Halloween With the New Addams Family (1977)

This morning, one of our rare forays into the world of bootlegs for a seasonally appropriate unavailable film. Halloween With the New Addams Family was shown on television only once, when I was six, and later turned up on a budget VHS label called Goodtimes. There’s kind of a folk memory of this being pretty awful, and unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the folk memory is correct. I didn’t make it through the film when I was six, and had occasionally seen repeats of the original series, and the somewhat similar Munsters, on WTCG-17. I had not seen any of the episodes with Cousin It, and his very brief appearance in this film unnerved me so much that I switched off around the 24 minute mark. That was the only thing from the movie I remembered at all, and I remembered it remarkably well.

So like a lot of other reunion programs from its era, this gets called “The New” presumably to distinguish it from repeats in an era when most people got their TV news from little grids in the newspaper without much information. But it’s a reunion of almost the entire cast: John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Jackie Coogan, Ted Cassidy, Lisa Loring, Ken Weatherwax, and Felix Silla are all back as the Addams clan. The only recasts are Blossom Rock’s Grandmama, now played by Jane Rose, and Morticia’s mother, by Elvia Allman.

So that’s not recast versions of Wednesday and Gomez in the photo above, those are actually new and completely unnecessary characters. That’s Wednesday Jr. and Gomez’s brother Pancho. It’s a weird, weird movie, on top of being incredibly boring, because it kind of feels like a backdoor pilot for a relaunch of the show, but it also feels like it started life as a one-hour special and the network decided they wanted it for a 90-minute slot instead. So it gets really, really long and tedious, with several unfunny gags repeated and the most interesting character in the thing getting dropped partway through.

Vito Scotti completely steals the show as one of a gang of criminals who’s sent to case the Addams house. A lot of what he does is seen-it-before reaction comedy, but when he gets back to their headquarters, he’s a complete scream, stumbling around in shock and babbling. Then the film leaves him behind and the others pose as distant relatives to get into the house during the Halloween party and find the Addams millions. The party is so tedious; it’s just extras in costumes dancing. The head criminal gets more lines than Uncle Fester. Did somebody involved with this movie actually think anybody in the audience wanted that?

Wednesday and Pugsley were often sidelined in the original show, but there’s no excuse for that happening ten years later. Loring and Weatherwax each get a kind of spotlight scene when they return home – she plays the piccolo and he’s a witch doctor – and then they’re on the sidelines again. They even do a recurring gag where Wednesday can hear her father playing Morse code on his own piccolo, but they don’t let Loring have any additional lines as she whispers instructions to Cousin It. There are two new children, who are called Wednesday Jr. and Pugsley Jr. and look just like their older sister and brother, and they don’t add anything to the narrative. Henry Darrow plays Gomez’s younger brother Pancho, who is also in love with Morticia. Madly, they remember to let Carolyn Jones dress as Morticia’s older sister Ophelia and do some judo, but decline to resolve this complication by marrying the two off. Best I can figure, this film was done on such a low budget that they couldn’t afford any rewrites.

Well, the kid laughed several times, and I enjoyed Scotti’s bit, but otherwise this really was as bad as its reputation has it. I adore the original series and rewatch episodes often, but was a dull and agonizingly long 75 minutes, and not at all the finale these actors deserved. Spirit of Halloween? Humbug, I say!

Night Gallery 1.5 – Pamela’s Voice / Lone Survivor / The Doll

I gave our son a heads up that he’d get to meet Phyllis Diller in the flesh in the opening installment of tonight’s episode. He knows her voice, and her caricature, from Mad Monster Party?, which we watch every Halloween. He didn’t offer up any “oh yeah, her” in response – nor did he offer any recognition of her co-star, John Astin – but he did say that the second segment, “Lone Survivor,” reminded him of a Twilight Zone that’s been lingering around in his head. He said that “Survivor” was a little like “Judgment Night,” and he’s right. He also predicted the revelation that the survivor that they picked up was from the Titanic, but the story had a couple more twists after that.

