Cynical Cinema

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing an impressive box set on November 4th. It is a set that impressed me when I first saw it, and I’m certain it will impress my dad when I re-gift him with it at Christmas time. The Wild Wild West Complete Series is massive. There were four seasons of this show, which are packaged together on 27 DVDs in a huge, appropriately western-looking box. Once the box is opened, the inside is less impressive, with some weird cardboard cases full of DVDs and not much else. But then, I assume my dad won’t actually look inside this box for several years, and so he will be impressed on Christmas morning, and that alone is what counts.

Actually, I hope my dad does open this box set. Because The Wild Wild West was a really cool show. A really cool show with which most of us are familiar solely because of that Will Smith - Kevin Kline movie from 1999 that might be the worst pile of garbage ever put onto the silver screen under the guise of being a “western”. That film was so memorably bad that…well…I still remember it. That in itself is a knock against it. And it made me think that there was a good chance that the TV series upon which it was based could not be much better. But it is. It is much better. In fact, the TV series is so much better than the movie, that the TV series could actually be considered good. It’s that much better.

The Wild Wild West is, in fact, a western series. It is also a science fiction series, a spy series, a cops-and-robbers series, and has a real sense of James Bond-style slickness to it. James West (Robert Conrad) is the slick, Bond-like agent who has gadgets in his shoes and guns in his hats and exploding snooker balls and knives in his canes. All of which is very cool, but not as cool as Artemis Gordon (Ross Martin) who is the genius who makes gadgets and creates masterful disguises. The combination of the two is one of the great screen pairings in TV history. Appearing throughout the four-year run of the series is the delightfully-named Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless, who serves as a nemesis to West and Gordon. He appears first in the third episode of the first season, The Night The Wizard Shook The Earth. You know he’s evil because his name starts with Dr. Also because he’s a dwarf. As Murdoc was to MacGyver, so is Dr. Loveless to this clever duo.

The Complete Series contains some cool extra features - introductions to the episodes by Robert Conrad are particularly neat, if not always interesting. But the best extras in the box set are on the 28th, bonus disc. Two made-for-TV Wild Wild West movies are included. The Wild Wild West Revisited, from 1979, is a movie that features Paul Williams as Miguelito Loveless Jr., the son of the pair’s former nemesis. And More Wild Wild West, from 1980, sees a villain planning world domination through some kind of invisibility formula. The TV movies are terrifically campy, and while the series itself can be taken either straight or with a small wink and dose of camp, the TV movies are camp, straight-up. Mostly a relic for the people who were alive in the era where they would have been fans of the show, The Wild Wild West: Complete Series is worthwhile for all fans of campy science fiction western action espionage. And I know those people are out there.

Last year, at about this time, Alliance Films released a box set called the Original Christmas Classics. It contained Christmas shows and movies with which we are all, I’m sure, familiar. The claymation stuff - Rudolph, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, the Frosty movies. It was a really nice nostalgic set. This year, Alliance is releasing The New Christmas Classics on a similar box set on November 4th. This time, the content of the box is decidedly less familiar. George of the Jungle, Casper The Friendly Ghost, Gumby, and Fat Albert are not generally thought of as Christmas Classics. At least, not that I’m aware.

The first series in the box is Gumby. This is the first time I have ever seen Gumby, a show from the 1960s about a weird little dude made out of clay with a pointy head who travels into books with his weird little clay horse friend. In this manner, the two manage to travel through history, observing the events as they take place and in some cases affecting the outcome. The books they enter are sometimes classics, like A Christmas Carol, and other times they are books that have never existed. Like The Big Snow Hill. The first episode appears to have nothing to do with Christmas at all, it is about Thanksgiving and the Mayflower. The second episode sees the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. This episode features some 1960s-style questionable history and attitudes toward Indians, and the theft of a bunch of corn.

