Kolchak: The Night Stalker 1.17 – Legacy of Terror

Arthur Rowe’s “Legacy of Terror” probably isn’t anybody’s favorite episode of Kolchak, but I thought it was huge fun. It starts with our hero narrating “I promised I’d show up with a haircut, new hat and pressed suit, but I lie a lot,” and I chuckled through the whole thing. Tony gets a zinger when Carl sets himself up with a question about why a rich hotel magnate would hire a dummy like Erik Estrada’s character for his VP. Whenever I set myself up for a burn like the one Tony throws back, I need some aloe.

Estrada has two costumes in this story. Given the choice of going out in public in a pink Saturday Night Fever disco suit with seven-inch lapels or the bare-chested bird suit shown above, I’d have to think about it a while. Ramon Bieri is back as this week’s cop who’s had it up to here with Kolchak, only by this point in the show’s troubled and rushed production, nobody seems to have noticed that the last captain that Bieri played had a different name. Nor did anybody seem to notice that they’d already done a story about a killer who sleeps for decades and wakes up to kill a set number of victims before vanishing again.

Despite the plot holes and repetitions, I did enjoy the hour, but my favorite part might have been noticing the setting of the final sacrifice. It’s set in a sports arena, and while I haven’t been able to figure where it was filmed – possibly on the USC campus? – it was so refreshing to see the camera show us this huge, empty, maybe 2500 seat arena and not a single corporate logo anywhere in sight. See, the seventies weren’t all bad.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker 1.10 – The Energy Eater

I did promise you good readers a look at the unbelievably awful sports coats that you can see in this show, and tonight, guest star William Smith is wearing an eyeball-bruising doozy. It was 1974. What could you do?

I had never seen “The Energy Eater,” co-written by Rudolph Borchert and Arthur Rowe, before tonight. It wasn’t syndicated; it was paired with “Firefall” as a sausage-linked TV movie. We all really enjoyed it, but I liked it best because it’s really unlike the usual format for a Kolchak story.

Our hero isn’t alone this time. When he realizes that a new hospital is covering up some strange deaths on the property and some absolutely bizarre structural failures, Kolchak starts gathering experts to investigate. Eventually, the hospital muckity-mucks have to admit – privately – that the story Kolchak has brought them must be true. There is a powerful, invisible force on the land where the hospital was built, and they have no choice but to deal with it in the way Carl prescribes. For once, our hero isn’t standing alone in a sewer or in a junkyard. Not that he’ll get the credit for it, of course.

Our son was most creeped out by a fabulous scene where Kolchak and William Smith’s character assemble a stack of X-rays that – without rational logic but with plenty of coolness factor for the TV – each caught a glimpse of the invisible beast. They assemble the X-rays like a jigsaw puzzle, revealing the size and the face of the beast. Well, part of its face, anyway.

And with that, we’ll return Kolchak: The Night Stalker to the shelf for a few weeks to keep things fresh, and to give our son a break from the scary stuff. But Carl will be back with more monsters in Chicago in mid-November, so stay tuned!

The Bionic Woman 3.4 – Fembots in Las Vegas (part two)

This story ends with a pretty run-of-the-mill episode, with a big climax built around getting out of the big enemy base before it blows up. It’s the sort of story the Bionic shows had done several times before. On the other hand, this does have some pretty interesting visuals. I love this shot of three Fembots confronting Jaime outside Carl Franklin’s secret base, and there’s a too-short nightmare sequence where Jaime is dreaming about unmasked Fembot showgirls.

Well, I say that it’s too short, but given the reality of this basic adventure plot, I don’t know that they could have really done much with a plot that ran in that direction instead. Nevertheless, while the images in the show are blurry and fleeting, NBC used several black and white photos of the Fembot showgirls in promoting their new acquisition. I was kind of disappointed that there was so little to the actual presentation in the episode!

