Alex Trebek. Jeopardy. Variety. THR.
The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.
Alex is survived by his wife of 30 years, Jean, and children Matthew, Emily, and Nicky. The family has announced no plans for a service, but gifts in Alex’s memory could go to World Vision.
She was the real estate agent in “The Amityville Horror” and “Clocktower Lady” in “Back to the Future”. She also did a bunch of TV: no “Mannix”, but “Quincy, M.E.”, “The A-Team”, “Wiseguy”, and one of the “Rockford Files” movies, among other credits.
If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it’s not funny.
So I’m bending the rules today. Really bending them. I’m posting two long videos, neither of which I have watched all the way through yet, and one of which is a “free with ads” documentary. As always, you are more than welcome to skip over today’s entry, or just read the linked articles if you prefer.
I could sit here and post gun related posts for the next 365 days, if I wanted to. But I like to break things up: military aviation one day, private/commercial aircraft another day, the occasional gun post, some food, Travel Thursday, Science Sunday…I just wanted to post something outside of normal and not creepy or horrifying or both today. I might go back to the disaster theme tomorrow, and then we’ll have Science Sunday. (Also, I want to bookmark these for myself.)
Today’s feature: “Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much”, a documentary about Ted Slauson.
“Ted who?” Ted Slauson is a man who spent a lot of time watching “The Price Is Right”, memorized the various price amounts (there was a fairly fixed rotation at the time) and, in 2008, was part of a “scandal” when he may (or may not) have helped a contestant place an exact bid on a showcase. Here’s a 2010 Esquire article if you’re one of those folks who prefers reading articles to watching documentaries.
Bonus: You can’t have a game show scandal without Michael Larson, who people may actually remember. (Well, you also can’t have a game show scandal without “Twenty-One”, but I’ve already covered Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel.)
For those who don’t: Michael Larson was a guy with a VCR. He started taping episodes of the old “Press Your Luck” game show, and realized that the board wasn’t random: there were only five patterns, and Mr. Larson memorized them all. He knew where and when to stop to win big bucks and miss “whammies”. (If this doesn’t make any sense to you, you were not a child of the 1980’s, and don’t worry: the video demonstrates.)
Anyway, he flew to LA, managed to get on the show, and won $110,237. In inflation adjusted dollars, that’s still the largest amount ever won in one day on a game show. CBS had to break the episode into two thirty minute segments, because Larson’s run went on so long.
Wikipedia entry. “The Man Who Got No Whammies” from Priceonomics.
“Big Bucks: The ‘Press Your Luck’ Scandal”, originally from the Game Show Network.
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.”
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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.
It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.
Margaret Nolan. She was “Dink” in “Goldfinger” (she was also the model in the title sequence), appeared (uncredited) in “A Hard Day’s Night”, and appeared in various other UK movies and TV shows (including “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” and some of the “Carry On” series). She has a small role in Edgar Wright’s upcoming “Last Night in Soho”, and the THR obit reprints some of his tweets.
Tom Kennedy, most famous as a game show host. He doesn’t have many non-game show credits, but he did appear on both “Cannon” and “Hardcastle and McCormick”.
I have an eye doctor’s appointment this afternoon, so I’m being a little lazy. However, this is something that’s been on my mind for a few days.
Today, a public service announcement. Actually, a few of them. I like having the morning airing of “Perry Mason” on ME TV on as background while I work. We’re at the point in the current run where William Talman, who played District Attorney Hamilton Burger, was fired from the series (about midway through season 3).
In spite of the charges being dropped, Talman was fired by CBS because of the morals clause in his contract. Gail Patrick Jackson, who produced “Perry Mason” and Raymond Burr both campaigned for Talman’s reinstatement, and he was rehired in December of 1960.
(Another interesting side note, unrelated to the theme of today’s post: William Hopper, who played “Paul Drake”, Mason’s private detective, served as both a member of the OSS and as a UDT guy during the war. Yeah, the guy who played Perry Mason’s private eye was a SEAL before there were SEALs.)
Talman only lived to the age of 53. He died in 1968 of lung cancer, and was one of the first people in Hollywood to do an anti-smoking commercial.
Bonus: Ladies and gentlemen, the late Yul Brynner.
Bonus #2 and #3: The Duke.
Smoking’s bad, m’kay, kids? Don’t do it.
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.
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.”
It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.
But that doesn’t matter, because Diana Rigg would have gotten one no matter what. THR. Variety. BBC.
Rigg was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1959-64, touring Europe and the U.S. as Cordelia in a RSC production of “King Lear” (she revisited the play in 1983, when she was Regan to Laurence Olivier’s Lear); she was also Viola in a 1966 RSC staging of “Twelfth Night.”
Rigg appeared on Broadway three times, starring in “Abelard and Heloise” in 1971 (her nude scene in the play and critic John Simon’s tart assessment of her body generated publicity); a revival of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope” in 1975; and a staging of “Medea” in 1994 — drawing a Tony nomination each time for best actress in a play and winning for “Medea.”
