Remember the last Hiatal week, when we looked at an issue of TV Guide? Let's do it again.
Another Dragnet offspring.
The Line-Up would be called “San Francisco Beat” in syndication. The opening sequence is a grabber:
It came from radio, where vets Bill Johnstone and Wally Maher played the main rolls. Maher was Lt. Matt Grebb, an odd name that always sticks out when you hear it. GREBB. They didn’t make the leap to TV.
Quite popular; ran six seasons.
You don't want your full flavor flat and filtered out, do you? Did you even think of the term "filtered-out" before now?
Tales of Wells Fargo, you say:
Says one comment:
SCENES FILMED JUST BLOCKS FROM MY HOME.
YOU CAN STILL DO A SELF-GUIDED WALK ON THE FORMER SETS.
118 Fwy to Simi valley Ca, Exit Kuener south, then left on Smith road and there you are.
You'll recognise all the big boulders features in all the scenes.
Possibly.
As for M-Squad, it was a heavy, heavy show, and had a Miami-Vice-like trajectory. Instant smash, very popular, and then it wasn’t. Absolutely boss theme, which reminds you where "Police Squad" came from.
Late and breaking: there might be a strike! And here we think that happens only incredibly rarely. They’re going to pre-tape the evening live shows.
I always wondered: why wouldn’t they?
It seems that the local TV Guide edition came out of the Rand tower. It would move to the Midwest Federal Building eventually; that’s where I worked.
Sponsor brand rub-off?
From the piece:
Gordon MacRae wanted a couple of cars. So he made a deal to appear in a filmed DeSoto commercial. In payment, he received two '58 DeSotos - his until replaced with '59's and ’60's.
Some weeks later Gordon was sitting at home. The phone rang.
The caller was the sponsor of a half-hour special Gordon was to do in a few weeks. He had just seen the DeSoto commercial.
The man from New York uttered the two dirtiest words in television: "Sponsor conflict," and Gordon's $10,000 fee for the special went down the drain. The sponsor was to have been Oldsmobile, which couldn't use a De-Soto man on its show.
The worst was yet to come. Because of the close identity with DeSoto, developed from a single commercial, Gordon Mackae sacrificed another $100,000 in guest-shot fees on auto-sponsored variety shows such as Ed Sullivan and Big Record. They could not use him for a season or two, until the sponsor's brand had worn off.
That’s a lot of hay. Speaking of which:
Farmer Al Falfa went back to 1915! A Terrytoons character.
Dinner Time was one of the first publicly shown sound-on-film cartoons. It premiered at the Strand Theater New York City in August 1928 and was released by Pathé Exchange on October 14, 1928, a month before Walt Disney's sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Dinner Time was not successful with audiences and Disney's film would be widely touted as the first synchronized sound cartoon.
I shouldn’t be surprised that we still have it, but I am.
As for the listings . . .
Some spinach short they fed the kids to instill some moral fiber.
This wasn't the original name. It was called "The Vise."
Real life jockey Billy Pearson plays a jockey here. He was also in the unsold pilot "Cool & Lam", based on Earle Stanley Gardner's series of novels published under the pen name "A.A. Fair". Both CBS Productions and Paisano Productions, which produced "Perry Mason" and the pilot, were to produce the proposed series.
We have the Cool & Lam intro!
We’ve forgotten all about this guy. Too many to remember.
A native of Chicago, Illinois, Pearson was successful jockey throughout the 1940s and 1950s, credited with over 800 victories, Pearson developed his interest in art after a serious riding accident, and went on to win over $170,000 on the television quiz shows The $64,000 Question and The $64,000 Challenge in 1956-57.
Also of note:
Some of the music cues in this outing would later be used in The Twilight Zone (1959). Also, one of the first times in season two where a jazz noir music soundtrack is used.
I watched the ep, and I recognized the cues. Moody nervy bee-bop woodwinds.
So much more. Every issue is a time capsule and a Rosetta stone.
This week we'll follow another case that filled the papers in the Twenties. This time it's . . .
Two weeks in, wham:
Two men high on the faculty of Smith college will be questioned regarding the disappearance of Frances St. John Smith, missing Smith college student, it became known today.
Two men on the faculty questioned! Who? Well, for starters, the president of Smith College. The detectives wanted to know why he “refused to let troopers interview Joy Kimball,” the friend whose newfound “coldness” may have made Smith wander away, but instead had another student interview her.
Does seem odd.
Speculation continues, covering all bases:
And there's a new theory:
Any more on that?
Now we get a glimpse of the father:
In other news: a porter on a Chicago train said he’d seen her. Didn’t pan out. At the bottom of the page, a rather startling set of assertions:
A new theory has Smith lured away to a hotel in Chicago, and then to Seattle.
It also tends to the belief that the woman, who separated from her husband on the day the girl disappeared, had corresponded with many girl students in colleges and had offered them positions in South and Central America. The positions invariably turned out to be far from inviting, once the girls arrived at the designated port.
Some of these girls eventually drifted into cabarets, and resorts which were not widely patronized by transient tourists, and agreed to accept positions there as hostesses, the information indicates.
Few of these girls have ever returned and seldom, if ever, have parents heard again from them, the information reveals.