Anyway, everything’s neatly tidied up at the end, with the Fembots all destroyed and no chance that their new controller will bother the heroes again. Even the Howard Hughes type we met in part one has a new miracle cure and a reunion with his girlfriend. On the other hand, our son enjoyed it quite a lot and told us that he liked all the big explosions. It’s a shame they didn’t bring back these villains for one last go-around before the end, though. I would’ve liked to have seen one more story with them.

The Bionic Woman 3.3 – Fembots in Las Vegas (part one)

The NBC year of The Bionic Woman started with a two-part story that introduced Jaime’s bionic dog, Max, but we skipped that for the exciting return of the Fembots in an adventure written by Arthur Rowe. It’s silly and full of coincidence – I loved Jaime learning that they’d rebuilt the Callahan Fembot about four minutes before her new controller reactivates her – but it’s got some great fight scenes and footage of Las Vegas’s neon at night, although not as much as the Bond movie Diamonds are Forever did.

Like Diamonds, the story even includes a Howard Hughes analogue, living in isolation in a Vegas penthouse while directing research into big important-to-the-plot stuff. This guy’s a lot younger than Hughes was in his Vegas days, and is played by James Olson, who we saw in the Wonder Woman story “Last of the $2 Bills.” Melinda Fee, who had co-starred in NBC’s Six Million Dollar clone The Invisible Man, is one of the Fembots.

With this season, there was a new change initiated by NBC: one of those “here are some scenes from the episode you’re about to watch” montages before the credits. Since this spoiled both the return of the Fembots and that they’re being controlled by the mad Dr. Franklin’s previously unmentioned son, I skipped over those, but forgot that the Callahan ‘bot is reintroduced in literally the very first scene. I see why they wanted to make it this way, but it honestly would have been much more effective had we not known the robots were back until a little later. I was pleased that our son was happy to see these baddies return, but his favorite part was when Jaime and the Hughes character escaped from a trio of Fembots in a helicopter. There’s really good stunt work throughout this hour (although, sadly, Lindsay Wagner’s stunt double’s face is right in the center of the screen for a bit during her fight with the Melinda Fee Fembot) but I was probably also most pleased with the helicopter escape myself!

The Bionic Woman 2.7 – Black Magic

For the November 1976 sweeps month, The Six Million Dollar Man went big, with a pair of feature-length audience-grabbing episodes. One featured nineteen year-old Vincent Van Patten as the fourth bionic operative, about which more in a couple of weeks, and the second movie featured the USAF Thunderbirds precision flying team.

The Bionic Woman, meanwhile, went with an all-star comedy episode. “Black Magic” is a live-action Scooby Doo story written by Arthur Rowe. It’s got a big spooky house full of secret corridors and dungeons, and a weird monstrous figure in the bayou outside. Jaime goes undercover as the long-lost relation of a family of thieves and swindlers played by a downright fantastic cast. It’s got three – three! – Batvillains: Vincent Price, Julie Newmar, and Hermione Baddeley (Egghead, Catwoman, and Shame’s mother-in-law-to-be Frontier Fanny), along with Abe Vigoda as a creepy butler and William Windom as a scheming lawyer.

The episode is completely ridiculous, of course. It’s played strictly for laughs and it works perfectly. Our son adored it. I think he recognized that he’s precisely the age bracket for whom this was pitched. Nothing was really scary, even though, like Scooby Doo or The Ghost Busters, it plays with the imagery at a kid-friendly level. I might need to remember to dust this one off next Halloween.

The Bionic Woman 2.6 – Kill Oscar (part three)

Happily, our son came around for the memorable conclusion of this story. He thought Steve and Jaime fighting the Fembots amid the forces of a hurricane was incredibly exciting, and he’s right. Taken as a whole, this three-parter is a master class in plotting, moving through the creepy, conspiratorial Body Snatchers business of people you can’t trust, to some good action sequences, to a tremendously busy hour with our heroes storming the island in the middle of a… well, a storm.

And since the Fembots have remained hugely troubling for him, he got to punch the air when lightning fells three of them. He was also really taken with Jaime finally getting practical with her power and doing something deadly against an implacable enemy. She uses a rock as a weapon and throws it at 60 mph into one Fembot’s back, instantly smashing it.