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As the third of four female sidekicks to Patrick Macnee’s dapper John Steed on ITV’s The Avengers, Rigg’s Peel became an icon in England and the U.S. The show centered on the duo — Steed with a bowler hat and umbrella, Peel in cutting-edge mod fashions — working as partners for a secret British intelligence agency in an over-the-top, sometimes surrealist England.
“She was ahead of her time,” Rigg said at a 50-year anniversary tribute to her character hosted by the British Film Institute. “Quite by accident she became this avant-garde woman, and dear God, was I lucky to get the chance to play this woman. For years afterward, people came up to me and said, ‘You were my heroine’ — not me, Emma — ‘and encouraged me to do this and that.’ Without overembellishing her influence, I do think she was a very, very potent influence in women claiming their place in this world.”
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The actress also starred with George C. Scott in the Arthur Hiller-directed, Paddy Chayefsky-penned satire “The Hospital” (1971); the classic Vincent Price horror film “Theatre of Blood” (1973); the 1982 Agatha Christie adaptation “Evil Under the Sun,” in which she played the despised and thus dispatched Arlena Marshall; and most recently 2006’s “The Painted Veil,” in which she played the Mother Superior.
Other film credits include “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1968), “The Assassination Bureau” (1969), “Julius Caesar,” starring Charlton Heston (1970), “A Little Night Music,” with Elizabeth Taylor (1977), “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981), “Snow White,” as the Evil Queen (1987), Bruce Beresford’s “A Good Man in Africa,” starring Sean Connery (1994), “Parting Shots” (1998) and “Heidi.”
What a life.
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.
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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.
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Cathy Smith is burning in Hell.
Ms. Smith is the woman who gave John Belushi the fatal speedball.
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.)
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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.
Ben Cross. He was “Harold Abrahams”, one of the two runners in “Chariots of Fire”. He also had a part in the 2009 movie reboot of a second-rate SF TV series from the late 1960s.
Mary Hartline. My mother actually mentioned this to me the other day. She was one of the very early TV stars:
“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Ms. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. The future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Ms. Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.
Dr. Jay Galst. Interesting sounding guy: he was professionally an ophthalmologist. But he grew up with a dad who brought bags of coins home from the grocery store for him to sift through (pulling out the rare ones), and he continued pursuing numismatics into his adulthood and professional career.
He specialized in coins and coin adjacent objects (“…tokens, medals and similar artifacts”) that were in some way related to eyes, and co-wrote a book on the subject with Peter van Alfen.
He also specialized in coins from ancient Judea.
Marvin Creamer, who sounds like another interesting guy, and died at 104. He:
…taught geography for many years at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.
His expertise helped him become a history-making mariner, the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments. His 30,000-mile odyssey, in a 36-foot cutter with a small crew, made headlines worldwide on its completion in 1984.
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It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.
But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch. He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.
Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.
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…when the 66-year-old Professor Creamer set sail from Cape May, N.J., in his cutter, the Globe Star, in late 1982, he was widely considered unhinged: No mariner in recorded history had traversed the globe without at least a compass, used by sailors since the 12th century if not before, or a sextant, introduced in the 18th.
His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year on the sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning. It would take the Globe Star to Capetown, South Africa; Hobart and Sydney, Australia; Whangara, New Zealand; and the Falkland Islands off Argentina before its triumphant return to Cape May on May 17, 1984 — an event that Professor Creamer gleefully described as “one small step back for mankind.”
More random!
Lawrence might approve of this: a tank battle. With remote controlled tanks.
The AAF Tank Museum. Flamethrower Day is coming up in September. Danville is only a little more than an hour away from Bedford, where the National D-Day Memorial is. Mike the Musicologist and I have talked about visiting the memorial, so the AAF Museum falls right in line with that plan.
I feel like this is going to turn some folk’s crank: a large R/C Airwolf in flight. With rocket fire a little past the 2:00 mark.
I have mixed feelings about some of these R/C aircraft videos. On the one hand, I admire the people who can build and fly these massive detailed objects. On the other hand, I keep thinking about the massive amounts of time, effort, and money that could be wiped out in seconds by one hardware failure or human error.
The “Leadership Secrets…” series is still active: I just haven’t found a lot of examples to post recently. But these two videos popped up in my feed. One short, but watch to the end for the point:
(This same point was quoted directly in a Twitter thread I linked to a while back. Thankfully, that’s still up.)
One longer:
It isn’t like Lawrence and I don’t have enough stuff already, but I’m giving some thought to “Band of Brothers”.
Your Wilford Brimley obits: NYT. Variety. THR.
Thing I did not know #1: he was, at one point (and “briefly”) a bodyguard for Howard Hughes.
Thing I did not know #2:
The Brimley/Cocoon Line. (Lawrence told me about this last night.) Not to be confused with the Mendoza Line, or the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal.
Separating this out:
It appears the full MST3K version of “Mitchell” (not the full movie, but the complete MST3K) is available on the MST3K channel on YouTube.