Sorry about posting the Voyage review, but I just happened to read it and thought it related to the ongoing debate on the shelf life of Irwin Allen products. I may be sorry about this post, too, but it's been on my mind.
BETTER THEN:
Alias Smith and Jones. A great show, even considering it's a thinly-veiled rip-off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I loved this show so much in my early teens that I wrote an entire spec episode of it and sent it to ABC. Of course I didn't know anything about release forms back then, so I was very disappointed when I got a letter back saying they couldn't even read it. But I continued to love the show. And then Pete Duel (or Peter Deuel) went and shot himself.
This brings up an entire topic that probably deserves its own thread, but thematically, it still belongs under this one about how a view of a show can change. Sometimes, what changes that view is when real life intrudes on the illusion. Sometimes we can ignore it, sometimes we can't.
If you prefer to ignore it and preserve the illusion, skip the rest of this post. But if real life occurrences have affected your enjoyment of a show, feel free to read on.
Pete Duel played Hannibal Heyes, loosely modeled on Paul Newman's wise-cracking Butch Cassidy. His smile and energy were really the life of the show. So, when he took his own life, I could never quite watch the show the same way again. No matter how much I tried to preserve the illusion of the show within its own world, at some point I'm thinking .... dude must have been in a tremendous amount of pain ... Kurt Cobain level pain. I can't help thinking about it. If you are in any way an empathetic personality, it's hard to laugh with the character when you know the actor playing him was so self tortured. I can suspend reality with the best of them for a good 49 minutes, but not always 50.
Here are some other shows that were BETTER THEN for me before I knew too much:
Chico and the Man. Freddie Prinz. Same deal as Pete Duel.
Baretta. Robert Blake. If a dime from the reruns of the show goes into his pocket, how could I ever watch?
Hogan's Heroes. Bob Crane. Not only what happened to him, but what he was deeply involved in. Stop cracking a smile, Hogan. It's not so funny. See Auto-Focus for elaboration.
Perry Mason. It's a great show. Raymond Burr's a brilliant actor. I even own the 50th anniversary set. But again, I can't watch without, at some point, getting creeped out. Let's just say the Fiji Islands make Michael Jackson's Neverland look like amateur hour.
And the saddest one of all for me ...
Combat! Vic Morrow as Sergeant Saunders was my personal hero when I was 10 years old. He and his squad single-handedly won World War II. The episodes are so great to watch again as an adult and appreciate the writing, acting and drama. But an episode does not go by where, at some point, I don't think about his tragic death under a certain director's complete irresponsibility on the theatrical movie The Twilight Zone. (I have not watched that movie or another of this director's movies to this day for that reason). Morrow (and those kids) did not deserve that. His work lives on, of course, but a part of my own innocence in watching Combat! died with his own tragic and unnatural end.
And I haven't even touched on the family shows, where the cute little kids grew up to be crack addicts, thieves, whores, or worse.
I realize this is just a personal issue, perhaps my own hang-up. Actors are human beings, and if we really judged any piece of work by the actions, or fate of the human artist behind it, and turned away from it for those reasons, we'd soon have no art to appreciate whatsoever.
But I'm simply relating this in terms of the theme of this thread: Namely, that some shows I watched when they originally aired, were better for my innocence then and ignorance of what happened later.
BETTER THEN:
Alias Smith and Jones. A great show, even considering it's a thinly-veiled rip-off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I loved this show so much in my early teens that I wrote an entire spec episode of it and sent it to ABC. Of course I didn't know anything about release forms back then, so I was very disappointed when I got a letter back saying they couldn't even read it. But I continued to love the show. And then Pete Duel (or Peter Deuel) went and shot himself.
This brings up an entire topic that probably deserves its own thread, but thematically, it still belongs under this one about how a view of a show can change. Sometimes, what changes that view is when real life intrudes on the illusion. Sometimes we can ignore it, sometimes we can't.
If you prefer to ignore it and preserve the illusion, skip the rest of this post. But if real life occurrences have affected your enjoyment of a show, feel free to read on.
Pete Duel played Hannibal Heyes, loosely modeled on Paul Newman's wise-cracking Butch Cassidy. His smile and energy were really the life of the show. So, when he took his own life, I could never quite watch the show the same way again. No matter how much I tried to preserve the illusion of the show within its own world, at some point I'm thinking .... dude must have been in a tremendous amount of pain ... Kurt Cobain level pain. I can't help thinking about it. If you are in any way an empathetic personality, it's hard to laugh with the character when you know the actor playing him was so self tortured. I can suspend reality with the best of them for a good 49 minutes, but not always 50.
Here are some other shows that were BETTER THEN for me before I knew too much:
Chico and the Man. Freddie Prinz. Same deal as Pete Duel.
Baretta. Robert Blake. If a dime from the reruns of the show goes into his pocket, how could I ever watch?
Hogan's Heroes. Bob Crane. Not only what happened to him, but what he was deeply involved in. Stop cracking a smile, Hogan. It's not so funny. See Auto-Focus for elaboration.
Perry Mason. It's a great show. Raymond Burr's a brilliant actor. I even own the 50th anniversary set. But again, I can't watch without, at some point, getting creeped out. Let's just say the Fiji Islands make Michael Jackson's Neverland look like amateur hour.
And the saddest one of all for me ...
Combat! Vic Morrow as Sergeant Saunders was my personal hero when I was 10 years old. He and his squad single-handedly won World War II. The episodes are so great to watch again as an adult and appreciate the writing, acting and drama. But an episode does not go by where, at some point, I don't think about his tragic death under a certain director's complete irresponsibility on the theatrical movie The Twilight Zone. (I have not watched that movie or another of this director's movies to this day for that reason). Morrow (and those kids) did not deserve that. His work lives on, of course, but a part of my own innocence in watching Combat! died with his own tragic and unnatural end.
And I haven't even touched on the family shows, where the cute little kids grew up to be crack addicts, thieves, whores, or worse.
I realize this is just a personal issue, perhaps my own hang-up. Actors are human beings, and if we really judged any piece of work by the actions, or fate of the human artist behind it, and turned away from it for those reasons, we'd soon have no art to appreciate whatsoever.
But I'm simply relating this in terms of the theme of this thread: Namely, that some shows I watched when they originally aired, were better for my innocence then and ignorance of what happened later.