I was a little worried, as this episode does have a fair amount of old men – generals and admirals – sitting around a big table grumbling while the weather forces stock footage of jets and aircraft carriers to turn back. Fortunately, one of the admirals is played by Sam Jaffe with a twinkle in his eye, which more than excuses the story regularly returning to the war room.

This story marked the end of an era. This was the last time the two bionic series crossed over, and in fact they apparently barely mentioned each other going forward. In part that’s because ABC canceled The Bionic Woman at the end of this season, and NBC picked it up with the understanding that there wouldn’t be any more crossovers. I may have given my son a somewhat flawed presentation of the programs, since we’ve watched all of the crossover stories, even the ones with very small appearances, but only a few of the many “counterfeiters in turtlenecks” that really dominated the actual schedule. But in our memories, Steve and Jaime were always teaming up anyway. That’s maybe the way it should have been.

The Six Million Dollar Man 4.6 – Kill Oscar (part two)

I swear, my kid must be the only one in history who prefers the episodes of the Bionic shows that don’t have Bigfoot or the Fembots in them. This is so strange, because he enjoyed Steve Austin’s fights with Dr. Dolenz’s robots in seasons one and two, and against the second bionic man, played by Monte Markham. But the Fembots somehow have a more sinister edge, and it’s made worse by Jaime telling Steve that the Fembots are stronger than they are. He has never liked seeing his heroes in serious trouble, and says that he really doesn’t like not being able to tell who has been replaced by a duplicate.

Never mind him, this is a great story. The pacing is a little “off,” perhaps, which also led him to become restless. Steve’s rescue of Oscar and Lynda is staged like the big end-of-show action finale, but it happens halfway through the episode. Since, like every six year-old, ours has no concept of time, I think he was satisfied that the show was over, but it kept going, and going, building up to the real end-of-show action finale, in which Steve battles an Oscar robot for the second time in the show. This is probably why Oscar issued standing orders that he’s to be killed if ever captured. You wouldn’t think that getting replaced by look-alike robots was part of the job, but there you go.

I also love the design of the Fembots. There was something in the air in the mid-seventies, with female robots losing their face-plates to reveal fake eyeballs and circuitry. About a year before, there were very similar creations in a Doctor Who serial called “The Android Invasion,” leading to a classic cliffhanger where it’s revealed that Sarah Jane has been replaced by a robot. About a year later, there was a villain in the Japanese sci-fi series JAKQ Attack Squad who also looked a little like this. She was called either “Atomic Mary” or “Atomic Witch,” I understand.

The Bionic Woman 2.5 – Kill Oscar (part one)

I know exactly where I was just after Halloween in 1976. I was in a hospital having my tonsils out and insanely worried that I would miss part three of this story. Well, I don’t know which hospital, so maybe I don’t know exactly where, but that’s not important. I was assured I’d get ice cream and that I’d get to see the story. They gave me a fudgesicle, which everybody knows isn’t ice cream. Worry accelerated.

“Kill Oscar,” which introduced a new recurring foe for our heroes called the Fembots, didn’t have quite the same impact on our son. He didn’t get quite as upset by Jaime injuring herself escaping from two of the evil robots as he did when Bigfoot thrashed the daylights out of Steve the other night, but he was still really bothered and hid his eyes while holding back tears with a pouting lower lip. The situation is much the same as we saw in that story: one of our heroes gets injured and it’s up to the other to save the day, but, as we’ll see, there will be a little more to it than that.

The Fembots have been invented by yet another disgruntled ex-OSI scientist, Dr. Franklin. He’s played by John Houseman. Financing his work is a guy played by Jack Colvin, a Universal contract player who later became famous when this show’s producer, Kenneth Johnson, remembered him when he was casting The Incredible Hulk and needed somebody to be warned about making Bill Bixby angry. This story is one of eight that features Jennifer Darling as the recurring character of Peggy Callahan, Oscar’s secretary. She’d been introduced a couple of years previously, but it looks like I didn’t pick many of her appearances for this rewatch.