Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Scourge of Revenge

 

Our Story So Far: Ready to make the final sacrifice to capture Ivan Shark, dauntless Captain Midnight throws himself into the hands of the master criminal!  But Shark eludes capture, and Midnight’s fate is sealed!

 

And hermetically sealed at that!  Shark’s hideout, wired to explode, does in fact and the roof comes crashing down on our hero.  But do you think a little thing like major structural damage is going to slow Captain Midnight down?  Au contraire!  He does, however, wobble a bit after picking himself up from the wreckage (shake it off, ya crybaby—this is just a flesh wound compared to that plane crash you walked away from) while in the meantime, Shark, Fury and the boys are planning to be off like a prom dress:

 

SHARK: Well?

 

FURY: I’m going with you…

 

SHARK: You’re going with the men to the Greer house…they’re getting jittery…I need you to keep them in line…now do as I say, get in the car…

 

Fury stamps her foot and goes off toward the automobile; Shark and one of his henchmen are planning to take Joyce and John Edwards with them as they escape via plane:

 

SHARK (to henchman): Well, what are you waiting for?  Get them into the plane!!!

 

HENCHMAN: They refuse to go!

 

EDWARDS: That’s right—I refuse to go anywhere with you, Ivan Shark…

 

SHARK: Why, that’s silly—you…

 

As Shark begins to manhandle Joyce (the masher!), Edwards suddenly develops some backbone and pow! lands one right on Shark’s beezer (I have to admit, he looks pretty damn good for about fifteen seconds but of course, in the end, he’s not a fighter—he’s a lover).  Fortunately, Cap’s sidekick Chuck Ramsey has finally manage to untie himself and he arrives on the scene to get in a few punches, and when he’s overcome, Midnight emerges from what’s left of Shark’s hideout to join in the melee and finish subduing the bad guys.  Cap, Joyce and Edwards take off in the plane with Shark as prisoner while Chuck gets behind the wheel and high-tails it back towards town.  Thinking that everything is okay (Martel: “There…what’d I tell ya—he’s safe enough!”), Fury and the boys get suspicious (“Great sufferin’ cats—that’s Midnight’s stooge that just passed us…”) when they see a speeding Chuck pass their automobile, so they follow him to the exact same country store that Chuck stopped at in Chapter 13…and what’s more, he uses the exact same pay phone to contact Major Steel.  With the help of a handy-dandy listening device, Martel eavesdrops on the conversation and reports to Fury that her old man has been pinched.

 

Meanwhile, in Steel’s office:

 

MIDNIGHT: With millions of dollars behind you, you’re been beaten…by loyal Americans working not for wealth, but for love of country!

 

SHARK: Beautiful and patriotic…but very uninteresting to me…

 

MIDNIGHT: All right, Major—I’m through…lock him up…

 

Since waterboarding hadn’t been invented back then, I guess they had to handle him with kid gloves:

 

SHARK: Pardon me—there isn’t any law in your Constitution that says that a man can’t have a drink of water when he’s thirsty, is there?

 

STEEL: No…but I wish there were…help yourself…

 

Atta boy, Major!  That’s more like it!  As Shark is being interrogated, his stupefyingly loyal gang pull up in a large truck in an alley next to the building that houses Military Intelligence, and when Martel observes: “It’s a cinch—only two men covering the entrance” you start to wonder how we won WW2 with that kind of security.  The men signal Shark via the truck’s horn, and after Shark pretends that he’s ready to talk he waits until Steel drops his guard…then throws his water in the Major’s face and crashes out through his office window onto a fire escape.  He sees the truck below and allows his stuntman to take over, falling on top of it.

 

Cap, the Major and Steel’s flunky Burns are soon after the truck in hot pursuit, but Shark and the gang give them the slip and the three men end up stopping a similar truck and arresting that driver by mistake.  Steel then decides to call it a day, and on his way home comes across the real truck—which he stops and holds the passengers at gunpoint:

 

SLICK: I don’t know what’s all the excitement…we haven’t done anything…

 

STEEL: Don’t stall—what have you done with Ivan Shark?

 

BORGMAN: Who?  I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about…

 

STEEL: I believe different…

 

BORGMAN: Now look, fella—you’ve got us all wrong…we’re just deliverin’ a cargo of cigarettes…

 

STEEL: Oh, another cargo of cigarettes, eh?

