Mitchell's Top Ten, #6: Perry Mason

Each week for the next couple of months, I’ll profile one of the series that appear on my personal Top Ten list. I don’t claim that these are the ten greatest series of all time; that would be presumptuous. However, I do presume to identify those shows that mean the most to me.

These aren’t academic histories or encyclopedic entries; rather, they’re personal memories of shows that, through the years, have brought me delight, influenced my way of thinking and doing, left their indelible traces imprinted on me. Think of it as a memoir of my life as seen on TV.

James Lileks once wrote that it was the secret dream of every lawyer to have the theme to Perry Mason played at his funeral, and a lawyer friend of mine later acknowledged it was probably true.

Few television shows have had an opening title sequence more representative of its content than the one used for the third season of Perry Mason.* It starts with the camera looking down on a stylized figure standing in front of the judge’s bench. There are no walls in the animation, no courtroom to be seen; just a still white image of a man, isolated and alone, open and vulnerable, before the bar of justice. It is the lawyer, engaged in single-warrior combat, the only man standing between an innocent client and the gas chamber. And that lawyer, we see when the camera returns to eye level, is Perry Mason.

*Along with the original opening of The FBI, it’s my favorite series opening of all time.

It’s not only stylish but gripping, telling us everything we would ever want to know about the character of Perry Mason. For Mason is a loner; we never see him out socially with anyone other than Della Street, his devoted secretary, and Paul Drake, his stalwart private investigator; we never see the inside of his apartment unless it’s to establish the setting when he receives an emergency phone call in the middle of the night. Mason's life is the law - you get the idea he reads law books for relaxation - and he’s chosen to pursue that profession by putting himself in the most vulnerable position available to him: that of a trial lawyer committed to seeking justice for his client.

The odds are always against him: the evidence of his client’s guilt is usually considerable, the DA and police are confident of victory, even Paul Drake has his doubts. His reputation and his undefeated record probably put even more pressure on him, what with everyone expecting him to pull another rabbit out of his bottomless hat - not only getting his client off, but identifying the true killer. That’s more than most people would ever want to deal with, and yet by all evidence, Perry thrives on it. What an interesting character!

Some people say that Perry Mason is formulaic, that the plots are often preposterously complicated, that Perry often functions more like a detective than an attorney, that he never seems to have more than one client at a time, that anyone seems able to walk in and see him without an appointment.

To such people, this is what I have to say: So what?

Burger about to snap his pencil after yet another airtight
case crashes in flames

Yes, it’s formulaic, as most series are. When you watch an episode of Perry Mason you know exactly what you’re getting: several characters are introduced, with one of them generally in some kind of untenable situation. Often, that person starts out consulting Mason about this situation, which suddenly fades into the background with the appearance of a dead body. The evidence usually puts Perry’s client at the scene of the crime at roughly the same time as the commission of the murder, and the client has ample motive for committing the crime. The client complicates matters by lying to Perry, or at least withholding the entire truth. The District Attorney, Hamilton Burger, and the homicide detective, Lt. Arthur Tragg, are obsessed with the idea of defeating Mason.*

*Burger more than Tragg; the good lieutenant occasionally acquiesces to one of Mason's far-fetched schemes, in the pursuit of truth. Burger, on the other hand, sometimes seems as if he doesn't much care whether the accused is guilty or innocent as long as he can beat Mason.

In the pre-trial hearing* Burger’s evidence seems unassailable, until Paul comes into the courtroom with a vital piece of evidence. Perry’s frowning visage fades, replaced by a steely determination as he launches into a withering cross-examination, punctuated with one rapid-fire question after another, always starting with “Isn’t it true,” at which point either the witness or someone in the packed gallery blurts out an admission of guilt (frequently without remorse). Before the final credits run, the gang gathers, usually either in Perry’s office or a restaurant, where he regales them with an explanation of just how he figured out the identity of the guilty party. Fade to black, and the theme music reappears. All you have to do is change the names of the actors and their characters, and you’ve pretty much got 90% of the stories right there.

*A cost-saving method; by staging the action in a pre-trial hearing, the producers didn’t have to cast – or pay for – a jury.

"Isn't it true?"

But it’s precisely this formula that makes the story so enjoyable. It shares the same qualities as a Three Stooges short or a Road Runner cartoon – you can see the punch line coming, which is half the fun. We salivate waiting for the key moment when Perry gets the guilty party on the stand, and with the first “Isn’t it true” question, we grin knowingly, because that’s the sign that the jig is up, that it’s just a matter of time before the truth comes out. From the moment Perry Mason stands up to start the fateful cross-examination (and he can get wonderfully contemptuous), these people have had it – they just don’t know it yet.

True, there are some questions. For example, the office of District Attorney is an elected one in many cities, including Los Angeles (where the show is set), and it’s hard to see how Burger* keeps getting voted in when he loses every high-profile case he tries. And what about that police department? They seem to constantly be arresting the wrong person, after little more than a cursory investigation which suggests they already have their minds up before they even start. Tragg’s just lucky he isn’t back to walking a beat. In that sense one might see a fairly subversive undercurrent to this series.

