Best of Route 66

Season 3 two cents con'd. I'm just doing this for my health.

"voice on the end of the line" Here's another episode that feels like it was lifted from the trunk of previously unproduced Naked City scripts. It's another character piece set in Chicago about a poor working stiff schlub (Sorrell Booke?) who's been carrying on a year and a half phone-only romance with a woman and misrepresenting what he actually looks like (fat, bald and short). So, it's still incredibly relevant considering about 80% of Internet romance seekers do the same thing (or use a photo from the one time after high school they successfully dieted).

I love that Tod is used as the Cyrano de Bergerac front figure for a false front meeting with the woman. You'd think the woman would wonder why the poetic caller never described himself with "more freckles than stars in the Milky Way." And Buz, as usual, has a bee up his bonnet when workmates publicly expose the secret calls and humiliate the caller. This one also has a very O'Henry twist at the end like the "man out of time" episode written by the same writer, Larry Marcus. Chicago dwellers might also appreciate the great shot from the top of the Tribune Building, which was long before the Sears, er Willis, tower was ever built. An enjoyable episode, but again, it's more Naked City than Route 66.

Has anyone else had an issue with the first disc of the replacement season 3 set? Mine makes a loud noise on 3 out of my six players.

Season 3 two cents con'd. No animals were harmed in the production of these comments.

"lizard's legs and owlet wings" This episode was on the Producer's Picks disc and commented on previously in this thread. But it's historic alone for the fact this was the first and last time Boris Karloff ever wore the Frankenstein makeup since he originated the character 30 years earlier.

"across walnuts and wine" Somebody help me with this title phrase, I have no idea what literary reference Silliphant borrowed it from and what it means relative to this story. You might call this episode "Charlie X, Jr." because it stars the young Robert Walker Jr. perfectly playing the bratty young troublemaker he so vividly recreates a few years later in the first season of Star Trek. He's got daddy issues here, since his father was a genius with 10 college degrees, who died prematurely. In real life, daddy was Robert Walker, Sr. who played the psychopath so brilliantly in one of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpieces, "Strangers On a Train." No wonder Jr.'s so fucked up.

Catch actress Nina Foch's terrific peformance and monologue at the end of this episode and wonder if she was nominated for an Emmy. She should have won. She did become one of the premier acting teachers in L.A., and is memorable in so many guest star roles from this period ("Borderland" on The Outer Limits, to name one). Oh, and our boys, well, they make their requisite cameos in this episode that would sit well in the Tennessee Williams' literary canon of dysfunctional families.

Wow, speaking of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, he appeared on this thread at the exact moment I was scribbling my comments. Talk about synchronicity.

But to answer your question ... Boris, yes, my machine churns like a muffled garbage disposal when it plays these discs, but it does play them. Oh, and there were a couple glitch moments in this last episode I just commented on where the image actually froze for a few seconds. Corrected replacement set, my ass.

Thanks Wayne.

Season 3 two cents con'd. 4 out of 5 doctors agree these comments help prevent brain decay.

"welcome to the wedding" Wow. Welcome to the early Truman Capote-style episode. Rod Steiger plays a prison transferee who put the cold in cold blooded killer. Steiger, who went on to win a best actor Academy Award six years later for "In the Heat of the Night" can take the most banal line and twist it into a threat of such hushed malevolence your skin crawls with unease watching an supposedly harmless episode of a television show 47 years later. Ed Asner shows up as the sorry bureacrat stuck with the job of transferring him. Tod gets to wear a pinched face look for an entire tour of Cleveland with his hands cuffed to the wheel of a Chevy. And there's a chick in the first ten minutes who is a dead ringer for Elisha Cuthbert, who won't be born for another 20 years. What more could you want from television entertainment?

Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 9/18/09 at 7:08pm

Season 3 two cents con'd. These comments will self destruct in 10 seconds. The secretary will disavow any knowledge of their content.