For me, the first two segments were in the way of the third. We paused after “Pamela’s Voice” to talk about horrible husbands and wives fighting because it’s yet another Serling depiction of a horribly miserable Lockhorns-style marriage that should have ended years earlier. Granted, nobody but Serling wrote marital fights that casually drop words like “ossuary,” “cacaphony,” and “bacchanalia” into the venom, and that makes it pretty entertaining, but the dude had issues with matrimony. Even for his generation of misery-pants marriages, the dude had issues. “Lone Survivor” felt a little longer than it needed to be, but I enjoyed John Colicos devouring all the scenery onscreen and everywhere else on the Universal lot.

“The Doll,” which wrapped up the episode, was tremendously entertaining. Nothing here was all that unpredictable – I mean, you’ve seen one living doll story, you get the idea – but I really enjoyed John Williams’ performance. He was living in Hollywood and on call whenever an upper-class Brit was needed on TV in the period. A couple of years later, he and Bernard Fox and Wilfrid Hyde-White were all playing supporting parts in one of my least favorite Columbos when Richard Basehart was pretending to be British. Yeah, I’ve mentioned it here before; it remains an annoyance.

Anyway, Williams, who is playing a character named Colonel Masters, figures out what’s going on with this strange doll that’s infiltrated his household even before Henry Silva, pretending to be Indian, shows up to gloat at him. It’s a great, sympathetic performance of a character who knows his fate and takes steps to see that the evil magic will return to its user. And the hideous doll is pure nightmare fuel. Our son allowed that it was really, really creepy.

I hate to spoil the end, but I absolutely love that this episode, which first aired on January 13 1971, ends with Colonel Masters ensuring the delivery of a big killer doll to his adversary. Four days previously, in the UK, Roger Delgado had been seen posing as a different “Colonel Masters,” delivering another big killer doll to his own adversary. No wonder everybody spent the seventies afraid their toys were going to come to life and kill them.

Night Gallery 1.3 – The House / Certain Shadows on the Wall

We resumed family teevee night this evening with a pair of creepy stories set in old houses. Our son let us know that he enjoyed these two tales more than any of the previous Gallery installments. I don’t agree at all, but I did find a thing or two to enjoy about “The House.” I occasionally get lost in my dreams, and dream that I have awakened when I’m still asleep, so the weird experiences of Joanna Pettet’s character, who finds her way to a large house hidden in a quiet valley that she has dreamed about for years, struck a chord. The episode was directed by the wonderful actor John Astin, and I see that we’ll be seeing him on the other side of the camera in a week or so.

“Certain Shadows on the Wall” reminded me of a few of Serling’s less pleasant Zone tales, especially “The Masks.” It’s centered around a family who really can’t stand each other and speak with very large vocabularies. These hateful three have returned to their childhood home for the long, long death of their eldest sister, played by Agnes Moorehead. I think this has become our son’s favorite installment because it’s very predictable, but not in an obnoxious way. It’s pitched perfectly for younger viewers, like something from a mainstream late sixties horror comic. The final shot would work just as well as the last panel in an issue of House of Mystery, with the horror host, Cain, wishing readers pleasant dreams.

I should probably find the kid some seventies DC horror books when I’m in Athens next. He’ll probably appreciate those more than superhero funnybooks…

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. 1.27 – High Treason (part two)

For their grand finale, Brisco and Bowler, having been shot by a firing squad armed only with Professor Wickwire’s rubber bullets, have to save the president from an assassination plot by a rogue general. This is one of the show’s silliest hours, with NFL gags and zeppelin gags and talking-with-helium gags, and a plot so slight that there’s more than enough time to indulge in these. At one point, for no other apparent reason than to make our son laugh like a hyena, Pete and Viva engage in an air-guitar noise-off that leaves the town’s hound dogs howling. Even the jail cell set used in half the episodes gets one more time in the spotlight.

Our kid loved it, which was nice, because he tolerated Barbary Coast and didn’t leave that with a high opinion of westerns. But in fairness, I’ve seen at least a few episodes of heaven knows how many TV westerns myself, and there aren’t all that many I’ll ever revisit. We watched a lot of them in the late seventies because stations kept showing repeats – The Rifleman, The Big Valley, Bonanza most of all – and there wasn’t anything else available. I came to appreciate some others as a grownup, Maverick the best of them by far, but anybody trying to convince today’s kids to enjoy the fiction that their grandparents loved probably needs a lighthearted hero like Brisco and a more playful touch than you’ll see in Gunsmoke.