*I wonder if anyone ever calls him "Ham"?  As in Ham Burger?

There’s never much of a passage of time between the commission of the crime and the pre-trial hearing, either – usually a matter of days, seldom more than a few weeks. Even if we’re looking at a significant period between the hearing and the actual trial (which we hardly ever get to), that’s still justice moving at the speed of light compared to what we have nowadays. And, even considering the judge’s desire to provide the defense with the greatest amount of leeway, Perry seems to get away with a lot.

And to all this, my answer remains: So what? There are few series that have been as much fun to watch as Perry Mason. Raymond Burr, simply put, is Mason; he embodies the role so much that it’s no surprise in real life Burr made many speeches before bar associations. Burr radiates a an overpowering presence, a confidence that most lawyers – or just about anyone else, for that matter – would kill for.*  If I were in serious trouble, I cannot imagine just how comforting it would be to have Perry Mason out there fighting for me. I'd probably figure that if he couldn't get me off, I must be guilty. It is rare that any actor can project that kind of power, but Burr does it week after week.

*And smooth, too.  When a fan once confronted Burr demanding to know how it was that Mason won every case, he replied, "But madam, you only see the cases I try on Saturdays."

And Perry’s surrounded by a great supporting cast: Della (Barbara Hale), the absolutely perfect confidential secretary; Paul (William Hopper), the private detective who, although he’s sometimes a step or two behind Perry, always delivers the key information in the nick of time.* Burger (William Talman) is properly villainous; seeing his smug face fall when he realizes that Perry has outwitted him yet again, is one of life’s simpler pleasures. And the performance of old pro Ray Collins as Tragg is almost always scene-stealing – it’s a shame that Collins died during the sixth (of nine) seasons.

*One of the things the series does quite well is portray Drake as the head of a large and successful business, the Drake Detective Agency. Contrary to the typical lone-wolf PI, Drake employs a number of good detectives, and has contacts in cities all over the world. He also knows how to throw his weight around.

As was the case with Nero Wolfe, about which I wrote last time, watching Perry Mason led me to pick up the Mason books, written by Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner wrote over 80 of them, many of which were adapted for the series. They’re not great art, but they’re great fun. In those books, even more than in the series, Mason comes across as a man dedicated to seeing that his client gets a fair break: he’s suspicious of authority, determined to prevent the police from rushing to judgment, willing to bend the rules to the breaking point in pursuit of the truth, and unwilling to rest until that truth is uncovered.

I wrote some time ago about the prevalence of police procedurals on TV today, and wondered if this in some way had the subliminal effect of reinforcing the public’s acceptance of police and governmental authority. If that is the case, it’s also interesting that there’s nothing like Perry Mason on TV anymore, a series built around a trial lawyer defending the innocent, taking on the state and its authorities, and winning. It’s our loss, in more ways than one.



Next week: The game show that was the most sophisticated half-hour on television

Last week: Nero Wolfe

This week in TV Guide: September 8, 1973

I don't know about you, but for me the second-most exciting publication of the year, right after the Sears and Penney's Christmas catalogues, was TV Guide's Fall Preview issue. In the days before the internet, before the press junkets that appeared on non-stop entertainment shows, the Fall Preview was our first glimpse at the new season's shows. And for many of us, it became a ritual to go through the glossy section of the Guide, reading the day-by-day rundown of the new series, deciding which ones were forgettable and which were worthy of at least one look, perhaps two.

For me, this particular issue took on a significance of its own. We'd just moved from my birthplace of Minneapolis to the Worst Town in the World™, and for the first time I'd be living in a place where I wouldn't be able to watch whatever shows I wanted. We'd have access to only one commercial channel - KCMT, in Alexandria, the hybrid NBC/ABC affiliate. The following six years would create a television vacuum in my life, which coincided with the decline of NBC into one of the worst ratings stretches of its history.*

*I'll try not to let my personal bitterness creep through.

Few of the series in this issue ring much of a bell with me; the best of them would have to wait either for the DVD era or my return to civilization (and the Twin Cities) in 1978, while the worst are little more than cyphers. As a result, I'm placed in the somewhat unique situation of having far more vivid memories of the television series of the 60s than I do of the 70s, even though I might be expected to remember more from those more recent shows. It probably accounts for the fondness I have for the shows - and TV Guides - of that era.

But regardless of the era, there's something magic about the Fall Preview. And looking back at it all, with the passage of time, the adventure takes on a new dimension. No longer are we searching for the show that hopes to become part of our regular weekly viewing; now, it becomes an archaeological dig, checking to see if there were any little-regarded shows that became huge hits, and remembering the touted star vehicles that wound up dipping below the waves of ratings failure.

***
It’s easy to pick out the hit series that debuted in the fall of 1973.

Click to enlarge

OK, so I’ll be a little liberal in my definition of “hit” – let’s say any series that ran for more than one season.

