Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

[Eric Paddon]

I hope they get back to work and digitize some of those other episodes!

That's a great point on Smith, the only series I knew she was on was SCARECROW AND MRS KING. But you're right Eric, the game show gig was good for a lot of B-level celebrities whose careers might've come and gone but they'd keep getting work on these series before they mostly kicked the bucket in, what, the early 90s? I knew Smith more from the $100,000 Pyramid appearances than any actual "acting gig."

The one you're thinking of from Scarecrow and Mrs. King was Martha Smith, a similar blonde type (Shelley was taller). Martha's claim to fame before Scarecrow is getting stripped at the end of Animal House but she milked the "Scarecrow" association for years afterwards on game shows.

Mary Cadorette from the one season "Three's Company" spinoff "Three's A Crowd" also kept doing game shows and hardly any acting well into the early 90s (when she was doing Pyramid then all she could plug was the restaurant she operated!)

[Edmund Kattak]

SCARECROW AND MRS KING.

Perhaps one of the most infectious themes ever - loved it! Never appeared in any form that I know of - not even on those TV Toons albums.

[AndyDursin]

The one you're thinking of from Scarecrow and Mrs. King was Martha Smith, a similar blonde type (Shelley was taller). Martha's claim to fame before Scarecrow is getting stripped at the end of Animal House but she milked the "Scarecrow" association for years afterwards on game shows.

Mary Cadorette from the one season "Three's Company" spinoff "Three's A Crowd" also kept doing game shows and hardly any acting well into the early 90s (when she was doing Pyramid then all she could plug was the restaurant she operated!)

Aaah yes! OK I remember. I got my Generic Gameshow Blondes mixed up

And I'm still mad Jack Tripper ended up with Mary Cadorette. That was a bad decision on the part of ABC execs at the time!

[Eric Paddon]

Starting July 20, BUZZR will finally resume new episodes of Match Game/Hollywood Squares Hour beginning with episode #76.

[AndyDursin]

Yes! Now to try and watch it at 10, I can't stay up for 1am anymore lol

[AndyDursin]

RIPTIDE Pilot

Of the several TV shows I bought on DVD over the last few months, this one I cracked open this week (this is the US version with the edited music...I am trying to track down the German version with the unedited music seeing as I might watch it all the way through lol).

And the pilot is fun -- a typical Stephen J. Cannell offering with good looking girls, fun action, dated technology (the nerdy, Eddie Deezen-type scientist has a hilarious looking robot that doesn't completely function), and sprightly Mike Post-Pete Carpenter music. Perry King exudes his would-be Han Solo charisma and Joe Penny has good chemistry opposite him.

I confess I also clearly have a thing for Karen Kopins, and it helped she was in the pilot. She basically worked steadily in TV and made a few features (the tepid Jim Carrey vamp comedy ONCE BITTEN and the even more dreadful Wayne Crawford adventure JAKE SPEED) throughout the 1980s. She's the female lead in the pilot and it's left that she might be around for a few episodes, though sadly she never returned.

At any rate, she seemed like she played Hollywood smart -- had a decent, if unspectacular, career for a decade-plus, then moved back to her native Connecticut, married her high school boyfriend, had 4 kids and called it a career!

She was also in an endless array of commercials, like these...

[John Johnson]

On a side note, there was also an Australian tv series called Riptide. Aired in 1969, the series lasted one season and starred Ty Hardin. Although the series was turned down in the US, I do remember it played in the UK.



http://www.australiantelevision.net/riptide.html

[Eric Paddon]

Your mention of Kopins reminded me of one of my 80s favorites, Rebecca Holden from the 2nd season of "Knight Rider" (and some guest shots on other shows before that). There's an eternal "Bonnie vs. April" debate among fans, and I come firmly on the latter not simply because Holden was a lot more beautiful, she had a more engaging presence and projected a lot more talent that wasn't fully utilized on the show (which was at its peak fun in S2).

After Knight RIder, she too eventually abandoned Hollywood for a singing career in the country music field with some relative success.

[AndyDursin]

This won't be a surprise to Eric but I didn't know Markie Post started out on CARD SHARKS. Saw her on the 12:30 episode on Buzzr last night

[Eric Paddon]

Markie had actually started out as a behind the scenes production person on game shows. First with the Tom Kennedy hosted "Split Second" (1972-75) where she appears on camera in the last episode when Tom introduces all the production people. Then she went over to Goodson-Todman and was Associate Producer on the short-lived "Double Dare" hosted by Alex Trebek (1976-77; Alex did that in between the two runs of "High Rollers". These episodes have aired on GSN and Buzzr!) and it was that G-T connection that led to her being a substitute model on "Card Sharks" which coincided with the point in time she started branching out into an acting career.

The fact that Markie had experience behind the scenes on game shows served her well in the 80s when she became one of the most reliable of game players on Pyramid, Super Password etc.

[AndyDursin]

These "new" Match Game/Hollywood Squares shows really drag with all the ANOTHER WORLD/soap opera people who show up every week. No wonder Rayburn looks like he's literally falling asleep at times during the second half of these shows. Did they know they weren't getting renewed by this point and filling out the string?

But at least Martha Smith is there!

[Eric Paddon]

New episodes BTW will only run through August 28 (To episode #108) and then they recycle back to episode #37. Still puts us only a little over half way through the nine month run (39 weeks less several pre-emptions). That means a long time before we get to the week of shows in early July that were the last ever game show appearances of Arlene Francis of "What's My Line?" fame.

