Cynical Cinema

I’ve been paying close attention to the way TV series end now, since I got totally screwed watching six days worth of The 4400 before realizing it never actually ends.  With the Final Season of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. was released onto DVD (November 25th, from Paramount Home Entertainment), I skipped right to the final episode.  And it’s OK.  But I am not convinced that the people making this show knew it was going to end.  I think they may have been hedging their bets.  First of all, the episode was set up with Gomer on the verge of transfering to another base, which would make Sargent Carter, of course, thrilled.  But then at the end of the episode, he stays after all.  And makes the Sarge ANGRY…

The final episode features clips and flashbacks to the best moments of the series.  Remember when Pyle did the following stupid thing… and so forth.  But there are only a couple, like they had run out of ideas and just needed to do a clip show.  And if that is the case, and they had just run out of ideas, they ended this show not a moment too soon. 

The biggest problem with this show is Sargent Carter.  He is constantly blowing his top, and there is nowhere for him to go.  He can’t get an angrier, he’s already so angry.  This type of character is best when he does a slow burn.  Think Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther movies, as he gets more and more angry with Peter Sellars.  Inspector Dreyfuss begins by being just a little irritated with the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, but by the end of the movies, he is in a full-on rage, eventually going so far as to plan to murder Clouseau.  With Frank Sutton constantly in full-rage mode, we know exactly what we’re going to get, and his rage is no longer funny.

This show remains reasonably funny, most of the time, in a cheesy-60s sitcom sort of way.  Jim Nabors is decent as Gomer Pyle, and the guest stars are usually pretty good, in some cases top-notch.  But the show was never terrific, never hilarious, and it was fairly merciful when the series ended.  Whether they knew it was ending or not.

I noticed something odd about Star Trek when watching Season Three of the original series, out tomorrow (November 18th) from Paramount Home Entertainment.  William Shatner is the kind of character who might conceivably refer to himself in the third person.  He’s overblown and arrogant and overacts and so forth.  But he doesn’t refer to himself in the third person, he does something more bizarre.  His name, really, is James.  Certain characters call him James.  Kirk is his last name.  Most characters on Star Trek call him “Captain”.  Because he is the captain.  Captain Kirk.  So far so good?

OK.  Now, when he meets other people, as he does quite often in many episodes, he needs to introduce himself.  So he says his name is Captain Kirk.  But when he meets old friends, people he has known for many years, or even people with whom he has grown up, he refers to himself as “Kirk”.  Like, “hey, Steve, it’s Kirk”.   Would anyone in the world do this, for real?  Phone up a friend and announce themselves by their last name?  It makes very little sense to me.  Your last name could be the name by which your friends know you, (as is often the case with me).  But even if that is the case, you don’t refer to yourself by that name, because it is a nickname.  If you do, you come across like George Costanza when he tried to give himself the nickname T-Bone on Seinfeld.

Anyway, just something I noticed.  Star Trek:  The Original Series, Season Three comes out tomorrow, and features that awesome episode where the weirdo creepy kids take over the Enterprise.  That episode, in itself, makes the third season better than the second one.

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.

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.

Boy, did I ever miss out when I was younger. Or, more accurately, by being born too late. I did not get to see Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Syd Barrett, The 13th Floor Elevators or the other cultural icons of the sixties do their thing. I never got to see the Beatles perform, I was nowhere when JFK was shot, I was unable to experience Paul Henderson’s goal for myself, and I missed out on The Mod Squad. Well, thankfully this fine show was preserved in a sixties time capsule for me by the good people at Paramount and released in a glorious 4-disc DVD box set! The main thing I took from this show was that at one point, Clarence Williams III was a major star of a major show. Was this a major show? I don’t even really know. Oh, he’s still around, playing bit parts in movies such as American Gangster and ridiculous parts in movies such as Half Baked and Reindeer Games. But he is the only cast member I recognize. Michael Cole looks a lot like Roger Daltrey to me, which was likely a perfect casting choice for the time, but I don’t see his name in the credits of any movie since 1992’s classic Triple Impact. And Peggy Lipton was definitely hot in 1969, and she has kept working over these past 40 years, but in nothing significant enough that anyone would have seen it.

The main premise of the show is that three “street kids” are recruited by the cops to work undercover, rather than go to prison. They are continually referred to as kids, despite the fact that Michael Cole was clearly 48 at the time of filming. I guess he paved the way for the likes of Luke Perry in later years. The “kids” talk jive to one another, and at the end of each episode, ruminate wisely about the events that have just taken place, and how those events may well shape the rest of their bright futures. I assume this show was a fairly big one , simply because in later years Claire Danes was recruited to create a movie version of the program. Much like Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, and every other movie based on a TV program, The Mod Squad movie sucked.

But watching this show reminded me of the old days. Days when I would come home after a night out and sit by the TV, watching The Simpsons late, and afterward a program called Funky Squad. Does anyone remember this show? It was clearly something that CTV had dredged up from the 70s, and was also an obvious parody of The Mod Squad. Since I was rarely in a straightforward state when I watched this program, I can’t recall if it was good or not, but I do remember finding it hilarious at the time. If there is one show that is ripe for parody, it’s The Mod Squad. It just isn’t ripe for a Hollywood movie ripoff. The Mod Squad, Season One, Volume 2 contains some classic episodes, like When Julie’s Mom Comes To Visit, and The Crime Ring That Extorts The Parents Of Young Babies.