So despite all sorts of critical praise, not enough people ever turned in to Brisco to warrant the network ever ordering more. Interestingly – and history’s done its darndest to forget this – it did catch a larger audience than The X Files every week in the 1993-94 season. Dig around the USA Today archives in your local library if you don’t believe me. Their weekly ratings summary, published on Wednesdays as I recall, would often show Brisco ranked around #75 or #80 of 100 shows, while The X Files was in the bottom five all the time. But what Brisco didn’t have was the growing buzz of the hipper show.

In 1994, every single article in every magazine or newspaper about this new technology of the World Wide Web, where we’d all be spending cyberspace in the Information Superhighway’s CompuServe chat rooms, hyped Files’ younger, detail-obsessed demographic. The character of Brisco County was often lost in thought about the dawn of the 20th Century and its “next coming thing.” The Internet was the 20th Century’s final “next coming thing,” and The X Files was its poster child, riding the wave of interest, curiosity, and conspiracy into a decades-long hit franchise.

Westerns were obviously yesterday’s news, but that didn’t stop an upstart network from trying to capture lightning in a bottle with another weird, winking western about a year later. More on that subject Sunday morning…

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. 1.26 – High Treason (part one)

This blog is, I’m sure, full of opinions nobody agrees with. You will certainly not agree with this one.

For the two-part series finale, four of the show’s main writers (Chehak, Cuse, Kern, Wirth) had our heroes round up four of the popular recurring characters (Pete, Wickire, Whip, Aron Viva) for a big mission in Mexico. But they’ve been set up; it’s all a pretence for a rogue general to launch an invasion and start a war. Brisco short-circuits the scheme, and he and Bowler are arrested, tried by a military tribunal, and sentenced to death at dawn.

Until the sentence, this is Brisco doing what it does best: lighthearted and faintly ridiculous, occasionally really funny. And then the tone changes and it spends about five minutes getting ready for the inevitable end. It’s quiet, funereal. There aren’t any gags. There isn’t any way out. Dawn comes, our heroes decline blindfolds, and Lord Bowler softly says “We had a good run, didn’t we?” The executioners fire and their bodies hit the ground.

If only that had been the ending. It’s so amazingly well done that it’s honestly spoiled by the screen reading “to be continued.” Of course there is more – sensibly, Fox’s trailers for the next episode did not actually feature Bruce Campbell and Julius Carry – and it will be triumphant and silly and entertaining, but if they had decided to end this with our heroes losing so permanently, that really would have been something.

It’s worth noting that about one year before, NBC aired the final episode of Quantum Leap. It ended on an amazing gut-punch that had all twenty million of that show’s fans and viewers furious with Donald P. Bellisario. I never cared much at all for Leap myself, but I enjoyed that strange little hour so much, especially how it refused to act like any traditional series finale before it broke its audience’s heart with its final caption, that it probably had me very anxious to see any other show produce a finale that bold. Brisco couldn’t do it, and it almost certainly shouldn’t have, but I have never been able to quash that part of me that wishes this had been the end.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. 1.13 – Steel Horses

Tom Chehak’s “Steel Horses” is one of my favorite episodes of the show, and I was glad that our son enjoyed it as much as he did. Some prototype motorcycles get pinched in order to be used in a robbery, and our slightly skeptical heroes are hot on the trail. Professor Wickwire offers some remarkable improvements to one of the prototypes, including mounting a sidecar for Lord Bowler, who isn’t happy about any of this. Neither is Brisco’s grouchier-than-ever horse Comet, who takes to this latest example of “the coming thing” with hilarious jealousy.

That’s all for Brisco County, Jr. for now. It’s going back to the shelf for a little while to keep things fresh, but we’ll be back in the nineteenth century in October, so stay tuned!

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. 1.8 – Senior Spirit

Funny that this episode should pop up while we’re watching Randall and Hopkirk every third night. R. Lee Ermey, after his small part in the pilot as Brisco’s father, returns tonight as a ghost. Sadly, they didn’t have him say “Only you can see me, Brisco! Only you!” Also returning this time out: John Astin and Billy Drago, and in her third and final appearance as the Horseshoe Club’s owner Ellie, Yvette Nipar. Darn, they should’ve kept her around. Jason Marsden, who had joined Astin for the final six episodes of Eerie Indiana a couple of years previously, gets to play John Bly’s hostage in this one.

