Credits beyond “One Life to Live” and a minor SF TV show from the 1960s include “Night Gallery”, “Bearcats!”, “Law and Order” (and “SVU”), “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…
…and “Mannix”. (“The End of the Rainbow“, season 2, episode 5.)
Archive for the ‘Mannix’ Category
Obit watch: April 9, 2022.
Saturday, April 9th, 2022Obit watch: April 6, 2022.
Wednesday, April 6th, 2022Bobby Rydell, one of the big teen idols.
Mr. Rydell and two other affable performers who became stars in those years, Frankie Avalon and Fabian, grew up within about two blocks of one another in South Philadelphia. Long after their days on the pop chart were past them, they enjoyed great success on the oldies circuit. The three had toured extensively together since 1985, billed as the Golden Boys, and were still performing together this year.
Mr. Rydell did not just have staying power; he also made a comeback after years of alcohol abuse, which he chronicled in his autobiography, “Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks” (2016), written with the guitarist and producer Allan Slutsky. Near death, he had a kidney and liver transplant in July 2012. By that October he was back, singing on a cruise ship with Mr. Avalon. But five months later, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Some of his later appearances were charity promotions for organ donation.
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Mr. Rydell’s recording prime encompassed the era roughly between 1959, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and 1964, when Beatlemania hit America. It didn’t hurt that Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was broadcast in those years from Philadelphia, the home of Mr. Rydell’s label, Cameo Records.
Mr. Rydell’s repertoire included plaintive love ballads; slow, danceable tunes; occasional frenetic rockers like “Wild One” and “Swingin’ School”; and ageless songs like Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit “Volare,” which became Mr. Rydell’s signature song in his later touring years.
Mr. Rydell was a pop phenomenon but hardly a cutting-edge rock star. Still, he sold a lot more records than some of those who were. Over the course of his recording career he placed 19 singles in the Billboard Top 40 and 34 in the Hot 100. His name alone could conjure up an entire era: The 1970s rock musical “Grease,” in both its Broadway and movie versions, was set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School.
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Alan J. Hruska, lawyer, novelist, and one of the founders of Soho Press.
Nehemiah Persoff. THR. He was 102.
206 credits in IMDB. If he wasn’t in everything, he was in lots of it. “Some Like It Hot”. “On the Waterfront”. “Law and Order”. “Barney Miller”. The good “Hawaii 5-0” multiple times. “Battlestar Galactica”. “Supertrain”. “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”. “Quincy, M.E.” “Sword of Justice” (I was just thinking about that show the other day.) “Columbo”. “McCloud”. “McMillan and Wife”. (Trivia question I don’t have an answer for: how many actors appeared on all three of the initial shows in the “NBC Mystery Movie” wheel?) “Mission: Impossible”.
And, yes, “Mannix”. (“A Puzzle for One“, season 6, episode 11.)
Obit watch: March 30, 2022.
Wednesday, March 30th, 2022Marvin J. Chomsky, TV director. Credits include “Roots” and “Holocaust”. Also three episodes of a minor 1960s SF TV series, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, “Lancer”, “Bearcats!”, “Evel Knievel”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Little Girl Lost“, season 7, episode 4.)
Paul Herman. Credits other than “The Sopranos” and “Goodfellas” include “We Own The Night”, “Once Upon A Time In America”, and “The Last Temptation of Christ”.
Obit watch: March 23, 2022.
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022Lawrence tipped me off to the deaths of two actors which (per the policy of this blog) I have to note here.
Lawrence Dane. Yeah, yeah, “Bride of Chucky”. Other credits include “Lancer”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The F.B.I.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Fly, Little One”, season 3, episode 21. “Overkill”, season 4, episode 24.)
Howard “Pepper” Martin. Sorry for the sourcing, but I haven’t seen this elsewhere.
Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, the 1990 revival of “Dragnet”, “T.J. Hooker”, “240-Robert”, seven appearances on “The Rockford Files”, six appearances on “Police Woman”, “Mission: Impossible”, four appearances on “Police Story”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Bearcats!”…
…and he was a “Mannix” three timer. (“A Catalogue of Sins”, season 1, episode 11. “Last Rites for Miss Emma”, season 2, episode 22. “The Color of Murder”, season 4, episode 22.)