"every fathers's daughter" There was something hauntingly familiar about this maudlin episode starring Maudlin, er Madelyn Rhue as the sheltered daughter of a widower Serbian construction company owner who falls in love with Buz (the daughter, that is). That certain sense of doom hanging over the proceedings. And then I remembered another script by this same writer, Anthony Lawrence that had the same feeling, but was infinitely more successful as a good drama and a great yarn, whether it was the actors (Shirley Knight and Martin Landau) or the director involved, or maybe just the brilliant score by Dominic Frontiere. It was a script for the first season of The Outer Limits for one of my favorite episodes, "The Man Who Was Never Born." Put that one on the credit list in the time capsule, Mr. Lawrence, not this one.

As if there weren't enough issues with these 'corrected' Season 3 discs already, add this to the pile - after I played the third disc of volume one chunking and clunking it's way before playing smoothly, MY BLU-RAY PLAYER NO LONGER PLAYS BLU-RAYS. They won't read. I don't know what could have happened, but I tried three different BDs that had played previously and,  immediately after playing the Route 66 disc, they wouldn't play. SDs okay, but no longer BDs.

If anyone has an idea how this could have occurred or what can be done, please pass the technical love. It's an earlier Panasonic Blu-ray player before the 2.0 BD Live versions, but I have continued firmware updates using discs through 2.9.

This may not help , but it would not hurt to try:  unplug the player  completely from the outlet, for a few minutes. Maybe the player will reset itself.

I have a Philips  SD player that sometimes locks itself into standby mode and is unresponsive to the controls, and unplugging it makes it work again.

Thanks, Bob, I tried that, but it didn't work. I'm going to see if a firmware update does anything. Otherwise ... I hate this disposable technological culture where it's probably cheaper for me to pick up a new player than to have this one fixed. This Panasonic DMB30 was $499 new, but would probably cost a couple hundred to fix. Now you can get good new players for that same price.

From the hardware threads, I'm learning that this is a somewhat common problem with the early Panasonic BDs, and the fact that the BD drive failed just when I was playing the Route 66 disc might be purely coincidental. But I still want to blame it on these crappily-made discs. The image is okay once they start playing, but your machine has to chew glass to get there.

Here's a phrase that no longer has any meaning in the consumer culture ... "Built to last."

Season 3 two cents con'd. Okay, I was just joking about the MI self destruct reference in my previous comments, I didn't really think this disc would take out my BD drive so that the only thing I can watch is THIS SD disc.

"poor little kangaroo rat" Already commented on as part of the Producer's Picks disc.

"hey, moth, come eat the flame" A very apt metaphor for alchoholism. And a very brave episode to air during the Mad Men era 1962 when drinking and smoking through work was as normal as breathing. Harry Guardino plays a piano player in a St. Louis Jazz club who passes out around 1:15 a.m. every night and has to be dragged home by his 13-year old son.

The story also features a possible caper to rob a factory payroll, but it's somewhat of a red herring. The main show is the effect of the father's alcoholism on the son who's still trying to look up to him. Buz even takes the kid to an Al-Anon meeting (or the 1962 equivalent of it). If this story doesn't pull at your heartstrings at some point, you either never had a father, never had a son, or never had the effects of alcoholism touch your family in some way. I hit the trifecta on this with a 13 year-old son and a late father who stayed sober the last 20 years of his life through AA. The ending here is a little too pat, but the sentiment is pure.
 
A favorite Silliphant-script moment: Guardino's character meets the caper boss trying to recruit him at a bowling alley and waves off a drink saying, "I never drink before dark." So the guy slaps a pair of sunglasses on him and shoves a boilermaker in front of him.


Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 9/23/09 at 10:06am

Season 3 two cents con’d. No animals were hurt in the creation of these comments, but a blu-ray died.

“only by cunning glimpses” This is a monumentally crappy print that belongs back with the Season 1, Volume 1 prints. You can barely understand the dialogue in some parts, the audio is so bad. And it’s a shame because it’s a stellar episode. A beautiful psychic (Lois Smith) shrieks at the sight of Tod during her stage performance. And it’s not because of the freckles exploding across his face. She has a terrifying vision of Tod causing Buz’s death in a fire. How nifty a hook is that?

