SATURDAY COMICS - WHO IS THAT TALL DARK STRANGER THERE?

It may not be August, but I'm going to share a TV Western-themed post today. 

For the last two Saturdays, I've posted the incarnations of TV characters as seen in the fictional universe of comic books. Today I'm showcasing the stars of my favorite Western: 'Maverick'.

From Wikipedia:

'Maverick ' is an American Western television series with comedic overtones created by Roy Huggins. The show ran from September 22, 1957 to July 8, 1962 on ABC and stars James Garner as Bret Maverick, an adroitly articulate cardsharp. 

Eight episodes into the first season, he was joined by Jack Kelly as his brother Bart Maverick, and from that point on, Garner and Kelly alternated leads from week to week, sometimes teaming up for the occasional two-brother episode. 

The Mavericks were poker players from Texas who traveled all over the American Old West and on Mississippi riverboats, constantly getting into and out of life-threatening trouble of one sort or another, usually involving money, women, or both. They would typically find themselves weighing a financial windfall against a moral dilemma. More often than not, their consciences trumped their wallets since both Mavericks were intrinsically ethical.

They proved to be so popular - in spite of them turning the genre on its head during a time when cowboys ruled the airwaves - that Bret and Bart gained their own comic book title from Dell. 

Here are some examples:

And when James Garner left the role of Bret Maverick, Jack Kelly as Brother Bart was joined by cousin Beau Maverick (played by Roger Moore) and another brother named Brent.  

But was Brent really the brother of Bret and Bart?

Well....  That is a post we'll save for the TV Western showcase next August.....

Happy trails to you!

ADDENDUM: THE KEEVY HAZELTON STORY

I posted this story the other day:

http://Toobworld.blogspot.com/2016/10/across-view-niverses.html?m=0

And I got this reply:

top_cat_james has left a new comment on your post "ACROSS THE VIEW-NIVERSES": 

Pearson portrayed yet ANOTHER rock 'n' roller- on a 1964 episode of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES ("Teenage Idol"). 

From Ann-Margret to Donna Douglas to...Frances Bavier? Yeesh, talk about a rapidly aging fan base! 

A big tip of the Toob Top Hat to TC James for this. It actually can be incorporated into my theory about Keevy's life in the main Toobworld. 

From the IMDb:

An old friend from back in the hills is now an Elvis-like singing idol. The Clampetts misunderstand the situation and decide to help Johnny get on his feet.

So here's how I plan to add  in this new information... information... information:

Back in the Ozarks, Emma Poke gave birth to twins in 1930, but her husband never got the chance to see them. Mr. Poke died before they were born, leaving Emma a widow-woman. Unable to care for both babies on her own, left poor and destitute, she gave up one of the twin boys to be adopted. 

That would be the baby taken in by the Hazeltons. They named him Kevin, but for his show business aspirations he used the nickname Keevy. 

Being twins, both Keevy Hazelton and Johnny Poke, despite being separated soon after birth, developed amazing talents as singers.  Since both of them gained national prominence in the music industry, their exposure through publicity eventually revealed to the world that they had to be identical twins. After all, they laughed alike, they walked alike; at times they even talked alike!

Let's step outside the fantasy world of the Toob for a moment, back to the mundane world of the Trueniverse in which we live.....

In 1979, only 49 years old, Jesse Pearson was stricken with terminal cancer.  He moved back to Louisiana to be close to his mother before he died. 

Normally, I make the claim that the characters pass away in Toobworld around the same time as the actors who played them. (Barring of course the dictates of the show in which they appeared - the character could be recast. Or they were already dead if the show was set in the past. Conversely, they might not even be born yet if the show takes place in the future.)

In the case of these twins, I'd like to think that hopefully both of them might still be alive - 86 years old, perhaps retired, but still earning pocket money on the nostalgia circuit. 

I'd like to think that after their careers as Elvis wannabes faded, Keevy and Johnny came out of obscurity to teamed up again to perform together on such shows as 'TGS with Tracy Jordan', 'The Larry Sanders Show', and even morning talk shows like 'Morning Chicago' and 'Wake Up, San Francisco'. 

What sparked their rediscovery?  Maybe some younger pop idol in Toobworld reworked their old hits so that a new generation might discover the oldies performed by Johnnie Poke and Keevy Hazelton. (I'm thinking artists like Hannah Montana or Rachel Berry....  Perhaps Juliette Barnes could give their rockabilly hits a true country twang.)

But if one or both of them has passed away already, then there's only one song we can sing.....

"Que sera, sera."

Thanks again Top Cat James!

BCnU!

SUPER SIX LIST - LISA'S LIBRARY

I haven't done a Super Six List in a while; but I couldn't think of an appropriate topic.  

So apropos of nothing, here's what I came up with....

SUPER SIX LIST

SIX REAL WORLD BOOKS 

READ BY LISA SIMPSON

"MASTER OF THE SENATE" 

by

Robert Caro

"LEAVES OF GRASS" 

by

Walt Whitman 

"MAN AND SUPERMAN" 

by

George Bernard Shaw

"THE BELL JAR" 

by

Sylvia Plath 

"THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV" 

by

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH" 

by

William Shirer

ACROSS THE VIEW-NIVERSES

'THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW'

"A SINGER IN TOWN"

Rock 'n' roll never fared well in the North Carolina town of Mayberry. Groups like the Silver Herringbones could be heard on the radio or personal stereo players.  And all of their songs sounded the same. 

When an actual superstar sensation came to town, he was more of an Elvis wannabe by the name of Keevy Hazelton. 

