The Protectors 2.15 – Lena

For the last of four sampler episodes of The Protectors, I’m afraid that I landed on a turkey. The kid didn’t follow it, and neither did I to be honest, but he still left the room humming the theme tune.

Anyway, I picked Trevor Preston’s Lena because it stars John Thaw, along with Judy Parfitt, plus Roger Lloyd-Pack in a small role. A few years later, Preston would write for Thaw several times in The Sweeney. Here, Thaw is playing a mob boss or a criminal or a politician or perhaps all three. It was filmed in Venice, and it reminded me of how in “Bagman” they found an incredibly interesting abandoned building in Copenhagen to shoot, because the first act fight scene is in a great, decrepit location in this city.

Also, this being a Gerry Anderson show, a getaway car turns out to be a very, very unlikely vehicle.

Maybe four episodes wasn’t enough of a sample, but I think that wasn’t bad. The four I picked had some fine guest actors, and by chance were filmed in four different countries. One was very good and one was a flop, but the other two were not bad at all. It certainly would have worked better as an hour show, with more character development and backstory and humor.

Going back to my comparison, twenty-odd years later, once they cancelled Jack of All Trades, Renaissance took the opportunity to expand Cleopatra 2525 into an hour series. ITC didn’t do that for the second year of The Protectors after they’d axed The Adventurer, and I think that’s a shame. A pretty good show could have been retooled into something much better.

That’s all for The Protectors, but we’ve got one more ITC classic to show our boy, starting at the end of the month. Stay tuned!

The Protectors 2.2 – Bagman

“Bagman” was written by Terry Nation, and I picked it because Lalla Ward is in it, along with Patricia Haines and Oliver Ford Davies in a story about a kidnapping in Copenhagen. There’s a lot of running around from location to location with a ransom in a case, not entirely unlike Nation’s “Take Me to Your Leader” for The Avengers, but really more like the ransom scene in Dirty Harry. Pretty simple and humorless stuff, but they found some neat places to shoot and the kid enjoyed it.

The Protectors 1.20 – Vocal

I love our little coincidences. I picked this episode because Shane Rimmer is in it, and also because Brian Clemens wrote it. I had no idea that Clemens co-wrote The Watcher in the Woods, which we watched last night, but they ended up on the schedule back to back anyway. I like how that villain with Rimmer is wearing a transparent plastic mask. I bet Clemens remembered the visual and decided to reuse it for his New Avengers episode “The Last of the Cybernauts…??” a few years later because it looks so good.

Anyway, I’ve probably watched five or six Protectors before now. I’ve thought of it as popcorn, just middle of the road adventure stuff, competent and occasionally good. “Vocal” is by a mile the best one I’ve seen. Tony Anholt’s character is temporarily blinded. Only he can identify a criminal, but the criminals need him alive because only he can identify who they believe is another witness. There’s a great twist in this one as well as a really good fight scene. Robert Vaughn’s barely in it. They must have been filming him for another episode while Shane Rimmer, playing a criminal who can mimic anybody’s voice, impersonates Harry.

One reason I’ve enjoyed doing this blog is that it’s given me many opportunities to give our son a good history lesson in how television used to be made. I mentioned Jack of All Trades last time, and the reason that show reminded me of The Protectors was the curious nature of its production. Jack was born because there were stations around the US that ran Hercules: The Legendary Journeys on Saturday evenings at seven, and Xena: Warrior Princess on Sundays at seven, and were looking for half-hour shows to lead into them. Other stations were looking for a one-hour block of programming. So they could buy Jack of All Trades for one night and Cleopatra 2525 for the next, or the stations that needed an hour could get both shows as the “Back2Back Action Hour.”

The Protectors was born because of similar circumstances a generation earlier. ITC’s salesmen had been hearing station managers tell them they needed a half-hour for Saturday nights, because they had an hour of local news, then half an hour of their network’s national news, a thirty minute gap, then the network’s prime time lineup. Other stations had a shorter half-hour local newscast and needed a full hour. In time, these gaps would be filled by game shows, chat shows, scandal shows, or whatever, but in the early seventies there was still a small window for dramas to get on the air. There are some lost media enthusiasts who remember a secret agent show called Monty Nash that appeared in this sort of slot briefly in 1971, but didn’t sell to enough stations to warrant making more than 14 episodes and is apparently missing apart from fragments.

ITC had the idea to produce a pair of half-hour adventure dramas, with American stars, to fill this need. Stations could buy The Protectors along with The Adventurer, with Gene Barry, and run them in an hour block, or any other way they chose. It worked incredibly well, and while The Protectors doesn’t have anywhere near the strong reputation as some of ITC’s other drama series that went straight into American syndication, it was remarkably popular among audiences and station managers. The Adventurer didn’t get a second season even though many stations must have wanted one – tales of the unhappiness among everybody involved, especially its star, are legend and hilarious – but the sponsors and stations were so happy with The Protectors that it continued production even without its stablemate. I wonder why ITC didn’t come up with a different half-hour show to accompany it, though.

