Route 66 (2 Viewers)

[Purple Wig]

Around the time (and a few years before) that Nick-at-Night started rerunning "Route 66," I was somewhat paralleling the experience, driving around the old state highways and obscure farm/ranch roads, shooting photos of those remaining visual remnants of roadside Americana. Diners, motels, feed stores, gas stations, etc. Still a lot of fascinating relics around back then, going back to 1920s/30s/40s/50s-era businesses still in service, especially along the more rural, isolated byways. It was so easy to really feel like you were stepping back in time with each journey. And much like "Route 66" liked to show, all the areas seemed to have their own individual character/culture. But within a few short years, maybe a decade or so, it seemed like about 95% of it was gone. I'd return to the same small towns and highway relics that I shot photos of years earlier, and note how everything had closed up, been torn down, or otherwise stripped of its vintage aura. All replaced by a landscape of fast-food chains, banal quickie-marts, and generic big-box architecture. It was awfully depressing, and my photo hobby withered to nothingness, and I lost the urge to continue such explorations.

But at the time, those "Route 66" reruns propelled my interests in seeking out and getting a taste of what Tod and Buzz's journeys might have been like. The series remains an all-time favorite of mine, if not my top favorite drama series. Although, I do sometimes start to wince a bit at the series' over-tendency towards psychological drama and purple-stained soliloquies. A trend of its time.

I wish I’d taken more photos, but was otherwise doing a similar thing back then. A friend and I took a long road trip in 1985 mainly to ramble through small towns and see what there was to see. Things like old country stores on lonely 2 lane highways, I remember one that was closed, through the window we could see the calender from 1981 still up, old soda signs, abandoned 1950s car behind the shop rusting. Did similar solo jaunts in 86/87, when touring with bands in the 90s/early 2000s would take any excuse to route us through 2 lane state highways. I agree that it was fast disappearing, though not sure I’d go as high as your 95% estimate. But what little remains is also rapidly vanishing. As an example, driving through Blythe California about four years ago at night, I was pleasantly surprised to see a mid century coffee shop, an old-time variety store in the once ubiquitous white front/yellow front/orange front vein, Fosters Freeze Drive in with the original sign, old motels, liquor stores, greasy spoons, all still open for business. Made the same drive the following year and over half had been shuttered.

And to prove that I’m on topic, this afternoon I watched the episode “Good Night, Sweet Blues”

 

[Jeff Flugel]

I wish I’d taken more photos, but was otherwise doing a similar thing back then. A friend and I took a long road trip in 1985 mainly to ramble through small towns and see what there was to see. Things like old country stores on lonely 2 lane highways, I remember one that was closed, through the window we could see the calender from 1981 still up, old soda signs, abandoned 1950s car behind the shop rusting. Did similar solo jaunts in 86/87, when touring with bands in the 90s/early 2000s would take any excuse to route us through 2 lane state highways. I agree that it was fast disappearing, though not sure I’d go as high as your 95% estimate. But what little remains is also rapidly vanishing. As an example, driving through Blythe California about four years ago at night, I was pleasantly surprised to see a mid century coffee shop, an old-time variety store in the once ubiquitous white front/yellow front/orange front vein, Fosters Freeze Drive in with the original sign, old motels, liquor stores, greasy spoons, all still open for business. Made the same drive the following year and over half had been shuttered.

And to prove that I’m on topic, this afternoon I watched the episode “Good Night, Sweet Blues”

Good stuff, Alan...thanks for resurrecting this fascinating thread! Route 66 is one of my favorite classic TV shows. Time to dig back into those DVD sets (finally acquired S4 earlier this year.)

 

[Flashgear]

Route 66 debuted 60 years ago tonight! October 7, 1960...
(these screencaps from one of my favorite episodes, season three's Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?)

 

[Purple Wig]

Route 66 debuted 60 years ago tonight! October 7, 1960...
(these screencaps from one of my favorite episodes, season three's Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?)
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I just watched this episode last night! It is a great one.

 

[The 1960's]

Lizard's Leg and Owlet's Wing Season 3 Episode 6 October 26, 1962​

One of the many classic episodes of this historic television series. Not much of a plot but the interactions between Martin Milner (Tod) and George Maharis (Buzz) working with Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. playing themselves is a treat to watch. You can clearly see that Milner and Maharis were having a ball, and Lon Chaney Jr. was hamming it up throughout the entire episode.

