In the UK: Saturday 10th April 2010, 6.15pm, BBC1 In the US: Saturday 24th April 2010, 9/8c, BBC America
Do you get the feeling that Steven Moffat’s plan for the season is to stick two fingers up at Russell T Davies and say, “This is how it should have been done?”
A late addition to the BFI HBO weekend: Alan Ball, creator of True Blood and Six Feet Under, is going to be “in conversation” on Saturday 24th April at 6.30pm. There are some tickets left, so if you’re interested, get booking now!
Do you remember Clash of the Titans, a delightful 1980s film loosely based on the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda? It starred Harry Hamlin and Lawrence Olivier among others, but is best known as the last movie to feature the stop-motion talents of Ray Harryhausen.
A lot of people are very fond of it, but few people are so fond of it that they’d remake it. Which is what Warner Bros, writers Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, and director Louis Leterrier have done.
The question is: is it as good or is it better than the original? And does 3D make it a better movie than it would have been? Here’s the trailer:
As weird old trends go, circa 1982, there was a big one on US TV: it was “We wish had a TV programme like Raiders of the Lost Ark“. So just before everything went techno with Street Hawk, Knight Rider, Airwolf et al, everything went 1930s. Odd, huh? As a result of this trend, as well as Tales of the Gold Monkey, US networks tried to cash in on Raiders with Bring ‘Em Back Alive.
Loosely based on the legendary wild animal collector Frank Buck, Bring ‘Em Back Alive saw big game hunter Frank Buck fighting dastardly Eastern spies in pre-war Malaya from out of the Raffles Hotel bar in Singapore, while dressed impeccably – or in a pith helmet and shorts – depending on the situation.
The show featured rising star Bruce Boxleitner, who went on to Scarecrow and Mrs King and Babylon 5 fame, and Cindy Morgan, who played Gloria, the US consul. Despite their almost romantic relationship, Gloria gets Buck to go on all his spying missions, where he typically comes across a damsel in distress who needs saving – in the first episode, that would be Gloria:
Hey trivia fans: Morgan and Boxleitner both appeared together in Tron the previous year:
And were reunited this year for the Tron: Legacyviral event:
As well as Boxleitner and Morgan, the show starred Clyde Kusatsu as Ali, Buck’s friend and No. 1 Boy (huh?); Ron O’Neal as HH, His Royal Highness, the Sultan of Johore, who was Buck’s competitor in the world of adventure; Sean McClory as Myles Delaney, manager of the Raffles Hotel; and John Zee as GB Von Turgo, smuggler and kingpin of the Singapore underworld. That’s all in the titles, so you know who’s who.
The plots were varied, but typically saw our Buck out and about in the East, moustache groomed nicely, braving wild animals and dastardly foreigners to preserve US interests overseas. I say “the East” but it was mostly shot on the back-lot of Columbia Picture Television’s Burbank Studios, with the Raffles Hotel built on the studio’s ‘New York Street’. Scenes that required an actual jungle as background were filmed in Hawaii and the Los Angeles Arboretum. Overall, it was as much like Singapore as Casablanca was like Casablanca, however.
With ‘Frank Buck’ based on a real person, the producers did go to some length to recreate certain aspects of Buck’s life. Buck’s compound was recreated from original photographs of his Katong headquarters and featured pictures of his parents hanging on the wall, as well as the flag of his home state, Texas.
It was diverting and fun stuff – not too taxing, but with a certain charm, although it didn’t quite manage to capture the charm of Raiders, so only lasted 18 episodes. But it lives on in memories if not DVD box sets unfortunately.
Here’s the weird old title sequence. You don’t get a whole load of salutes to camera and character descriptions in the titles, these days, do you?
