Category: All Posts

TV at its best

After getting all serious from watching Z, on the Roku I’m enjoying a totally weird episode of Thriller — Boris Karloff, not Michael Jackson — from 1960. Mort Sahl has kidnapped Sue “Miss Landers” Randall (from Leave it to Beaver), to protect her from Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer, who wants to kidnap her!

Dragnet on the Net

A TV show I enjoyed a lot as a kid in the 60’s was Dragnet. When I was older I learned that Dragnet had not only been on TV in the 50’s, it had first been a radio show. The revived Dragnet returned with its old formula, and supporting cast members, intact. In the intervening years Sgt. Joe Friday had apparently been overlooked for promotion, despite his unbroken string of cracked cases and successful arrests.

In the Fifties, Dragnet dealt with some hard facts of life, such as drug addiction and sex crimes. When Jack Webb returned as Joe Friday ten years later, he used the show to crusade against the growing influence of the youth culture. There was an anti-Summer of Love attitude, and Hippies were depicted at best as misguided and confused kids, or as drug addicts hiding behind the trappings of Eastern religion. Parents were concerned about the rapid pace of change in Sixties, and many were struggling with rebellious teenage children. In 1968 the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and Webb offered a clear, unwavering view of right and wrong. It’s my opinion that the popularity of Dragnet helped to get Richard “Law and Order” Nixon elected in 1968.

Even the growing ranks of comic book collectors, empowered by the Batman TV show, weren’t spared Webb’s critical gaze, as seen in the infamous “Superfan” episode. I saw this when it first aired, and it starts off nicely enough, with a brief history of Hollywood, but towards the end it’s painful for an old fanboy to watch, because I have to admit there’s a lot of truth in what Stanley says.

Getting back to Dragnet in the Fifties, the link at the end of this sentence searches eBay for Dragnet OTR. “OTR” stands for “Old-Time Radio,” and as you can see there are plenty of sellers offering Dragnet radio shows. Anybody who buys one of these collections is wasting their money, because they’re available for free on Archive.org, from a wonderful organization of enthusiasts called the OTRR — the Old Time Radio Reseachers Group.

If you don’t feel like downloading and unzipping the files, you can listen to Dragnet on Tunein.com. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing that for the past few weeks. It’s interesting to compare the radio and TV versions of Dragnet. For example, here’s an episode from 1955 called The Big Deal.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/01/The+Big+Deal.mp3|titles=Dragnet “The Big Deal” 4/19/55]

Flash in the post

I don’t do very much video capturing anymore, partly because it’s a royal pain, but mostly because YouTube has most everything anyway. But I have some video clips I’d like to post later that aren’t on YouTube, so tonight I spent way too much time testing a new video editor. As is always the case, there are good and bad things about the software, but at least I got it working.

This is a comparison between the 1987 LD (LaserDisc) release of HELP! and the 2007 DVD edition. The LD is full frame, the way the film was shot.

[jwplayer config=”std” mediaid=”17311″]

And this is from the DVD. The movie has been cropped top and bottom to create a wider image, as it would have been shown in movie theaters in 1965. The color has been corrected, but it has much harder video contrast and louder sound than the LaserDisc.

[jwplayer config=”wide” mediaid=”17305″]

Blog cross-pollutionation

Two huge J.R.R. Tolkien fans are Brian Sibley and Stephen Colbert, and they happen to have provided me with a convenient segue so I can include them both in a single post. (I hope Colbert hasn’t already coined the word “pollutionation!”)

Brian (friend of the blog) Sibley is up for a BBC Audio Drama Award, for his superb radio adaptation, The History of Titus Groan, based on the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake. This is a wonderfully engrossing and challenging series of radio dramas, with outstanding performances that are both finely nuanced and, when required, hilarious and over the top. The cast includes one of my favourite ladies of British stage and screen, Miranda Richardson. Winners of the BBC Audio Drama Awards will be announced on Sunday. Good luck, Brian!

A couple of days ago, Brian told the story of the ill-fated attempt by Boston-based American publisher Houghton Mifflin to have artist Maurice Sendak provide illustrations for an edition of The Hobbit. By coincidence, this week The Colbert Report featured an uproarious interview with Sendak.