Put that way, the hits are – let’s see, there’s Police Story, the NBC anthology series that runs for five seasons, CBS’ Kojak, which is good for five seasons as well, and Lee Majors' The Six-Million-Dollar Man, which not only stuck around for (you guessed it) five seasons* but also spawned a successful spin-off series of its own. And – that’s it. Not a very good season, hmm? Well, there’s also Happy Days and Good Times, arguably the most successful of the new shows that season, but they don’t even debut until the “second season” in January and February, respectively.

*It's easy to imagine some network executive, cigar jutting from the corner of his mouth, looking at the slate of proposals for new series scattered across his desk, removing the cigar, and saying, "Listen, kid - if it's not good for five seasons, don't even bother wasting my time".

But surely there must have been some lost classics, series that, given enough time to grow an audience, would be remembered fondly today, perhaps even in a DVD release.

Right?

How about Lotsa Luck (left), the Dom DeLuise sitcom on NBC? That only lasts for 22 episodes, although you can catch it on DVD if you’re curious. It was partnered with Diana Rigg’s eponymous series Diana, which totally failed to utilize its star’s charisma and bombs after 15 viewings. NBC’s other sitcom double-dip, The Girl With Something Extra (22 weeks) and Needles and Pins (14), part of an all-comedy Friday night, similarly fade without a trace. NBC Follies, a stab at the dying variety show, is in itself a folly – it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page!

CBS tries to duplicate M*A*S*H’s success with Roll Out, a World War II sitcom with a mostly black cast to boot. It disappears after the proverbial 12 episodes. It's preceded in death, and in its time slot, by Calucci’s Department, which only makes it to 11. And then there’s my favorite definition of “bad idea” – CBS’ remake of Perry Mason. Even though it's helpfully called The New Perry Mason, with Monte Markham playing the lawyer for all seasons, the reboot doesn't even make it through one season, being convicted of failure after 15 trials.

Don’t think that ABC's immune to failure, either: Griff, another private eye show starring the suddenly Ponderosa-less Lorne Greene, disappears in 13 weeks; Adam’s Rib, in which Ken Howard and Blythe Danner try to fill the shoes of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, meets a similar watery grave; and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, trying to copy the success of the movie of the same name, succeeds only in copying Adam’s Rib’s failure, making it through only seven episodes before getting the ax.

The most interesting of these failures might be ABC’s Toma, which is in fact fairly successful - except, that is, with star Tony Musante, who quits after one season. The retooled program, starring Robert Blake and retitled Baretta, goes on for four more years.*

*Unlike President Richard Nixon, whose own four more years, starting in January of ’73, were cancelled after only two.

***

Time-sharing: not just for vacation resorts. An interesting trend in 1973 is that of the occasional series, one that appears on a regular, non-weekly basis. We’ve seen this before; for example, Jack Benny’s show appeared every second or third week for much of its run, and Armstrong Circle Theatre and The U.S. Steel Hour alternated weekly for many years. In more recent times, NBC’s Sunday and Wednesday Mystery Movies presented a quartet of rotating elements, in what was known as a “wheel show”.*

*The Sunday segment, longer-lasting and better-known of the two, featured Columbo, McCloud and McMillan as its most stable features.

This year we’re seeing several examples of this, but with a twist. For instance, ABC’s Saturday night Suspense Movie will be pre-empted once a month for Lee Majors’ soon-to-be hit series The Six-Million-Dollar Man – two such movie-length episodes will be aired, in October and November, before the series goes full-time (with a move to Friday nights) in January 1974. The Suspense Movie concept itself will last for the rest of the season. On Tuesday, meanwhile, CBS plans on rotating its New Tuesday Night Movies with two semi-regular segments: Hawkins, a lawyer series starring Jimmy Stewart, and Shaft, the private detective played (as in the feature films) by Richard Roundtree (right). Each would produce seven 90-minute episodes during the season, alternating with made-for-TV movies, before the whole concept is scrapped the next year in favor of Hawaii Five-O and Barnaby Jones. And on Wednesday, ABC’s at it again, with James Franciscus’ medical show Doc Elliot scheduled to run in place of Owen Marshall once a month. Like The Six-Million-Dollar Man, Doc Elliot runs twice before becoming a weekly series the following January; unlike Lee Majors, however, Franciscus’ luck runs out after 11 additional episodes.

As for NBC’s Mystery Movies, the Sunday night lineup, including Hec Ramsey* with Richard Boone, remains untouched from the previous year. Wednesday night’s lineup, though, gets a complete overhaul: George Peppard’s Banacek is joined by three new shows – Tenafly, The Snoop Sisters and Faraday and Company. The shows weren’t on long enough to leave much of an impression, let alone for me to take the time to describe them here. Only Banacek enjoyed any real success, and the whole thing is called off at the end of the season.

*Returning for a second season. With the exception of Quincy, which gets spun off into its own timeslot, Hec Ramsey is the only non-Columbo, McCloud or McMillian series to run for more than one season.

And then, of course, there’s the most successful “occasional show” of them all: Monday Night Football returns for its fourth season. That’s long since gone to cable, with NBC taking over the prime-time network coverage on Sunday night, but as a “part-time” series, it’s still going strong.

