Archive for the ‘1970s’ Category

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 266

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020

I’m hoping I won’t be doing this next Christmas. I’m hoping that we will be back to “normal” (whatever the new “normal” is) and that we won’t be scrounging for paper goods or wearing masks everywhere and that I’ll even be able to get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

But in the meantime, I intend to have some fun with the Christmas theme.

“Rankin/Bass CBS Christmas Special W/Vintage Commercials”. Four hours of Christmas specials.

The main features of this simulated CBS Rankin Bass Christmas special include Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Little Drummer Boy, Santa Clause is Coming to Town and Frosty the Snowman. A few bonus classic Christmas cartoons are also included near the end, And all commercial breaks are packed full of nostalgic Christmas commercials from mostly the 70’s and 80’s.

Bonus video: I had a video I was thinking about putting here, but she turned out to be dull. (And she had good material to work with, too.) So today’s bonus video is really a question for the huddled, wretched masses yearning to breathe free:

Is it just me, or does Alton Brown:

kind of look scarily like Walter White these days?

(I picked a season 2 clip because Lawrence and I have only gotten through season 2. The resemblance may be more pronounced in later seasons, but since we haven’t watched those…)

Posted in 1970s, Christmas, Food, History, TV | 1 Comment »

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

Friday, December 11th, 2020

The holiday is only two weeks away, so here’s a little morning musical interlude to cheer you up and put you in the spirit.

Posted in 1970s, Christmas, Music, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 4, 2020.

Friday, December 4th, 2020

Warren Berlinger, prolific TV and movie actor.

He was in a lot of stuff: “Cannonball Run”, multiple appearances on “Happy Days”, “The Shaggy D.A.”, “Operation Petticoat”, and the list goes on.

Hamish MacInnes, mountain climber. I note this for two reasons:

1) Not making fun of his name, but if “Hamish MacInnes” isn’t the most Scottish name imaginable, it’s in the top ten.

2) Not only was he a climber, he was also one of the pioneers of mountain rescue:

As inventive as he was adventurous, Mr. MacInnes built a car from scratch when he was 17. He later used radar to search for bodies in the snow and, in 1961, founded the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team. He also trained dogs to help search for avalanche victims. His friends called him “the fox of Glencoe” for his cunning in finding lost climbers.
Perhaps his most famous invention was the first all-steel ice ax. It was a significant improvement on the wooden-handled ax, which snapped under pressure.
He also developed a foldable lightweight mountain rescue stretcher that is still in use today and an avalanche information service. His “International Mountain Rescue Handbook” (1972) became the go-to manual for rescue teams all over the world.
All told, his inventions and services saved countless lives.
“No one man has done more to help put in place the network of emergency response efforts designed to keep climbers from harm’s way,” The Scotsman newspaper wrote after Mr. MacInnes’s death.

Scary story:

When he was 84, he was found unconscious in front of his house. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was deemed demented and held against his will for 15 months. During that time, he was sedated and put in a straitjacket, his weight plummeted, and his memory vanished. He made several attempts to escape; at one point he scaled the outside wall of the hospital, only to end up on the roof with nowhere to go.
Doctors eventually discovered that he had been suffering from a chronic urinary tract infection that produced dementia-like symptoms.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 26, 2020.

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

Dena Dietrich.

She had a strong TV career, and an interesting theater one:

What would have been her Broadway debut — “The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake” (1967), a generation-gap comedy — closed in previews, reportedly because its Hollywood star, Jean Arthur, was ill. Ms. Dietrich’s first official Broadway appearance was also brief: “Here’s Where I Belong,” a musical based on John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” opened and closed on March 3, 1968.
Then her luck changed. Ms. Dietrich played a sensible older sister in Mike Nichols’s Broadway production of Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971). The play, starring Peter Falk and Lee Grant as Manhattanites struggling through a bad economy, ran for almost two years and won two Tony Awards.

She was most famous, though, as “Mother Nature” in those 1970s commercials for a margarine company. (“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”)

Ian Finkel, the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest xylophonist”.

