NOTED IN PASSING

Looking back over 2005, I was stunned by the number of great TV characters we lost with the deaths of so many fine actors - Ernest T. Bass, Maxwell Smart, Mr. Peterson, Scottie, Gilligan, Maynard G. Krebs, and Miss Ellie; not to mention those better known as themselves - such as Johnny Carson, Peter Jennings, Paul Winchell, and Richard Pryor, to name just a few.

I couldn't see how such an "annus horribilis" could be eclipsed, but it's the nature of Time itself that will only make each passing year worse.

The second month of 2006 hasn't even ended yet and already this year we have lost the actors who gave us Grandpa Munster and Ambassador G'Kar, as well as Shelley Winters, Tony Franciosa, and Curt Gowdy, among far too many others.

And this weekend, in the less than 24 hours, we've lost two more who provided two characters who figure prominently in my personal pantheon - Don Knotts ("Barney Fife") and Darren McGavin ("Carl Kolchak").

It was a long, draining night at work so I need some time to recharge the batteries. But this afternoon I'll post not only their respective "Hat Squad" tributes, but also begin looking back at their contributions to Toobworld in respect to all of the characters each of them contributed.

I suspect there'll be a few posts to come over the next week about them both......

BCnU
Tele-Toby

AMAS DE CASA DESESPERADAS

In Toobworld, there is quite an international echo when it comes to certain TV shows. One could go to England and meet junk dealers Albert Steptoe and his son Harold; and then travel to Los Angeles where it would be like looking in a "mirror darkly", so to speak, [ahem!], when you encounter Fred Sanford and his son Lamont working the same trade.

Hop a flight back to the Netherlands to meet up with the proprietors of 'Stiefbeen & Zoon' and it's deja vu all over again.

Their situations, their lives all parallel each other.

The best example of this would be the adaptation of the British sitcom 'Till Death Us Do Part' to become the Americanized 'All In The Family'. That proved to be a cultural juggernaut, but many such adaptations fail to translate satisfactorily. Only twelve episodes were ever made of 'Fawlty Towers', but it set a gold standard that 'Amanda's' and 'Payne' couldn't even reach, let alone match.

A few years ago there was a news story about certain American TV shows being remade down in South America; taking the original scripts and tailoring them to fit the new locale, but basically remaining the same. The shows cited were classic prime-time soaps like 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty', I believe; shows that would fit the populace's love for tele-novelas.

Last summer, it was announced that there would be a French version of 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent' produced, and now they're working on the Gallic edition of 'The Office', to be called 'Le Bureau'.

And of course there are all the variations on those stupid "reality" shows like 'Survivor', 'Big Brother', 'Who Wants To Be A Millioinaire', and 'Idol' (Pop, American, or something else).

Bleep! We've even seen the far-flung future of 'Big Brother' in an episode of 'Doctor Who'!

But now a current cultural phenom here in the USA is going to be reborn with several incarnations in South America, three in Spanish and one in Portugese.....

'Desperate Housewives'.

Each version will have its own cast and cultural references, but they will all be filmed on the same set in Buenos Aires. For Toobworld purposes architecturally, I guess this would be an example of the influence from one particular urban planner; an international Moses or Levitt.

The Spanish versions will be produced for Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador, while the Portugese adaptation is obviously meant for Brazil.

The story format will remain the same, (although more closely resembling telenovelas), so I guess there will be four more suicides to kick off the storylines. But there will be some alterations to reflect the cultural differences of each country.

Fernando Barbosa, senior vice president of its Latin America division, said:

"In the US version there's a plumber (actor James Denton) in that neighbourhood. In Latin America, a plumber is very unlikely to live in such type of neighbourhood, so we'll have to switch that profession."

Here's another change: The Hispanic couple (played in the US version by Eva Longoria and Ricardo Antonio Chavira) will reflect permanent immigrants in each community. In the Colombian version, for example, the couple will be from Ecuador.