***
TV's two definitive 70s-era rock music shows, NBC's The Midnight Special and ABC's In Concert, faced off on Friday nights.  Midnight Special was a weekly show, airing after Johnny Carson, while In Concert was an every-other week part of Wide World of Entertainment.  Whenever the two slug it out, we'll be there to give you the winner.

This week's head-to-head battle features Gladys Knight vs. ... Gladys Knight. As always, these descriptions come straight from the pages of TV Guide.

In Concert: Soul with Gladys Knight and the Pips, nostalgic rock of Sha-Na-Na, mellow rock sounds of Earth, Wind and Fire, and the African-rock vibrations of Manu Dibango.

Midnight Special: Something for everyone in a show hosted by soul artist Curtis Mayfield, pop sounds from Helen Reddy, Jim Croce and the Bee Gees, soul from Wilson Pickett, and Gladys Knight and the Pips, and rock from Sly and the Family Stone, and War.

Something for everyone? Maybe. Something for me? Not likely. I would have watched Midnight Special in the day, because it would have been the only program available to me at the time. I guess there are some things you just can't take back. But I'm not sure In Concert is much of an alternative. Hate to do this, but this week's verdict is a push.*

*Yes, Don Kirschner's Rock Concert debuts this season, but not yet. According to the online episode guide, we'll have to wait until September 28 for a show that features the Doobie Brothers, Earth Wind and Fire, and Cross Country, with music videos by The Rolling Stones. And don't look to American Bandstand for relief; Curtis Mayfield (again) appears with "the newly crowned Miss Sixteen."

***

In the days before widespread cable movie channels, before DVD and VHS and Laserdisc, there was . . . network movie night. It was here that big screen movies would make their television debut, often quite a few years after they'd appeared in theaters, accompanied by great fanfare. Sure, they'd be interrupted by commercials, and they'd be edited for time and/or content (that last bit often made for enticing speculation as to the exised material), but what else were you going to do? Unless you lived in an area that had a revival moviehouse, you were pretty much stuck with what you got on TV. And the fall preview issue always made a big scene of those movies that were at long last headed for the small screen.

TV Guide's resident critic Judith Crist offers a rundown on this year's coming attractions: 97 scheduled new theatrical films (down from 101 last year), including The Hospital (one of the funniest black humor movies ever made, Funny Girl, Doctor Doolittle, Airport and Rosemary's Baby on ABC, My Fair Lady, A Man For All Seasons, Judgment at Nuremberg and Cool Hand Luke on NBC, and The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Bullitt, Planet of the Apes and Hello, Dolly! on CBS. Movies making a repeat television appearance include A Streetcar Named Desire, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In Cold Blood, Ben-Hur and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

I'm not sure any of these movies are strangers to cable TV today, and I'd expect most if not all are available on DVD, as well as through streaming video, so it's a little hard to appreciate how much excitement these announcements could cause at the time. Remember, at this point Gone With the Wind had yet to make its television debut. And yet, it's doubtful that any of these showings would have been entirely satisfying to the movie fan at home. A few weeks ago we read about the controversy being generated at having movies chopped up for comercials*; it's hard to imagine what had to be done to a movie such as Virginia Woolf to make it suitable for broadcast. I wonder, in 10 years' time, how primitive today's delivery systems will seem.

*I can recall the first time I ever saw 2001: A Space Odyssey - it was on television, and included a commercial break right in the middle of Dave Bowman's journey across the surface of Jupiter at the end of the film. Talk about a mood breaker.

***

I've mentioned many times how much sports television has changed over the years, and a look at this issue reinforces how odd the state of the business looks with 40 years' hindsight. One of ABC's biggest sports properties, for example, is the Indianapolis 500, which is shown in prime time on a same-day tape-delay basis; while the Professional Bowlers Tour remains a network staple on Saturday afternoons, right before Wide World of Sports, which expands to include a Sunday edition as well. ABC also scores with its exclusive (except for the bowl games) college football, which this year will feature four - count 'em, four - doubleheaders and 13 national telecasts in addition to its lineup of regional broadcasts (often featuing teams nobody cared about, while the big game was being seen in another part of the country.)

Tennis coverage is limited to the big tournaments - Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and Lamar Hunt's World Championship Tennis tour, the premier professional pro circuit - and only appears on weekends. Golf's network of record is ABC, and their coverage of major championships (both U.S. and British Opens and the PGA Championship) runs for two or so hours each on Saturday and Sunday.* College basketball doesn't appear on the networks until the two big tournamens: the NCAA on NBC, and the NIT on CBS. Horse racing, in the wake of Secretariat's Triple Crown-winning year, is still a major sport.

*And then there's the made-for-TV competition, in the form of the CBS Golf and Tennis Classics, a series of one-on-one matches running throughout the year, and Superstars, which becomes a five-part series this year.