Mr. Finkel’s path took him from the borscht belt resorts in the Catskills to playing with the New York Philharmonic. He also worked as a composer and musical arranger for stars like Sid Caesar, Tito Puente and Ginger Rogers, his brother, Elliot Finkel, said.
As a percussionist, he worked in orchestras that accompanied the likes of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross and Tony Bennett.

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 14, 2020.

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020

Conchata Ferrell.

Yes, yes, “Two and a Half Men”, but she did a lot of other work too.

Ms. Ferrell had achieved acclaim decades earlier in New York theater, appearing as the prostitute April in Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot L Baltimore” (1973), a role he wrote for her. The play won multiple awards, including an Obie for best Off Broadway play, and ran for three years.
Ms. Ferrell collected her own Off Broadway prizes, including the Drama Desk Award for best actress in a play and an Obie, for her performance as a disillusioned waterfront-bar owner in “The Sea Horse” (1973).
She received her first Emmy nomination in 1992 for a recurring role as Susan Bloom, a ruthless entertainment lawyer with more money than manners, on “L.A. Law.”
She later said the three favorite characters she had played were Berta, April and Susan Bloom. What they had in common, she said in a 2018 interview with The Huntington Quarterly, a West Virginia magazine, was “a zest for living life to the fullest in the best way available to them.”

…

She notably played the judge who refused to annul Ross and Rachel’s Las Vegas marriage on “Friends” (1999). But she often went dramatic too, playing a homesteader’s wife in the 1979 movie “Heartland” and appearing on series including “Knots Landing,” “Lou Grant” and “Touched by an Angel.” In a 1986 television version (and Los Angeles stage version) of William Inge’s heart-wrenching drama “Picnic,” she played the kind widow who hires a dangerous drifter.
Ms. Ferrell also had small roles in big movies, including “Network” (1976), as a television executive appalled by Faye Dunaway’s series ideas, and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), as a neighborhood lady in pink hair rollers. She starred as a pizzeria owner in “Mystic Pizza” (1988), with a cast that included a young Julia Roberts. The two reunited in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), with Ms. Ferrell as Albert Finney’s secretary.

She never did a “Mannix”, but she did appear on “The Rockford Files” and “Quincy, M.E”, and had a recurring role as “The Fox” on both “B.J. and the Bear” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, along with a bunch of other guest shots.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 170

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020

Today, I wanted to put up something that pushes a few of RoadRich’s hot buttons (and my own).

The California Highway Patrol has a YouTube channel. I thought it might be interesting to look at some aspects of operations that are common to both the Austin Police Department and the CHP. These are things that APD devotes presentations to in their Citizen’s Police Academy (which is on-hold at the moment), so why not take a look at how a department outside of the United States handles these things?

First up: “Air Operations”. This is a two-parter: Part 1.

(Can I note here that I hate “vlog”? I would say I hate the word, but it isn’t even a word.)

Part 2: this covers CHP’s fixed-wing (that is, not helicopter) operations.

You know what else CHP has? The mounted police.

You know I had to do that.

Anyway, the CHP mounted patrol.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Cops, Horses, Law, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2020.

Sunday, September 13th, 2020

Toots Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals.

Lawrence has a good tribute up.

Kevin Dobson. He never did a “Mannix”, but he did a fair number of other cop shows. His two most famous roles were as Kojak’s sidekick, and as a detective on “Knots Landing”.

Mr. Dobson was less active on the big screen than the small one, but he did appear in some notable films, including “Midway” (1976), as part of an all-star cast that also included Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston, and the 1981 romantic comedy “All Night Long,” in which his character was married to Barbra Streisand’s.
In 1981 he played Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective created by Mickey Spillane, in the CBS television movie “Margin for Murder.” “Mr. Dobson is given a valuable opportunity to step outside of his usual ‘nice guy’ image,” John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote in a review. “He makes the most of it, reinforcing Mike’s toughness with an impeccably accurate New York accent.”

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 5, 2020.

Saturday, September 5th, 2020

Julia Reed, writer about food and the South. She wasn’t someone I was really familiar with, but reading her obit makes her sound like a barrel of fun.

