"micky" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:48:46 -0500, "Robert Green"
wrote:


You've got to be a real night owl, Micky, to catch the "Outer Limits" on
TV - around here it's only on at 5AM along with Broderick Crawford's
"Highway Patrol" and "Sea Hunt."

I go through periods when I am a night owl, but when that stopped I
just recorded those two and Patty Duike. Patty Duke's show is really
great in a lot of ways. It's the most "sophisticated' sitcom I ever
saw, in that they talk about all kinds of topics international travel,
how to form corporations, how to get suppliers, vendors, advertising,
about politics (One episode where her father's boss runs for office,
he makes the same speeches politicians make today, word for word).
They use words even I barely know or don't know. They had an episode
where Patty wants a fancy French dinner for her friends, and her
mother gives her some choices. Patty can pronounce the French well,
but she doesn't know what they mean. One was chicken broth, which she
said sounded a lot better in French.

I've noticed a lot of TV is dumbed down in a peculiar way. The tell the
joke, leave enough time for those who get it to laugh, and then explain the
joke further on in the script. I believe pretty strongly that the major TV
networks of the 50's and 60's, and to a lesser extent later years, really
"synchronized" the cultural patterns of Americans. What we see now is
outlets that cater to laser-narrow special interests. Network TV, for many
people, defined what is was to be American. People would discuss the shows
the next day at work as if they were discussing a large, common extended
family. Remember how obsessed the nation was with "Who shot JR?" TV barely
has enough clout now to pull off anything similar.

If you ever watch "Highway Patrol" look

I taped all three but didnt' have time to play back everything I tape
(record) so when I went away for a week, I cut out Sea Hunt and Patty
Duike, all the episodes I had seen already, and kept Highway Patrol.

So far, even when it starts boringly and I know I've seen it, it still
gets very interesting within 10 minutes. A big advantage of
half-hour shows is they are all plot, no sitting around thinking about
what to do next.

for how often Crawford appears leaning against something when standing
up.
It's reputed he was fall-down drunk for most of the filming. (-:

I read that once, (here? from you?) and wikip says something
similar, but I don't see it.

Yep, it was probably me. I slander the living and the dead, but mostly the
dead because they don't sue with the same vigor as the living. I believe
you'll see it in the episodes towards the end of the series. From what I
read, it was boredom and I remember it because the writer used the word
"ennui" which I did not know at the time. I couldn't quite figure out what
the author meant when he said "He drank from the ennui." Was it a bottle?
A disease? At first I thought it meant "he drank from the toilet" but I've
only heard that happening when people take ketamine (animal tranks) or smoke
Jimson weed (one of the guys who lived in my dorm name Mouse who also took 7
tabs of LSD to prove he was braver than anyone). If you ever seen a human
drink out of toilet, you'll never forget it. Voted mostly likely to be dead
before graduation.

His body language seems reasonable,
especially for a man his weight, and he doiesn't run fast, but he does
climb hills and move around a lot when the plot calls for it. The
last couple days he's had a dark mark on his lower lip, towards the
side. But the show stopped filming in 1959 and he didn't die until
1986, so maybe it was only a cold sore scab or something.

Are you sure you're not looking at his stunt double? (-:

A lot of interesting things about the show. They rarely rush, and
not because he's too fat, because often they haven't left the station
yet. And they almost never use the radio when the police car is
moving. Instead, even though it's usually an emergency, they call in
before they get into the car. Even when they see a guy turn around at
a road block and in 30 seconds he can be out of sight or turn down a
side road, the cop stands there and calls in.

Maybe some ham reading this will tell us why. Could be that the radios
didn't work so well on the move or that a moving car complicated the filming
and sound recording. I remember an interview with the director of the
enormously entertaining film "Gun Crazy" (written by blacklisted commie
Dalton Trumbo):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042530/

who talked about how difficult it was to film scenes in a moving car back
then if only because of the size of movie making equipment at the time. He
talked about how "button" mikes were brand new and so enabled him to place
them throught the car to capture each actors' voice accurately.

Or someone's shot, and his wife doesn't ask the operator for an
ambulance, she asks for the highway patrol. I was alive then and at
least in Pennsylvainia, one asked the operator for the police, an
ambulance, or the fire department. A lot quicker.