Network baseball resides on NBC, where coverage is limited to the Saturday afternoon Game of the Week and Monday night broadcasts through the summer. NBC is also home to American Football Conference games, continuing their longstanding relationship that first started with the American Football League, while CBS continues to cover the National Football Conference. ABC joins in with Monday Night Football. Today, Monday Night Football is on ESPN, a station that didn't even exist in 1973, while Sunday Night Football, a concept that didn't exist back then, is the staple of NBC's schedule. The AFC moved from NBC to CBS, while Fox (yet another twinkle-in-they-eye network) owns the NFC. Got that all straight? Oh, and the Super Bowl is scheduled, in the daytime, on January 13. Yeah.

***
Finally, an item that I think is kind of ironic given the content of network television today. Fred Silverman, top programmer at CBS, forecasts an end to crime shows on TV. They're overdone, he says, and the trend for the future is "general dramas that don't necessarily feature doctors, lawyers or policemen." Considering that CBS is already home to Mannix, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, Perry Mason, Hawkins and Shaft, Silverman adds that it won't be all crim shows that disappear - "only the lesser ones," meaning, presumably, those not on CBS. Instead, family fare such as Apple's Way will become the standard.

So what dominates television today? NCIS, CSI, Law & Order and their spinoffs, and a host of quirky amateur detective shows endlessly repeated on cable. I don't know what else you'd call them, but it's certainly a crime, isn't it? TV  

Around the dial

Time once again to take a spin around the dial and see what else is worth reading.

First, greetings to readers coming here from Uniwatch. Thanks to Paul for linking to Tuesday's article, and I hope those of you new to the site will make a habit of coming back. The blog is generally updated three times a week (Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday), with Saturday's "This Week in TV Guide" feature being the highlight of the week.*

*In my opinion, anyway; some of you may beg to differ.

And for regular readers, what do you think of the redesign? I like it myself, though I still need to make a few tweaks. We'll see how long it lasts; I may hang on to it for awhile, or I could change it again to something a little more serious-minded. Any thoughts out there?

On Saturday, the TV Guide feature will be looking at the fall preview issue from 1973, which puts me in mind for Billy Ingram's rundown of the new 1964 season over at TVParty!*. In contrast to what you'll be reading about on Saturday, the new season in 1964 was full of future hits: Bewitched, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Gilligan's Island, Gomer Pyle, The Addams Family, The Munsters - not a bad year for newcomers.

*As always, in the interests of full disclosure, I've written in the past (and hopefully the future) for TVParty!

The Onion's AV Club has been reviewing Saturday Night Live's first season, and this week's piece is a look back at Desi Arnez' guest-hosting gig in February of 1975. I never saw the classic first season of SNL live; our enlightened KCMT chose instead to run local movies in the Saturday late-night spot, which meant we also missed anything else (such as the Indiana-UCLA basketball game) that NBC might run in that timespot. Don't get me started... Anyway, as Phil Dyess-Nugent writes, there was something impressive about seeing a living, breathing TV legend (a "dinosaur," as he puts it, not unkindly) years after the fact, as if time stands still for the moment.

I believe I've mentioned this in the past, but Joanna Wilson's Christmas TV History is one of my favorite sites - not surprising since Christmas and television are two of my favorite things.* And this week Joanna looks back at Christmas With the King Family, from 1967. The King Family was a moderate success in the 60s with their own variety show, built somewhat along the lines of the Lawrence Welk prototype, though perhaps a bit more modern (if no less wholesome). This show is such a great example of the Christmas variety show genre; I'd watch it even though I've never been a big fan of the King Family. It's also great to see the show in brilliant, videotaped color; the public domain clips I've seen were in B&W, and it loses a lot in the translation.

*Stop me if I start channeling any more of The Sound of Music.

Finally, Kinescope HD has a nice write-up on the late David Frost. David Frost was, in some respects, Jon Stewart before there was a Jon Stewart. As part of the groundbreaking British series That Was The Week That Was, Frost was a pioneer in the satirical television program that sought to mock current events under the guise of sober analysis. Frost later became a talk show host, but of course achieved his greatest fame for his series of interviews with former President Richard Nixon. Eat your heart out, Stewart!

That's it for a somewhat abbreviated roundup today - see you back here on Saturday! TV  

Don't try this at home (plate)

Some time ago, TCM aired a collection of episodes from Screen Directors Playhouse, an anthology series which ran on NBC in the 1955-56 season. The hook was that the series features directors and stars seldom seen on television to that point. I checked out the episodes, which varied in quality and were for the most part entertaining if unremarkable. However, there was one which called for further attention to be paid, as an example of how it can be dangerous to leave some things to amateurs.

The episode in question was “Rookie of the Year,” directed by the legendary John Ford and starring the legendary John Wayne as a sportswriter from a small-town newspaper on the trail of a story that would land him in the big-time: that a rookie phenom is actually the son of a ballplayer banned from the bigs for throwing a game. The story isn’t really the point here, though*: it’s how it’s told that attracts my attention.

*Although if you’re interested, the Duke decides to spike his own story to preserve the young man’s future and let the past rest in peace.

The phenom, Lyn Goodhue (played by Wayne’s son Patrick), plays for the New York Yankees. How do we know that? Well, there’s the comment, made several times by the Duke, that he’s going to Yankee Stadium* to see the kid play. And when you do see Goodhue, he’s dressed in what is clearly a Yankee uniform, right down to the pinstripes and the interlocking NY.