The episode is written by John McNamara, who’d later work extensively on Lois & Clark, Spy Game, Aquarius, and most recently The Magicians. It establishes that there are – or were – three Orbs, that John Bly knows a heck of a lot about them, and that Lord Bowler is so mean that even rattlesnakes turn tail rather than face him. That moment was our son’s favorite. He said that this episode was great, but once again it failed to measure up to the one with the tank. As much as he’s enjoying the show, Marie suggested that there might need to be an episode with two tanks to make him stop offering the comparison.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. 1.4 – No Man’s Land

“No Man’s Land” is one of four Brisco County stories to be written or co-written by Tom Chehak, and the first of two to deal with the vulgar, stupid, but occasionally competent Swill Brothers. That’s the gang of ne’er-do-wells who shot Brisco about thirteen years previously, as recounted in the last episode, which is pretty nice continuity. Everybody’s paths cross in a former ghost town that’s been brought back to life as a planned utopia for women, and Denise Crosby, who guest starred in everything around that time, plays the sheriff. Crosby had most recently co-starred with Fisher Stevens and Jennifer Tilly in a clone/copy of Northern Exposure called Key West which had run on Fox in the first half of 1993.

But the most important thing to our kid was the B-plot, in which Lord Bowler tries to recapture a stolen, experimental mobile battle wagon. “It’s a tank!” our son smiled as Bowler looked over the blueprints – upside down. Naturally, the tank makes its way to the women’s town, and gets to show off its 70mm cannon with a few good explosions that made an already entertaining episode a roaring success with him.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. 1.2 – Socrates’ Sister

I didn’t realize until now that Fox did not originally run this series quite in the order intended. “Socrates’ Sister” was made second, but shown fifth. This might be because the episode, while not bad, is really quite ordinary. It plays like a very standard western, and it wouldn’t have done at all to come down from the wildness of the pilot with something that pretty much any western of the previous forty years could have done. It was written by Chris Ruppenthal, and this is his only credit on this show. He’d previously been a producer on Quantum Leap for three seasons and, the next year, would write for Bruce Campbell again in an episode of Lois & Clark that we looked at in May.

With no explanation of how he survived what looked like his death in the previous episode, John Pyper-Ferguson is back this week as Pete Hutter. Motormouthed and with a hair-trigger temper, Pete’s really the best thing about the episode, which also very, very, very briefly introduces Yvette Nipar as a recurring character, Ellie, who owns Brisco’s favorite bar. Our son loved the underwater fight, and enjoyed giggling over a recurring gag about Socrates rushing off to rescue his sister while loaded down with an absurd amount of unnecessary junk.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. 1.1 (pilot)

I spent the 1990s in Athens GA, the best city possible to see lots and lots of live music. And I saw some great shows, but never went out as much as I should have, and very rarely on Fridays. That’s because I spent my Fridays in front of the television instead of at the 40 Watt or the Uptown Lounge. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. was one of the programs that kept me home on Friday nights whenever there was a new episode.

Had I known in 1993 that one day you could get all 28 hours, uncut, on a format yet to be developed, and take up just slightly more shelf space than one VHS tape, then I’d have recorded them on a timer on 6-hour speed to watch once and collect later on down the road, and go out to see Hillbilly Frankenstein or the Labrea Stompers like I should have been doing. But no, I sat in front of the TV, taping and live-editing out the commercials while watching Brisco County and The X Files and, the next season, Homicide: Life on the Street. Did I see Elf Power’s first dozen or so shows? Not a one of them. But I wouldn’t have missed Brisco County for the world.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. was created by Jeffrey Boam and Carlton Cuse. It’s a western, mostly, but its tongue is in its cheek. There are science fiction elements, and it’s very, very funny. In the Maverick tradition, this is a show that where the situations are often “hopeless, but never serious.” It starred Bruce Campbell as our hero, with regular support from Julius Carry as the bounty hunter Lord Bowler and Christian Clemenson as the representative of the wealthy robber barons who are paying them to clean up a criminal gang. In recurring roles, there are Billy Drago and John Pyper-Ferguson as two of the villains – more about them another time – and John Astin and Kelly Rutherford as occasional allies.