Then there are episodes with no dialogue, that just see Gumby running around and falling into toasters and cement mixers and then putting himself back together. He and Pokey the horse visit fairy tales involving poor kings and princes and the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is an episode called In a Fix that involves a bunch of strange bird-like clay creatures that hop around. It is a genuinely bizarre collection of Gumby episodes, and of the 12 that are featured on this set, only three are even tangentially related to Christmas. The main theme of the Christmas episodes is Ebeneezer Scrooge, who keeps escaping from A Christmas Carol to wreak havoc on Christmas. Apparently the Grinch wasn’t yet the anti-Christmas villain yet in 1967, so Scrooge became the bad guy. He keeps trying to kidnap Santa, or at the very least discredit him. In one particularly memorable episode, Scrooge uses the word “humbug” as a verb, a noun, a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, and an epithet. Sometimes within the same sentence. Another great one involves a couple of little clay building blocks who drive a tank that shoots lasers. And then there are nine other bizarre episodes of Gumby that may appeal to stoners in some way.

The next series in the set is Fat Albert. And because every single cartoon, ever, does a Christmas episode that rips off A Christmas Carol, this one is no exception. The boys are trying to put together a Christmas pageant at their clubhouse, a shack in the junkyard. The mean old Scroogey owner of the junkyard wants to bulldoze the shack, and hates the kids, and is miserly with money, and is generally a nuisance. A young couple with no job and no money end up in the shack to have their new baby, because there is nowhere else for them to go. There is a Tiny Tim character named Marshall, the son of the downtrodden couple, and there are some standard Fat Albert style cheesy lines. “You remind me of school at vacation time - no class!” Of course, in the end, the old Scrooge sees the error of his ways, and all is mended. There are two other Fat Albert episodes on the DVD, neither of which has anything to do with Christmas. One is about a girl who is embarrassed about her poverty and her rundown house, and the other is about Fat Albert’s friends helping him with his chores so he can go to the zoo and feed an elephant.

Then there is George of the Jungle. This show is reasonably funny, for a kids’ cartoon, and the six episodes here are pretty good. But again, only two of them have anything to do with Christmas. Again, we get the Christmas Carol cartoon cop-out, as George is visited by three goats. Get it? Goats? The Goat of Christmas Presents? You see, he has tried to make Christmas happen for some irritating city girl who lives in the jungle. Not being familiar with Christmas, he gets overwhelmed by the Christmas spirit, and makes every day a Christmas celebration, much to the chagrin of his friends. He is visited by three ghosts. Three ghost goats. Who show him the error of his ways, blah blah blah, and everything turns out fine.

The other George of the Jungle episodes involve a crazy rash George can’t scratch, and a weird baboon who hogs George’s heroism for himself. Although he calls himself a marmoset, he’s clearly a mandril. He has the coloured nose and all. There’s one about a magical bathroom that gets stolen, and all the apes begin disappearing from the jungle. And then there is the George’s Birthday Present episode where George has his first birthday ever. A premise which is virtually identical to the one in the episode where he tries to provide Ursula, the annoying city girl, with her Christmas.

And that brings us to the final series in the box set, Casper. Not the TV series, but a made-for-TV movie called Casper’s Haunted Christmas. This is an 80-minute movie with the computer-generated Casper and his computer-generated uncles taking up residence in Kriss, Massachusetts. Get it? Kriss, Mass? Anyway, after a Randy Travis theme song and the appearance of a ghost who is clearly Slimer from Ghostbusters, we get into the movie. Apparently, some giant green ghost god will revoke the ghost licenses of the uncles if Casper doesn’t scare someone by Christmas. You see, ghosts have to scare people, and blah blah blah. At the very least, in this movie they make the point - Casper does, indeed, scare people all the time when they discover he’s a ghost. But in this case, it is scaring people on purpose that matters. He has until Christmas to do so, or the four of them will be banished to some dark-space purgatory for eternity.

This set-up takes about seven minutes. Which means that the next 73 minutes need to be filled with something. And that something is cheesy, awful jokes. Like the kind I used to see on Hallowe’en cards when we were forced to exchange them with our classmates in the second grade. See if these phrases make you laugh - smellular phone! Shocking days until Christmas! No? Yeah, me either. There is an incredibly painful few minutes of dialogue about “scare mail”, the “ghost office”, and the dead letter department. Basically, it is the same show that Casper used to be when it was a cartoon, years ago, only much worse. And with slightly better animation.

Overall, with a total of 22 episodes of various series in this box set, only 7 of them actually have anything to do with Christmas. Of the seven Christmas episodes, five of them are takes on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you count the Casper movie, six of the seven involve three ghosts. And very few are worthwhile. But the box set could, conceivably, keep your kids entertained from December 1st all the way until Christmas.