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[The 1960's]

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Thanks to Randall for helping me with my first screen cap venture!

 

[Flashgear]

Thanks to Randall for helping me with my first screen cap venture!

Neal, great screen caps of the "Society For the Preservation of the Gerunuks"!

Lizard Leg and Owlet's Wing is very enjoyable escapism, then and now...America (and Canada and the whole world) needed this kind of affectionate parody on the night this episode first aired...sure, the overwrought hysteria of the fainting "executive secretaries" gets to be a little over-played, but so much of this episode is so sweetly intentioned, and our affection for these long-lived horror film immortals is reinforced yet again...

Consider the real life horrors that we were dealing with on the night that Lizard Leg and Owlet's Wing first aired...

On Friday October 26, 1962, in the first such challenge to JFK's Naval blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis, the U.S. Navy stopped a Soviet freighter on it's way to Cuba for inspection...in a secret communication with Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro urged the Soviet Union to consider a nuclear first strike on the U.S.A....

The next day, Saturday October 27, was even worse...a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet SAM anti-aircraft missile with USAF Major Rudolf Anderson being killed...and U.S. Navy destroyers forced a Soviet submarine to the surface on which a struggle between the exhausted and Carbon Dioxide poisoned submarine commander and the political commissar was playing out with the issue of firing a nuclear armed torpedo being debated!...At a White House meeting of the 'EXCOM' (executive commission, basically a war cabinet national security panel) JFK was pressured by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to authorize an immediate invasion of Cuba!

Americans went to bed that night knowing that Nuclear War was imminent...I was only 6 and in grade one at the time, and couldn't possibly have understood what was going on...but I do remember the worried conversations my parents were having...and we were told to run home as fast as we could from school that Friday, carrying with us a pamphlet titled If War Should Come, warning us that our hometown would likely be targeted by a Soviet 5 Megaton H-Bomb...

I wish I had memories of watching Route 66's Lizard Leg and Owlet's Wing that night, as I remember us watching the series on a regular basis...I wonder how many TV markets it was pre-empted on for live TV news coverage of the missile crisis? Probably mostly in the Eastern time zones, as Route 66 aired at 8:30...The first time I saw it was on a 1980s home-made VHS traded to me by another collector who had recorded it off of Nick at Night...and then again, beautifully remastered, when I got the Roxbury/Infinity DVD set in 2009...when I bought the Shout! Factory complete series in 2012 (to finally get season four), that represented the third time I bought this seminal American television classic...surely in my top five of all-time immortal TV series in my life-time collection...

 

[The 1960's]

Did you know this episode got a BluRay release? I was surprised.

See on Amazon


"Presented for the first time in HD by special arrangement with SHOUT! FACTORY."

 

[The 1960's]

Neal, great screen caps of the "Society For the Preservation of the Gerunuks"!

The first time I saw it was on a 1980s home-made VHS traded to me by another collector who had recorded it off of Nick at Night...and then again, beautifully remastered, when I got the Roxbury/Infinity DVD set in 2009...when I bought the Shout! Factory complete series in 2012 (to finally get season four), that represented the third time I bought this seminal American television classic...surely in my top five of all-time immortal TV series in my life-time collection...

Thanks Randall!
Is it true the Nick at Night 1st season episodes are better pq than the Shout versions? Is the Roxbury/Infinity DVD set any different than the Shout discs? I once owned the Roxbury/Infinity but can't remember. I gave it to a gf because I wanted her to enjoy the series as much as I did. She never watched a single episode.

 

[timk1041]

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Thanks to Randall for helping me with my first screen cap venture!

Thanks for all the great pictures. Good stuff.

 

[The 1960's]

S01E23 Most Vanquished, Most Victorious (Apr.14.1961)

One of the more dark and violent episodes of this series.
Had I encountered Tod and Buzz I'm sure I wouldn't have messed with them!

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[The 1960's]

 

[The 1960's]

 

[The 1960's]

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Screen caps have been edited for the best possible presentation.

 

[Jeff Flugel]

Great stuff, Neal! Haven't seen this particularly episode...will have to remedy that real soon.