Actresses have already been cast in the Argentine version, with Araceli Gonzalez playing Gabriela (Gabrielle in the US version), Gabriela Toscano as Susana (Susan), Carola Reyna as Elisa (Bree) and Mercedes Moran as Lia (Lynette).

I suppose there are several variations on the 'CSI' theme around the world by now. But I'm wondering if any other country will attempt to make their own version of 'Lost'.......

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

THE HAT SQUAD: PHIL BROWN

Phil Brown has passed away. He was most recognizable to modern audiences for playing Luke Skywalker's uncle, Owen Lars, although he only appeared in the first "Star Wars" film for a handful of scenes. He in fact had a long and successful career in New York, Hollywood, and Europe.

A Stanford University graduate (class of 1937), he joined the Group Theatre of New York in 1938 before moving to Hollywood in 1941 where he quickly came to be cast in a series of roles as “the guy who didn’t get the girl.” He soon took to directing as well.

Unfortunately, Brown fell victim to the Red-hunters of the ’50s and was blacklisted in 1952, despite his claims to never have been a Communist. This prompted a move to London for Brown and his family, where he stayed until 1992 and was able to act and direct on the West End as well as in television and films.

The success of "Star Wars" also allowed Brown to join the convention circuit for many years.

TV MOVIES
Maneaters Are Loose! (1978) (TV) .... Kevin Pennington
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1978) (TV) .... Jeremiah Cobb
Roast Goose and Walnut Stuffing (1959) (TV) .... John Sloan
The Offshore Island (1959) (TV) .... Captain Charles

TV MINI-SERIES
"The Fortunate Pilgrim" (1988) (mini) TV Series .... Supervisor F/O
"Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years" (1981) (mini) TV Series .... Lord Beaverbrook
"Oppenheimer" (1980) (mini) TV Series .... Strauss
"The Martian Chronicles" (1980) (mini) TV Series .... Mr. Black (Capt. Black's father)

TV RELATED MOVIES
Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming (1999) .... Council Elder
Star Wars (1977) .... Uncle Owen Lars

TV GUEST APPEARANCES
"The Professionals"
- Take Away (1980) TV Episode .... Callahan
"Tales of the Unexpected"
- Edward the Conqueror (1979) TV Episode .... F. Milton Willis
"The Protectors"
- It Was All Over in Leipzig (1972) TV Episode .... Adam Markos
"Bonanza"
- The Night Virginia City Died (1970) TV Episode .... Wade Tucker
"Journey to the Unknown"
- Stranger in the Family (1969) TV Episode .... Charles Wilson
"The Troubleshooters"
- Operation Saigon (1966) TV Episode .... Harry Tobin
"The Four Just Men"
- The Bystanders (1960) TV Episode .... Albert Peterson
"Interpol Calling"
- The Money Game (1959) TV Episode .... Brownley
"Dial 999"
- Extradition (1959) TV Episode .... Vic Brady
"White Hunter"
- The Inside Story (1957) TV Episode .... Sherman Wick
"The Scarlet Pimpernel"
- Thanksgiving Day (1956) TV Episode .... Rawlingson
"Colonel March of Scotland Yard"
- Present Tense (1956) TV Episode .... Gordon
- The Sorcerer (1956) TV Episode .... Brian Hayes
"Sailor of Fortune"
- The Million Dollar Rose Tree (1956) TV Episode .... Clayton
"The Vise"
- Never Let Me Die (1955) TV Episode
- The Corpse in Room Thirteen (1955) TV Episode
"Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents"
- My Favorite Aunt (1953) TV Episode

[Thanks to the IMDb.com]

BCnU.....
Tele-Toby

THE SHILLS ARE ALIVE!

Of the commercials that premiered during the Super Bowl, the ones that seemed to be most reviled were the Diet Pepsi twofer - both starring Jay Mohr as the televersion of Bob Sugar from the "Jerry McGuire" movie, and with P. Diddy in one and Jackie Chan in the other.

Despite the buckets of bucks he must have made, Mohr looked like he was squirming in his seat; like he should have been cast in a Preparation H blipvert instead!

