FRANK VINCENT - A HAT SQUAD BLIPVERT

And now a word from our sponsor.....

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Frank Vincent passed away this week after open heart surgery.  He made his mark playing to his strengths, looking as he did like a made man in some crime family.  He worked in the movies "Goodfellas", "Casino", "Raging Bull", "Do The Right Thing", and "The Pope of Greenwich Village".

But I think the role for which he'll be remembered the most was not in the Cineverse, but in Toobworld - as Phil Leotardo in 'The Sopranos'.  A lot of characters got whacked on that show, but his death was one of the more interesting.  Look around, you'll probably find it.

I wrote about Phil Leotardo once, and made the claim that it is Phil we saw dealing with the AFLAC duck.

Click here if you want to read that story.  As you can see, that original YouTube copy of the blipvert is no longer viable.  So use the one in this story.

Good night and may God bless......

BCnU!

CROSSING ZONE - "MIDNIGHT SUN" & "SEINFELD" AND THEN BACK AGAIN ON FLIGHT 33

We haven't done a "Crossing Zone" post so let's launch another one.

WARNING!  If you haven't seen the 'Twilight Zone'' episodes "The Midnight Sun" and "The Odyssey of Flight 33" and the 'Seinfeld' episode "The Gymnast", be forewarned - there will be SPOILERS!

Our focus for this Crossing Zone is "The Midnight Sun", which starred Lois Nettleton as Norma and Betty Garde as Mrs. Bronson.  

The Twilight Zone
- The Midnight Sun (1961) 

When the Earth falls out of orbit, two women try to cope with increasingly oppressive heat in a nearly abandoned city.

In a world that is getting ever nearer to the sun, people are trying to find ways to deal with the extreme heat. Most people have gone north with Norma and Mrs. Bronson the only two people left in their apartment building. There is little or no infrastructure remaining and water is one commodity that is very much in demand. They panic when an intruder breaks into Norma's apartment and holds them, at least for a few moments, at gunpoint. All is not as it seems however. 

Many episodes of 'The Twilight Zone' took place in the main Toobworld, but there were a lot of them that could only exist in alternate Toobworlds.  And "The Midnight Sun" is one of those stories.  In fact, I don't think that particular Toobworld exists anymore.

But even so, the people of that Toobworld (Terra Gelida) had doppelgangers back in Earth Prime-Time, the main Toobworld.  And while we met several others of the eight million stories in that world's 'Naked City' - the doctor, the neighbors, the intruder - we're going to be concerned only with the main players of this doomed little tale, Norma and Mrs. Bronson.

As she was the main character, we'll begin with Norma.  Let's see who she might have been in Earth Prime-Time......

Seinfeld
- The Gymnast (1994)

 ... Mrs. Enright

George's girlfriend's mom thinks he is a bum when she catches George eating an éclair out of the trash can, among various other coincidences.

We never hear what Mrs. Enright's first name was.  And we never learned what Norma's maiden name was either.  I'm going to suggest for this edition of "Crossing Zone" that Norma was divorced from Mr. Enright (a brother to Sgt. Charlie Enright perhaps?) already in that TV dimension; they were divorced before 1961 and had no children in that Toobworld.  In the long run, that was probably a blessing.

But in Earth Prime-Time, they remained married at least until after the birth of their daughter, Lindsay, in 1965.  Lindsay would grow up to date George Costanza, whom Mrs. Enright thought was a bum after seeing him eat an eclair out of the garbage and clean a car windshield with a newspaper.

"See that painting behind me?
I painted that."

We don't learn anything else about the life of Mrs. Enright, but it could very well be that she was a painter just as her doppelganger was in that frozen Toobworld.

Now let's turn our attention to Mrs. Bronson.  We don't even have to leave the parent series of 'The Twilight Zone' to find her again in the main Toobworld.....

The Twilight Zone
- The Odyssey of Flight 33 (1961)

 ... Passenger

Passing through the sound barrier a commercial airliner inadvertently travels back in time.

Global Flight 33 is en route from London to New York in what appears to be a routine flight in a modern jetliner. Suddenly however, the jet's speed increases to an incredible 3000 knots and they arrive in New York rather quickly. Neither the captain or his well-trained crew can explain what happened - a strange tail-wind perhaps - but they are certainly not prepared for what they find as they survey the land below them.

