GAME OF THE NAME - FROM HUTCHENS TO SWANSON

Millie Hutchens was a young woman from Wheeling, West Virginia, who moved to Mayberry and found a job as the counter girl at Boysinger's Bakery. 

In two episodes of 'The Andy Griffith Show', Millie quickly entered into a relationship with county clerk Howard Sprague. But after they decided to get married, they discovered how incompatible they were during the train trip to Wheeling where they were to meet her parents.  

Howard went back to Mayberry with Sheriff Andy Taylor and his girlfriend Helen Crump.  Millie didn't go back with them, but she didn't stay long in Wheeling either.  

In order to put her heartache behind her, Millie went to New York City.  It was a heady time in the Big Apple during the Summer of Love and Millie was quickly swept up in its maelstrom.   She met a handsome businessman named Rick Swanson and their whirlwind romance led them to driving down to Maryland for a quickie marriage. 

Rick and Millie might have been able to live happily ever after as a married couple, despite differences between them which created a greater gulf than that between her and Howard. 

Unfortunately, Rick Swanson was killed while test-driving a Jaguar after only a few months of wedded bliss. Now a distraught widow, Millie faced her bleak future and made the decision to return to Mayberry rather than to Wheeling. Not only did she have no desire to go running home to her parents, but she didn't want to risk getting involved again with an old boyfriend named Clyde Plaut. 

But Millie had been happy in Mayberry and she felt confident that she and Howard Sprague could co-exist there without their past coming between them. 

Such fears proved to be unwarranted, even after Millie began dating farmer and town councilman Sam Jones. 

So actress Arlene Golonka was not playing two characters named Millie in Mayberry.  Instead she was playing one role but with two different surnames. 

And that's how Millie Hutchens became Millie Swanson. 

O'BSERVATION:

I had written this years before, but that was before 'Mad Men' premiered. That's where I found an actual Swanson to be Millie's husband between the two Mayberry shows. 

Rick Swanson

"Mad Men" 

    - The Other Woman (2012) 

Played by Jordan Feldman

    - Lady Lazarus (2012)

Played by Jordan Feldman

Originally I had Millie as a divorcee but that didn't play well with the late 60s wholesome image of the town.  But killing off Rick Edwards - only seen in those two episodes of 'Mad Men' - was too tempting to resist. Especially in a Jaguar crash since that was the subplot for those two episodes of 'Mad Men'.

After all, widows and widowers are a time-honored tradition in Toobworld. 

BCnU!

ASOTV - CORDWAINER BIRD

In the real world, "Cordwainer Bird" was a pen name for Harlan Ellison. But that wasn't the case in Toobworld.....

http://youtu.be/4KCWAFBZlF0

BCnU!

ZONKS - THE GHOST IN THE BLUE SHIRT

From the IMDb:

'THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW'

"A NEW DOCTOR IN TOWN"

Mayberry has a new doctor in town who runs into difficulty being accepted because no one wants to be his first patient.

Notes:

When Andy first walks into [Doctor Petersen's office], you can see a production man in the right side of the screen, in a blue short sleeve shirt.

We just dealt with this kind of situation in an episode of 'Columbo', and we're going to use the same splainin for what happened here in the TV Universe....

That man in the blue shirt?  Certainly NOT a production man, or even a moving man who's delivered the last few boxes for Dr. Thomas Peterson.  If he was, the Doctor and Andy would have given some acknowledgement that he was there. 

But they don't see him. And by now you've figured out why....

Yep.  He's a ghost. 

Like the circumstances of most ghosts, his uneasy spirit is tied to that office because that's where he died. I figure he must have been a patient of the previous occupant, Dr. Bennett. 

Dr. Bennett had been the GP in Mayberry since at least 1926. But he suddenly decided to retire. Sure, he was old; here's how he looked like in his only appearance on the show:

But why did he make such an abrupt decision?

I think it's because he deliberately killed that guy in the blue shirt. 

Dr. Bennett may have been practicing medicine in Mayberry for forty years, but that murder had to have happened just before he retired in 1966. That's because the ghost's clothing was contemporary to that episode. 

The man in the blue shirt may have visited Dr. Bennett for some kind of ailment, perhaps unannounced and late at night. It may have been something that was non-life threatening, but for some reason, Dr. Bennett felt compelled to violate the Hippocratic Oath and end the man's life rather than treat him. 

So here's the next big question: why would old Doctor Bennett kill the man in the blue shirt?

Whoever he was in Mayberry, the man in the blue shirt posed a major threat to either the physician's reputation, his family, his livelihood, or even to his very life.  

It would have been easy enough for the doctor to assess the threat and come up with a deadly solution to remove that threat. Dr. Bennett would have convinced the man in the blue shirt that he had the flu. (As all of this happened off-screen, free of the constraints needed to maintain the wholesome image of on-screen Mayberry, perhaps Doc "diagnosed" him as having an STD.)

And then?  A quick jab with a needle filled with "the cure", but it was a cure more beneficial to Doc Bennett than to the man in the blue shirt.  (Shades of that 'Twilight Zone' episode "What You Need".)

As for the disposal of his victim's body, I don't consider that a big question. This is why I think the visit to Dr. Bennett had to be at night. Old though he was, Dr. Bennett was still strong enough to hoist that dead weight ('Columbo' reference!) and put it into the car belonging to the man in the blue shirt. 

From there, he had plenty of options:

1} Dump the body into Myers Lake and make it look like a fishing mishap - most Mayberrians always have their fishing poles handy, so the victim probably had one in the car. 