*Incorrectly referred to as “the Yankee Stadium.” Sloppy writing or trademark issues? Based on the information below, I'd suggest the former.

And here’s where things get interesting: when we actually get to see Goodhue in action, he is clearly wearing the uniform number 4.

Now, the number 4, as all but the most casual baseball fans must know, was worn by the great Lou Gehrig. And that number was retired when Gehrig retired, on July 4, 1939 – the first number ever retired by a major league baseball team. As in “nobody on the Yankees will ever wear this number again.”

I have a hard time figuring out how a whopper like this could have been made. I mean, it’s not as if Gehrig was a lesser-known player whose number was retired for some obscure reason. He was one of America’s most famous players – famous enough that the disease which killed him is named after him. Even today he’s considered one of the all-time greats, and keep in mind that when “Rookie of the Year” was broadcast it had been less than 20 years since Gehrig retired, and about 15 since he’d died – not exactly time enough for him to have faded into the mists of time. His number was retired even before Babe Ruth’s. And don’t think that this is some kind of continuity accident having to do with the file footage – when we see Wayne meet the kid in the locker room after the game, you can see that the costuming department made sure his uniform bore the 4 on the back.

Are you trying to tell me that from all the miles of footage of New York Yankee games available to the production staff, they couldn’t have come up with a clip of a player wearing a number that hadn’t been retired by the Yankees? It’s true that the Yankees have retired more numbers than any other baseball team, but at the time this was made they’d only retired three – Ruth’s 3, Gehrig’s 4, and Joe DiMaggio’s 5. Seriously – they didn’t have any other numbers to choose from?*

*Is it any less likely, for example, that fans would have objected to Goodhue wearing Yogi Berra’s 8? As if they’d recognize that, but not Gehrig’s 4?

Back in the day it wasn’t uncommon for shows (and movies, for that matter) to use film shot from multiple games, with the result that viewers might wonder why the two teams had chosen to make complete uniform changes between plays, so at least you have to give the production team credit for using footage that clearly identified the players as Yankees. And I suppose it’s conceivable there might have been a policy against using film of any active player without compensating him for the use, but that seems to be a pretty contemporary spin to my way of thinking. (Besides, without sitting down and studying the footage, I can’t be sure that there aren’t active players appearing in the shot.)

What seems more likely is that this represents a total boneheaded lack of attention to detail. Either they didn’t notice the use of Gehrig’s number, or they figured nobody else would notice it. But whichever option you want to pick, it’s pretty slipshod to me. Is it really that hard to get it right?


UPDATE: Welcome to everyone coming here from Uniwatch! Please stick around and tour the rest of the site, and become one of the regulars!

This week in TV Guide: August 24, 1974

The late summer isn't usually a time when one thinks of pro football - at least not in 1974, unless you're talking about NFL exhibition games.  But amidst the preseason hoopla, on Thursday night we have a game that actually counts: the Birmingham Americans vs. the Chicago Fire. And if those team names don’t sound familiar to you, there’s probably a good reason why. They’re franchises playing in week 8 of the inaugural season of the World Football League, with games broadcast via syndication on TVS, the network primarily known to that point for college basketball (including the epic Houston-UCLA game of 1968). (Birmingham wins this game, 22-8.)

The World Football League was the brainchild of Gary Davidson, who had played a part in the formations of the American Basketball Association and the World Hockey Association. The idea behind the WFL was to liven up the pro game which, in the wake of the NFL-AFL merger (remember, that happened only five years before), had grown a bit stale. The league placed teams in cities such as Birmingham, Memphis, Jacksonville, and Anaheim – thought to be strong football areas – and places like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit, NFL cities that had suffered from bad football teams for too long. The WFL introduced new rules that they hoped would make for a more open, high-scoring game: kickoffs from the 35 to encourage more returns (the NFL at the time kicked off from the 40), goalposts at the back of the end zone ala college football to discourage field goals (the NFL would follow suit there as well), and an “action point” to replace the perfunctory extra point (which the NFL never did adopt). Overtime would be adopted for tie games (which the NFL also incorporated). They planned a 20-game season (it would be a few more years before the NFL expanded to 16 games), and launched successful raids on NFL rosters, luring players who, since the merger, lacked the leverage to get higher salaries.

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

With a players strike delaying the start of NFL training camps (and cancelling the annual College All-Star Game), the new league hoped to attract fans who were increasingly disgusted with labor unrest in the pros. And, in fact, the WFL had a marvelous rollout. Through two games the Jacksonville Sharks had averaged over 50,000 fans, while the Philadelphia Bell, playing in venerable JFK Stadium, averaged over 60,000. And then – Ticketgate. Turns out most of the attendance counts were padded by freebees – the Bell had given away 100,000 of the 120,000 tickets for those two games, and only about half of the Sharks fans had paid. The Detroit Wheels, playing in a decrepit high school stadium in Ypsilanti, had hoped to hang on until the Lions moved into their new domed stadium in Pontiac, at which time the Wheels could take over Tiger Stadium. They couldn’t hang on, and folded in September. The New York Stars became the Charlotte Hornets, and the Houston Texans moved to Shreveport, LA. Birmingham players went without pay for the last five games of the season. Most of the NFL stars who’d signed contracts would have to wait until the 1975 season before they could play for their new teams.