The great actor Theodore Bikel shows up as the psychic’s estranged father, whose life is dedicated to working for a bunko squad debunking psychics. Gee, do we have conflict here? But the script is solid, believable, and the story takes you to places where you have profound doubts, no matter what side of the “is it real or not” fence you tread upon. I get the feeling Silliphant (working from a story co-authored by Preston Wood)  was struggling with the same questions, and that always makes for intriguing drama on television.

And somewhere in the last episode, the boys suddenly, and without any explanation, turned up with the third version of their Corvette. You don’t have to be psychic to predict the original sponsor Chevrolet would make that happen as soon as the new 1963 model was available.

Season 3 two cents con'd. RIP Panasonic DMP-BD30. Welcome to my world, LG BD-390.

"where is chick lorimer, where has she gone?" Pfffffffffffffffttttt. The sound you hear is the air leaking out of the tires of the '63 Corvette as Buz has left the bucket seat. A smarmy one-way phone conversation from Tod to his buddy 'laid up at a hospital in Cleveland' doesn't cut it for a still present co-star billing for the missing Maharis. And Vera Miles as a potential cougar love interest for Tod because they are sympatico souls who can't settle down and don't fit with the hometown crew has zero chemistry. It doesn't help that this soap opera episode with talking scenes that go on forever makes Peyton Place look like The Wire it's so static. 

And a hint to scribe Larry Marcus here; the poet inspiration for the hip soul of this series is supposed to be Jack Kerouac, not Carl Sandburg (where the episode title character comes from). Sandburg might use a cemetary as a metaphor during a break-up scene, but Keroauc was more about embracing life to the point of flame out, than standing around moping among the tombstones.

Where's crazy kerouacky Vicky when you need her? Oh, good, coming up in two episodes, I see.

(And speaking of metaphors, how apt is it that the Corvette is stuck in a garage up on the hydraulics with it's wheels missing when Tod is talking to the absent Buz in the opening scene?)
Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 9/30/09 at 7:47am

Season 3 two cents con'd. "I love you, but no thank you."

"give the old cat a tender mouse" Buz-less episode saved by Silliphant. And by Julie Newmar in black leather pants three years before she plays Catwoman on Batman. Who can resist this Vicki sequel, where she's the kooky millionaire heiress still roaming around the country on a motorcycle causing havoc, only now she's got a sad sack Brooklyn detective following her in a van to smooth things over with the local authorities. If I were still pitching TV series ideas in Hollywood, I would be all over this as a spin-off series.

Here she meets an even richer Cotton industry heir (Robert Webber) in Memphis with their respective families (and banks) salivating over a possible 'merger.' Has she met her match? Not likely. There are more good lines in this episode than there are in most series' entire seasons.

Cotton Heir's mother (Mrs. Howell!) to hubby: In the 30 years we've been married, I don't think you've ever used more than 29 words."
Hubby: "Nonsense"
Wife: "Okay, 30"

Tod is the frustrated comic foil b-story in the episode as he catches all the speeding tickets and grief from the local police that Vicki manages to evade. A good use of Milner's patented exasperated look. And the actor playing the Brooklyn detective with a running telephone monologue to Vicki's father (or banker?) back in Boston and moaning about missing his wife and seven kids is fantastic. In my fantasy spin-off series, he's the real unrequited love interest match for Vicki.

Anyone who's had the experience of dating an untameable free spirit like "Vicki" in their lives will re-swoon over this classic episode. Part of you will go back and dream of what might have been if you let go all ties and flew off with that particular circus, and part of you will thank God and your sanity you ultimately didn't.

But, Wayne, didn't you think the ending was a total, er, buzz-kill?

For me the 'buzz-kill' came in the previous episode, when we first find out Buz is MIA. And, perhaps the studio, in their negotiations with Maharis, whether he was gravely sick or just wanted more money, no doubt considered that option in literal terms for the continuation of the series.

 

But I get your point about the Vicki episode, which seemed to me to leave things open as a possible pilot for a spin-off series.

And left Tod's unconsumated attempts to hook up with Vicki ... well, 'frustrated' is the polite word.

Season 3 two cents con'd. "Some laughs, some tears."

