Around the dial

Let's start off the week with a question from one of our readers. Mark is a fan of Mission: Impossible, and wonders if there's any information about the music from the first season episode "The Short Tail Spy," which has Eric Braedon (who was then going by Hans Gudegast) romancing Barbara Bain's Cinnamon Carter. "I love it, but can't find it anywhere. Can you help?" I don't see a separate music credit for the episode, which means either than it was done by Lalo Schifrin or, more likely, was from CBS's music stock. It's possible that it could be on this boxed set of music from the show, but I'm throwing it out there to my knowledgeable readers to see if one of you might have further information, and I know you won't let me down. Now, on to this week's features.

No sooner did I wrap up last week's feature, musing about the legends who'd recently passed on, then news kept coming about more of them: Cicely Tyson, the trailblazing actress; Allan Burns, writer for some of television's best shows; and the legendary Hal Holbrook, who was Mark Twain and a whole lot more. At A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence has thoughtful appreciations of them all. The toll this year just keeps rising, doesn't it?

I don't know why, but I've always had a fondness for banks, and that's even before I started keeping my money in them. To a kid, there's something very impressive about them: clean, institutional. And, of course, money. It's not quite the same now with ATMs and direct deposit and online banking, but the fascination with banks continues. That's the focus of this week's Comfort TV, as David looks at classic TV episodes that take place where you keep your cash.

It's taken awhile, but at The Horn Section, Hal's taken us all the way through the 17 episodes of Hondo, and now it's time to take stock and rank those episodes in order, along with other links of note regarding this short-lived but enduring series and its star, Ralph Taeger.

At Garroway at Large, Jodie shares a wonderful hour of conversation that resulted when Dave stopped by to talk with his old friend Studs Terkel on his Chicago radio series back in 1974. They don't make 'em like that anymore—either the shows or the people on them.

There was a time when Disney used to make quite a few exciting adventure movies that weren't simply live-action remakes of their cartoons; they'd often wind up on TV in two- or three-part stories. Third Man on the Mountain, starring James MacArthur and James Donald, Michael Rennie, Laurence Naismith and Herbert Lom, is one of them, and at Classic Film & TV Café, Rick tells us what to expect from it.

When I started slumming around YouTube channels like FredFlix, I ran across all kinds of shows I'd never heard of before. One of them was It's A Man's World, starring Glenn Corbett, Ted Bessell, Mike Burns and Randy Boone. To learn more about it, I went to the some of obscure TV shows, TV Obscurities, where Robert tells me all about it.

At Shadow & Substance, Paul revisits one of the most beloved Twilight Zone episodes, "Night of the Meek," and revisits his interview with  Larrian Gillespie—the elf who welcomes Art Carney's Santa to his sleigh for a return to the North Pole. TV