The name of that passenger never comes up during that adventure for Flight 33, so there's nothing to impede us from making the claim that she was indeed Mrs. Bronson.  Unfortunately, I don't think she fared any better than her doppelganger in Terra Gelida.  We never saw the outcome of that last attempt by the flight crew to pierce the temporal vortex and return to their own time.  But I don't think they ended up back in the Jurassic age nor did they return to the New York City of 1939. 

But the Captain was determined that they should not return to a world in which they might significantly cause an impact on the future of Mankind.  But wherever they did end up, it was going to be their last attempt; they just didn't have enough fuel to try again. 

I'd like to think they had to make an emergency landing in the New York area after the age of the dinosaurs but before the first stirrings of Early Man in the region.  There they would just have to live out their lives as best they could, with the agreed determination not to bring any more children into that timeline.

They would have had to cannibalize the airliner, of course.  That could accelerate the advancement of humanity once it was found, if only to be melted down to make weapons.  

And so, depending on whether or not she survived the plane crash, the Mrs. Bronson of Earth Prime-Time lived out what was left of her life - perhaps dying a million years before she was born......

BCnU!

"ENDEAVOUR" & "MIDSOMER MURDERS" - A THURSDAY THEORY OF RELATEEVEETY

So I've put together a theory of relateeveety which can connect 'Midsomer Murders' to the 'Inspector Morse' prequel, 'Endeavour'.  And of course that means it would connect to the Morse mothership and to the sequel 'Inspector Lewis'.

The focus of the theory is DS Daniel Scott, whom we saw transferred to Causton CID in 2004.

From a 'Midsomer Murders' wiki:

Daniel Scott is a Detective Sergeant who joined CID after DS Gavin Troy's transfer. City boy Scott was reluctant at first to be working in Midsomer with Tom Barnaby, but soon warmed up to the job, despite itching to get back to London. He felt his transfer to Midsomer was punishment, so he was eager to prove himself a good detective. He is portrayed by John Hopkins and is not an original character in Caroline Graham's books.

Detective Sergeant Daniel 'Dan' Scott first joined the Midsomer team in 2004, in the episode, Bad Tidings, where he was thrown straight into a murder investigation. One of the first things that his new boss said was, when looking down at the dead body of a woman, "By the way, welcome to Midsomer." Not much is known about Scott's life before transferring to Midsomer but we do know that he worked for the Metropolitan Police Service in London. 

It is standard for Toobworld Central's televisiological studies to consider a TV character to be the same age as the actor who portrays him or her.  Therefore, Scott was born in 1974, just like John Hopkins who played him for two years (14 episodes) in 'Midsomer Murders'.

In Toobworld, telegenetics are strong.  For anyone who was able to witness such a thing - a time traveling doctor, for instance - they might see that exact likenesses can echo exactly down through the ages.  And such was the case with DS Scott's natural father.....

'ENDEAVOUR'

"LAZARETTO"

In 1967, Dr. Dean Powell was working at Cowley General Hospital with an eye to eventually succeed Sir Merlyn Chubb as the Chief Surgeon.  And while there, he built up quite the reputation as a ladies' man.....

Lyle Capper:
Course, most of them are potty about Dr Powell.
Except for Sister Clodagh, of course.

Later in the episode, when the nurses were relaxing and kibbitzing in their break room, Dr. Powell was the topic of conversation:

NURSE #1

Dean says they've been in and out of everything.

NURSE #2

Dean, is it, now?
I think "Dr Powell" would be appropriate.

NURSE #1

I think after last night, I can call him what I like.

NURSE #3

You're wasting your breath.

She's a big girl.

NURSE #4

But you know what his reputation's like.

And they do talk, doctors.

NURSE #3

She doesn't want to be just another notch on the bedpost.

NURSE #4

We nurses need to look out for each other.

NURSE #2

 I don't get it at all.

Give them a white coat and a stethoscope, 

and we're expected to fall at their feet?

By 1973, six years later, Dean Powell may well have still been practicing medicine at Cowley General.  (He may have even succeeded Sir Merlyn as he had progressive tremors in his hands.  Sir Merlyn might also have died by that point in time.  (I shall have to keep track of David Yelland's status in the real world, but I expect he - and Sir Merlyn - will hopefully live on for some time in their respective timelines.)

And in that time, Dr. Powell may have continued on as the medico lothario, eventually enthralling and seducing the young woman who would become the mother of Daniel Scott.