"a lonely bunch of pagliaccis" Tod works as a secretary for a famous William Faulkner-like author (Barry Sullivan) in Mississippi (actually outside Memphis). The author's beautiful daughter (Laura Devon again!) shoots her husband when she finds him with another woman and the ensuing trial brings a media circus to town with frothing television crews, gossip columnists and paparazzi. This could never happen today, of course, we're much more civilized.

Silliphant definitely must have seen Billy Wilder's cautionary tale classic about the insatiable and insensitive needs of the media in "Ace in the Hole" a couple years early because this episode 'mines' the same territory very effectively. Tod has another cougar moment with a gossip columnist (Vivian Blaine) who charms the freckles off his face, but isn't above using him or anyone else for a good scoop. No one writes these 'broads' better than Silliphant.

There's a strange little side story about a writer (Warren Stevens) who comes to town, has an affair with a local bored wife, gets called out by her redneck husband, cleans his clock, and she suddenly rushes back to the side of her loser husband with renewed love in her eyes. I can't help thinking the 'big town' writer of this episode might have been adding a little non-fiction mea culpa to this little chapter. It was very ... real, and had not much to do with the rest of the story.

Oh, and the 'lonely bunch of pagliaccis?" That would be all of us clowns on this Earth, grabbing a few laughs and a few tears along the way.

Season 3 two cents con'd.

"you can't pick cotton in tahiti" Richard Basehart is featured as a cad Hollywood composer wandering into a Tennessee town to mine some local musical inspiration from the yokels for his magnum opus. Tod gets beat up by proxy for, well, for just being an outsider like him, and also for some comic relief. This is a really good role for the usually stoic Basehart, with no traces of Admiral Nelson here. Just a selfish, cowardly, con man cad. You can tell he relished playing the part.

Martin Milner has to be the worst one side conversation telephone actor in the world. He could learn a few (thousand) tricks from Bob Newhart. In the episode's requisite phone call to the missing Buz, his smarmy comebacks don't leave any time for the supposedly equally smarmy lines he is responding to. It's just so arched and painfully plugged in, the episode would be better just forgetting Buz existed. I imagine that's coming soon enough.

A personal and (possibly for anyone else) useless trivia story related to this episode. When I first moved to Hollywood in the late '70s, I got a survival job working at a copy store called Copymatic in Beverly Hills on Doheny Drive just south of Wilshire Boulevard. One of the regular customers was this older gentleman who looked like a balding Dr. No with glasses. He would bring in manuscripts from an investigative research book he was working on about the radiation levels showing up in America's milk supply from cows ingesting grass that readily absorbed the particles drifting around the Earth leaked from reactors and other sources. Interesting and scary stuff. But in talking with him one day, he revealed that he had worked as a televison writer in the fifties and sixties. It was ancient history to him, and he had moved on to what he considered more important pursuits. Of course, I was still pursuing the dream he had let go of (or been aged out of). We talked about writing, but I never pushed him for shows he may have written for in decades past since he was reluctant to talk about them. As I was watching this episode last night, suddenly there was his name; Shimon Wincelberg. He wrote it.

Season 3 two cents con'd. These comments sponsored by the blog, where there's a piece on the power of black & white and The Outer Limits, for fans of either out there.

"a gift for a warrior" What's going on here? Buz is back. The previous '62 Corvette is back. The earlier title font is back. The last three episodes were in Memphis and suddenly we've zipped across the entire country back to Chula Vista, California. Oh, I get it. Obviously this is an earlier produced episode held over for later in the third season for whatever reason. Which kind of screws up the continuity considering the fact that Buz has supposedly been in a Cleveland hospital with 'echo virus' and of course there's no mention of it here. A good argument that sequential air dates are meaningless compared to actual production schedules when revisiting an old series or producing one for DVD.

The 'warrior' is James Whitmore, always great, as a successful agricultural businessman who had an affair with a local as he marched through Germany in World War II eighteen years prior. The 'gift' would be the son he never knew about now tracking him down with mixed emotions and an unclear agenda. The son is played by an actor named Lars Passgaard, who I've never heard of before or since, but can I buy a vowel? Oh, and the story is by a guy named Harlan Ellison. Who no doubt has disavowed any connection to this episode, villified the re-write by Larry Marcus, and sued the producer for insufficient compensation (and a Corvette). I keed, I keed. But it sounds about right, doesn't it?