Deeply imprinted by the Mississippi Delta traditions she grew up with, Ms. Reed was as well known for her entertaining as her journalism. In one of her many food columns for The New York Times Magazine, she described a New Year’s Eve party that had gone off the rails. There was a fistfight, more than one bathroom dalliance, the unmasking of an arms dealer, a fainting, a fire and more — all of which she missed but heard about secondhand by phone when she awoke with a hangover the next day.

…

Ms. Reed earned her first byline at 19, when she was a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington and a part-time library assistant and phone answerer, as she put it, at Newsweek, a job she had held since she was a student at Madeira, an all-girls boarding school in Virginia.
When the school’s headmistress, Jean Harris, murdered her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the celebrity doctor and creator of the Scarsdale Diet, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief sent Ms. Reed to get the Madeira angle. As Ms. Reed wrote, he woke her up with an order to head back to her old school. When she wondered why, he barked, “You idiot, your headmistress just shot the diet doctor!”
Ms. Reed liked to say she was sorry the doctor had to give his life in service to her career as a journalist.

…

Mr. Talley also recounted the story of Ms. Reed’s aborted marriage to a charming Australian foreign correspondent. She canceled the wedding, a full-on Southern affair with nearly 1,000 guests, but the couple went on their honeymoon anyway — it was paid for, after all — ending up at the Ritz in Paris, where they met Mr. Talley, and holding court in the bar until the early hours of the morning, with characters as various as Madonna’s bodyguards, Kate Moss, Johnny Depp and Arlene Dahl.

Cathy Smith is burning in Hell.

Ms. Smith is the woman who gave John Belushi the fatal speedball.

Posted in 1970s, Food, Law, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 1, 2020.

Tuesday, September 1st, 2020

McThag had this story the other day, but I was waiting:

Joe Ruby, co-creator of “Scooby-Doo”.

Mr. Ruby and Mr. [Ken] Spears had been working mostly as editors at Hanna-Barbera, the leading TV animation studio, when they were charged with creating a show that was a mash-up of “I Love a Mystery,” a popular radio show heard from 1939 to 1944 about three adventure-seeking pals; the 1948 horror-comedy movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”; and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” the 1959-63 sitcom about a hapless teenager.
The directive, which came from Fred Silverman, then the head of daytime programming at CBS, also asked that a pop song be embedded in each episode, as was done on “The Archie Show.” The idea was for the new series to be soothing and nonviolent, an answer to the moral panic about violence in the media in the wake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, said Kevin Sandler, an associate professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University.
The pop song part didn’t work out. But Mr. Ruby and Mr. Spears hit all the other marks by writing an adorable half-hour comedy-mystery with a lovable and hapless Great Dane — a character modeled, they often said, on the character Bob Hope played alongside Bing Crosby in the “Road” movies. After 15 or so drafts, they realized that the dog, Scooby-Doo, was the star. (The artist was Iwao Takamoto, another Hanna-Barbera veteran, who died in 2007.)

…

Hanna-Barbera was a relatively small studio at the time that was short of writers, and the pair started submitting gags and scripts on spec. They became network darlings and were the particular favorites of Mr. Silverman, said Mark Evanier, a television writer who later worked for Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby. When Mr. Silverman moved to ABC, he took Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby with him, and in 1977 he helped them set up their own studio.
Over the next 20 or so years, Ruby-Spears Productions created a slew of animated programs, among them “Thundarr the Barbarian,” starring a musclebound hero and set in a postapocalyptic future, and “Fangface,” featuring a lovable werewolf and a gang of teenagers — like “Scooby-Doo,” but with complications. The company also produced a reboot of “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and many other shows.

The obit does not discuss Scrappy-Doo at all, but the Wikipedia entry on same is enlightening.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2020.

Sunday, July 26th, 2020

Yesterday and today were big news days.

Olivia de Havilland. THR. Variety.

She was known for her sincerity, fragile beauty and beautiful diction, and for bringing dimension to sympathetic characters. When she made a rare foray into villainous roles, she was expert. But the public preferred her as a heroine, which suited her well, since she said it was harder to play “a good girl” rather than a bad one.

I did not know she was in “Airport ’77”. Not that that was a highlight of her career. Or Joseph Cotton’s. Or anybody else’s. But the “Airport” movies are on our list.

