TVXOHOF 11/01/18 - NIXON'S THE ONE! (105 THAT IS...)

"If Nixon got elected,

You can get elected!"

Cathy Shumway

'Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman'

November has always been the month in which we induct a newsmaker of some sort into the Television Crossover Hall of Fame – usually presidents, politicians, or even those who report the news, both real and fictional.  (For instance, Walter Cronkite and Murphy Brown.)

But presidents have always been a fertile field to choose from, most of them as multi-dimensionals.  (Drumpf is one who made it into the TVXOHOF before he even became the POTUS, but considering his reputation even back then, he was inducted in April of that year. [2009])

Anyway, it shouldn’t come as a surprise who our candidate is this year.  It might be a surprise though as to why we waited this long!

RICHARD NIXON

We probably should have inducted him five years ago at least, when he would have been 100 years old.  So then after realizing I missed the opportunity, I figured I’d wait for the next stepping stone – Tricky Dick would have been 105 this year.

From Wikipedia:
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th President of the United States from 1969 until 1974, the only president to resign the office. He had previously served as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961, and prior to that as both a U.S. Representative and Senator from California.

Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California. After completing his undergraduate studies at Whittier College, he graduated from Duke University School of Law in 1937 and returned to California to practice law. He and his wife Pat moved to Washington in 1942 to work for the federal government. He subsequently served on active duty in the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War II.

Nixon was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1950. His pursuit of the Hiss Case established his reputation as a leading anti-communist and elevated him to national prominence. He was the running mate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Party presidential nominee in the 1952 election. Nixon served for eight years as Vice President, becoming the second-youngest vice president in history at age 40.

He waged an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1960, narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy, and lost a race for Governor of California to Pat Brown in 1962. In 1968, he ran for the presidency again and was elected, defeating incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Nixon ended American involvement in the war in Vietnam in 1973 and brought the American POWs home, and ended the military draft. Nixon's visit to China in 1972 eventually led to diplomatic relations between the two nations and he initiated détente and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union the same year. His administration generally transferred power from Washington D.C. to the states. He imposed wage and price controls for ninety days, enforced desegregation of Southern schools, established the Environmental Protection Agency and began the War on Cancer.

(Actually, that's Homer Simpson experiencing G-Force)

Nixon also presided over the Apollo 11 moon landing, which signaled the end of the moon race. He was reelected in one of the largest electoral landslides in U.S. history in 1972 when he defeated George McGovern.

In his second term, Nixon ordered an airlift to resupply Israeli losses in the Yom Kippur War, resulting in the restart of the Middle East peace process and an oil crisis at home. The Nixon administration supported a coup in Chile that ousted the government of Salvador Allende and propelled Augusto Pinochet to power.

By late 1973, the Watergate scandal escalated, costing Nixon much of his political support. On August 9, 1974, he resigned in the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office. After his resignation, he was issued a controversial pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford.

In 20 years of retirement, Nixon wrote nine books and undertook many foreign trips, helping to rehabilitate his image into that of elder statesman. He suffered a debilitating stroke on April 18, 1994 and died four days later at the age of 81.

Like many of the presidents who make it into the Hall, Nixon was a multi-dimensional in the TV Universe and we’re inducting all of these variants of his televersion as one collective group. 

These dimensions would include:

• League of Themselves
• Earth Prime-Time
• Skitlandia
• The Tooniverse
• Doofus Toobworld
• Alternate TV dimensions
• And the many alternate worlds of TV movies.

THE LEAGUE OF THEMSELVES

For the League of Themselves, we would include the Frost/Nixon interviews, and so many appearances on the news and in documentaries.  It's basically a C-Span world, not much adventure or laughs.

EARTH PRIME-TIME
Televersions of people from the Real World can appear in the main Toobworld as either played by themselves or by actors portraying them.  The differences caused by recastaways can be chalked up to changing points of view.