 

[jayembee]

Thanks Randall!
Is it true the Nick at Night 1st season episodes are better pq than the Shout versions? Is the Roxbury/Infinity DVD set any different than the Shout discs? I once owned the Roxbury/Infinity but can't remember. I gave it to a gf because I wanted her to enjoy the series as much as I did. She never watched a single episode.

One thing I can say about the Roxbury/Infinity S1V1 set is that one episode (1x11: "A Fury Slinging Flame") uses a syndication cut running 46:12. I have an illicit download of that episode that's 51:00. And the sound cuts out at the end of the closing credits. And four episodes have a color Columbia card at the end in place of the original b&w Screen Gems card.

(Hmmm...I guess that's more than one thing I can say about it...)

Never got around to getting the complete series set. I need to rectify that.

 

[Nelson Au]

I recently made MKV files of the first season of Route 66. I own the Shout Factory complete series set that I used to make the MKV files. In checking on that episode, A Fury Slinging Flame with the Infuse app, it shows that the run time on that episode is 47 minutes, while the other episodes are 52 minutes. I guess the app rounds out the run times on the high side. I’d seen this episode twice, and there is a warning that the image quality is poor and the source material for this episode was the best available. It certainly is not the same quality as the other episodes. I had not realized it’s a syndication cut.

 

[Flashgear]

S01E23 Most Vanquished, Most Victorious (Apr.14.1961)

One of the more dark and violent episodes of this series.
Had I encountered Tod and Buzz I'm sure I wouldn't have messed with them!

Great screen caps for this excellent episode, Neal!

It's long been a first season favorite of mine as well, for the following reasons:

It's a classic 'Tod' episode, where we get valuable insight into his character's back-story, which helps to go some distance in establishing more context to his somewhat troubled and stiff Patrician background and possibly helping to explain how his once-wealthy Father came to lose it all...except, of course, for his inherited Corvette and the wanderlust to go along with it...

A memorably intense Martin Milner performance. One of his best.

As Tod's black sheep Aunt, Beatrice Straight is given maybe 4 minutes of screen time, but does so much with it! Heartbreaking and powerful. Apparently, this renowned stage actress who routinely carried many a play on Broadway knew how to turn a supporting role into maximum impact on TV or the big screen...as she would again prove 15 years later with her Oscar winning performance in Network, where she delivered the goods in a 5 to 6 minute scene that everyone who saw that great Oscar winning film remembered. That single scene performance as William Holden's betrayed wife, which might be the shortest Oscar winning performance in history, blew me away when I saw this film first run. And she was in some fast company with Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall.

Elizabeth Allen, a fine and beautiful actress, is always welcome! This is one of my favorite performances from her, along with her appearance in Combat! season one (No Hallelujahs For Glory), Stony Burke (Kelly's Place), The Fugitive (Detour on a Road Going Nowhere, The Evil that Men Do) and Donovan's Reef and Cheyenne Autumn.

Two grizzled character actors, Royal Dano and Frank Dekova, both get choice supporting roles of real dimension and depth...with evocative monologue...both these guys seem to turn up in half the shows I've watched my whole life...but rarely were they allowed to shine like this.

Pat Desimone, playing the lead greaseball of 'La Ratas', with their laughable monkey climb over the fence, a fashionably 1961 combo between West Side Story and The Young Savages, is given little to say but with his threatening silence is at least memorable...a couple of years ago when Film chest released the 1959 syndicated series Deadline, I recalled his appearance there (Return to Murder) and immediately thought "isn't that the guy from Route 66's Most Vanquished, Most Victorious?"...sure enough, that was him, basically playing the same kind of youth gang greaseball, and again in two episodes of Naked City...

I of course also love the seedy period North Hollywood and Studio City locales seen in this episode...after filming in 9 states in the first season (10 if you count the Kentucky based pilot filmed in Feb. 1960), they were clearly trying to make up for some of the spending done keeping a 50+ person production company on the road for what must have been television's most expensive show on the air in 1960-61. I think this episode, along with Sleep on Four Pillows, An Absence of Tears, and Don't Count Stars were all filmed one after the other...and a nice way to finish out the season for the road company...although the last episodes aired that season were those classic Ohio based episodes...