Interesting story about Wincelberg, Wayne.  He died just before, or maybe even after, I'd contacted him to request an interview.

Lars Passgard was one of the stars of Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, so he would've been snatched up by Route 66 just at the moment that film arrived in the US.  Somebody in the casting department must've had one foot in Europe, or else firmly planted in the art house cinema, because they also brought over the French actress Macha Meril for her only American TV role in "Mon Petit Chou."  Another way in which Route 66 was the hippest thing on TV at the time.

Season 3 two cents con'd.

"suppose i said i was the queen of spain" Suppose I said this was one of my five favorite episodes. It's got everything (except Buz): A great role and performance for the late Lois Nettleton (who never looked better or more appealing); A side role for Robert Duvall; And Harvey Korman as a snippy credit card agent. It's also got a heart-breaking and nicely underplayed performance by Martin Milner as Tod. Are those tears in the final scene? I totally believe him. And isn't that Eli Wallach's Music City record store in Hollywood in the opening scene? A classic location for music enthusiasts. Tasty, indeed.

Lois Nettleton plays a woman, or rather several variations of a woman, f-ing with Tod's mind, heart and credit card. Who is she? What is she really after? This episode is probably the greatest defnition of your basic aspiring Hollywood actress I've ever seen put to film: Bonkers. Self-involved drama queens totally out of touch with any reality, and not letting anything or anyone get in the way of their self-perpetuated fantasy existence or agenda. I feel your pain, Tod. You didn't have a clue; you never stood a chance. Where was your buddy Buz when you really needed him? It takes a drama queen to recognize one.

I think Silliphant (working from a story by Jerome Brown) found his Buz-less stride with this episode. No stupid phone calls. No pretending the beat poet heart was still lingering. Just great characters, emotions, and hang on to your sanity for a wild ride. As untameable free spirits go, this is the haunted and haunting counterpoint to Vicki. Run for your life.

Yeah, that's one of my favorite episodes, too.  Some amazing location footage on Hollywood Boulevard.

Season 3 two cents con'd. "The saving grace of a dilemma is that you can only get tossed on two horns."

"sometimes it gets to be tomorrow" A second heartbreaker in a row for Tod. Things are getting tougher without Buz. But, in a way, this episode has a Buz. Joby is the 13-year-old foster home runaway who's sizing up Tod as a replacement father for the one he really loved and who was killed with his mother in a fishing accident. Martin Balsam plays the thankless child welfare worker trying to reconcile the boy and his sister with a home. We know how the orphaned Buz would have come down on the decision whether to help put Joby back in the foster home, or let him go his way, but Tod, without Buz's streetwise counsel, is stuck on the horns of that dilemma. And gored by them when he finally makes a decision.

I really appreciate how this Silliphant-scripted episode never sells out to syrup or an unrealistic resolution. The foster parents are willing and loving, but they don't know how to be the parents the child expects. The kid (nicely played by Roger Mobley) is very complex, with all parts toughened and tender gasping for dominance. The title sadly summarizes the only attitude you can live with when confronting an issue like Joby: the hurt, anger and damage will never go away, but somehow it does get to be tomorrow. He WILL grow up.

One of the things I find so remarkable about this series because it is shot on location with constantly changing characters dealing with the very human condition is that ... almost every episode has touchstones for any numbers of viewers out there. Points of relation, whether a character, or a location, or a story. This episode was shot in Corpus Christi, Texas, the city my late father was born in, but which I have never visited. The boy running around the city is the same age as my son. So part of the touchstone of this episode for me was seeing the sights of my father's birthplace through the sneaker footprints of a boy my son's age. I felt closer to my dad, and grateful I am still here for my son. How often does television do that?

Season 3 two cents con'd.

"...and he shall forfeit his dog and ten shillings to the king"  Oh, yeah, and also his wife. Hey, after two straight episodes of violence of the heart (Tod's), we finally get some good old-fashioned normal violence: people shooting other people. An Arizona motel owner and a bystander are murdered during a robbery and a posse is formed to track them down. That's right; a horse-riding posse.