For Nixon, here is a good example of the “As Played By” category:

Doctor Who
The Impossible Astronaut (2011)

From the IMDb:
The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River Song are reunited in the Utah desert.  President Richard Nixon (Stuart Milligan) converses with a younger Delaware (Mark Sheppard) about a series of phone calls he received from a young girl asking for help. The Doctor quickly gains Delaware's trust, convincing Nixon to give him a few minutes to locate the girl.

Doctor Who
Day of the Moon (2011)

From the IMDb:
The Doctor and his allies mount a rebellion against invaders who have been controlling humanity from the very beginning.

Here, Nixon is played by Stuart Milligan, so O’Bviously he doesn’t look exactly like the real deal.  This can be splained away as the audience seeing him from the Doctor’s perspective.  (But he makes for a much better Nixon than Ian MacNeice did as Churchill.)

One exception to that would be Alec Baldwin as Nixon in an episode of '30 Rock'.  In that case, it was a dream sequence experienced by Tracy Jordan.  His subconscious mind fused Nixon with Tracy's "boss" Jack Donaghy.  (They are seen here with the dream version of Hall of Famer Sammy Davis Jr.)

When Nixon showed up in an episode of 'Drunk HIstory', it really is just a narrated dramatization of a particular story from his life as recounted by a drunk. 

But Nixon as himself is often seen in fictional shows, usually as archival footage.  Here’s my favorite example:

Here’s a list of some of those archival appearances:

• Star Trek: Enterprise
• Murphy Brown
• M*A*S*H
• Trust
• The X-Files
• Mad Men

Then of course there are the references to the existence of Nixon’s televersion in TV shows (for which the IMDb lists over 300 such references.)  And there is one which I specifically wish to mention as it comes from a movie which belongs in the universe of Earth Prime-Time even more so than in the Cineverse….

Captain Spock: 

There is an old Vulcan proverb:

only Nixon could go to China.

“Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”

The great thing about references is that they verify the existence of historical figures in Earth Prime-Time.  After all, if there are Nixon masks, they must be based on an actual Nixon, right?

Here are a few other TV shows with such references for Nixon:

• ‘The Kids Are Alright’
• ‘Dead Like Me’
• ‘Aquarius’
• ‘That 70s Show’
• ‘Swingtown’
• ‘Alone Together’
• ‘Saved By The Bell: The College Years’
• ‘L.A. Law’
• ‘Political Animals’
• ‘Will & Grace’
• ‘Last Man Standing’
• ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’
• ‘Corner Gas’
• ‘Amazing Stories’ (“Guilt Trip”)
• ‘Good Times’
• ‘Better Call Saul’
• ‘Goliath’
• ‘Mama’s Family’
• ‘Masters Of Sex’
• ‘The New Normal’
• ‘Two And A Half Men’
• ‘Superstore’
• ‘NewsRadio’
• ‘Lie To Me’
• ‘Breaking Bad’
• ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ (“Full Disclosure”)
• ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’
• ‘Preacher’
• ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’
• ‘The Outer Limits’
• ‘Lethal Weapon’
• ‘Sons Of Anarchy’
• ‘Gilmore Girls’
• ‘Strange World’
• ‘The Marvelous Ms. Maisel’
• ‘Quarry’
• ‘The Net’
• ‘Borgen’
• ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’
• ‘Weird Science’
• ‘Chicago Code’
• ‘Fargo’
• ‘Maude’
• ‘Bull’
• ‘Psych’
• ‘Journeyman’
• ‘Picket Fences’
• ‘Law & Order’
• Bewitched’
• ‘Three’s Company’
• ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’
• ‘Warehouse 13’
• ‘What’s Happening’
• ‘Starsky & Hutch’
• ‘Sanford’
• ‘Bones’
• ‘The Partridge Family’
• ‘All In The Family’
• ‘Soap’
• ‘Fringe’
• ‘Becker’
• ‘Frasier’
• ‘Renegade’
• ‘The Mindhunter’
• ‘Sanford and Son’
• ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’

And he was referenced in several alternate dimensions differentiated by their Oval Office occupants or because the show is a remake:

• ‘House OF Cards’
• ‘The West Wing’
• ‘Scandal’
• ‘Veep’
• ‘Lois & Clark’

So when it comes to vouching for the existence of TV’s Nixon, he has quite the pedigree!