I think the main complaint was that the premise was idiotic - that a soda can was alive.

But I didn't find it idiotic; that can was definitely alive. On cue it popped its top to lay down its "brown & bubbly" sound to P. Diddy's track; and it popped that top again as if was a Kung Fu move for the Jackie Chan movie.

I had no trouble believing that. I couldn't buy into the idea that Diet Pepsi would be so popular that it needed an agent.

[Full disclosure - I used to drink Coke. I hate the taste of Pepsi. Also, I hate anything connected to Tom Cruise because of the blasphemy committed against my memories of the TV version of 'Mission Impossible'. As he was one of the producers, Cruise could have done something to change a key plot point.]

Maybe all of the people complaining are fans of Diet Coke as well, not Diet Pepsi, because they don't usually complain about inanimate objects coming alive in TV commercials. For years, people thought nothing of conversing with a maple syrup bottle or chatting up a walking talking pile of cookie dough.

Perhaps if the Diet Pepsi can had fully articulate arms and legs and a smiley face?

But then again, nobody said "Boo" about the Bud Bowl......

Currently, Toyota Rav 4 is running two blipverts in which inanimate objects have come alive, and without the benefit of faces, arms, or legs.

In the first, a shopping mall parking lot is besieged by packages run amok. They scurry and flip and even climb trees; maneuvers that would stymie the drivers of anything but a Rav 4.

In the other, the Rav 4 is pursued by a relentless horde of orange traffic cones, but the driver is able to outthink them and leave them in his wake.

In the various sites I visit which deal with TV advertising, I don't see anybody making a big deal over these. Maybe they're not inanimate objects of affection, but nobody's calling for the torches and pitchforks either.

As the Faithful might expect, I have a splainin for both.

The packages are obviously a ploy by the evil megalithic corporation which runs that shopping outlet to keep its customers under its thrall. But somehow the microchips or whatever that was implanted in their purchases was triggered too early, when it was supposed to attack the owners once they were home. (This would have made a great newspaper story for 'The Chronicle', if it had only been still around.)

As for the orange traffic cones, they are made of plastic and serve the will of the Nestene Consciousness. This alien aggregate has finally smartened up and decided that its latest component should land in some other country besides England, to avoid a certain time-traveling Doctor.

The guy in the Rav 4 could be a member of 'Torchwood' working in America without letting the FBI or UNIT know that he's there. And as such, he's probably leading those possessed traffic cones into a trap so that they could be brought back for study at headquarters in Cardiff......

Just because we have to wait about a year for 'Torchwood' to premiere, that doesn't mean they're not at work already in Toobworld!

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

ELI'S COMING....

Former 'LA Law' star Corbin Bernsen will appear on February 28th episode of 'Boston Legal'. Unfortunately for those of us who are fans of TV crossovers, his character's name will be Eli Granger, not Arnie Becker.

Had Arnie been a character that David E. Kelley created when he worked on 'LA Law', perhaps he might have had the muscle to get the right to bring the character over from another network, as he did with Chi McBride's character from 'Boston Public'. But he joined the Bochco-Fischer production when it was already in progress and Arnie was already established.

Some fancy maneuvering and sleight-of-hand writing skills might be able to come up with a proper reason why we should assume Arnie Becker was now working in Boston under an alias. After all, 'LA Law' has been off the air for over a decade. Look at your own life - lots of things have happened to you in ten years, am I right? (Me? Nah, my life's frozen in amber.)

Perhaps he was forced to go into the witness protection program because he represented (and eventually bedded) the ex-wife of a powerful mobster. To keep it topical, maybe Arnie helped the wife of a Muslim diplomat sever the marital ties to her abusive husband, and now he has a fatwah declared against him.

Of course, that type of speculation gets shot down in a hurry. If he was under federal protection, they never would have put him into a high-profile city like Boston; nor would they let him continue to practice law, especially divorce law!

