It's episode 85!
And it's time to say goodbye to Masquerade.
In this episode...
Mitchell and Dan dive into the 35th episode of Bourbon Street Beat*
Dan covers the 4th episode of Shadow Chasers
Amanda and Dan wrap up Masquerade with its unaired episode
Listen here.
Please, enjoy. And be safe.
*Happy 10th Anniversary, sir! In one year, you'll catch up to Happy Days. And that's all I've ever asked.
Hello again!
ReplyDeleteThis is mainly about the Masquerade episode, so be sure to let Amanda know, OK?
- First off: Reid Shelton is a man.
Mr. Shelton came from the Broadway stage, where he was most famous as the original Daddy Warbucks in Annie.
In this episode, Mr. Shelton is the fat, white-haired Russian general who's Sybil Danning's boss.
Mary the Girl is Cindy Morgan, probably best-remembered as Lacey Underall in Caddyshack.
Sorry I couldn't get to you sooner with this - problems with the old confuser.
Should you or Amanda - or both of you - take on Blacke's Magic in the near future, may I make this suggestion:
Before you discuss the two-hour pilot, you ought to take a look at "Who Killed Merlin The Great?", from the second season of the original Burke's Law in 1964.
No spoilers; if you see the shows in close proximity, all will be self-explanatory.
If you really need an explanation, send me an Email at:
mike.doran9740@att.net
Because I Just Want To Get Your Attention:
ReplyDeleteThis is about the Nero Wolfe minisode, which I just listened to.
First off, my bona fides:
I've been reading the Wolfe books since high school - the mid '60s.
Bantam paperbacks, which back then were fifty cents.
I still have those - and I'm holding my 1966 edition in hand as I'm writing this.
That's Number One: The Doorbell Rang was first published in 1965.
The book Mrs. Bruner is so taken with, The FBI Nobody Knows, is real; Fred Cook put it out in 1964, and Rex Stout was himself so taken with it that he used it as a trigger (so to speak) for his new Wolfe book.
Hoover was still running the FBI at the time (the TV show was just starting out then), so Doorbell got a major publicity push by Viking Press, and wound up being a best seller (which almost never happened to genre books then - but that's another story …).
Anyway, I got my Bantam paperback when it first came out in '66, for 50 cents, and it's right in front of me now.
By the way, in the '60s Bantam pbs used the smallest typeface available; Doorbell is 122 pages long, which was about average for a Stout book (your copy is possibly from a decade or so later, when Bantam started using larger typefaces, which would have upped the page count somewhat; still, I don't recall Rex Stout ever writing a novel which topped as much as 200 pages, even in hardcover).
It's coming up on 4:00 in the blessed AM, and I've got just loads of other stuff (including how Frank Gilroy came to be involved in this particular production), so I'll stand down until you put up a post in the blog proper.
(If you can't wait, my Email is in the previous comment.)
(Fair warning, though: my next birthday, this coming September, will be my 70th - which means I can't wait …)
PS:
Are you guys too young to remember Dark Shadows?
Just askin' …
A proper post will be going up soon, Mike. Thank you for the comments, as always. I will do another "Comments From Mike" in the next full episode. I hope you and yours are safe and well.
ReplyDeleteI do know Dark Shadows. I've seen about 120 episodes or so. I've always meant to watch more. I can't speak for Tim but I'm pretty certain he's seen it too.
Thanx for the thanx.
DeleteIf both of you have seen Dark Shadows, than at some time or other you must have seen or heard Thayer David, who played about a dozen roles over the show's history.
David's best-known parts on Shadows were the various generations of the Stokes family: grubby Ben Stokes (the 18th Century manservant) and his semi-elegant 20th Century descendant Prof. T. Eliot Stokes (the designated explainer whenever they started a "new" storyline).
At the very least, you might have recalled the flashy fight promoter who sets up Apollo Creed with Rocky Balboa in the first film in that series (Thayer David died before production started on Rocky II, or else he might have done more of the series).
More To Come - when the time comes …
Back from my second pass at the minisode.
ReplyDeleteBelieve me, this can't wait:
What follows is from I Wake Up Screening!, a memoir written by Frank D. Gilroy in 1993.
This book is mainly concerned with some feature films that Gilroy wrote and directed between 1968 and 1989.
Whatever work Gilroy did for television is only mentioned in passing, when it is at all.
The following is a footnote, accompanying the noting of Thayer David's passing in 1978 (the year after Doorbell Rang was filmed):
When Orson Welles bowed out of playing Nero Wolfe, which I was enticed to write and direct with assurance they had Welles signed, I was told to discover someone for the role since no other name actors were acceptable to them (ABC/Paramount) or to me.
After a bicoastal search, which acquainted me with just about every corpulent character actor available, I, close to giving up, encountered Thayer David. No sooner did he start to read than Emmett Lavery, the producer, and I exchanged a look: We'd found our man …
… Suffice to say that Thayer David's is acknowledged the best portrayal of Wolfe by the Nero Wolfe fan club (The Wolfe Pack), who show the film repeatedly.
(Slightly abridged and amended for use here - and remember, this was written in '93, before the Chaykin-Hutton A&E series.)
Just thought you'd like to know …