolchak's girlfriend and Kent Smith as a bad tempered and slimy Los Vegas District Attorney. I definitely enjoyed this for what it was: a made for TV film with limited budget. Barry Atwater was nicely sinister as the vampire and the story unfolded in a very watchable and entertaining manner. One complaint would be that, for the most part, it really wasn't all that scary. In fact, it wasn't until the film's climax, with Kolchak exploring a spooky old house in search of the vampire's lair that things got properly creepy. But it was still a pretty enjoyable hour and a half of early 70s genre TV. I'll definitely be watching the follow up movie, The Night Strangler (1973), at some point. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Jan 19, 2022 13:02:57 GMT -5
I watched the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, which is the first instalment of the Kolchak series, last night. I can't remember how I first heard about Kolchak: The Night Stalker, but it was definitely through comic culture. The series and main character mean nothing over here in the U.K., and I'm not even sure if it was ever shown here. This first TV movie finds Kolchak, a down on his luck journalist, on the trail of a serial killer in Las Vegas, who it seems might just be a real live (dead?) vampire. Kolchak himself (played by actor Darren McGavin) is a hugely likeable protagonist, and the supporting cast are also great -- particularly Carol Lynley as Kolchak's girlfriend and Kent Smith as a bad tempered and slimy Los Vegas District Attorney. I definitely enjoyed this for what it was: a made for TV film with limited budget. Barry Atwater was nicely sinister as the vampire and the story unfolded in a very watchable and entertaining manner. One complaint would be that, for the most part, it really wasn't all that scary. In fact, it wasn't until the film's climax, with Kolchak exploring a spooky old house in search of the vampire's lair that things got properly creepy. But it was still a pretty enjoyable hour and a half of early 70s genre TV. I'll definitely be watching the follow up movie, The Night Strangler (1973), at some point. Night Strangler is decent, as was the short-lived tv series that followed. Both teleplays were written by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, Incredible Shrinking Man), who did quite a bit of writing for tv, in the era, including Trilogy of Terror and had written several episodes of the Twilight Zone. Kolchak is, basically, an attempt at melding the detective genre to a horror story, with everyone reacting the way they actually might, if presented with a case that seems like a vampire, but obviously couldn't be. Both the films and the tv series had a major influence on The X-Files, which brought McGavin back as a guest star. A little bit later, NBC had a series (which was shown in the UK), called Cliffhangers, which was a tribute to the old movie serials. It had three segments, one of which was Dracula, with the vampire alive and in modern San Francisco. A Van Helsing descendent hunts him, with his female partner. He masquerades as a teacher of European history and the woman becomes a student (I think, it's been a while) and she starts falling for him. That was the only segment that had the serial completed, before the show was yanked. It was popular enough that they repeated those segments on Sundays and later as a tv movie, called The Curse of Dracula. The other two segments were Stop Susan Williams, about a journalist (Susan Anton, aka Dudley Moore's girlfriend), investigating a conspiracy to kill a bunch of world leaders; and, The Secret Empire, set in the Old West, with a marshal dealing with a mysterious group of black-clad riders. That was an updating of the old Gene Autry serial, The phantom Empire. Mark Lenard, of Star Trek, played a Ming the Merciless-type villain, who rules the advanced underground civilization. NBC yanked the show without broadcasting the last episode, which featured the conclusions to The Secret Empire and Stop Susan Williams, with Dracula finishing up in the previous episode, the last to be aired. The entire show was broadcast in the UK, on ITV (I believe) and that allowed later tape traders to have the complete series. If you want something scarier, Trilogy of Terror fits the bill, especially the third story, with an African statue that comes to life. Also around this time, ABC broadcast an adaptation of Theodore Sturgeon's Killdozer, with Clint Walker, where a meteor crash, on an island, brings a bulldozer to life and sends it on a murderous rampage. Sounds stupid but it's actually a pretty good story and a decent telefilm. Back in the early 70s, the networks, especially ABC, used to have a showcase for tv movies and put some real effort into them. Many were pilots for series; but, many did not start out that way and some were just meant to be films. The Six Million Dollar Man began this way, and was intended to continue as a series of films, when ABC decided to go to series, after the third one, which led to the shorter first season. Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II was broadcast this way, then they did it again with Planet Earth, with a new cast (using unproduced stories for the early intended episodes), then again as Strange New World. Gary Lockwood appeared in one, called Earth II, about an orbital space station that is an independent state, at odds with the governments on planet Earth. You also had stuff like The Birdmen, about a POW escape from a castle prison (aka Escape of the Birdmen), Duel, with Dennis Weaver menaced by a semi-truck (directed by Stephen Spielberg), Brian's Song, about NFL players Brian Piccolo (who died of cancer) and Gayle Sayers; Family Flight, with Rod Taylor, about a family plane that sets down in the desert, with engine trouble; Outrage, with Robert Culp, as a man whose family is terrorized by some out of control teen agers; and Bad Ronald, about a kid hiding in the attic of a house that is occupied by a new family. A lot of these films can be seen on Youtube and the Warner Archives sells manufacture-on-demand dvds of several, which they control, including Genesis II, Earth II and Bad Ronald. |
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Post by berkley on Jan 19, 2022 17:31:51 GMT -5
I wish I had seen Kolchak when I was a kid because it's exactly the kind of thing I would have loved at that age. And I still think I'll like it as an adult whenever I do get around to watching it but for now I'm holding off until I start getting into a lot of early 1970s stuff in general.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jan 20, 2022 22:37:44 GMT -5
I've been slowly rewatching the entire Kolchak series. I got the whole 20 episodes for a couple bucks on Amazon Prime a while back. Crazy that we just had the 50th Anniversary of the show. Well, the original movie, The Night Stalker. The tv series didn't debut until 1974. Man, don't remind me that anything within my lifetime is 50 years old. It's happening too often! |
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Post by Confessor on Jan 21, 2022 12:32:01 GMT -5
So, last night I watched the second Kolchak TV movie, The Night Strangler (1973).  I have to say that, actually, I thought this was a better film than The Night Stalker. It finds our hapless hero, reporter Carl Kolchak, having relocated to Seattle, where he investigates a series of murders in which young women are strangled and drained of a few ounces of blood. Kolchak ends up pursuing a 144-year old alchemist who has synthesised an elixir of life through the abandoned underground city beneath Seattle in a tense, eerie finale. The Night Strangler was, like its predecessor, written Richard Matheson (of I Am Legend fame) and, I have to say, the script is slightly more interesting than the earlier film. There's also better chemistry between the central characters, who were a bit more developed and given more dramatic "meat" to work with. In particular, the scenes between Darren McGavin's Kolchak and his long suffering editor Tony Vincenzo – played superbly by Simon Oakland – are really enjoyable. Sure, the fact that Kolchak has again cracked the case early on and yet again isn't believed by those in authority felt like a bit of a retread of The Night Stalker, but the climax of this film in the abandoned subterranean city under Seattle was proper creepy. Overall, pretty good stuff. I might well give the Kolchak: The Night Stalker series a go next. |
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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 22, 2022 10:17:40 GMT -5
I somehow missed the Kolchak movies, but my brother and I never missed the Kolchak TV series! We were OUTRAGED that it only lasted one season!
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 25, 2022 14:01:32 GMT -5
I somehow missed the Kolchak movies, but my brother and I never missed the Kolchak TV series! We were OUTRAGED that it only lasted one season! There are only so many monsters out there. |
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Post by berkley on Jan 25, 2022 15:28:19 GMT -5
Watched the first three episodes of a show I've only recently become aware of: Man with a Camera, a late '50s series starring Charles Bronson as a free-lance photographer who gets bitten by a radioactive spider ... no, no, that's another thing altogether. Bronson stars as a free-lance photographer who gets involved in various crime stories. So far, interesting mainly as a period piece and to see Bronson in the starring role. Worth a look for any Bronson fans.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 25, 2022 15:57:48 GMT -5
All these posts about older TV shows, many of which, especially Westerns, I watch occasionally, remind me that many a modern comics writer (and artist) might learn something about telling a compelling story by watching a few of them.
Oh, many of them are forgettable, but on the best of them, the plots are airtight, nary a line or a scene distracts, and the dialogue never wastes time telling you what you can already tell about a character from the acting. No gimmicks, no cheap emotion, no excess. Low budgets and strict deadlines brought out the best in many of these creators. These, like comics way back in the day, were proof that necessity often is the mother of invention.
If only many modern comics artists and writers could learn these lessons.
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