Somewhat surprisingly, the league actually made it through that first season, with Birmingham defeating the Orlando-based Florida Blazers in the World Bowl (Birmingham’s uniforms were confiscated after the game to take care of unpaid bills). The league did attempt a second season in 1975, but folded halfway through.

And yet this wasn’t really such a foolish idea. Had the WFL come along a few years later, it could have taken advantage of cable TV to get more exposure. The idea of summer football would be copied by the USFL, with some slight degree of success. The rules changes, most of which were copied by the NFL, did in fact open up the game. Had the league survived, it would have had a very good roster of players for upcoming seasons (including Memphis’ trio of Miami Dolphins stars: Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield), and new NFL stadiums in Detroit and New York would have opened up better home fields for those teams.

As they say, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts,…

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Speaking of cable TV, it’s been predicted as the wave of the future in many of the TV Guides of the era, but this week we see that the future of television has hit a stumbling block.

Cable had started out as a way to provide clear pictures to rural areas that suffered from poor reception (or no reception at all in certain places), but everyone knew the real money lie in cable’s spread to large urban markets, which comprised 70 percent of the nation’s viewers. However, as New York City is demonstrating, there doesn’t seem to be all that big a demand for more stations, clearer reception, or some of the extra services that went along with cable: access to banking and other financial services, being able to get advice from their doctors, casting votes in elections, and fire and burglar alarms. Dayton, Newark and San Antonio have given up on cable, while Chicago and Detroit debate the issue, and Boston recommends against it.

The costs of installation, as it turns out, are enormous, and construction has been delayed time after time. Illegal taps into the system are decreasing subscriber numbers, and the service itself continues to get more expensive. Manhattan Cable reported a net loss of $1.3 million in 1973, even though they raised monthly rates from $6 to $9.

What can be done? Well, some think that sports might eventually migrate to cable, even though surveys show only about 20% would subscribe to cable for sports alone. FCC action to allow cable systems to carry local stations and syndicated programming will be required to broaden cable’s appeal. A pay channel showing first-run movies would help a system that’s already profitable, but probably can’t save one that wasn’t. As for home shopping services? It will be tough to make them work when only 12.5% of homes are wired for cable.

TV Guide’s conclusion is not an optimistic one. The rush to cable is, for now, stalled. “No one talks of ‘the wired nation.’ Potentially, it still exists. But today it is still short-circuited.”

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TV's two definitive 70s-era rock music shows, NBC's The Midnight Special and ABC's In Concert, faced off on Friday nights.  Midnight Special was a weekly show, airing after Johnny Carson, while In Concert was an every-other week part of Wide World of Entertainment.  Whenever the two slug it out, we'll be there to give you the winner.

Well, we have a match this week! In Concert was not a weekly series, so it’s always nice when we get the chance to compare lineups. And what do we have this week? Hmm.

In Concert: Rock musician Don E. Branker welcomes guests including ‘50s style group Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, the Hues Corporation and O’Jays soul groups, and the Chris Jagger (Mick’s brother) Band rock artists.

Midnight Special: An all-blues show with B.B. King (host), and guests Jimmy Witherspoon, Papa John Creach, Paul Butterfield’s Better Days, Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Joe Williams and Bobby “Blue” Brand.

Okay. I think I’ve heard of the O’Jays, and I do recognize the song “Rock the Boat,” though I wouldn’t in a million years have known that it was sung by the Hues Corporation. Other than that, the only thing I can say about In Concert’s lineup is that Chris Jagger’s name reminds me of a story that Arrowsmith’s Steven Tyler told about having once passed himself off as Mick Jagger’s brother, and how the adulation he received from the girls made him want to be a rock star. I’ve never been a big blues fan, but I know who B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and Joe Williams are, and I know just how big they were. Ultimately, that’s what makes this week’s decision so easy. The verdict: Midnight Special.

As a note, Channel 4 presents Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert at 2:30am Saturday, but with no description of who was on, it’s pretty hard to say how it compared to the others. It would have been a rerun from the show’s first season; the new series wouldn’t begin until September. Maybe we’ll have better luck next time.

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I’ve talked before about the Saturday morning cartoon graveyard so I won’t belabor the point here except to illustrate just how vapid and derivative kids programming was in the mid-70s. For one thing, a startling number were merely animated versions of past live-action shows: Emergency Plus 4, The Addams Family, My Favorite Martians, Lassie’s Rescue Rangers, Jeannie, Star Trek, The Brady Kids. On top of that, CBS also has an “animated” movie entitled “Guess Who’s Knott Coming to Dinner,” which features a cartoon version of Don Knotts.*

*Is that an oxymoron?