Obit watch: March 8, 2022.
Tuesday, March 8th, 2022Laurel Goodwin, actress.
She had a somewhat short career, possibly due to bad luck. Her first movie was “Girls! Girls! Girls!” with Elvis. She was in the first (rejected) pilot for a minor 1960s SF TV series, but was cut from the second one. In the meantime, she said she had turned down offers for two successful comedies.
Other credits include “Get Smart”, “The Beverly Hillbillies”, a 1978 TV mini-series based on Dashiell Hammett’s “The Dain Curse”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight”, season 3, episode 5.)
Obit watch: February 25, 2022.
Friday, February 25th, 2022Joe Wanenmacher, founder and owner of the Tulsa Arms Show, one of (if not the) largest gun shows in the world.
Mike the Musicologist and I have been lucky enough to attend a few of the Tulsa shows. The obit says that Mr. Wanenmacher had mostly handed off operational responsibilities to his other family members, but he still built the show into what it is today. Our hat is off to him.
(Hattip on this to our great and good friend David Carroll.)
Sandy Nelson, drummer and subject of one of the most interesting obits I’ve read in the NYT recently.
He had a big hit in 1959 with “Teen Beat”, which was based on a drum riff he heard in a strip club:
“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”
“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”
He had a second big hit with “Let There Be Drums” in 1961. In 1963, he had a motorcycle accident and lost part of his right leg: he retrained himself to play the bass with his left leg.
He did a bunch of instrumental albums in the 1960s and 1970s, many of which featured covers:
But he also continued to do experimental work:
His friend and fellow musician Jack Evan Johnson said that Mr. Nelson was especially proud of “The Veebles,” a whimsical five-track concept album released on cassette in 2016 that had an extraterrestrial sound and theme.
“It’s about a race of people from another planet,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996, when the long-gestating project was just beginning to take shape. “They’re gonna take over the Earth and make us do nothing but dance, sing and tell dumb jokes.”
(I checked: there was a CD version of this, but it is out of print. Amazon and Apple Music do not show a digital version, though some of Mr. Nelson’s other work is available from both.)
Mr. Nelson acknowledged that he had not handled his early success well.
“I spent most of the money on women and whiskey, and the rest I just wasted,” he told The Review-Journal.
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Yes. He dug a cave in his backyard.
The project took him 12 years.
“I got a ‘cave tour’ once,” Mr. Johnson said by email, “and it was quite something, precarious even — dug down at a very steep angle into the hard desert soil, with no kind of support structure whatsoever and just enough room to scoot down into it for a ways until the room opened up at the bottom.”
“He had an electric keyboard down there,” he added.
Kenny Burrough, wide receiver for the Houston Oilers during the 1970s.
Other than the original “Hot Lips”, credits include a guest spot on an early episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Back to School”, “T.H.E. Cat”, “Coronet Blue”, the legendary “Delgo“, and a whole bunch of other stuff…
…including “Mannix”. (“The Solid Gold Web“, season 2, episode 23. She plays a former love interest of Mannix.)
Obit watch: January 30, 2022.
Sunday, January 30th, 2022Booger.
I didn’t watch “Head of the Class”, and, while I may have watched the original “One Day at a Time”, I’m pretty sure I had checked out by season 9. (We were actually discussing that show last night at dinner: I believe we all watched it, but with the mitigating excuse that there were only three channels at the time.)
I can’t find my favorite Dr. Johnny Fever moment online. (Johnny takes a sobriety test, and the drunker he gets, the better his reaction time gets. This is the kind of humor you could get away with in the late 1970s/early 1980s, before joyless fun suckers sucked all the fun out of everything.) And I don’t want to use the turkey drop stuff, because overused and it isn’t Thanksgiving.
So here’s a nice golden moment for you.
Edited to add 2/7: Lawrence pointed out something over the weekend that was quite a surprise to me (I should have checked his credits more closely): Howard Hessman did a “Mannix”. (“A Ransom for Yesterday“, season 8, episode 17. We watched it Saturday night: given that it was so close to the end of the series, it is actually a pretty good episode, and Hessman’s role is substantial. It also isn’t an old Army buddy episode, thank Ghu.)