The Protectors 1.2 – Brother Hood

For our next dip into the world of ITC, we’re sampling four episodes of The Protectors, which is nobody’s favorite series. It was produced by Gerry Anderson and Reg Hill, and everybody is surprised to learn that no matter how much we all love Anderson’s puppet series, The Protectors was the first time that Anderson was given the okay to produce a full second season of anything. In the US, it was successful enough in first-run syndication in the 1972-73 season that ITC needed a second batch of 26 half-hours for the next year.

So the show is kind of like Department S, only with far simpler plots and an anything-goes approach to why our heroes get involved in the case of the week. These heroes are played by Robert Vaughn, Nyree Dawn Porter, and, frequently, Tony Anholt. There are a whole pile of familiar names in the credits, from Anderson’s Supermarionation crew behind the scenes, to reliable vets like Brian Clemens and Ralph Smart contributing scripts, Don Chaffey and Charles Crichton directing, and of course it’s full of great guest actors.

The problem is that when you’re watching other ITC adventures, the plot will occasionally not matter quite so much so that we can focus on the leads being charming and witty and fun. With only twenty-five minutes available, this show is all plot and no character and very serious business. It’s kind of the opposite of the later Jack of All Trades, where the plot barely mattered much and everybody had fun and was ridiculous. I’ll explain why this comparison struck me when we get to the next episode.

So this time out, Patrick Troughton plays an evil billionaire who wants his brother, played by Vladek Sheybal, broken out of prison before he spills the beans on his criminal cartel. Everything is done with leaden weight and our heroes are unbelievably, conveniently, stupid not to realize that Troughton is not telling them all they need to know. But there are three fights, a small explosion, a helicopter, and some gunfire, which was enough to make our kid say “I think I’m gonna like this show!”

The Protectors followed the approach taken by The Persuaders! the previous year and actually filmed all over Spain, France, and Italy, so there’s a bit more to look at than the usual Avengerland locations. This one, set near Barcelona, even has a prisoner exchange in a bullring. But you just can’t help but wish this show was made with the same carefree and fun spirit of The Persuaders! and that after half an hour with these people you can remember any of their names.

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

Our summer season of Star Wars cash-ins comes to a crashing finale with the much-maligned Battle Beyond the Stars, a movie so derivative that it recycles sound effects from Battlestar Galactica, making it a cash-in of a cash-in. It’s also a remake of The Magnificent Seven, with George Peppard in the Steve McQueen role and Robert Vaughn in the Robert Vaughn role, which was itself a remake of The Seven Samurai… could you tell that Roger Corman produced this?

Actually, one of the most delightfully Cormanesque qualities of this movie is that all of the principal actors, except for John Saxon, who plays the Vader Villan Sador, were probably only required on set at the same time exactly once. Saxon never interacts with any of the principal characters, who also include Richard Thomas, Sybil Danning, Marta Kristen, and Sam Jaffe, who plays a cyborg. I think that if I were casting a movie in 1980, Sam Jaffe would not be the first name I’d come up with to work for about eight hours as a disembodied head stuck on top of a bunch of wires and machinery.

I can’t credit this turkey with much of anything myself, except that I was genuinely impressed with at least the first two-thirds of the script, which is lean and mean and moves absurdly fast, all character and nuance chopped for the bare bones of a fast-moving plot. It makes a huge error in breaking the battle against Sador into two chunks; the momentum vanishes when they return to the planet Akir (as in Akira Kurosawa) for the respite between fights with Sador. The last half-hour of the movie drags.

But it certainly didn’t drag when I was ten or so. This was one of those movies that was shown on HBO about thirty times over a couple of months and I saw most or all of it about twenty-nine of those times. I don’t know why bits of it were so unfamiliar this time around, though. I’d forgotten all about the collective-consciousness aliens who join the fight, but remembered Sybil Danning’s last line exactly. This is a movie that you watch when you’re a kid for all the space explosions and the illicit thrill of some mildly bad language because your parents see this and assume it’s more kiddie space junk and they don’t need to monitor it.

There are other cute little bits. I like that John Saxon’s character is in search of a new arm, and there’s one of the all-time great “Show me more of this Earth thing you call kissing” scenes between Thomas and Darlanne Fluegel, in a very early role. George Peppard’s Cowboy character has a belt that dispenses scotch, soda, and ice.

I nearly fell asleep during the last half hour, and my wife cringed and winced through the mess, as indeed she did with all the other outer space dramas we’ve watched this summer. But our son whooped and hollered and punched the air and had the best time in the galaxy again. He has, in that delightful way of six year-olds, decided that each and every one of the eight silly movies we watched during this season of cash-ins was better than the previous one, and this – this! – was the best of them all. I’d say that it’s not half as good as Starcrash or Message From Space, but it’s his opinion that counts the most.

We’ll head back to Earth for our next few Sunday movies, but we’ll let him see the actual sequel to Star Wars one day next month, so stay tuned!