Classic TV

Adaptions, hey? Where can you go wrong there? You’ve got the original material that’s proven a success already. Should be simple, huh?

If you think like that, the result is shows like War of the Worlds.

As you might suspect, this late 80s syndicated show was based on the HG Wells novel, but predominantly it was based on the 1953 movie adaptation starring Gene Barry. But to turn it into a series a few changes were made:

1. It turned out all the aliens weren’t killed by the common cold at the end of the movie, but did in fact go into hibernation. Fortunately for them, they’re exposed to radioactive waste that kills off the viruses in their bodies and they wake up
2. Now they intend to take over the world again, this time by taking over our bodies (hang on, wasn’t that Invasion of the Body Snatchers?).
3. Only a lone band of rebels, led by Jared Martin (of The Fantastic Journey fame) and including a single mom scientist and her kid, a black guy in a wheelchair and a Cherokee soldier can stop them.
4. Why just them? Well, this is where it gets really good – because everyone in the world HAS FORGOTTEN WE WERE INVADED BY ALIENS – except Jared Martin. We just all forgot. Even though we set off hydrogen bombs to stop them.
5. To save on cash, apart from the whole bodysnatching thing, the aliens had to wear special suits to protect them from re-contracting any Earth diseases. So we just saw either generic actors or people in radiation suits the whole time.
6. A new set of producers turned up for the second season and tried to improve the show. This involved:
7. 1. Killing off the two “ethnic” guys and replacing them with Adrian Paul from Highlander.
   2. Killing off the aliens and replacing them with an entirely new set of aliens
   3. Moving the entire show from the “present” to “the near future” in which the whole world has gone Mad Max

Now, this – as you can probably tell – wasn’t a great show. In fact, it was pretty awful. When the show got cancelled, they actually wrote it a happy ending, in which the aliens call off their war and everyone walks out into a happy sunny world.

Not good.

All the same, it did have a few good touches. It was surprisingly graphic and frequently had melting flesh, et al. But better still, every week, although the good guys won, so did the aliens. So aliens want three million bazillions tons of toxic waste to wake up their entire invading force, the goodies stop them – but the bad guys end up with 3,000 tons instead.

They also, intriguingly, managing to use the famous Orson Welles radio spoof in one story, claiming that it had actually been real and Welles had been forced to retract his broadcast to avoid full nationwide panic.

But those were the only good things, apart from the loving recreation of all the visual and sound effects from the 50s movie. Queue the weird, old explanatory title sequences of both season one and season two.

PS Black guy wasn’t really disabled which is how he ended up running a martial arts dojo in the second season of… Highlander with Adrian Paul.

Sometimes the title of a TV show more or less tells you what it’s about. Let’s roll back to 1967 now for ABC’s The Flying Nun, an adaptation of the book, The Fifteenth Pelican. It starred Sally Field (then famous as a surfer girl on Gidget but obviously now more famous for Smokey and the Bandit, Brothers and Sisters, Steel Magnolias, ER and Mrs Doubtfire) as well… can you guess?

Yes, she played a nun who could fly. Hence, The Flying Nun.

The general idea was that

1. She had a very big cornette
2. She was quite small and light
3. The wind would catch the cornette
4. And she would take flight

Now, this was a sitcom, so each week, Sister Bertrille would come across someone or something who needed her help and usually by the end of the episode, she’d have fixed the whole situation, typically by taking flight – to much amusement.

Now, in case you think writers can’t milk an idea for all its worth (and then some), The Flying Nun lasted three seasons for a total of 82, 24-minute episodes. Yes, 82 ways in which a nun flying could help the world and bring laughter to an audience. And in case you ever thought directors and propmen/propwomen were a talentless bunch, for most of the first season, Field was pregnant. A pregnant nun who’s light enough to fly. That took some interesting blocking.

Aren’t these TV folk ingenious?

There’s not much else to say about The Flying Nun, though, except that the Roman Catholic church praised it for humanising the work of nuns. Did it also give people false expectations of nuns? That, I cannot say.

Cue the weird old titles for The Flying Nun – in case you were in any doubt about the show’s premise, the titles did all they could to explain it with the subtlety of a V2 rocket. And if that whet’s your appetite, the show’s available on DVD.

One of those glorious trends of US TV in the 70s and 80s was “Me, too!” One network had a hit show on a certain subject – cat juggling, spoon sculpting, fish dating, whatever – and all the other networks had to have one, too (cf Blue Thunder, Airwolf, Knight Rider, Street Hawk, et al). A related trend was “More please!”, in which a network would try to capitalise on its own ideas. The Six Million Dollar Man on ABC begat The Bionic Woman on ABC (and then NBC), for example.

But that was a spin-off. Sometimes it was just the idea that got revived. To demonstrate, let’s look at two examples of “More please!”: NBC’s 1975 show The Invisible Man, with David McCallum, and its 1976 show Gemini Man, with Ben Murphy, in which two men perform secret agent-style missions thanks to the gift of invisibility.

Here are their weird old title sequences with very 70s theme tunes. Or just the theme tune in The Invisible Man‘s case. Sorry.

Continue reading “Weird old title sequences: The Invisible Man (1975)/Gemini Man (1976)”