Star Trek is one of the great phenomena in pop culture. Somehow it has managed to maintain it’s relevance over the course of five incarnations, with similar stories and similar characters and similar sets throughout all five. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a box set tomorrow, September 16th, that highlights the similarities between all five series. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective contains episodes from The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyageur, and Enterprise. It’s a box set featuring 20 episodes of Star Trek that explore alternative realities. And by that they mean mirror universes, parallel dimensions, twisted realities, and alternate lives.

What this box set does, most of all, is highlight the similarities between the five series. For example, no matter which version of Star Trek you watch, trouble causes the flight deck to shake and shudder, and makes the lights flicker, no matter what that problem actually is. And at the end of every one of these “alternative realities” episodes, the bizarre occurrences are easily explained away as “a temporal discharge of abnormal anomalies”, or some such thing. Most of these episodes fall into one of two categories. Either they are like clip shows - there are crossovers with old episodes, sometimes even other series, and they are really easy to do with a minimum of effort. For example, the episode of Voyageur where one of the characters is able to pass from deck to deck in the spaceship, and each level exists in another time frame. So old episodes get recycled. Or, they function as a reason for the creators of the series to do something totally different for one episode. Like the episode of The Next Generation where Captain Picard is in a coma and lives another man’s life on another planet while in his coma.

Perhaps that makes this box set less than appealing for true Star Trek nerds, or maybe it’s even more appealing. I really don’t know. But as a non-Star Trek afficionado, I found it to be very interesting. There are some great episodes here. The episode of Voyageur where two of the crew members cause the destruction of the ship, and send a message from fifteen years in the future in order to avert the catastrophe. Or the episode where a hot woman appears to be constantly jumping backwards in time, from the moment she dies until the moment she is conceived.

But the best episode on this box set, the one that makes it all worthwhile, is the episode of the Original Series where there is an evil Captain Kirk and a good Captain Kirk, and William Shatner fights himself. There is, I believe, no moment in television history (outside of that Star Wars holiday special) that involved worse acting than does this one. You see, Captain Kirk’s personality has been split in two - one of them all of his evil characteristics, and one of them all his good ones. The Evil Kirk makes it known that he is evil by twitching his face like a hamster. It is absolutely hilarious! William Shatner was silly at the best of times, but here he sets some kind of record for over-the-top silliness. This episode alone is worth the price of the box set. However, for those of you who don’t want to spend the money buying this massive box set, but would still dearly love to watch William Shatner fight himself, check out the bargain-basement DVD White Comanche, in which he plays long-lost twins, one who has grown up cowboy and one who has grown up Indian. The final showdown is as bonkers and hilarious as is this episode. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective hits stores tomorrow.

The first thing I noticed about Star Trek The Original Series: Season Two when I picked it up today, August 5th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, was the packaging. The packaging is irritating. There is a big, clumsy plastic box, and inside that there is a cardboard package with a bunch of episode cards in a little pouch. Also in the cardboard package are the DVDs themselves, in a book-shaped plastic case. There is no artwork on the DVDs themselves, and the listing of episodes and special features is on the cards in the other pouch. I guess the idea is that it looks futuristic, yet is in practice rather clunky and unnecessary. Much like the series itself.

When, after thirty-one minutes of twisting, prying, and shaking, I managed to get the DVDs out of the package, my girlfriend immediately wanted to put on Disc 5, the “Tribbles” episode. From what I understand, after listening to her Trek-nerd ramblings, this is one of the most famous episodes of Star Trek. After watching it, I still didn’t really understand what the big deal was. The tribbles are these tiny little fuzz balls that make a comforting noise. They don’t move, they don’t have eyes or feet or features. They’re just stuffed…nothing. And so they can’t really be cute, because they aren’t really anything. But the idea is that these “tribbles” just eat and reproduce, to such a massive extent that very quickly they cause a real danger to the Enterprise.

On the fifth disc, the “Tribbles” disc, there are two other Star Trek episodes - one of them is a tribbles episode from a cartoon Star Trek series that ran in 1973 and 1974. And another is an episode of Deep Space Nine that actually takes footage from that original, Shatner-led “tribbles” episode. The cast members of the new series are superimposed on the old one, in a sort of homage to the original Star Trek. This is an episode that really calls attention to the difference in production values between the modern and the classic. I had forgotten how low-budget the classic Star Trek really was compared to today’s versions. But all the same, I think I still prefer the original.

