Before The Naked Gun came Police Squad!, a short-lived TV spoof of other cop shows. Reams could be written about it, but if you’ve watched The Naked Gun, you know as much as you need to know.
But I will talk about the title sequence, which changed every week: it’s motif was that the supposed guest star would die in the title sequence and never appear in the show itself and that the wrong episode title would be read out each time.
The end titles were also very Naked Gun.
You just don’t get that level of attention to detail these days.
Oh, incidentally, and I used to work somewhere once where they all thought I was Johnny the shoe-shine guy, because I was the source of all knowledge and not because I cleaned shoes:
If you went to see Legally Blonde: The Musical like what I did last year, Peter Davison would have been amongst the cast. In the programme, among his various credits (you know, like Doctor Who, All Creatures Great and Small, et al), he says that the thing he’s most proud of is that he wrote and sung the theme song to Button Moon.
I’m guessing he left out The Tomorrow People for a reason.
Anyway, Button Moon, as the theme song suggested, sees Mr. Spoon travel to Button Moon in his homemade rocket-ship (all of the characters in the show are based on kitchen utensils, as well as many of the props). Once on Button Moon, which hangs in “blanket sky”, they have an adventure, and look through Mr. Spoon’s telescope at someone else such as the Hare and the Tortoise, before heading back to their home on ‘Junk Planet’. Episodes also include Mr. Spoon’s wife, Mrs. Spoon, their daughter, Tina Tea-Spoon and her friend Eggbert.
Amazingly, the series lasted for 91, 10-minute episodes. And Peter Davison (with Sandra Dickinson, his then-wife) sung the theme tune to all of them.
When it comes to weirdness, you can’t beat kids show Get Up and Go! and its follow-up show Mooncat and Co. The premise was simple: a talking cat from the moon comes down to Earth and moves in with the shows’ host, Stephen Boxer. Together with a variety of other people – Beryl Reid in Get Up and Go! but Pat Coombs, Kenny Lynch, Wilf Lunn and others in Mooncat and Co – Boxer would educate Mooncat in human ways.
Get Up and Go! ran for three series before Reid was offered a job in a major ITV drama series, so her character moved out and the show became Mooncat and Co, which ran for another two series.
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:
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
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?).
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.
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.
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.
A new set of producers turned up for the second season and tried to improve the show. This involved:
Killing off the two “ethnic” guys and replacing them with Adrian Paul from Highlander.
Killing off the aliens and replacing them with an entirely new set of aliens
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.