Hazelton might exist in other TV dimensions where variations of 'The Andy Griffith Show' exist. For example: Skitlandia and the Tooniverse. In fact, it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that Keevy Hazelton might be born to rerun in the Future of the Tooniverse as the pop idol Jet Screamer. 

But he could exist in other fictional universes. And the case could even be made for him to be found in the movie world of the Cineverse. 

Keevy Hazelton was played by Jesse Pearson.....

From the IMDb:

Jesse Pearson played another rock 'n' roll singer, Conrad Birdie, in the movie "Bye, Bye Birdie" with Dick Van Dyke, Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell.

Here's how I would splain away the name change between Hazelton and Birdie:

In both universes, he was adopted as a baby - in Earth Prime-Time, his adoptive parents were the Hazeltons, but it was the Birdies who took him in over in the Cineverse. 

And dat's de name of dat tune!

DOUBLE VISION: DEHNER'S PAST

Normally I would save this for the August showcase for TV Westerns, but as we're nearing Halloween.....

'THE TWILIGHT ZONE'

"MR. GARRITY AND THE GRAVES"

Back in the 1880s, Jared Garrity was a con man traveling through the American Southwest with a unique scheme: he claimed he could resurrect the dead.  In Happiness, Arizona, Garrity went up to Boot Hill and performed the spells necessary to bring Life back to the Dead... Out of the goodness of his heart. 

The residents of Happiness, however, weren't too keen on the idea.  And they were more than eager to pay hundreds of dollars to Garrity so that he would keep them quiescent up on Boot Hill. 

The Dead had other ideas though.....

Garrity thought his powers were a scheme, but he really did have the talent to resurrect the dead. 

I believe eventually Garrity discovered his powers and turned it to his advantage - by hiring himself out to bring notorious outlaws back to life after they were gunned down by officers of frontier justice. 

In this way, Jared Garrity is deemed eligible for the TV Crossover Hall Of Fame - think of all the gunfighters and assorted other "bad hombres" played by the same character actors in all those TV Westerns of Yesteryear, like Morgan Woodward, Jack Elam, John Milford....  

Thanks to Garrity's powers, they came back to life, assumed new identities, and moved on to other frontier towns to cause trouble. (Although Milford's character seemed fixated on North Fork, New Mexico, where he took on eleven different aliases... and was gunned down as most of them.)

The time eventually came when Garrity felt the clasp of mortality on his own shoulder and figured he had nothing left to lose but to use his own powers on himself. 

This gave him a form of immortality. 

It's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that Jared Garrity, under other names, appeared on our TV screens over the decades in several different series. I'll have to do more research on that. But here's one possibility I think fits:

'THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW'

"AUNT BEE'S MEDICINE MAN"

From the Mayberry Wiki:

Colonel Harvey, a traveling medicine man, sells Bee two bottles of his Indian elixir. Bee becomes tipsy on the brew and Colonel Harvey lands in jail.

From the IMDb:

Andy must protect Aunt Bee from a charming, traveling, dishonest huckster whose 170-proof "tonic" provides temporary relief from [her] mid-life crisis.

By the 1960s, the bureaucracy of the world was making it harder for a man like Garrity /Harvey to hide in plain sight - boxed in by social security numbers, for example. 

The actor who played Mr. Garrity, John Dehner, is gone now. But the character could still be alive in Toobworld, keeping himself alive through his powers. 

But if so, how come his path hasn't crossed with any one of hundreds of TV characters over the last quarter century?

Simple go-to answer:  Jared Garrity met The Doctor, who took him to a world where he could live undisturbed as an immortal. 

Either that... or another kind of immortal mistook Garrity as the same kind of immortal and sliced off his head. 

"What are you doing with that sword?"

As often quoted in another Dehner series....

Que sera , sera. 

MOUNT[ED] BALDWIN

On 'You're The Worst', publicist Gretchen Cutler claimed that she did two of the Baldwin brothers. 

In case you're not familiar with all of them, here they are:

Alec Baldwin (born 1958)

Daniel Baldwin (born 1960)

William Baldwin (born 1963)

Stephen Baldwin (born 1966)

[The pictures are not in order.]

She didn't specify the brothers involved, and I could see Jimmy becoming obsessed with trying to identify which ones.  The guessing game could even become a recurring theme with quick references, sub-plots....  

Maybe a few of those siblings might even show up in an episode which could stir up the speculation. 

Since it was a throw-away joke that could be revisited (no matter how unlikely), I'm not about to lock in any definite answer.  Alls I know is that Stephen Baldwin seems the most logical. 

But as for the other Baldwin she mounted?  

I think the ultimate payoff would be for Jimmy to find out that Gretchen had sex with Adam Baldwin who isn't even related to the acting dynasty of Massapequa!

BCnU!

MUSICAL INFLUENCE OF "THE PRISONER"

Since we looked at 'The Prisoner' in the universe of comic books, let's take a look at the influence the series has had on pop music....

http://youtu.be/fwjXgskUN50

http://youtu.be/yHUM8pocGjo

http://youtu.be/JzUCCl9YaBQ

http://youtu.be/pfRQGZUKS2Y

http://youtu.be/6bwRuQIbF_E

http://youtu.be/4LyB4Ux2ryg

http://youtu.be/ebzzQf9AE08

http://youtu.be/n8jm7M7Dm4E

http://youtu.be/jx8GhXm-HcA

http://youtu.be/1XO1pF2IG9I

http://youtu.be/-FXFf0H7pds

BCnU!