Now, although I find William Shatner’s overacting to be totally hilarious, I realized in watching Season Two of this original series that he wasn’t the only one! In fact, just about everyone in the original Star Trek was an overactor! Even Leonard Nimoy, as the emotionless, uber-logical Spock, still manages to have a scene or two where he manages to over-act. Now, I’m not sure it’s the fault of the rest of the cast - I think it’s likely that when acting next to William Shatner it’s natural that it would just come out. It seems like over-acting would be the only way you would even know you were in the scene with him.

Campy over-acting, some interesting ideas, and of course the Tribbles make Star Trek Original Series: Season Two worth checking out for nerds and non-nerds alike.

          “Mannix” was a TV show from the 60s and 70s.  It seems to be one of those shows that was a success in its time, but it really doesn’t hold up today.  You see, it’s a detective show.  And there have been so many detective movies over the years, and detective TV shows, that for a film or show to cut through and maintain any kind of relevance in today’s world, it has to be something really special.  Think of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, or Eastwood as Dirty Harry, or yes, even Peter Falk as Columbo.  Each of those characters was so unique and so interesting that people will watch Columbo, Sam Spade, and Harry Callaghan for years to come.  Season One of Mannix comes out today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.  But I would recommend picking up the Dirty Harry Ultimate Collection instead, it also comes out today.  And comes with a free police badge! 

          Detective Joe Mannix is played by Mike Connors, who does a good job.  He has a Johnny Cash late-60s haircut, and looks and talks a lot like the Man In Black.  He is tough and implacable, and direct, and determined and smart.  And he always gets his man.  But then, haven’t we seen that a thousand times before?  He’s not as implacable as Sam Spade, not as tough as Harry Callaghan, less determined than Philip Marlowe, and not as smart as Columbo.  So he exists on this second-tier, forgotten rung of the Private Eye ladder from that era, who just doesn’t measure up to Mike Hammer, let alone the truly classic detective characters on TV and in film.  No knock against Connors here, he was just written that way. 

          And it’s the writing that makes this show seem terribly dated when you watch it now.  Mannix works for a company called “Intertect”, a massive private-detective company.  Which was something that apparently existed in the sixties.  There are virtually no cops in the shows, and although there are very often some heinous crimes, like murder, Mannix doesn’t call the cops for backup, he calls his boss.  And regardless of how many bad guys there are, his boss showing up with a gun forces them all to drop their guns.  Which means that Mannix and the boss, played by Joseph Campanella, are so bad-ass that the two of them are able to surround and outnumber ten bad guys at a time.  And “Intertect”?  Sounds a lot like a company name that is created for a punchline in a modern comedy.  Like “Initech” in Office Space.  And the bad guys always come from something that is cryptically called “the syndicate”.  It is never explained what this “syndicate” actually is, we just take for granted it is a large and powerful evil criminal enterprise.  But then, Joe Mannix is not James Bond. 

          In every episode there is a hot babe.  Almost always a blonde.  And in every episode, there is a femme fatale character.  Usually the blonde.  But Mannix is usually too smart and perceptive to fall for their traps and charms - I guess because he saw the exact same woman every week for seven years.  Your radar would be up after that.  The opening and closing credits are irritating, with this mosaic-style fade-cut where a bunch of squares appear on the screen to make a big picture.  Which would be fine if they didn’t do it every single commercial break as well.  And the theme music is sparse, and really short, which would also be fine if it was just for the opening and closing credits.  But they use it as a sting, as a car-chase theme, as dramatic pause music - always the exact same tune!  Through the whole show!  It’s annoying!   

          The episodes have titles that are hit-and-miss, some of them hilarious.  Skid Marks on A Dry Run.  Warning: Live Blueberries.  Coffin For A Clown.  Funny stuff.  There is always a bevy of hot women walking around Intertect, showing up as secretaries and office runners and so forth.  Which makes me think the casting agent for this show was getting laid a lot on the side by promising walk-on roles to every hot woman who crossed his path.  And even if the bad guys are NOT from “the syndicate”, they still seem to have hired thugs for some reason.  All this means that every single episode of Mannix is exactly the same as every other episode of Mannix.  And that makes the first season tough to watch all the way through - 24 one-hour episodes, the main difference in each being that the hot blonde is played by a different actress. 