Obit watch: December 23, 2021.
Thursday, December 23rd, 2021He was “Enrico Rossi” in 113 episodes of “The Untouchables”. Other credits include two episodes of “Get Smart”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The Rockford Files”, four episodes of “Quincy M.E.”, the Andy Sidaris film “Picasso Trigger”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Deadfall”, season 1, episodes 17 and 18. We have not seen this yet, as we are saving season 1 until after we’ve watched seasons 2 through 8. But this is kind of a legendary episode: Joe Mannix gets into a bloody fight with his boss at Intertect.)
Robbie Roper. He was a high school quarterback in Georgia and one of the top recruits in this year’s class.
He was only 18 years old, and passed away after a routine surgery.
Department of I Am Required To Blog This.
Tuesday, December 14th, 2021Even though (as I have said in the past) I find CrimeReads 50% worthwhile and 50% pretentious annoying crap. This falls on the worthwhile side:
“Mannix Was Vintage TV’s Perfect Savvy PI“.
I particularly approve of the author calling out Gail Fisher’s contribution, and his mention of the recurring “old Army buddy” trope.
Obit watch: November 12, 2021.
Friday, November 12th, 2021Still on the road, but taking a few minutes to round up some obits from the past few days. Sorry if this seems compressed.
John Artis, historical and legal footnote. He was the other guy convicted with Hurricane Carter.
Jerry Douglas. He was most famous for “The Young and The Restless”, but he had a pretty extensive career. “Barnaby Jones”, “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockleman, Private Eye”, “The Dead Don’t Die”…
…and he was a “Mannix” three-timer. Sadly, IMDB has messed up the site to where I can’t easily get a list of his episodes.
Obit watch: November 9, 2021.
Tuesday, November 9th, 2021Dean Stockwell. He was 85.
204 credits in IMDB, dating back to 1945. The man worked, and had been working since he was a child.
Yes, “Quantum Leap” and “Blue Velvet” and the Lynch “Dune”. Also the “Battlestar Galactica” revival, the original “Twilight Zone”, one episode of a spinoff of a minor 1960s SF TV show, “Beverly Hills Cop II”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, “Paris, Texas”, “Wagon Train”, and the list goes on. He was no slouch when it came to movies, and if it was a TV series, he was almost certainly in it at some point.
And that includes “Mannix”. (“A Step in Time”, season 5, episode 3. He was “Chris Townsend”.)
Lawrence sent over a nice obit from National Review for Gerald Russello, NR contributor and editor of the University Bookman.
Edited to add: NYT obit for Dean Stockwell.
Max Cleland, former Senator from Georgia.
Stipulated: he was a liberal (according to the NYT, too liberal for Georgia), and we probably would have disagreed on many issues.
But: he also served honorably in Vietnam.
On April 8, 1968, just days before his tour was to end, Capt. Cleland was on a rescue mission in the village of Khe Sanh when he noticed a hand grenade on the ground. He picked it up and it detonated, instantly severing his right leg and right arm; his left leg was amputated within the hour. He was later awarded the Bronze Star and a Silver Star for meritorious service.
For three decades, Mr. Cleland blamed himself for his injuries, thinking the grenade had fallen off his own belt. But he later learned from a Marine who had witnessed the explosion that it had been dropped by an unnamed private who had manipulated the pins in a misguided attempt to make the grenade easier to use in combat.
Edited to add 2: THR obit for Dean Stockwell.
Obit watch: November 4, 2021.
Thursday, November 4th, 2021William Lucking, actor.
161 credits in IMDB. He did a lot of work on “Sons of Anarchy”: other credits include “The X-Files”, “Millennium”, two spinoffs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, “Renegade”, “Columbo”, “Jake and the Fatman”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Desert Sun”, season 8, episode 10. And I have to update the list, because according to the IMDB reviews, this is another episode in which “Mannix gets a phone call from an old Korean War buddy…asking for help.”)
I wrote yesterday about Pat Martino (and please read the excellent comment left by pigpen51). This isn’t quite an obit, but it came across Hacker News today: a piece from Nautilus about Mr. Martino, his surgery, and his recovery. It was originally published in 2015, from what I can tell, but was updated with a new introduction.
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