Only don't expect your normal posse in a Silliphant script; this is basically your existential posse. That doesn't mean you won't get your expected faire of a good story, action sequences and sagebrush justice, but you will also get Tod's angst at what the pursuit of another human being to shoot them down is all about. "Why do you need to go?" A woman piano player, who might be the female embodiment of Tod's conscience, asks him. By the end of the episode, and after witnessing the usual TV episode quota of senseless violence, betrayal, murder and greed, Tod is asking himself the same question. And yelling into the wind, for all the good it does.

This episode could have been called, "The History of Violence," but David Cronenberg won't come up with that title for another 45 years. But for all the revisionist views of what the classic Western use of violence is all about and where it gets you (see also "The Unforgiven"), Silliphant got there first with this story.


Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 10/14/09 at 12:00pm

Season 3 two cents con'd.

21 "on the closing of a trunk" Yegads, am I watching a ponderous episode of the hour-long Alfred Hitchcock Hour? (And don't tell me the hour long episodes weren't sluggishly paced). A woman returns to Los Lobos Island, Texas after 27 years in prison for killing her abusive father and the locals, and her uncle and son (now 27), are none too happy. Tod is the big heart who lets the women mistake him for her son briefly, and all he gets for that is attacked with a huge fish gaffe and stuffed in a trunk. Ruth Roman, playing the woman, is good as always, and nobody does grit-your-teeth-bitter better than Ed Begley, Sr. as the uncle. But this episode, like the ex-father, is somehow DOA.

Also missing in action; George Maharis' name from the credits for the first time. I guess the negotiations or thoughts of his returning finally ended with this episode. There's a very unusual and long scene of Tod and the Ed Begley character having a conversation while fishing waist-deep in the Gulf of Mexico while getting battered by waves in between their dialogue. That must have been a bitch to film for the cast and crew.

Season 3 two cents con'd.

22 "the cage around maria" Aah, so many troubled women in the world, and only so much of Tod's empathy to go around. How do you solve a problem like Maria? Who starts the episode standing barefoot in the middle of the bear cage at the Houston zoo. Well, the moment you recognize it's Elizabety Ashley, you already know she's batshit crazy, so you should RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. But, of course, that's a different program.

This episode is flatter than Kate Hudson in a corsett. I think the writer (Jesse Sandler) was trying to pull off the Silliphant formula of our freckled white knight stumbling into the damaged psyche (read: kook) of the local hottie, but the mare just doesn't kick here. When you spend the 48-odd minutes staring at the big mole on Elizabeth Ashley's cheek (which she obviously later had removed), you know something is wrong. Compare this episode to how magnificently the same formula worked in the Lois Nettleton episode ("suppose i said i was the queen of spain") and it may be impossible to articulate the difference, but there's no denying that one works and one doesn't.

Tod's weary, troubled look is wearing thin. When he just walks away at the end, you get the feeling he's turning his back on carrying this whole show on his own shoulders, as well. Relief is needed. Who you gonna call?

 
Postscript: A technical question. I'm noticing in many of the bright scenes in this set of disks, particularly when a large patch of sunny sky is featured, there is a lattice-like pattern faint on the image across the whole frame (like a faint chain-link fence pattern). Is this some polaroid or filter effect from the camera lens at the time of filming, or is it a defect in the prints or transfer? I've been noticing it throughout this set, but it's only apparent on bright, outdoor shots.

 

Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 10/23/09 at 7:39am

Season 3 two cents con'd.

23 "fifty miles from home" Who you gonna call? Glen Corbett. The original 'McDreamy' blue eyes (at least my mom thought so). And I'll see your crystal blue eyes and raise you a pair of Susan Oliver cobalt blue orbs. Course, they're all in black & white so you'll just have to use your memory from shows they appeared on later (like their appearances on Star Trek TOS).

The newer, less-improved Buz is a Lincoln Case, a Vietnam veteran returning home to Landon, Texas, withdrawn and emotionally damaged and looking for meaning beyond the violence he has witnessed. Considering this is 1963 and America's ... adventure in Vietnam was just gaining speed and hadn't had it's Walter Cronkite 'this is a lost cause' moment, this episode is suprising prescient of the pschic damage that war would inflict on its returning heroes. But how psychic did Silliphant or any empathic writer have to be to understand that war is hell, and emotionally, there are no intact survivors. See "The Best Years of Our Lives" for the WWII version.