To be fair to the woman, I don't think she cheated on her husband.  I don't even think she was married at the time.  I think she may have been a nursing student or already a staff nurse at Cowley General and perhaps an easy mark to the more experienced Dr. Powell.  He may have plied her with over romantic gestures, such as making a request to Lester Fagen (the hospital's deejay who called himself "The Nightfly") to play one of her favorite pieces of music - "Midsomer Rhapsody".  And eventually she succumbed to his charms... and became pregnant.

As I said, it was 1973, and Daniel's mother may have been seeing more than one man at that time.  That other man, with the last name of Scott, would be the man she would eventually marry.  She may have been torn between the two men until she discovered that after sleeping with Dean Powell, she discovered that he had still been having sex with the other nurses she worked with.  Overcome with shame, she cut ties with Powell and turned to Scott, accepting his proposal of marriage.

It was after they made plans to marry when she discovered that she was pregnant.  She would not have had any clue as to which man was the father, but she couldn't take the chance.  She begged her future husband to not only hasten their marriage ceremony, but also that they should move away from Thames Valley and move to London.  Should it turn out that her child grew up to look like Dean Powell, she didn't want this to be noticed by the people surrounding their family.

And so they eloped and moved to London where Dan Scott grew up, looking like Dr. Dean Powell as his mother had feared.  When he graduated from college, Dan Scott went to work for the Met in London until his unwanted transfer to the Midsomer area.

This is of course conjecture.  But ain't it fun to think about?

BCnU!

WIKI WEDNESDAY - NASTY NAZI NOTES

JOHN DRAKE:
"These were made by order of Himmler during the war, by expert technicians who were prisoners in the concentration camp that once stood at the side of [unintelligible]. As the allies marched in, the Nazis dumped the residue of their counterfeit fortune in the lake."

'DANGER MAN'

"UNDER THE LAKE"

I keep replaying this voice-over narration by McGoohan but I just can't make out the name, so I don't know if he's referring to a lake or a mountain.  (It sounds like it begins "Steinberg", which makes me think he's talking about a specific mountain.)  McGoohan's clipped, precise diction sounds perfect for the German inflections.  Perhaps it's a little too perfect; I'm wondering if someone fluent in German could undestand what he's saying?

Nevertheless, even if the locations of the lake and the mountain were fictional, the basic back-story was not.

From Wikipedia:

Operation Bernhard was an exercise by the Nazis to forge British bank notes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy. The first phase was run from early 1940 by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) under the title Unternehmen Andreas (Operation Andreas). The unit successfully duplicated the rag paper used by the British, produced near-identical engraving blocks and broke the algorithm used to create the alpha-numeric serial code on each note. The unit closed in 1942 after its head, Alfred Naujocks, fell out of favour with his superior officer, Reinhard Heydrich.

The operation was revived in July 1942; the aim was changed to forging money to finance German intelligence operations. Instead of a specialist unit within the SD, prisoners from Nazi concentration camps were selected and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp to work under SS Major Bernhard Krüger. The unit produced British notes until mid 1945; estimates vary of the number and value of notes printed from £132.6 million up to £300 million. By the time the unit ceased production, they had perfected the artwork for US dollars, although the paper and serial numbers were still being analysed. The counterfeit money was laundered in exchange for money and other assets. Counterfeit notes from the operation were used to pay the Turkish agent Elyesa Bazna—code named Cicero—for his work in obtaining British secrets from the British ambassador in Ankara, and £100,000 from Operation Bernhard was used to obtain information that helped to free the Italian leader Benito Mussolini in the Gran Sasso raid in September 1943.

In early 1945 the unit was moved to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, then to the Redl-Zipf series of tunnels and finally to Ebensee concentration camp. Because of an overly precise interpretation of a German order, the prisoners were not executed on their arrival; they were liberated shortly afterwards by the American Army. Much of the output of the unit was dumped into the Toplitz and Grundlsee lakes at the end of the war, but enough went into general circulation that the Bank of England stopped releasing new notes, and issued a new design after the war. The operation has been dramatized in a comedy-drama miniseries 'Private Schulz' by the BBC and in a 2007 Austrian film, "The Counterfeiters" (Die Fälscher).

If you speak German and would like to check out that speech, see if you can decipher what McGoohan said, it's in the 'Danger Man' episode "Under The Lake" in the very last scene.  The episode is only half an hour in length if you're interested in watching the whole thing, and as an added bonus - Roger Delgado, the original Master of 'Doctor Who' is the guest star.