Regis Philbin, for the record. THR. Variety.

I’m probably giving him short shrift, but everyone has covered his death. And I never watched a single episode of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” or “Regis and (x)”.

Peter Green, founder of Fleetwood Mac.

John Saxon, working actor. THR. No obit from the Times yet. 198 credits in IMDB. I guess he might be most famous for his roles in “Enter the Dragon” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, and possibly “Mitchell”. I also remember him from “The New Doctors” segment of “The Bold Ones” wheel.

And he had guest shots in every damn thing in the 1970s: the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “The Rockford Files” (we watched “A Portrait of Elizabeth” last night: it’s a fun episode), “Banacek”, “Banyon”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”…

…oddly, though, he’s another one of those guys who seem to have done everything except “Mannix”.

The paper of record did finally get around to publishing an obit for Ronald Graham. (Previously.)

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 98

Monday, July 6th, 2020

This is a little longer than I’d like, but it popped up in my recommendations, and pushes several buttons at once:

  • The Bell System
  • Lee Marvin
  • The 1970s!

    • From 1970, “It Couldn’t Be Done”, a Bell System film about “impossible structures”, featuring Mr. Marvin and the 5th Dimension.

    Bonus video: since we’re talking about what we can accomplish when we want to, “They Came To An Island”. From 1946, a documentary about the Navy Civil Engineer Corps (aka the Seebees).

Posted in 1970s, Bridges, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 3, 2020.

Friday, July 3rd, 2020

Hugh Downs, long time TV guy and good Akron boy. (“20/20”, “Today”, “The Tonight Show” with Jack Parr.)

In February 1960, Mr. Paar, no stranger to volatility, became furious after NBC removed a joke from the show for reasons of taste. (The joke, tame by today’s standards, involved the use of the term “water closet,” meaning bathroom.) He decided that the best way to teach NBC a lesson was to walk off the next night’s show as it was being taped, leaving Mr. Downs in charge. Mr. Downs assumed the host’s chair immediately, if not confidently: at one point he looked into the camera and plaintively said, “Jack, come back.” The show aired as scheduled, walk-off and all.
Mr. Paar did come back, to the surprise of nobody, but not until 25 days later. In his absence Mr. Downs — who years later would diplomatically remember his former boss as “quite a bundle” — ably assumed his duties as “Tonight Show” host. The Times critic Jack Gould saluted Mr. Downs for having “in most trying circumstances carried off the situation with dignity.”

…

In addition to his television work, Mr. Downs was a composer (he wrote a prelude that was performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra); an amateur guitarist (he played for Andrés Segovia and said he was pleased that Segovia did not leave the room) and painter (when he had the time); the author of numerous books; an advocate for the elderly (he wrote books and articles about the aging process and was the host of a PBS series on aging called “Over Easy”) and for family planning (including abortion rights); a science buff (he was once NBC’s resident expert on science programming); an audiophile (he built his own stereo equipment from scratch); an environmentalist; and an unabashed adventurer who piloted a 65-foot ketch across the Pacific, went to the South Pole and rode a killer whale at Sea World.

Andrew “Jack” Whittaker Jr. The name may not ring a bell right off: he hit the Powerball for $315 million in 2002, took a lump sum payout of $113.4 million post tax…and it didn’t work out quite like wanted.

…he quickly fell victim to scandals, lawsuits and personal setbacks as he endured constant requests for money, leaving him unable to trust others. He was often quoted as saying he wished he had torn up the ticket.
His wife left him. A friend of his drug-addicted granddaughter was found dead at his home in 2004. Three months later, his 17-year-old granddaughter was gone, too.
His daughter, Ginger Whittaker Bragg, died of cancer in 2009 at 42.
And in 2016, he lost a Virginia home to a fire.

Byron Bernstein. I’d never heard of him, but he was a popular Twitch streamer under the name of “Reckful” and noted World of Warcraft player. He was 31.

In a YouTube video posted in January, Byron revealed that he lost his brother to suicide when he was 6 years old. He also admitted to struggling with his mental health but was improving as he worked on a new game.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 30, 2020.