          Now, there is one awfully cool special feature on the DVD worth mentioning.  Clips from the “Hard-Boiled Murder” episode of the TV show Diagnosis Murder, where the entire cast of Mannix was reunited for the show.  And by that I mean Connors, Campanella and Peggy Fair, who played Mannix’s secretary.  One of the first African-American women to have a regular role on a major TV series, Fair was very good, but she didn’t appear until Season Two.  So really, there is almost no reason to pick up Mannix Season One.

The Invaders was a pretty cool series from the 1960s that existed for only two seasons. In point of fact, only a season and a half. It was kind of the antithesis of The Fugitive, in the sense that it was about a guy chasing others, rather than others chasing the guy. The guy is David Vincent (played by Roy Thinnes), an architect who is the only human alive who knows that aliens are invading the Earth. His being an architect is a pointless addition to the story, because it never comes up. He spends every episode running around, chasing the aliens (who of course have taken human form), and trying to warn the rest of the world. Thinnes is quite good, but the supporting cast around him changes so much in each episode that they are all very hit-and-miss.

But the rest of the world won’t listen. Either they think he’s just plain crazy, or they are actually aliens and try to silence him. Although, this makes little sense also. The aliens seem perfectly willing to kill anyone who is willing to expose them, and anyone who agrees with Vincent ends up dead. But somehow, they just keep leaving him alone! I guess it’s the only way the series could go on. But it didn’t go on long. In fact, it appears to have been mercifully short-lived, with the season and a half running time and all. And although it didn’t do too well, and was cancelled before it wrapped up and got resolved, it certainly was a harbinger of shows to come - V, The X-Files, and dozens of others. Maybe before it’s time, maybe not that good. Season One of The Invaders comes out May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment. I assume Season Two (the final season) will be coming out soon. I am curious to see how it ends, or if it does end at all.

I just picked up a show I never know existed. Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., season 4. It came out May 13th, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Oh, I’ve heard of Gomer Pyle. The Andy Griffith Show and all that. And I knew he was played by Jim Nabors, and I knew he was goofy and as dumb as a bag of hair. I might even have been able to pick him out of a lineup of 1960s TV characters, if he stood beside Dick Van Dyke and Carol Burnett and Chester from Gunsmoke. Gomer Pyle is an American institution, just like Jerry Lee Lewis is a French one. But somehow the existence of the show completely eluded me. And I should have known – I always thought, in Full Metal Jacket, that R. Lee Ermey was referring to the Andy Griffith character when he calls Vincent D’Onofrio “Private Pyle”. But now I know better - He’s referring to this, actual “Private Pyle”. Which makes that bathroom scene all the creepier.

Especially now that I watched Season 4 of Gomer Pyle. I couldn’t help but think about Vincent D’Onofrio and that maniac smile that spreads over his face while he sits on the floor of the bathroom. Seven-six-two millimetre. Full. Metal. Jacket. And so every time I see even a shadow cross the permanently-happy, blissfully stupid face of Gomer Pyle in this series, I expect the next thing he’ll do will be to bust into the weapons depot, load up a Rambo rifle, and go on a killing spree. (Which, as I understand it, is the alternate ending to Episode 91, “A Visit From Aunt Bee”. Or, at least, the director’s cut.) There are very few killing sprees in Gomer Pyle, USMC. And I wasn’t counting, but I think there are more laughs than murders. I think. I believe the final score is 1-0. One laugh, zero kills.

Not that I expect a military-themed show to have actual soldiers doing actual fighting. Remember Major Dad? No, neither do I. But I DO expect a “comedy” to make me laugh. And I have rarely seen a comedy that feels more dated than Gomer Pyle. The premise here is that a garage station attendant of sub-par intelligence has left Mayberry to enlist in the Marine corps. While there, he has to deal with his angry, yelling, order-barking platoon sergeant, but because he’s a “knucklehead”, he can’t do anything right ever. Which makes the sergeant yell more. And that makes Pyle screw up more. And hilarity, one would suppose, would ensue. But somehow, it just doesn’t. There is something just so painfully sit-com-ish about Gomer Pyle USMC. And perhaps in it’s day, it felt new, but there are few shows on DVD today that feel as dated as this. And that includes the A-Team.