Aggravatingly, one character who didn’t return when Fox agreed to buy this as a regular series was Amanda, the daughter of Astin’s mad scientist character, played by Anne Tremko. It might have been fun to have a naughty vs. nice love triangle with her, Brisco, and Kelly Rutherford’s sexy showgirl, Dixie Cousins. James Hong also has a one-off role in the two-hour pilot as an old friend of Brisco’s father. Hong probably couldn’t have returned even if they wanted him, because he had about fifty-two other commitments that year. Busy man.

Our son has been very skeptical about this show, since he didn’t enjoy Barbary Coast very much and that has soured him on westerns. But Brisco won him over exactly as it did me that Friday night in 1993. The first scene introduces the science fiction element of the show in the form of a mysterious, otherworldly Unearthed Foreign Object called The Orb, and the second scene builds to a train derailment using a variation on all those fake tunnels that Wile E. Coyote used to paint on rocks. Seven minutes into this and we hadn’t met the hero yet but I wasn’t going to miss an episode no matter who was playing at the Rockfish Palace that week.

And our kid indeed watched with eyes about as wide as mine must have been. Add in John Pyper-Ferguson’s hyperactive never-shuts-up gunslinger Pete, and Brisco’s horse Comet, who does not understand that he is a horse and needs to do horse things, and he was sold. He really liked Brisco racing to save the day riding a railroad rocket, although sadly he didn’t recognize the rocket’s inventor. He and I rewatched the Eerie, Indiana episode “The Hole in the Head Gang” this morning about an hour before we sat down to this and he still couldn’t identify John Astin!

Eerie, Indiana 1.19 – Reality Takes a Holiday

One sad night in April of 1992, NBC showed the last two episodes of Eerie, Indiana back-to-back. I had the habit, then, of occasionally taping the first or the final episodes of programs, figuring there might be some nostalgia value down the line. This lasted for a few years, but I unburdened myself of my thousand-some tape collection in the early 2000s. So much for nostalgia. Anyway, after the network finished up “Zombies in P.J.s,” I cued up the tape, sorry to see this cute show go, but it didn’t collect dust on a shelf. I showed this tape to everybody over the next couple of years. “This is what you missed,” I told all those people who couldn’t be bothered to watch. Everybody watched it with a big, big grin.

Vance DeGeneres had already written my favorite-so-far episode of the series, and he got to see it out with one of television’s most delightful series finales, “Reality Takes a Holiday.” They don’t have much time to explore the premise and still give all the actors a little spotlight, but basically Eerie collides with a parallel universe called NBC, where “Marshall Teller” is just a character played by a bound-for-trouble child star named Omri Katz, and who is being written out of his own show, killed off by the new character.

Marshall is astonished and repulsed to find that his family and best friends are just actors, that Mr. Radford is really good at improvising in character, and that the prop man – who looks an awful lot like Tee Hee from Live and Let Die – really wants to make sure his blood-pack squibs are set right for his death scene. And the director, Joe Dante, can only wince as Omri Katz goes all method acting and hopes for new pages to make it to the set. Incidentally, Joe Dante actually only plays the part of the director. The real director of this is Ken Kwapis, who also directed Vance DeGeneres’s previous script. Maybe there’s a third parallel universe where Eerie, Indiana was a hit, and they assigned DeGeneres and Kwapis seven or eight episodes in the 1992-93 season.

But no, as we’ve sadly discussed before, Eerie, Indiana was unfortunately a ratings bomb and this was its last hurrah. Our son wasn’t quite as thrilled with it as I am. He enjoyed it, and grinned as he realized where it was going, but many of the in-jokes (like the name of the “writer” and the length of the lunch break) naturally went way over his head, and he really got stuck on the DVD chapter menu calling some script rewrites “blue pages” even after I thought I explained it. Maybe he’ll come back to this one day and get a good giggle out of Mary-Margaret Humes attempting to commiserate with her young co-star by mentioning how she once got killed off Jake and the Fatman. Still, the prop man’s incredibly memorable. He’s Julius Harris, and maybe our son will remember him when we see him in a Hardy Boys a few months from now…?