SKITLANDIA

Skitlandia is an easy one to find an example.  Before Trump, I don’t think there’s ever been a POTUS who was parodied more in sketch comedy shows and late night talk shows.  Best example would be Dan Aykroyd on ‘Saturday Night Live’, playing Nixon with a mustache.

Years later, Joe Piscopo came closer to a caricature of Nixon.

Other Skitlandian appearances as himself:

• Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus
• Monty Python's Flying Circus
• Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In

Three episodes in the second season of 'Laugh-In which included this memorable moment:

THE TOONIVERSE
My personal favorite televersion for Nixon in the Tooniverse would be as the severed cloned head in the year 3000, as seen in several episodes of ‘Futurama’!

Connected to that….

The Simpsons- Worst Episode Ever (2001)

(O’Bservation – “The Treehouse of Horror” is an annual Halloween special which is outside the canon for ‘The Simpsons’.  However, Nixon showed up on Homer’s jury when he was tried for breach of contract in Hell.)

Even 'Animaniacs' got into the act:

Nixon ranks right up there with Kennedy, Lincoln, and Washington for portrayals in all facets of television.  And there are plenty of alternate TV dimensions in which he could exist.

MOTW TOOBWORLD
Nixon wasn’t always portrayed by an actor in the TV movies.  When he’s not a major factor in the storyline, it was usually decided to rely on archival footage.

Here’s an incomplete list of those TV movies:

• J. Edgar Hoover
• Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
• Citizen Cohn
• Jackie, Ethel, Joan: The Women of Camelot
• Will: G. Gordon Liddy (Voice of John Byner as Nixon)
• The Final Days (played by Lane Smith)

TOOBWORLDS OF MINI-SERIES
Blind Ambition (Rip Torn as Nixon)
Separate But Equal
Kennedy
The Kennedys (archival footage) 
11.22.63 (archival footage) 

MULTIPLE TV DIMENSIONAL SPINOFFS
Chief among these to be dealt with would be all of the new timelines created by the intervention of the various time-travelers in ‘Timeless’, both the good guys and the baddies.  With each new time period they visited, something in the past was irrevocably altered from what we have in the Real World and (for the most part) the main Toobworld.

The three ‘Timeless’ episodes in which Nixon was featured were:

• "The Watergate Tape"
• "Space Race"
• "The Kennedy Curse"

(Nixon was portrayed by Sheldon Landry.)

DOOFUS TOOBWORLD
(This is a TV dimension of low IQ.)

Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971 TV Short)

From the IMDb:
This mockumentary follows the fictional career of Harvey Wallinger, ostensible chief aide and adviser to Richard Nixon, from Nixon's time as Eisenhower's vice-president through his loss in 1960.

UNDEFINED CATEGORIES
(SPOILERS, SWEETIE!)

Life on Mars
- Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows? (2008)

O’Bservation: This took place in Limbo, which had been recreated to simulate Manchester, England, in the early 1970s. 

Drunk History
Underdogs (2018)

From the IMDb:
Fred Rogers fights for government funded children's programming.

Observation - The series consists of historical events acted out in the minds’ eyes of drunk comedians.  So these televersions of historical characters don’t really exist in any dimensional plane.

Wherever he ended up, I’m sure Nixon is chortling with devilish glee (okay, so I have an opinion as to where he ended up) about how History will no longer look upon him as the most crooked of United States Presidents.

Enjoy this meaningless accolade, Tricky Dick!

O'Bservation - By the way, the images I used of the "true" Nixon in the Wikipedia segment could be used for fan fiction.  Nixon and the "actual" Lone Ranger, Robocop, and a certain Gallifreyan Time Lord....