Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

Obit watch: March 14, 2024.

Thursday, March 14th, 2024

Admiral Philippe de Gaulle has passed away at 102. He was the oldest son of Charles de Gaulle.

I’ve noted before that I don’t like doing obits for children of celebrities simply because of their birth. In that vein, I think it is important to point out that Philippe de Gaulle himself had a long history of heroism:

As a young naval officer in World War II, he fought in the English Channel and in the Atlantic; personally received the surrender of German troops in Paris occupying the Palais Bourbon, now the French Senate, in August 1944; “took part in all the battles of the Liberation,” the Elysée said; and was wounded six times.
He later became a naval pilot and fought in France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria. He ended his military service in 1982 as inspector general of the French Navy.

Robyn Bernard, actress. Other credits include “Diva”, “Simon & Simon”, and “Tour of Duty”.

Michael Culver, actor. Other credits include “Space: 1999”, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips”, “Thunderball”, and “From Russia With Love” (the last two were uncredited).

Paul Alexander, TikTok and iron lung guy.

Obit watch: March 12, 2024.

Tuesday, March 12th, 2024

Eric Carmen, musician. NYT (archived).

I don’t have any association with or memories of “All By Myself”, but I do remember hearing “Hungry Eyes” a lot on the radio.

Jean Allison, actress. No “Mannix”, but she did do a fair number of cop and cop adjunct shows. Other credits include “Hec Ramsey”, “McCloud”, and “Lou Grant”.

Obit watch: March 4, 2024.

Monday, March 4th, 2024

Brigadier General John C. Bahnsen Jr. (US Army – ret.) has passed away at the age of 89.

Gen. Bahnsen was a genuine, certified, American badass.

General Bahnsen was among the most decorated combat veterans in U.S. history. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest honor for heroism, behind the Medal of Honor; five Silver Stars; four Legions of Merit; three Distinguished Flying Crosses; four Bronze Stars (three for valor); two Purple Hearts; and the Army Commendation Medal with a “V” device for valor.
He earned most of those awards during the second of two Vietnam tours, when he led a troop in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment that was commanded by Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, the son of Gen. George S. Patton Jr. of World War II fame.

Unlike fellow commanders who led from a desk, General Bahnsen led troops from his own helicopter — a tactic that allowed him to coordinate air and ground forces simultaneously, which he did while firing his rifle and dropping grenades from his window.
“We thought he had a death wish sometimes,” Mr. Noe said.
He did, but not for himself.
“The enemy of my country is my enemy, and our mission was to kill them,” General Bahnsen said in a 2013 interview with the American Veterans Center. “You could capture them if you could. We captured a lot of them in my units, but we also killed them. And my feeling was, that’s our job.”
He was unrelenting. He often landed his helicopter to fight alongside his ground troops. One day, he was shot down three times. Each time, he ordered delivery of a replacement helicopter so that he could return to attacking.

General Bahnsen was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions during a battle in early 1969.After his crew chief was severely wounded amid heavy gunfire at low altitudes, General Bahnsen evacuated him, refueled and rearmed.
“I was mad as hell!” he wrote in his autobiography. “I thought those bastards had just killed my crew chief.”
Not knowing whether the crew chief was alive or dead — he survived but was paralyzed — General Bahnsen returned to the battle site.
“Forcing them to a confined area, he marked their position and directed five airstrikes against them, while at the same time controlling four separate rifle platoons,” his award citation reads.
Enemy fire crippled his helicopter, so he returned to his base and got another.
Upon returning, the citation says, he “landed to guide in the lift ships carrying an additional infantry unit, and then led a rifle platoon through dense terrain to personally capture two enemy who were attempting to escape.”
He ordered the captives to be evacuated by helicopter while he remained on the ground, and led his squad on foot for more than a mile to a safe position.