Great stuff, Neal! Haven't seen this particularly episode...will have to remedy that real soon.

Absolutely Jeff! I know you'd find much to like in this great episode.

One thing I can say about the Roxbury/Infinity S1V1 set is that one episode (1x11: "A Fury Slinging Flame") uses a syndication cut running 46:12. I have an illicit download of that episode that's 51:00. And the sound cuts out at the end of the closing credits. And four episodes have a color Columbia card at the end in place of the original b&w Screen Gems card.

(Hmmm...I guess that's more than one thing I can say about it...)

Never got around to getting the complete series set. I need to rectify that.

Jerry, I'm sure you'd agree that the picture quality of those first 12 episodes vary wildly, with a confounding assortment of syndicate cuts and old tape transfers...great episodes like A Fury Slinging Flame and Sheba, among others, look the worst...while a classic episode like Man on the Monkey Boards are from a great 35mm source and look great. When I bought the five VHS volumes of Route 66 released by Columbia House in the 90s, A Fury Slinging Flame was one of them that was included. And it was the uncut 51 minute complete episode. By the time that Roxbury released their first DVD set, someone decided that archived permission releases for the actual Waco and Dallas/Fort Worth TV newscasters seen in this episode couldn't be found, and thus they were (needlessly in my opinion), cut out for legal reasons. Too bad, as they were probably thrilled to have been in this. Herbert B. Leonard and Sam Manners peopled the backgrounds of many episodes with local businessmen, politicians and actual law enforcement members, so the editing out of the newscasters and reporters was strange in the context of the whole series.

The second volume of the old Roxbury/Infinity season one release was from newly remastered film transfers, but was initially released in a bastardized faux WS, 16:9! I don't know if they ever corrected it with a follow-on set. I still have all the original Roxbury/Infinity sets for seasons one to three, and am glad I didn't give them away when I purchased Shout!'s complete series set...I discovered that Shout's release, though a high quality set, had three discs, one in season two and two discs in season three, where Shout made the mistake of putting 6 episodes on a disc...usually leaving one episode to pay the price with diminished or dark PQ! Roxbury/Infinity presented seasons one to three on 8 discs each. Shout tried to do the same thing with only 6 discs. So for me, I need to have both the Roxbury/Infinity and Shout complete series in my collection, as Route 66 is one of my top 5 favorite all-time series.

In my opinion, for anyone who loves this series and has to have it in the best possible combination on DVD, I'd recommend the following:

Shout for season one.

Roxbury/Infinity for season two and three...if you can find them. Season two was released in one 8 disc set. Season three in two separate 4 disc volumes.

Shout for season four, of course, as they were the only one to release it.

I posted comparative screen caps that I took from both the Shout and Roxbury sets for the worst affected episode, season three's Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?...the difference between the two sets' PQ was dramatic...scroll back a few pages in this thread to see them.

EDIT: I must have posted these comparative screen caps that I took in another thread on HTF...I'll post them here again as proof of what I'm talking about...

Shout! Factory...the first disc of season three having 6 episodes loaded on it...all the others look great, except Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma? A Damn shame as it's one of the best episodes in the whole series!

Roxbury/Infinity...the difference is dramatic!

Shout!

Roxbury...

Shout!...

Roxbury...

Shout!...

Roxbury...the lovely surfer girl is Romney Tree, in a magical scene that is murky indeed on the overly compressed Shout S3 disc one release loaded with one too many video files with 6 episodes...

 

[The 1960's]

Great stuff, Neal! Haven't seen this particularly episode...will have to remedy that real soon.

Thank you Jeff. I find at my age if I space out my viewings, many times I think it’s the first time I’ve watched something when I know darn well it isn’t.

 

[The 1960's]

One thing I can say about the Roxbury/Infinity S1V1 set is that one episode (1x11: "A Fury Slinging Flame") uses a syndication cut running 46:12. I have an illicit download of that episode that's 51:00. And the sound cuts out at the end of the closing credits. And four episodes have a color Columbia card at the end in place of the original b&w Screen Gems card.

(Hmmm...I guess that's more than one thing I can say about it...)

Never got around to getting the complete series set. I need to rectify that.

You know Jerry whenever you see this disclaimer …

You know you’re about to be disappointed.