These were all filmed in California, which at some point in time has stood
in for every place on earth and quite a few places not of this earth. I'm
stumped on this, but I haven't watched Highway Patrol in years. There are
plenty of shows I'd love to see again from the 50's. What's mostly left is
Perry Mason and I Love Lucy. A staggering number of old shows were recorded
on tape that was erased when the shows left the air. A lot of TV history
was simply demagnetized out of existence.

OTOH, it was what people would, sillily, call modern, in a lot of
ways. Sometimes the women criminals were the dominated female who
did whatever their boyfriend or husband told them, but other times
they were the more crimiinal one, who dragged the guy into crime, and
even the brains. More than half of the criminals wore suits and
ties,. They had people who were extorted into crimes. They had an
episode with a mute girl, who had been kidnapped and released, where
they showed how smart she was when matthews asked the right questions,
and she wrote down enough info to catch the bad guys.

HP was made toward the end of Hollywood's film noir period and when there
was no film work for them, a lot of directors and craftsmen ended up doing
TV series, which many felt was beneath them. But they had to eat.

Of course no one on the show was black. Not in Sea Hunt either iirc.

That's one reason why it's sad to have lost so much of even "junk" TV from
the 50's. It captured so much of the essence of that society. No book, to
my mind, can ever express the same sentiment as a scene from Leave it to
Beaver, showing what houses looked like, what people wore, how they talked,
etc. I get TCM now, and get a real hoot out of seeing movies from the 30's
with wind-up telephones, furniture cabinet radios, cars without any safety
features whatsoever(!), men all wearing hats. The people all have the same
sorts of problems we have now, though. They just had to be circumspect in
showing things like violence. In the original "Scarface" when someone is
killed, they show a bowling bowl making a strike, the pins go flying and you
see an X being marked on a scoresheet. Now you get to see slow motion
images of pieces of brain matter spattering on the lens.

A great movie he stars in was Born Yesterday, with Judy Holliday.
She's great too.

Gangster and his moll? Seen it a long, long time ago. Just watched "White
Heat" again and noticed that they made their radio calls stopped, too. They
had radio transponders they used to track the gangsters that were the size
of vacuum cleaners!

Patty Duike had token blacks, someone dancing at the school dance or
sitting in a class or at the malt shop, but I dont' think they spoke
more than three words total.

You see some of that going with Hispanics, Koreans and Chinese nowadays. I
guess if I were black I'd be happy that other minorities are lower on the
totem pole.

BTW, the aparatment building they used to show was actually in
Brooklyn Heights, right at the south end of the Brooklyn Promenade, a
broad sidewwalk facing the river above the Brookly Queens Xway which
was built into the side of the hill, northbound lanes on the bottom I
think, southbound above them, Promenade on top. They have an episode
or two where they walk on the Promenade and look at Manhattan. It's
an apartment building, even though they acted like they lived in a
house. My friend lived a couple doors away, 20 years later. In
later episodes, they lived in a big house with a big yard. No one in
Brooklyn Heights has even a small yard in front. Nor does Brooklyn
Heights High School exist.

The show "Homicide:Life on the Street" was filmed in Baltimore and every
year the H:LotS group on the Internet had a drinking tour of all the
buildings that were used as sets or backdrops. I went one year. It was a
lot of fun. Seeing something you've seen on TV is always a weird feeling.

There is no neighborhood school in
Brooklyn Heights, even elementarry I think, and for high school they'd
have to walk a couple miles to Brooklyn Tech, one of the 4** NYC HS's
that require passing a test to get in, but maybe not such a high score
if it's the only high school near your home.

Careful, friend. I graduated from Brooklyn Tech!

**Brrooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School
(in Manhattan) and the High School of Performing Arts, portrayed in
the move and tv show Fame. That one requires an audition, not an
academic test.

HSPA wasn't usually considered one of the "three" special entrance NYC high
schools. Once, during a transit strike, I got to attend our sister school,
the all-girls Bay Ridge High School. I still have dreams about being the
only teenage boy in a building full of teenage girls. Good dreams. (-:

10-4

Over and out.

"Whenever the laws of any state are broken, a duly authorized organization
swings into action. It may be called the State Police, State Troopers,
Militia, the Rangers... or the Highway Patrol. These are the stories of the
men whose training, skill and courage have enforced and preserved our state
laws."

Well, that's about as OT as you can get. (-: Has the OP returned to tell
us how the bulbs have worked out? My newserver occasionally drops posts.

--
Bobby G.