I’ll grant that not all of these ideas are ridiculous. The Addams Family started out as a cartoon, of course, and the animated Star Trek did offer producers a greater leeway in some of the special effects and creatures that the crew of the Enterprise encountered. But by and large, these cartoons could be taken as dumbed-down versions of adult programs that weren’t all that smart to begin with. It could have been worse, I suppose. Goober, which was a Scooby-Doo clone about a crime-fighting bunch of kids and their dog, could have been referring to him.

Other cartoons were merely spin-offs of previous cartoons, such as Sabrina (Archie) and Pebbles and Bamm Bamm (The Flintstones, which started out as an adult show), and then there’s another movie-length animated special, “The Red Baron,” in which all the characters are dogs, and the Red Baron himself is a heroic character trying to rescue the Princess of Pretzelshtein. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as World War I goes, wasn’t the Red Baron one of the bad guys?

There’s just a stunning lack of imagination to these programs, and it’s kind of sad considering the time period. In the last ten years, the nation had come through riots and assassinations, the Vietnam War and Watergate. It was a dark and cynical time. The least we could have done was to give kids something that would stimulate their minds, instead of the escapist junk food they got.

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Back in the day, PBS would make the occasional foray into sports programming, and this Monday night sees the network bring us the finals of the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships from Boston. This was the cusp of the American tennis boom, when it seems that everyone was running around in shorts and carrying a racket, so I suppose PBS figured this was a good program for their demographic.

Actually, this Monday night tennis series ran for several summers on PBS, and it was an excellent production, with legendary tennis writer Bud Collins teaming up with Donald Dell to bring us the action. It was a serious, no-frills broadcast that concentrated on the tennis itself instead of the glitz. These late-summer tournaments served as the warm-up to the U.S. Open, so they tended to attract some pretty big names. I was a tennis fan myself at this time, and I always chose this over NBC’s Monday Night Baseball series. If PBS had stuck to sports, who knows where it would have wound up?

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

Golf is another sport that’s changed radically when it comes to television. In 1974 a considerable number of tournaments were still shown through syndicated broadcasts (mostly from Hughes Sports Network), and this week’s Westchester Classic, from Harrison, NY, is no exception. The announcers are a mixture of network figures (Ray Scott), syndicated staples (Jim Thacker, John Derr) and golf experts (Bob Toski). The Westchester was actually one of golf’s biggest money tournaments of the time, with a first prize of $50,000. Johnny Miller, in the midst of his incredible 1974 season, takes the title this year, with a record winning score of -19. Today, the Westchester goes by the name of “The Barclays,” and isn’t even played at its namesake Westchester Country Club anymore. It’s still a big tournament, though – one of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoff.  You could have watched it last weekend on CBS*.

*Unless you lived in Dallas and some other cities.

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Ah, nostalgia. We don't often get to take a nostalgic look back at a nostalgic look back, but NBC’s Wonderful World of Disney embarks on such a tour this week with a rare rebroadcast of its 1954 Davy Crockett series. It’s a great throwback to the origins of the Disney program, and one of the classic adventures that helped establish Disney’s greatness in the non-animated arena. The Crockett adventures will run for the next three weeks, starting this week with “Davy Crockett – Indian Fighter.” I wonder why NBC was rerunning the series at this particular time? Could it be because Crockett’s sidekick, George Russel, is being played by Buddy Ebsen, star of CBS’ Barnaby Jones? I wouldn’t think so. Maybe they’re just celebrating the 20th anniversary of the original run.

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SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

Ah, Susie Blakely. Her smile, Neil Hickey tells us, is worth $100,000 a year. She’s typical of today’s big money, big star models, and she has what it takes: an inventory of great smiles. “I can do fake smiles for you all day, and every one of them will look real,” she says, matching the smile to whatever she happens to be hawking.

Right now, Susie has been taking acting lessons, hoping to duplicate the success of other models-turned-actresses such as Cybill Shepherd and Ali MacGraw. And it will be acting that will bring Susan Blakely her greatest fame, forever known for her role as Julie Prescott in the landmark miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, winning a Golden Globe and getting an Emmy nomination in the process.

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Finally, one more rare glimpse into the world that was. A brief TV Guide editorial morns the loss of programs such as Where’s the Fire?, Everything Money Can’t Buy, We’ll Get By, The Love Nest, Sunshine and Second Start. What’s that, you say? Haven’t heard of them? There’s a good reason why – they never aired, at least not as part of the 1974 fall season. Just two months ago, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling overturned changes to the FCC Prime-Time Access rule, which meant networks would have to cede 90 minutes per week of prime-time to local stations – 90 minutes they’d already plotted out.

The shows listed above, manned by stars such as Paul Sorvino, Bob Crane, Cliff DeYoung, Billy Mumy and Meg Foster, would have aired in those lost time slots (mostly the 6:30 – 7:00 CT period, right after the local news). And as for what happened to them? Well, Television Obscurities has a very good write-up here.  By and large, I’d have to pronounce the local access rules a failure – the thought had been that local stations would provide news and public affairs shows in those timeslots, but the stations quickly figured out it would be cheaper and more profitable to run syndicated game shows and reruns of network series. We all know how well that’s worked out. TV