He is one of those rare professionals who truly enjoys fighting, taking risks and sparring with a wily foe,” General Patton wrote in an evaluation of General Bahnsen, adding that he was “the most highly motivated and professionally competent leader I have served with in 23 years of service, to include the Korean War and two tours in Vietnam.”

Chris Mortensen, ESPN guy.

David Bordwell, film scholar. He did a lot of work for the Criterion Collection.

Among Bordwell’s favorite films, according to IndieWire, were Passing Fancy (1933), How Green Was My Valley (1941), Sanshiro Sugata (1943), Song of the South (1946), Advise and Consent (1962), Zorns Lemma (1970), Choose Me (1984), Back to the Future (1985) and The Hunt for Red October (1990).

Interesting list. I kind of feel like calling “Song of the South” one of your favorite films in this day and age is just setting yourself up for cancellation. But then again, he’s dead, so what does he care if he gets cancelled? (And to be frank, the Criterion Collection could probably do a great job of preserving and showing “Song” in a historical and scholarly context.)

Mark Dodson, voice actor. Other credits include a video game inspired by a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Darkwing Duck”, and “Legend of the Superstition Mountains”.

Obit watch: February 29, 2024.

Thursday, February 29th, 2024

Richard Lewis. Tributes. (The one from Jamie Lee Curtis is particularly nice.) NYT (archived).

Anne Whitfield, actress. Other credits include “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Dragnet 1967”, and “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”.

Obit watch: February 26, 2024.

Monday, February 26th, 2024

I was running pretty much flat out from mid-Friday afternoon until late Sunday night, so this is the first chance I’ve had to post anything. But: the NYT finally ran an obit for Chuck Mawhinney. (Previously.)

After graduating from high school in 1967, Chuck wanted to become a Navy pilot. But a Marine Corps recruiter won him over by promising that he could delay his enlistment by four months, until the end of deer season.
The Marines had not had dedicated snipers since World War II, but by 1967 the corps had changed its mind. Mr. Mawhinney was among the first to complete the new Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps installation in Southern California. He graduated at the top of his class.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Golden Richards, former Dallas Cowboy receiver.

Richards helped the Cowboys reach Super Bowl X and XII. Against the Broncos in Super Bowl XII, Richards caught a touchdown pass from running back Robert Newhouse (the first touchdown pass thrown in a Super Bowl by a non-quarterback) as Dallas recorded a 27-10 win.

José DeLeón, pitcher.

DeLeón was 86-119 with a 3.76 ERA in 264 starts and 151 relief appearances for the Pittsburgh Pirates (1983-86), Chicago White Sox (1986-87, 1993-95), St. Louis (1988-92), Philadelphia Phillies (1992-93) and Montreal Expos (1995). The right-hander struck out 1,594 in 1,897⅓ innings.

Jackie Loughery, actress (and Jack Webb’s third wife). Other credits include OG “Perry Mason”, “Surfside 6”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.

Charles Dierkop, actor.

Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Bearcats!” and…two episodes of “Mannix” (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6. “Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6).

Eddie Driscoll, actor. IMDB.

Chris Gauthier, actor. Fair number of genre credits, including “Supernatural”, “Watchmen”, and the “Earthsea” mini series.

Kenneth Mitchell, actor. Other credits include “NCIS”, “CSI: Cyber”, and “Detroit 1-8-7”.

Obit watch: February 23, 2024.

Friday, February 23rd, 2024

It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.

Pamela Salem.

Yes, Miss Moneypenny counts as a Bond girl. Yes, “Never Say Never Again” counts as a Bond movie.

Other credits include “Magnum, P.I.” (original recipe), “The Great Train Robbery”, “God’s Outlaw”, and some “Doctor Who”. And “EastEnders”.

Obit watch: February 22, 2024.

Thursday, February 22nd, 2024

The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Niklaus Wirth.

Ewen MacIntosh, British actor. IMDB.

Lefty Driesell, noted college basketball coach.

Robert Reid, one of the great Houston Rockets.

Lawrence sent over two obits:

Paul D’Amato, actor. IMDB.