My way of thinking is to go the traditional route - the Patty-Cathy Option. Arnie Becker and Eli Granger are cousins, identical cousins.

Or to bring it closer to home, DNA-wise, if the acorn didn't fall far from the tree, maybe Arnie's dad got his nut off (to keep that metaphor going) with Eli Granger's mom.

Half-brothers, growing up on opposite sides of the country, natural aspects of aging (i.e., Corbin Bernsen's hairline) making the physical dissimilarities just distinct enough to put the concept into play, and both following the same line of work (and probably the same lascivious relationships with their clients)..... We've seen stranger things happen in Toobworld.

Somehow, I'll bet there will be at least one in-joke made in reference to 'LA Law' during the course of that 'Boston Legal' episode this Tuesday night.....

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

WELCOME TO OFFICEWORLD

For the first time, 'The Office' franchise is being translated into a foreign language. 'Le Bureau', as the show will be called, will take the same approach that NBC did in translating the scripts for an American audience.

"This is the first time that the scripts have been translated into a foreign language but we are confident it will work," says a BBC spokesperson.

"We're not talking about a literal translation - we had a team who went over to France to work with the French scriptwriters to produce something that will work with a French audience. Ricky Gervais has also been involved.

"The scripts have been Gallicised for a French audience - but the beauty of the original was that it played on universal values, the workplace and what happens around the coffee machine."

The BBC said it was confident that the remake of such a quintessentially British comedy will strike a chord in France and still maintain the spirit of the original when it appears on the pay-TV channel Canal Plus in May.

The "mockumentary", which exploits the comic divide between an over-zealous boss and a monotonous workplace in the style of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, has already spawned an American version, which looks to be headed for a third season (one more than the British original).

The French version also locates its cast at a paper merchants in a less-than-dynamic provincial town. Instead of Slough, 'Le Bureau' will be set in Villepinte, a town north of Paris once known for producing beetroot and home to one of France's largest business parks.

The David Brent character becomes Gilles Triquet, played by the veteran film and television actor François Berléand.

Although it might be interesting to see how the show would work if it was translated for a Chinese audience (How long before the young lovers in the office are run over by tanks?), I'm thinking the next step should be to set the show in the far future. Have it be about some jerk functionary in a dull bureaucratic cubbyhole of Starfleet. Let the focus of the show be someone who thinks his paper-pushing (an antiquated term by then, of course) has some grand effect on the galaxy.

I'll bet there was a David Brent type of character on board 'Babylon 5'!

But whether he was Centauri or Minbari.....?

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

"RED" CHANNELED

Jeff Goldblum is in final negotiations to star in 'Seeing Red', about an "eccentric, brilliant cop" who solves murder cases by talking with the ghosts of the victims. Frank Darabont is directing the pilot.

This is being developed for NBC, so you can already guess what to expect by November sweeps should this show be picked up for the fall sked....

A 'Medium'/'Seeing Red' crossover!

Of course, I would have expected a 'Law & Order'/'Third Watch' crossover at some point during the run of 'Third Watch', but what do I know?

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

AQUAMAN ON RECASTAWAY ISLAND

One more story.....

'Aquaman' has been picked up by The CW, the network that is rising from the ashes of The WB and UPN. But there will be a change in casting - Justin Hartley will replace Will Toale as Aquaman.

This has no effect on Toobworld, however. Since the show hasn't aired yet, Justin Hartley will be Aquaman when it does so.

But there will be a splainin needed for why he's not the same Aquaman as in 'Smallville' last year - if they do make the connection between the two shows. I posted on this back in January, so for now that splainin twill serve.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

PASSING, THROUGH TOOBWORLD

It's always been my contention that when an actor dies in the real world, it doesn't mean that all of the characters they played in "present day" Toobworld should also be considered as having died.
Jim Hutton died back in the mid-1970s, but I think his portrayal of Ellery Queen lives on.... although he's now probably about 102 years old!

But when that fictional character is the tele-version of the person playing him - that is, a celebrity portraying him(or her)self, then we have no choice but to consider them dead in Toobworld as well.