Those soap panels and other cast gimmicks like "Leave It To Beaver", "Too Close For Comfort" and later "St. Elsewhere" reveal again another problem with this show compared to the older versions. On those, the celebs were for the most part, second-tier performers, but they had solid game playing credentials at least. That can't be said of many of the ones who were booked here (they all had some "current" association in some way or another) and for MG that *really* made a difference. You need reliable, quick-thinking game players like an Orson Bean etc.

[AndyDursin]

Geez, COVID aside, why don't they just do them all at once? I think the LEAVE IT TO BEAVER week has been on a dozen times! At this rate we'll get, what, another batch at Christmas time?

It does say something because the best episodes of this incarnation are easily when there are a slew of comics at once, like Leno, Fred Travalena or Arsenio. Like you said, there's no chemistry with having a group of actors from one show on at the same time, then throw in a Stan Freberg or Charles Nelson Reilly, who looks painfully uneasy without his usual supporting cast. The TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT week was especially painful. JM J Bullock is like a comic without material -- he's "wacky" but not funny whatsoever, and never was on any episode of this he's been on!

Speaking of other game shows, who was CARD SHARKS aimed at, anyway? Swingers just waking up from a hangover? Bored and under-sexed housewives? The "provocative", often sex-oriented questions are quite "different" than the other game shows of that era. Plus the hyper-active contestants are hilarious too -- one woman on a 1979 rerun I watched the other night was jumping up and down so much it looked like the set and the podium in front of her were about to fall apart!

[Eric Paddon]

It's all a matter of how long does it take them to digitize this stuff alas. The formats used for GSN airings of shows back in the 90s aren't compatible now apparently and these shows hadn't been transferred back then to begin with because of the rights issues so they're going from an even older obsolete format.

Couldn't agree more on Bullock - not funny. And a lousy game player too. But they still booked him on other game shows anyway (the John Davidson hosted version of Hollywood Squares he even got to be a fill-in host!)

Card Sharks, it was never the questions in the main game. Always the big cards and watching that "HIGHER/LOWER!" bit of craziness. I think as a kid when I caught it, I just slept through that part until it was time to call the cards.

Only one time in the history of the run, both NBC and the later CBS and syndicated versions did anyone successfully run the board in the Bonus Round to the maximum possible level, and what made her accomplishment all the more remarkable is that when she did it there was no "push" rule for hitting a double on the board. If you hit a double, you were wiped out!

[Eric Paddon]

I just watched an episode of Trek I know I hadn't seen in about 20 years plus, "Assignment Earth". And after watching it through the most critical lens I have ever subjected it to, I can say quite categorically that it's both a terrible Star Trek episode and a terrible series pilot that never could have worked in a million years a regular series. I felt compelled to do this after watching a glut of people at the Trek FB board gush endlessly about how "Yeah it would have been a great series!", "Oh, those terrible NBC execs were crazy!". These were the kind of Trekkies who literally don't think with their heads or who have no conception at all of the realities of how TV was then, or what it took for TV shows to get on the air or survive back in the day.

To me, the premise of "Assignment Earth" just comes off as ridiculous. I'm not frankly comfortable at all with the idea of a "superior" alien race engaging in a level of interference with Earth affairs "for our own good" when that totally undermines the whole "Prime Directive" philosophy of Trek (which admittedly Trek didn't always follow consistently). But what really strikes me as ironic is how this kind of patronizing interference from a more "enlightened" race (which itself is just a riff on "The Day The Earth Stood Still") is never seen by the "progressives" who love Trek as a kind of "Colonialism" in reverse with what could be argued is a "racist" attitude about Earth itself (take note of Gary Seven's aside about how "primitive" everyone is). Someone should explain to me how this attitude is no different from the "spreading the white man's burden" philosophy. And frankly if you're going to have someone spouting the platitudes of what this is all about, you couldn't have made a more wrong choice for the lead than Robert Lansing with his dour expression and attitude. Lansing had some great work in other projects, but this was not one of his finer moments. It'd be easier for me to take some of this coming from an actor with a more lighter touch (like say a Robert Culp) and an ability to crack a joke. Terri Garr gives it her all despite the fact that Mr. Enlightened (Not!) Gene Roddenberry's obsession with making her a sex object saddled her with a costume that looks more like something a Batman villian's henchmoll would wear. But frankly her part comes off as even more silly when first she knocks out Seven because she goes into the patriotic American "he's destroying my country's rocket!" mode but then when he explains what he is, she then gives a cliched line about what the rebels think.

I won't even bother with why the Enterprise would be sent back in time just do research and why the computer didn't have the tapes available of what happened until episode's end (low gigabyte capacity!) because if they had, Kirk could have relaxed and said, "Oh right, this is what's supposed to happen, let's just play it out!"

But the big question to ask is.......just what kind of stories would we be seeing every week if this show had made it to a series? I think the obsessed Trekkies have deluded themselves into thinking we'd get a gaggle of alien invaders being thwarted or visits to other planets etc. or other heavy sci-fi stuff in the Trek mode. They don't seem to realize that you can't have a show that prevents WW3 every week, and you can't give us Seven going off to other planets if the series premise has to do with the aliens using Seven to push Earth along in the contemporaneous time-period. It's a lot more easy for me to see stories recycled from 60s drama fare like "Naked City,", "East Side West Side" or "Dr. Kildare" with sci-fi trappings in that Seven's gimmicks would be the way he say, "helps a kid from the slums from being killed who'll one day become a world leader" and we get a lot of speechifying about the issues of the day. Maybe the occasional alien invader could get mixed in (emphasizing that wouldn't fly however considering there'd just been a show called "The Invaders" that had run its course), but those expecting pure "sci-fi" would find themselves in for a colossal letdown because what we'd more likely get would be low-budget forgettable fare for the most part.