Auf wiedersehen!

TWO FOR TUESDAY - LESLIE NIELSEN IN "COLUMBO", TWICE OVER

‘COLUMBO’
“LADY IN WAITING”

Peter Hamilton was a lawyer working with the Chadwick advertising agency, one of the largest on the West Coast.  Soon after joining, he began dating Beth Chadwick, the sister of the company’s chairman, Bryce Chadwick.  But it was a clandestine relationship because Beth knew that Bryce and their mother would not approve of her suitor.

Bryce still found out however, and threatened to fire Hamilton if he didn’t end his relationship with his sister.  This led to the death of Bryce Chadwick and a transformation in the life of his sister.

Peter Hamilton came from a well-established banking family which had been founded by John Hamilton, the president of the North Fork Bank in New Mexico during the 1880s.  I’ve written about Mr. Hamilton in the past:

THE HAMILTON BANK & “MacMILLAN & WIFE”

THE HAMILTON BANK & “BARNEY MILLER”

But Peter Hamilton didn’t stay in the family business, not even in his capacity as a lawyer.  His twin brother didn’t either.

Oh, you’ve seen this ‘Columbo’ episode and don’t remember Peter Hamilton having a twin brother?  Well, remember – this is Toobworld.  We never limit ourselves to just one episode of a show; we don’t even respect the borders between TV series!

But in this case, we are sticking to the ‘Columbo’ bailiwick.  Leslie Nielsen played Peter Hamilton, but he returned a few seasons later as a spy known by the alias of AJ Henderson and the code name of “Geronimo”.  (The real AJ Henderson actually was in the advertising business and traveled the world as part of his job.  This made him a perfect mark for Geronimo to steal his identity.)

The full name for Geronimo’s true identity isn’t known, but I’m going to assert that his surname was Hamilton, making him Peter Hamilton’s twin brother.  This “splains” away at least his visage reappearing a second time on ‘Columbo’.  But this splainin certainly wouldn’t work for all the characters played by Vito Scotti (six) and Mike Lally (28!)  Having sextuplets and putting them all up for adoption might work for the mother of the Scotti characters, but having 28 kids - even if they weren’t all from the same zygote! - would surely have killed the poor mother of all those Lally boys!

Just one more thing....

One of their cousins in the Hamilton family line also was a lawyer, but he may have still had a hand in the family banking business.  And even though he didn’t share in the established family surname – his name was Paul Williams – it’s O’Bvious that Williams was descended from John Hamilton.  The telegenetics were strong in that one.

Paul Williams could also be found in a ‘Columbo’ episode.  In fact, he was in the second pilot for the series, “Ransom For A Dead Man”.  Paul Williams was the leading attorney in a law firm which he established with his second wife, Lesley Williams (who was the one who killed him.)

And unfortunately for him, Paul Williams had the distinction of being the second murder victim seen in the series.  (And unfortunately for the actor, Harlan Warde, he didn’t have a single line of dialogue!)

So there’s my theory of relateeveety for three characters from ‘Columbo’, linking them all back to ‘The Rifleman’.

BCnU!

IF ONLY.....

If only the real world could imitate Toobworld - the World Trade Center survived this attack.  But eventually the Twin Towers did fall just as they did in the Trueniverse.  In some of the alternate TV dimensions they still stand, such as in the "Over There" dimension as seen in 'The X-Files'.

Many TV shows have incorporated the tragedy of the terrorist attack into their story-lines - 'CSI: NY', 'Without A Trace', 'Rescue Me', even 'Becker' a sitcom.  If only Superman had still been alive in Earth Prime-Time, he might have prevented the destruction, at least in the TV world.

If only....

On this anniversary, Toobworld Central remembers the thousands lost that day.....

BCnU!

AND NOW A WORD FROM A HIGHER POWER.....

VIDEO SUNDAY - REMEMBERING WALTER BECKER

This week's Video Sunday is dedicated to the music of my all-time favorite group, Steely Dan, in memory of Walter Becker who passed away one week ago.  

All of these videos are taken from various TV shows, mostly music programs and a few late night talk shows......

One thing I won't share here is the cover of "Reelin' In The Years" as performed by Donnie and Marie.  If you feel it's necessary to subject yourself to it, feel free to look it up.  I won't sully Becker's memory here with it.

Good night and may God bless......