 

As a famous secret agent would say: “It’s the old ‘deliverin’-a-cargo-of-cigarettes’ trick…and I fell for it.”  Sure enough, Shark and the other gang members sneak up behind the Major and put the snatch on Steel.  Back at the Greer house, Shark audaciously whips out his can’t-fail makeup kit and proceeds to disguise himself as Major Steel; there’s a real laugh-out-loud moment when actor Ray Teal (as Borgman) walks into the room where Shark (now being played by Joseph W. Girard as “Shark- disguised-as-Major-Steel”) is applying the last touches of his makeup and barks at him in Steel’s voice: “Well—did you get anything?”  Teal does this hilarious “take,” so much so that even Girard and Luana Walters (as Fury) can’t keep from laughing out loud.  With the Major’s papers tucked away in his suit, “Steel” arrives at his office the next morning and tells his flunky, Lieutenant Clarke, that he’s flying to D.C. and will need John Edwards’ range finder.  The scene then cuts to the Edwards’ bungalow:

 

JOYCE: Don’t get excited, Dad…no one’s trying to steal your invention…

 

MIDNIGHT (slightly exasperated): Of course not, Mr. Edwards—but as soon as Major Steel arrives in his office, I’ll go and get it for you…

 

EDWARDS (raving): I want it at once!  Right now!  I don’t trust anyone!  Right now I want it!

 

IKKY (aside to Chuck): I think he wants it…

 

Midnight phones Steel’s office and talks to “Steel”, telling him that the inventor is throwing a hissy fit and that he’ll be over in ten minutes.  Now there’s really trouble in River City, and to make matters worse, Clarke has forgotten the new combination to the safe in which the finder is kept, causing Shark to break out in a tiny sweat.  Fortunately, the combination is written on the papers in “Steel’s” suit, and the model is retrieved just at the very moment that Cap arrives at the office.

 

Seeing “Steel” with the range finder, Midnight begins to wonder what’s up—and while the phony Major starts his bluff about the D.C. trip, a sharp-eyed Cap spots a noticeable white circle around Steel’s ring finger…and quickly deduces that it’s Shark in disguise!  Cap and his nemesis begin to fight, and when Steel’s men finally break into the office…that’s right, they grab Midnight and allow “Steel” to get away:

 

MIDNIGHT: Let me go, you fools!  That man was Ivan Shark!  (He dashes out of the room…)

 

CLARKE: What did he say?

 

BURNS: He said that man was Ivan Shark!

 

CLARKE: Impossible!!!

 

Oh, it be possible, Lieutenant Dimwit—and Shark hooks up with a waiting Borgman and Martel, who fortunately saw Midnight arrive at the building and did a little maintenance work on Cap’s wheels “just in case.”  As Midnight begins to close in on the fleeing villains, his own transportation begins to emit smoke…and a close-up reveals that a bomb has been planted in his car…

 

Tomorrow—the final chapter: The Fatal Hour!

…and while I’m on the subject of how the British make me laugh…

 

Linda at Yet Another Journal posts that Irish comedian Dave Allen has shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 68.  Like Linda, I watched Dave quite a bit in the 70s and 80s when our local public television station broadcast episodes of his hit standup/sketch comedy series, Dave Allen at Large.  As a Catholic, I thought his jokes and sketches poking fun at Catholicism were falling-down funny; in fact, I got into a bit of trouble in Sunday school for telling a few of them (this probably resulted in my soon-to-be-acquired “lapsed Catholic” status).  At the close of each show, Allen would tell his audience: “Good night, and may your God go with you.”  I can’t think of any better way to wish a tremendously funny man R.I.P.

 

I’ve been re-reading a book by Gregory Koseluk entitled Great Brit-Coms: British Television Situation Comedy, and it’s a must-read for any fan of British comedy.  Koseluk mentions most of the biggies (Fawlty Towers, Are You Being Served?, Blackadder, etc.) but he also devotes chapters to ones that I haven’t seen in quite a while.  One of these is a series that I remember watching on public television entitled Bless Me, Father—which starred Arthur Lowe (Dad’s Army) as a parish priest and Daniel Abineri (he’s the gentleman who gave Tatum O’Neal her first screen buss in International Velvet) as a newly ordained curate in a small London suburb circa 1950.  Koseluk praises this series highly, and mentions that it was much better received here in the U.S. than its country of origin—though it’s not shown much these days.

 

Well, that will change come April 26th when Acorn Media releases Bless Me Father: The Complete Series, a DVD box set containing all twenty-one episodes of this neglected sitcom.  (The show only ran for three series between 1978 and 1981; a fourth had been planned but was scrubbed when actor Lowe passed away in 1982.)  Acorn has led the way in releasing many of the UK’s finest series (including Brideshead Revisited, Brother Cadfael and the Hercule Poirot mysteries); they even have in their catalog a sitcom starring Broadway’s legendary Elaine Stritch entitled Two’s Company, about an American writer living in England who engages in verbal sparring matches with her veddy British butler (Donald Sinden).  (Two of my friends weren’t even aware that Stritch had appeared in a sitcom, so they were pleased as punch when I told them about Company.)