(One extenuating circumstance - if the episode in which they appear was set in the future. As such, even if author William Gibson gets killed by a bus tomorrow, in Toobworld he'll be alive at least until 2012 - the year during which 'Wild Palms' takes place. And the tele-version of Frank Gorshin lived at least a few days longer than the original model did here in the real world, thanks to an appearance on 'CSI'.)

This was brought home with true finality in the February 14th episode of 'Gilmore Girls'. Betty Friedan had only passed away ten days earlier, but her death was remaked upon in that episode.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

CRYSTAL MYTH

Every so often, something - or someone, - comes along which I could use to connect so many TV shows together by a common theme, or at the very least provides some sort of splainin for an aspect of life in Toobworld.

For instance - 'The 4400'. There's no way that we'll ever meet all 4400 of the abductees during the run of the series. So it could serve as a dumping ground for all of those characters who just disappeared from TV shows with no mention as to where they had gone. The oldest son on 'Davis Rules'; the youngest son on 'Grounded For Life'.

But not the classic MIA - Chuck Cunningham of 'Happy Days'. I know what happened to him - his crazy-eyed younger sister Joanie killed him!

'Between Time And Timbuktu' gave the name for the passageway between dimensions which has been utilized on such shows as 'Sliders' and the 'Star Trek' franchise - the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum. It's that same wormhole through which the Doctor travels in his TARDIS.

As for characters who serve as a nexus of connectivity, there's Sweet the Demon from the musical episode of 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer'. Thanks to his appearance, I now have a reason for the existence of 'Hull High', 'Cop Rock', 'That's Life', and now 'High School Musical', among others.

Fabian Lavendor, the undertaker played by Carroll O'Connor in an episode of 'The Wild Wild West', splains away all those cowboy bad guys who kept showing up in all of the TV shows with the same faces. (In the real world, the reason is casting - actors like Jack Elam, Morgan Woodward, and Victor French just kept getting used over and over again.) Lavendor was just giving new aliases to villains everyone believed to have been gunned down.

And then there's Red the Squirrel from 'My Favorite Martian --# Well, I'll just hold off on that one for now, as he figures into Monday's posting of the Crossover Of The Week.....

So now I have a new one. I've been catching up on old 'Doctor Who' stories I've missed over the decades (which is most of them). And I just finished watching "The Visitation" featuring the Fifth Doctor.

While they were exploring a crashed escape pod in the woods of 17th Century England, actor and highwayman Richard Mace wanted to know what was providing the lighting inside the wreck.

"Vintarac Crystals are a common source of illumination," splained the Doctor.

First off, "vintarac crystals" are a great sci-fi idea on its own merits. Crystals that were able to supply illumination would help save on the power generated by the ship's engines for other functions like speed or life support.

As to how they work, my best guess would be that they absorb ambient radiation and then transform that into the safe release of light. As such, they would also serve a beneficial life-saving purpose as well.

For Toobworld's purposes, if vintarac crystals are a common source of illumination, then ships of other alien races must use them.

Since they're probably bio/eco-friendly, I would imagine most Vulcan ships are equipped with them in the 'Star Trek' franchise.

Moya, the living spaceship on 'Farscape', might have these crystals as body piercings; her outer hide studded with them to draw in the radiation of outer space which would then be released as harmless luminance.

The 'Babylon 5' space station might use the vintarac crystals. And so would the Minbari, the Narn, the Centaurians, the Drazzi, the Gaim and the pa'k ma'ra; probably the Vorlons as well.

Maybe the Vogon Constructor Fleet uses these crystals as well, although from what we saw of them in 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy', the Vogons don't seem the types to care much for proficiency.

'Firefly' and the new version of 'Battlestar Galactica' may take place in an alternate dimension, but there's no reason to think they wouldn't have access to the vintarac crystals on their side of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum.

When it comes to TV trivia like this, Toobworld brings good things to light!

BCnU!
Tele-Toby