But you have to question the producer's choice of a character that even Susan Oliver's Vietnam vet groupie (?) describes as 'always quiet, and I wish I knew what he was thinking." So do we. Television is a dialogue-based medium. If we want to see someone brood quietly, we can always go to a museum and stare at a statue.

Tod and Linc meet and bond cute, of course. And by 'cute,' that means they beat the shit out of each other. Tod thinks Linc unfairly used his trained killer karate skills on a group of harassing college basketball players that Tod was coaching, putting one of them in the hospital. And Linc, well, remember he doesn't talk much, so his fists have to make up for his lack of dialogue. Buz, as you remember, could talk a blue streak and still have the wind left for a good rumble.

This is a good episode as a portrait of brooding and emotionally wounded returning warrior, but is that who we really want to wander across America with in the passenger seat of Tod's 'vette?

Season 3 two cents con'd.

24 "narcissus on an old red fire engine" Boredeom from an old B&W television show. By now, anyone familiar with the Route 66 canon knows that it serves very effectively as a primer on every type of woman NOT TO DATE, or even become remotely involved with. But that never stops our impressionable hero/victims; in this case Linc going all gaga-eyed over Ann Helm hanging out in a Greek Galveston sailor's bar and playing a variation of her 'Sweet Thing' character from Season 1.
 
File this WNTD (woman not to date) under pure narcissist: a spoiled empty poser who could make Paris Hilton look less vapid. But she's so damn ... cute. And isn't there a degree of narcissism on the part of Linc, who falls for her before she ever opens her mouth, like she's just the perfect complement to him looking in a mirror, or appearing in tandem atop a wedding cake? It's a hoot when the Skipper (Alan Hale, Jr.) shows up as her doting and overprotective father, though.

And you're never going to get out of a Greek sailor's bar without a brawl, of course. It was a missed opportunity (at least for me) when this series aired repeats on Nick at Nite in the 80's to not turn it into a drinking game where you had to do shots every time a fistfight broke out. But then I would have ended up with alcohol poisoning well before the end of the first Season.

Episode scribe Joel Carpenter gives the formula his best shot (and a quirky Silliphant-esque title), but strikes out far worse than Linc here.

Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 10/26/09 at 6:47am

Season 3 two cents con'd.

25 "the cruelest sea of all" Episode writer Silliphant finally got so tired of writing kooky women for Tod to fall in love with that he said "oh, screw it," went off the deep end and sent in a mermaid. Seriously. Or should I say, whimsically? Or perhaps, mysteriously? Because the overreaching and ultimately unanswered question for this episode is, "Is she or isn't she?" Do you believe, or don't you? And the cruelest sea of all? That would be our surface world, where we can't always accept things on faith, even unconditional love.

Tod and Linc finally make it to my neck of the woods (or should I say swamp), with staff gigs at the Weeki Wachi Springs mermaid spectacular tourist attraction in Florida. Thirty air-hose-sucking, slightly chunky (by today's standards), reasonably attractive human women in one-piece suits ... and one ringer, who shows up unannounced and not breathing underwater for seven straight minutes. One of the problems with this episode is that you spend a lot of time watching those seven minutes and more of women dancing underwater with no dialogue to cover the action. This has all the dramatic effect you would get staring at your aquarium. Which would be entertaining only if you were smoking what Silliphant must have been when he wrote this episode.

But Diane Baker as the sea nymph from the Sargasso Sea is awfully cute (and not chunky), and the Tod squirm factor goes past 11, as he mugs and looks increasingly confused trying to figure out just where this soggy chick is coming from. She told you, Tod, the Sargasso Sea. Can't you take a mermaid at her word? Oh. Guess not. Too bad. There she goes.

Now Buz, the poet, would have believed. And wouldn't that have been more fun? But he also would have drowned swimming after her. So maybe Silliphant's ultimate message here is to take things on faith ... unless it requires breathing underwater.