Steve Miller, SF author.

While Miller is known in the science fiction community for the hundreds of stories he and [Sharon] Lee wrote together, he is best remembered for having co-authored the Liaden Universe, a series that now includes 25 books described as “space operas,” with stories emphasizing the interpersonal connections between characters, human or otherwise, within vast literary universes.

Pop culture programming note.

Wednesday, February 21st, 2024

Tomorrow morning’s episode of “Perry Mason” (assuming METv sticks to their schedule) is “The Case of Constant Doyle”.

This is an interesting episode. This is not the same as saying it is a good episode, or one I recommend you watch. If you have not seen it previously, it might be worth your time.

During the filming of the sixth season, Raymond Burr was hospitalized for a period of time. I haven’t read any of the biographies, so I’m not sure exactly why. But his issue was serious enough that he was unable to film several episodes of “Perry Mason”.

There’s a four episode block (plus at least one more episode later in sequence) where they have “guest” lawyers, played by some of the best actors in Hollywood. Michael Rennie, Hugh O’Brian, Walter Pidgeon, and Mike Connors all did stints.

This is the first episode in that four episode block, and the guest lawyer is…Bette Davis, as the titular “Constant Doyle”.

The setup for this episode is that Constant and her husband Joe were both lawyers, and friends of Perry Mason. As the episode opens, it is established that Joe Doyle passed away a few months earlier, leaving Constant a widow. She gets involved in the case of “Cal Leonard”, a 17-year-old juvenile delinquent (played by Michael Parks) and friend of Joe’s. Constant ends up having to defend him from murder charges, even though criminal law is not her area of practice. But of course, Paul and Della are willing to help out. Perry even appears briefly (by telephone from his sickbed: they shot some scenes before Burr’s hospitalization and inserted them).

If I don’t exactly sound enthusiastic about this episode, as I have with others, well…

Bette Davis is always worth watching. But the way she plays Constant Doyle in this episode is very much as a cougar. This was 1963, and the networks still had standards and practices, so there’s nothing explicit here. But the character very clearly comes across as desiring not just a client-lawyer relationship (and the big fee she’d get from defending a teenage deliquent), but something more: perhaps something to fill the void left by the death of her husband.

The long lingering looks, the touching…your mileage may vary, but for me, this is a really uncomfortable episode to watch.

This episode will be on at 0800 CST (0900 EST) Thursday morning, so if you want to watch Ms. Davis, consider yourself notified.

You could also wait until the evening and watch “All About Eve” again.

TMQ Watch: February 13, 2024.

Tuesday, February 13th, 2024

So. It has come to this. The last TMQ of the 2023 season, and the last TMQ Watch.

After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…

(more…)

Obit watch: February 2, 2024.

Friday, February 2nd, 2024

Colonel Roger H.C. Donlon (United States Army – ret.)

Col. Donlon was the first person, and first Special Forces member, to receive the Medal of Honor for action in the Vietnam War.

His Medal of Honor citation:

Rank and organization: Captain, U.S. Army. Place and date: Near Nam Dong, Republic of Vietnam, 6 July 1964. Entered service at: Fort Chaffee, Ark. Born: 30 January 1934, Saugerties, N.Y. G.O. No.: 41, 17 December 1964.
Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while defending a U.S. military installation against a fierce attack by hostile forces.
Capt. Donlon was serving as the commanding officer of the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment A-726 at Camp Nam Dong when a reinforced Viet Cong battalion suddenly launched a full-scale, predawn attack on the camp. During the violent battle that ensued, lasting 5 hours and resulting in heavy casualties on both sides, Capt. Donlon directed the defense operations in the midst of an enemy barrage of mortar shells, falling grenades, and extremely heavy gunfire. Upon the initial onslaught, he swiftly marshaled his forces and ordered the removal of the needed ammunition from a blazing building. He then dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades to abort a breach of the main gate. En route to this position he detected an enemy demolition team of 3 in the proximity of the main gate and quickly annihilated them. Although exposed to the intense grenade attack, he then succeeded in reaching a 60mm mortar position despite sustaining a severe stomach wound as he was within 5 yards of the gun pit. When he discovered that most of the men in this gunpit were also wounded, he completely disregarded his own injury, directed their withdrawal to a location 30 meters away, and again risked his life by remaining behind and covering the movement with the utmost effectiveness. Noticing that his team sergeant was unable to evacuate the gun pit he crawled toward him and, while dragging the fallen soldier out of the gunpit, an enemy mortar exploded and inflicted a wound in Capt. Donlon’s left shoulder. Although suffering from multiple wounds, he carried the abandoned 60mm mortar weapon to a new location 30 meters away where he found 3 wounded defenders. After administering first aid and encouragement to these men, he left the weapon with them, headed toward another position, and retrieved a 57mm recoilless rifle. Then with great courage and coolness under fire, he returned to the abandoned gun pit, evacuated ammunition for the 2 weapons, and while crawling and dragging the urgently needed ammunition, received a third wound on his leg by an enemy hand grenade. Despite his critical physical condition, he again crawled 175 meters to an 81mm mortar position and directed firing operations which protected the seriously threatened east sector of the camp. He then moved to an eastern 60mm mortar position and upon determining that the vicious enemy assault had weakened, crawled back to the gun pit with the 60mm mortar, set it up for defensive operations, and turned it over to 2 defenders with minor wounds. Without hesitation, he left this sheltered position, and moved from position to position around the beleaguered perimeter while hurling hand grenades at the enemy and inspiring his men to superhuman effort. As he bravely continued to move around the perimeter, a mortar shell exploded, wounding him in the face and body. As the long awaited daylight brought defeat to the enemy forces and their retreat back to the jungle leaving behind 54 of their dead, many weapons, and grenades, Capt. Donlon immediately reorganized his defenses and administered first aid to the wounded. His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese defenders as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp. Capt. Donlon’s extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.

The linked NYT obit provides a little more color. This was a wild battle.

Years later, Mr. Donlon said that among the fighters the Green Berets were training were many Vietcong sympathizers. When the shooting began, he told the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the attackers made an announcement over a public address system in English and Vietnamese telling the sympathizers: “Lay down your weapons. We just want the Americans.” He estimated that there were only 75 dependable fighters to defend the camp.

He wrote two books. I think his first, Outpost of Freedom, was a pretty big seller at the time. We had a version of that in a “Reader’s Digest Condensed Book” at my house when I was a little kid, and I remember reading it pretty regularly. (That same Condensed book also had The Century of the Detective and The Yearling.) His other book was Beyond Nam Dong, about his post-war return.

In a 1995 return trip to Nam Dong, Mr. Donlon visited the overgrown graves of the South Vietnamese soldiers under his command who died in the battle. Beside him was Nguyen Can Thu, a former Vietcong political officer who had helped plan the attack. It was Mr. Thu, Mr. Donlon later said, who told him that 100 of the 300 Vietnamese he was training in the camp were Vietcong infiltrators.

David Kahn, cryptographic historian and author. (The Codebreakers.)

I read The Codebreakers (the original edition, the one with the key on the cover) when I was in middle school, and it was a big influence on me. I suspect there are a lot of other folks out there who can say the same thing. (Hattip: Bruce Schneier.)

Carl Weathers. THR. IMDB. Pretty well covered elsewhere, and I don’t have much to add.

Don Murray, actor. Other credits include “T.J. Hooker”, “Ghosts Can’t Do It”, and “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”.

Jennell Jaquays, prominent D&D creator.

Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.

In the early 1980s Ms. Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and she eventually oversaw the teams that designed games for the Coleco Vision, an early home video game console; one notable project was WarGames, an adaptation of the 1983 film.
Long after leaving Coleco, when video games were vastly more sophisticated, Ms. Jaquays designed levels for the first-person shooters Quake II and III and the military strategy game Halo Wars. She also made The War Chiefs, an expansion pack that let users play as Native American cultures vying for power against European civilizations in Age of Empires III.