Tuesday, June 30th, 2020

The great Carl Reiner.

His contributions were recognized by his peers, by comedy aficionados and, in 2000, by the Kennedy Center, which awarded him the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He was the third recipient, after Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters.

…

“I always knew if I threw a question to Mel he could come up with something,” Mr. Reiner said. “I learned a long time ago that if you can corner a genius comedy brain in panic, you’re going to get something extraordinary.”
As Mr. Brooks put it, “I would dig myself into a hole, and Carl would not let me climb out.”

…

Mr. Reiner returned to Broadway twice after moving west, but neither visit was triumphant. In 1972 he directed “Tough to Get Help,” a comedy by Steve Gordon about a black couple working in an ostensibly liberal white household, which was savaged by the critics and closed after one performance. In 1980 he staged “The Roast,” by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall, two writers he had worked with on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” That play, about a group of comedians who expose their darker instincts when they gather to roast a colleague, ran for less than a week.

THR. Variety.

Also among the dead: Johnny Mandel, film and television composer.

Mandel was considered one of the finest arrangers of the second half of the 20th century, providing elegant orchestral charts for a wide range of vocalists including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Tony Bennett, Natalie Cole and Hoagy Carmichael.
Mandel scored more than 30 films during his Hollywood career, including the 1960s films “The Americanization of Emily” (from which the hit song “Emily” emerged), “The Sandpiper” (which contained “The Shadow of Your Smile,” earning an Oscar and a Grammy for Song of the Year along with lyricist Paul Francis Webster), “Harper,” “An American Dream” (which included the Oscar-nominated song “A Time for Love”), “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” and “Point Blank.”

He was perhaps most famous for writing “Suicide Is Painless” aka “The Theme from M*A*S*H”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 29, 2020.

Friday, May 29th, 2020

Richard Herd, working actor. He appeared on a minor SF TV show and was a regular on a minor sitcom, but he had a lot of other credits. (Including, interestingly enough, “Capt. Dennis Sheridan” on “T.J. Hooker”. One of the less reputable broadcast networks was running a marathon of that last weekend. Man, it is hard to watch these days.)

Anthony James, another working actor. He was in “Unforgiven” and “In the Heat of the Night” (the movie), also appeared on a minor SF TV show, and had a lot of other credits (“Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Gunsmoke”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Police Story”, and so on).

By way of Lawrence, Cindy Lou Butler Stevens.

“Cindy Lou who?”

No, Cindy Lou Butler Stevens. She was one of the female leads in the awful “Boggy Creek II: and the Legend Continues…“, and also appeared in “The Town that Dreaded Sundown” and “Grayeagle”.

All three of those were directed by Charles B. Pierce (who also directed “The Legend of Boggy Creek”, the first film in the trilogy). Per Lawrence, Ms. Stevens was married to Mr. Pierce at the time.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 18, 2020.

Monday, May 18th, 2020

Phyllis George, former Miss America and former co-host of “The NFL Today”.

Hired as a co-host of CBS Sports’s weekly pregame football show — which featured the high-profile hosts Brent Musburger and Irv Cross and the gambling commentator Jimmy Snyder, or Jimmy the Greek, as he was known — Ms. George immediately became the most prominent woman in sportscasting.
But with her beauty-queen background and her modest television résumé, she was criticized for lacking the traditional sportscaster credentials. She was not a former sportswriter, like Mr. Musburger, and she was obviously not a retired football player, like Mr. Cross.
She responded to her critics by saying that she knew enough about sports, especially football, to get by.
“I’m from Texas,” she told People magazine in 1976, “and down there you follow the Texas Longhorns and the Dallas Cowboys or you don’t belong.”

Excuse me?

She was married twice: to John Y. Brown Jr., former Governor of Kentucky, and Robert Evans.

Captain Jenn Casey, Royal Canadian Air Force. She was a public affairs officer with the Snowbirds demonstration team: the plane she was in crashed during a demo in Kamloops yesterday. The pilot, Captain Richard MacDougall, ejected but suffered serious injuries.

McThag has some thoughts on the subject.

Posted in 1970s, NFL, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

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