 

Acorn also released a DVD entitled Good Neighbors: The Complete Final Series/Royal Command Performance, which features the final seven episodes of one of my all-time favorite Britcoms, Good Neighbors.  (Fans probably know that the original UK title of this classic is The Good Life; it was changed when it arrived on these shores because it was thought that audiences would confuse it with a 1971 sitcom with the same title starring a pre-Dallas Larry Hagman and a pre-Knots Landing Donna Mills.  Has anyone ever seen the Hagman-Mills series?  I thought not…).  Anyhoo, I thought I was going to have to purchase the other three series on Region 2 DVD but Warner Brothers has them scheduled for US release June 14th.

Across the pond

 

Brent McKee has a great post at I Am a Child of Television that asks whatever happened to good American comedy adaptations of Britcoms, like Sanford and Son (from the BBC hit Steptoe and Son) and Three’s Company (Man About the House).  He discusses the folly of trying to imitate Fawlty Towers; it was tried three times over here as Snavely (a pilot starring Harvey Korman), Amanda’s (Bea Arthur) and Payne (with John Larroquette)—all miserable failures.  I remember thinking at the time that if anyone could pull it off it would be Larroquette’s version, and being sadly disappointed at the results.  I think the problem with Payne, however, was with JoBeth Williams—who played the Sybil Fawlty role as Larroquette’s wife.  Williams was, to borrow a catchphrase from another Britcom chestnut, Are You Being Served?, “weak as water.”  (I never saw the Korman tryout, but Arthur’s version suffered even worse because she was cast as both Basil and Sybil Fawlty, essentially eliminating any potential comedic tension.)

 

I’m old enough to remember how the major networks during the 1970s were anxious to find the next Sanford or All in the Family, and how a floodgate of UK-to-US sitcoms resulted, including Thicker Than Water (UK: Nearest and Dearest), Love Thy Neighbor (Love Thy Neighbour) and A Touch of Grace (For the Love of Ada).  Two of these shows stand out in my memory: a 1973 series starring Dom DeLuise and Kathleen Freeman entitled Lotsa Luck (based on the very popular On the Buses) and a 1976 prison sitcom called On the Rocks, which I actually thought was quite funny.  Later on, though, I saw its inspiration—Porridge, with the incomparable Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale—and had to concede that the British show was vastly superior.

 

As I thumbed through the latest issue of Entertainment Weakly Weekly, I read an interesting interview with Steve Carell (who will star in the US version of The Office) and the show’s original creator, Ricky Gervais—Gervais seems pretty gung-ho on the program, remarking that “it is as good”:

 

And I love the fact that, apart from the first one, the scripts are all original.  You’ve gone back to the blueprint of what the characters are and you’ve started from there, as opposed to copying anything.  To me, it was like watching something I had nothing to do with, and it would be my favorite sitcom.  You’ve made a new program, and it has to be that way.  Which is why I purposefully had no involvement.  It should be made by Americans for Americans.

 

Now, I’m sure Gervais has a bit of a financial stake in the American take of The Office, so perhaps we should take his effusive praise cumo graino salto—though EW’s TV critic also seemed to give the new sitcom (which premieres this Thursday on NBC) a thumbs-up as well.  I do think it’s a good idea that the show’s creators (if you can call them that) are going with original scripts rather than make the mistake that the Coupling series did and just use the British version’s teleplays.  (I never thought the American Coupling would amount to anything simply because it was a version of a US show that the British Coupling essentially copied: Friends.)

 

Brent observes: “Come to think of it, it’s more likely that most American series could be adapted by the British with comparatively difficulty.  The question is, given the current state of sitcoms in the United States, why would they want to?”  Seeing as how our neighbors across the pond pretty much import most of our sitcom product anyway, I can see why it would be fruitless to do so.  The track record for American-to-British sitcoms is pretty spotty: they’ve tried versions of The Golden Girls (UK: Brighton Belles), Mad About You (Loved By You), Married…with Children (Married For Life) and That 70’s Show (Days Like These) with little to middling success.  The most successful US-to-UK transplant?  An ITV series called The Upper Hand, which was inspired—wait for it—by ABC-TV’s Who’s the Boss?  (Although I will admit that I would probably watch this series, but only because Honor Blackman was in the cast.)  And yet, the strangest US-to-UK parlay goes like this: the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part spawned the US’ All in the Family.  Family gives birth to Maude, which gives birth to Good Times—which is adapted in the UK as The Fosters, a sitcom that introduced TV audiences to a young Lenny Henry, who would return to these shores in the 1990s with the Britcom Chef!  (For the record, Maude was also borrowed for a Britcom starring Elaine Stritch entitled Nobody’s Perfect.)  While attending Marshall University in the early 1980s, I got the opportunity to ask visiting comedian Jimmie Walker if he had ever gotten the chance to see Fosters, but he told me he hadn’t.