Obit watch: January 24, 2024.

Wednesday, January 24th, 2024

Dr. Arno A. Penzias has passed away at the age of 90.

While this is another one of those obits for a relatively obscure figure, I feel there’s a good chance many of my readers have actually heard of Dr. Penzias.

Dr. Penzias (pronounced PEN-zee-as) shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery in 1964 of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that gave birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago. That explosion, known as the Big Bang, is now the widely accepted explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe. (A third physicist, Pyotr Kapitsa of Russia, received the other half of the prize, for unrelated advances in developing liquid helium.)

In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., with the intention of using a radio antenna, which was being developed for satellite communications, as a radio telescope to make cosmological measurements…
In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?…
The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation…
The discovery not only helped cement the cosmos’s grand narrative; it also opened a window through which to investigate the nature of reality — all as a result of that vexing hiss first heard 60 years ago by a couple of junior physicists looking for something else.

Charles Osgood. THR. I feel like I’m giving him the short end of the stick, but there’s really nothing I can add to what others have said about him.

Gary Graham, actor. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and the 2003 “Dragnet”.

Melanie (aka Melanie Safka), who sang at Woodstock. This is another one where there’s not much I can say: pigpen51 may be more familiar with her music than I am.

Obit watch: January 17, 2024.

Wednesday, January 17th, 2024

Professor Peter Schickele, of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

Damn it.

I was a big fan of Prof. Schickele and his interpretations of P.D.Q. Bach when I was younger. I still am, but I was when I was younger too. (If it’s been a while since I bought a PDQ Bach album, well, it’s been a minute since I bought any albums.)

Fun fact: he stole Philip Glass’s woman. (Well, okay, only sort of. You’ll have to read the obit for the full story. And that is supposedly a NYT “gift” link: please let me know if you have a problem.)

Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.

Worth noting: he wrote the score for “Silent Running”.

Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.
Designed to be appreciated by novices and cognoscenti alike, P.D.Q.’s music is rife with inside jokes and broken taboos: unmoored melodies that range painfully through a panoply of keys; unstable harmonies begging for resolutions that never come; variations that have nothing whatever to do with their themes. It is the aural equivalent of the elaborate staircases in M.C. Escher engravings that don’t actually lead anywhere.

True story: once upon a time, I had just bought the new Schickele recording of a recently discovered P.D.Q. Bach work. Lawrence and I were sitting around our apartment listening to it when a friend came over for a visit. Said friend was (like us) a big fan of Glass and other minimalist composers. So we told our friend we had a new Philip Glass recording, and we wanted to play the first track for him.

He was fooled. Right up to the point where the slide whistle came in.

I was lucky enough to see him in performance…

In his early, supple years, he often slid down a rope suspended from the first balcony; on at least one occasion he ran down the aisle, vast suitcase in hand, as if delayed at the airport; on another he entered, pursued by a gorilla.

…when he could still climb down a rope.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”
That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”
“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Prof. Schickele also gave me a quote I have been known to use from time to time:

“Truth is just truth – you can’t have opinions about truth.”

John Brotherton, owner and pitmaster at Brotherton’s Black Iron Barbecue. The Saturday Dining Conspiracy has been there twice, and eaten there once. That’s not a shot at Mr. Brotherton, just a statement of reality. When you run a really good barbecue restaurant (which Brotherton’s is), your customers run the risk of the barbecue selling out before they get there.

Dejan Milojević, assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. He was 46.

Lynne Marta, actress. Other credits include “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Then Came Bronson”.

Some followups: Tom Shales in the NYT. And an appreciation of him by one of the NYT writers.

Nice obit for Terry Bisson by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swanwick also has a touching piece up about his friend of 50 years, Tom Purdom, which I encourage you to go read.