"THE RIFLEMAN" - HAVE IT YOUR WAY

Here are two Big Macs for you - Lucas McCain at McDonald's......

When I first saw this blipvert during my 'Rifleman' search of YouTube (I don't remember its initial run on TV.), my first reaction was that he could be the ghost of Lucas McCain... come back to get rid of those other ghostly varmints.

It wasn't Lucas McCain culled from clips from the show, but Chuck Connors as he looked at the time the commercial was made. So you could see that Lucas had lived a long life before he gave up the ghost to become a ghost.

But upon reflection, that would fly in the face of the Toobworld theory that the soul of Lucas McCain was born to rerun as Sheriff Andy Taylor of 'The Andy Griffith Show'. (And that he would be reunited with his son Mark who was reincarnated as Opie Taylor.) Maybe I'm hazy on the details, but wouldn't a ghost consist of one's soul?

Then I thought of another, more complicated Toobworld theory which I came up with while CBS was celebrating its 50th anniversary on TV by inserting old clips into their newer shows. Maybe Lucas McCain was a bio-electrical echo feedback brought forward in Time, perhaps by a rogue backwash vortex which escaped from the 'Quantum Leap' facility - also to be found in New Mexico.

The other use of this theory happened in a special episode of 'Diagnosis Murder' when Dr. Mark Sloan momentarily saw the echo of Rob Petrie of 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'. But with that premise, an echo isn't the real thing; it can't react to its new surroundings. And yet here was Lucas McCain ordering a Happy Meal!

I was even toying with the idea of McCain as a prototype for a Video Ranger, a living hologram program. (This theory is my way to splain away the Zonkish references to 'Captain Video') But who would have had the technology and the genius to do such a thing way back then? Dr. Loveless?

As you can imagine for this fan of Miguelito, that was tempting.....

But then it hit me - I was going about this all wrong. I was trying to make this blipvert fit into Earth Prime-Time when actually it belongs in the TV dimension of 'Hi Honey, I'm Home!'

That intro pretty much sums it all up - That TV dimension had the same TV shows as the real world (plus others), but those TV characters could come alive and cross over into the world that used to watch them. (The same dimension showed up in "Remote Control Man", an episode of 'Amazing Stories'.)

The Nielsens came from that TV within TV world and they now lived incognito (for teh most part) in suburbia where they would be visited by other refugees like Alice & Trixie (from 'The Honeymooners'), Grandpa ('The Munsters'), Alice the maid ('The Brady Bunch'), Eddie Haskell and June Cleaver ('Leave It To Beaver'), Sally Rogers ('The Dick Van Dyke Show'), Mr. Mooney ('The Lucy Show'), and Gomer Pyle ('The Andy Griffith Show' & 'Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.').

Those "sitcommies" also had use of a device called a Turnerizer which would give them color if they were originally black & white.

But Lucas McCain didn't used the Turnerizer. It could be that he was one of a growing minority movement of relocated refugee repeats who were no longer going to hide but instead stand tall as who they were - living reruns.

(Well, there would be at least one who wouldn't stand tall - Chief Robert T. Ironside. Sorry about that, Chief.)

Political incorrectness aside, do you see the level of commitment I have to put into Toobworld Central? It's no wonder I'm going on vacation as soon I set this post up to run automatically while I'm gone.

Oh. By the way.... While you've been reading these 'Rifleman' related posts the last two weeks, I've been taking it easy at the Lake. Hopefully if I set it all up right, you didn't miss me at all!

I'm having it my way!

BCnU!