Cynical Cinema

“Whoa, man.  That’s a lotta bread.”

Peggy Lipton, in 1969, was scrumptious.  She was so hot forty years ago, that I am willing to bet good money that today, she remains quite striking.  It’s a hunch I have.  But the point is that in 1969, she was ridiculously attractive, and safe.  Why safe?  Well, because I can watch Season Two, Volume One of The Mod Squad, out November 25th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and lust after Peggy Lipton, without getting into trouble with my girlfriend.  Because although she rolls her eyes at my silliness, she knows that were I to meet Peggy Lipton today, she would be in her 60s and pose no threat. 

I have often tried to make the point that lusting after Scarlett Johanssen is no different, because were I to meet her today, she would have no interest in a fat, unattractive individual like myself anyway.  I couldn’t get her into bed if I was the richest, funniest, most clever man alive.  But somehow there is a difference.  This is why I’ve been watching so many Audrey Hepburn movies lately.  Again, Audrey Hepburn poses no threat.

And once again, the best reason to watch The Mod Squad is, indeed, Peggy Lipton.  The second best reason to watch is the dialogue.  I’m not sure if it sounded realistic in 1969 or 1970, but listening to this stuff now is hilarious.  They refer to money as “bread”.  Like, “that’s a lotta bread”.  They take down bad guys in “groovy” fashion.  And they sure don’t look like “the man”.  There are even political messages in some of the episodes.  The first episode of Season Two is one that is clearly in favour of legalizing abortion.  A back-alley abortionist wishes fervently that she would be out of a job, should the procedure be legalized.

The second season gets a slightly better rating than the first one, simply because there is more Peggy Lipton involved.  And she is totally scrumptious.  Just don’t tell my girlfriend I said so.

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.

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.

Paramount Home Entertainment is in the Christmas spirit. A little early, if you ask me. But they didn’t ask me. They just went ahead and released the Holiday Treats DVD today, October 7th. It’s billed as “8 heartwarming TV classics”, and it actually delivers. For although I have not yet become imbued with the Christmas spirit, and I will likely hold off on that until about December 22nd, these TV episodes stand on their own. I had just turned on the I Love Lucy episode to take a quick gander at the DVD, and I was joined by my nine-year-old stepson. And he forced me to sit there, through eight episodes of Christmas cheer. And, with the exception of the Frasier episode, he laughed the whole time.

There is an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ricky put up a Christmas tree while reminiscing about the birth of their child. Then The Honeymooners, where Ralph sells his bowling ball to buy Alice her Christmas gift, only to find out she bought him a bag for his bowling ball. The episode of Andy Griffith where they hold their Christmas celebration in the jailhouse. The Brady Bunch episode where Flo has laryngitis. A particularly funny episode of Taxi where Louie puts up his own mother in a poker game with his brother. The Family Ties episode where Alex is visited by the ghosts from A Christmas Carol. Then a truly heartwarming episode of Frasier and a silly episode of Wings that involves Fay throwing her late husband’s ashes out of a plane in a dustbuster.

I could have done without the Family Ties and Wings, but six out of eight isn’t bad. I would suggest saving the Holiday Treats DVD for Christmas, but it’s a gift that could well be opened before December 25th.

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.

When I was a kid, after a long game of tennis, I saw an episode of Mission: Impossible at my friend Oliver’s house. I loved this show! It was one of the best things I had ever seen on TV! It had everything - espionage, international bad guys, gadgets, and missions! And that theme music! So distinctive, so cool! However, Oliver had some channels that I did not, and I never saw the show again until today. When I grabbed Season Four of Mission: Impossible from Paramount Home Entertainment on May 13th, I wondered if it would be as good as I remembered. After all, my favourite programs growing up were MacGyver and The A-Team, and I can’t watch those now without laughing at what an idiot I must have been to have enjoyed such crap.

As it turns out, however, Mission: Impossible really does hold up over the years. Of course, over those years it has been the source of some of the worst pop culture has to offer. Those three horrible movies with Tom Cruise. The music has been used as background for the irritating Scientology video, also starring Tom Cruise. The phrase “your mission, should you choose to accept it” has been overused ad nauseum, and the self-destructing message has been a concept taken to asinine proportions. By the way, I DID watch Inspector Gadget as a child, and I could never understand the self-destructing message. The chief would always pop up in a garbage can, a dryer, a potted plant, and hand Inspector Gadget the message. Then, he would be told that the message would self-destruct. And Gadget would throw the message right into where the chief was hiding, and it would blow up the chief. Every time. Every time, it happened! And I would always wonder, as a child - if the chief was so adept at finding these hiding places for himself, in order to give Gadget his mission, why wouldn’t he just pop out of the dishwasher and tell Gadget the message, rather than having to hand him paper and wait while he read it? That always bothered me.

Season 4 of Mission Impossible is yet another example of when network TV used to be good. It’s like the A-Team, only without the terrible writing, the ridiculous gunfights and the lame acting. It’s like Counterstrike, only less slick and less Canadian. And it is far, far better than those absolutely idiotic Tom Cruise-John Woo movies.