patty maloney – Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time

Well, this was very fun! In what feels like a detour into what a second season of Legend might have been like, our heroes decamp to San Francisco for an adventure with Pratt’s mother Delilah. She’s played by Janis Paige and runs a “salon” of bohemians, artists, and oddballs. No wonder Ernest turned out to be a writer. They’re helping a young woman played by Molly Hagan find her family, lost about twenty years previously. Other very familiar faces include Patty Maloney, who plays the Pratt family maid, and James Hong, who plays a man who has purchased a very familiar space…

Well, here’s one for the Wold Newton / Tommy Westphall fans out there. James Hong’s character is the current owner of Cash Conover’s Golden Gate, from Barbary Coast! I was initially amazed that the facade had remained up on its backlot for the twenty years between Coast and Legend, but the reality is that it’s only seen in a pair of establishing shots without any of this episode’s characters in it, and Legend was filmed in Arizona anyway. It’s more likely that this was just repurposed footage from episodes of Coast without Richard Kiel standing in front of the place. Coast was set in 1870-71 and Legend in 1876. Hong’s character has Ernest Pratt’s old gambling markers. I’d like to think that sometime a few years before he ended up in Sheridan, Pratt, losing his shirt at poker, got roped in to one of Cable and Cash’s byzantine plots. He probably had a last smiling freeze frame shot before the credits with his arm around whoever was playing the redhead dealer that week.

Anyway, the plot of this episode was nothing too out of the ordinary – the person who wants Molly Hagan out of town wants her out of the way of a possible inheritance, can you imagine? – but I enjoyed the setting and the characters and the cast almost as much as my silly speculation. A second year of Legend in San Francisco with all these oddballs and a great character like Delilah Pratt would certainly have been worth watching.

“This is really going to try your patience,” I told Marie, and I was right. There’s only one episode of Sid and Marty Krofft’s Far Out Space Nuts available commercially, and I swear it’s the worst of the series. It ran in the fall of 1975 on CBS, alongside Filmation’s Shazam!, Isis, and The Ghost Busters, and six or seven of the episodes are really, really funny.

In 2002, Rhino released a three-disk sampler set containing one installment each from thirteen different Krofft shows. They didn’t pick the one with the space haunted house, and they didn’t pick the one with John Carradine (!!). They picked the one with the chicken-people. The adults suffered in silence. The five year-old loved it to pieces. He laughed and giggled all through the thing somehow.

Far Out Space Nuts starred Chuck McCann and Bob Denver. Many of the episodes were either written by McCann and his writing partner Earle Doud or, like this one, by Ray Parker, who wrote dozens and dozens of Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the 1970s, but I don’t believe he did any other work for the Kroffts beyond this. FOSN is typical mid-period Krofft, with the gigantic and intricate sets of their earliest days abandoned in favor of smaller sets – meant to represent different places on different planets but invariably all looking the same – and guest stars. The fun is watching Denver and McCann do their delightful physical comedy – it’s Gilligan and Hardy, basically – and grumbling wordplay while being threatened by various ridiculous aliens, almost all of whom observe them from the same “monitor” prop. I guess all alien supervillains shop at the same electronics store.

It’s a shame this one hasn’t been properly collected. Most of the show appears to be on YouTube in various quality bootlegs, but I’d really like to teach our son to respect artists and creators by buying official releases where possible. He’d love to laugh at some more of this show, and I’d love to see the space haunted house one again.