Reminder: this is a Hiatal Week, so there's just less of everything. No updates. No Odds & Ends. Nothing below the fold. No long essays on tiny subjects. But there's something to repay your visit, and conversation to be had at the end.

There’s always a chance that I’m showing you something you know about already, and have known about for years. Hey, didn’t Mystery Science Theater do that one? I’m sure they did. And it was probably hilarious. I’m not trying to compete with that; this is a different medium with different intentions. I’m not trying to be a catalog of All the Things That Pertain to This Subject or Genre or Idea. I mean, there are themes to this site, but it’s a hodgepodge, and has no pretensions to being some sort of scholarly work or useful reference.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to add that. But I can anticipate the complaints, I guess. This has been done before. It’s nothing new. Well . . . just hold on a second. We’ll see about that.

Perhaps you've heard of this one.

It's not a spoof-spy movie. Hard to describe. Here are two sentences I wrote and abandoned:

It's like a cheap Bond movie where they exaggerated everything to compensate for its deficiencies

It's actually sincere about being over-the-top and ludicrous, and as such is rather fun

Bad? Good? Goodbad? The poster tells you everything you need to know: the classic Bond pose, the novel use of a Neil instead of a Sean for your Connery Factor, the tell-tale Italian names that scream FOREIGN PRODUCTION. The tagline is nonsense: He's too much? Too much what? Why, too much for one mother! Okay. Brother, Mother, we get it - this is Sean Connery's bro. Can he act? No. That's okay, because everyone else can overact.

Really screams "suave secret agent," doesn't it? Except he's not a secret agent. He's a doctor of something-or-other, named Neil Connery - and in the world of the film he's 007's brother. How far can they walk up to the line without getting a lawsuit? This close:

They were sued anyway.

The actor who plays M plays M. And Moneypenny is in it. And the main villain is the guy from Thunderball. But that's not why I brought this up. It's the pleasures of pseudo Bond music. How one note changes everything, and ruins it.

I miss the days when these were cool, but that's just a way of saying you miss being 15.

So what was new? I don't know. I just said that to give some people a sense of hope.

Here's something you might find amusing. Dragnet took a while to find its tone. Here's the way they announced the name of the show in the fifth season.

Understated. Calm. Under control. Professional.

Here's the way they announced the show when it began.

The early shows had Joe Friday wrap up the story in a fashion that might have reminded the audience of his previous roles, but it didn't really work, and they dropped it.

Dude, shut up!

I like this next bit for the way it prefigures the TV show. He played good heavies.

Dragnet was praised for its realism, and while it was certainly different from every other cop show that had gone before, sometimes their desire to show the mundane details of police work resulted in scenes that were almost self-parodic.

Here's a standard bit of "realism," during a witness interview.

And here's where they push it a bit too much.

Well, that will for this slackard week . . . I'll be back just in time to knock off for the Thanksgiving weekend!

See you Monday, and thanks for your indulgence.