2} Leave it in the front seat of the car and push it over the edge of Lover's Leap. 

3} Leave him not far from where Rafe Hollister's moonshine still was rumored to be and splash the body with grain alcohol so it might be assumed he drank himself to death. 

No matter how he staged it, Dr. Bennett knew that Sheriff Andy Taylor would most likely consult with him as an ad hoc coroner to determine the cause of death. 

But wherever his body was dumped, the ghost of the man in the blue shirt would have returned to the scene of the crime. And that may have spurred Dr. Bennett to flee Mayberry, more than the fear of getting caught. 

And even though he couldn't see the man in the blue shirt, Dr. Thomas Petersen might also have felt the ghost's presence in his office. That could be why Dr. Petersen was not in Mayberry for very long.  (He was gone two years later when Doc Roberts was the town physician.)

All just supposition on my part, but it's as good a splainin as any for that man in the blue shirt whom Andy couldn't see....

BCnU!

Originally, this was going to be a theory of relateeveety establishing Dr. Thomas Petersen as the nephew of Father Francis Mulcahy (of 'M*A*S*H').  But that can wait. It's October!  Always best for a ghost story!

COLUMBOO!

From the IMDb:

'Columbo'

"The Most Dangerous Match"

As killer chess-champ Emmett Clayton sneaks into Dudek's apartment for the second time (to mess with the medication), he sneaks past a room where you can clearly see two figures: an older man with mustache in a white shirt, and a woman sitting on his front left side. The apartment is supposed to be empty.

Just one quibble on that item. It was Tomlin Dudek's hotel suite, not his apartment. 

But let's get down to the splainin for those two people in the suite, within the "reality" of the TV Universe.  (Forget the mundane reason from the Real World: that they were two members of the production crew.)

There's a very good reason why Emmett Clayton didn't see them....

They are ghosts.

I've spent the last 36 years in the hotel business, and I've heard enough stories about the spooks haunting both hotels where I worked. And there was one murder/suicide in that first hotel while I was on duty. 

And that's what I think we have here.  My theory as to who they were in Life: She worked for that hotel, maybe as a housekeeper.  He was her husband. They could have been separated; perhaps in the process of getting divorced.  

And one day he showed up while she was at work, finding her in that suite. Distraught that she was leaving him, he pulled out a gun and shot her dead before shooting himself. 

And now their souls are forever bound to that hotel suite. 

Since this 'Columbo' episode aired, shows with supernatural themes have flourished; so many ghosts have appeared in their episodes. And in the show that made this genre so popular, 'The X-Files', they had two ghosts who haunted a house for decades, especially at Christmas.  

So it may not be a precedent, but it does support the idea that ghostly couples exist in the main Toobworld. 

That's my splainin and I'm sticking to it. 

BCnU!

My thanks to Steve Skayman for reminding me of this goof.  And October is a good month to finally write about it. 

AS SEEN IN THE TOONIVERSE: DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

From Wikipedia:

Doris Kearns Goodwin (born January 4, 1943) is an American biographer, historian, and political commentator. She has authored biographies of several U.S. presidents, including "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream"; "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga"; "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II" (which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995); "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln"; and her most recent book, "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism".

As seen in 'The Simpsons' - "The Town"

MISSING LINKS: "THIS IS US" @ GILMORE

Randy Cranin, who - like me - is a member of the Iddiot Nation, saw this possible Zonk last week on 'This Is Us':

As written, I'm sure it was meant to be a reference to the characters Lorelei and Rory Gilmore from 'Gilmore Girls'.  However, the characters in 'This Is Us' share the same TV dimension as the Gilmore girls (so far).  And as the Gilmores live in Stars Hollow, Connecticut, and 'This Is Us' is set in Pittsburgh, it's unlikely that their paths crossed that of the guy who said the above quote. 

And who just happens to be named Toby....!

However, we can rescue this from being a Zonk by turning to another TV show for the splainin. 

In 'One True Hill', there was a small college for which Nathan Scott may have played B-Ball.  They were the Gilmore College Cobras. 

And so that's what we have here to keep that quote from causing harm to the main Toobworld.  Toby was referring to either the general populace of Gilmore College co-eds or perhaps more specifically to a Gilmore girl on the cheer-leading squad. 

Thanks, Randy!

THEORY OF RELATEEVEETY - "DOWNTON ABBEY" & "PENNY DREADFUL"

Thanks to the wonderful 'Downton Abbey' wikia, here's what we know about Beryl Patmore:

Beryl mentions having two sisters, one who died prior to 1912 and another, Kate Philpotts, who is her nephew Archibald's mother.

In "Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs", Amy Louise Erickson states that "In the middle of the eighteenth century, 'Mrs' did not describe a married woman: it described a woman who governed subjects (i.e., employees or servants or apprentices) or a woman who was skilled or who taught".

She may have been born somewhere between 1869 or 1870.  

In the 2013 Christmas Special, Mrs Patmore mentions that no-one "has wanted to squire [me] since the Diamond Jubilee". Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was on the 20th June 1887 and Mrs Patmore had to have had her season (though she would not get a debutante ball due to being a commoner) by that time. A woman typically has her season when she is 17 or 18. Going by the ages of a woman having her season and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Mrs Patmore would have been born in 1869 or 1870.

If it is true that Mrs. Patmore was never married and that her status as "Mrs." is an honorific based on her job in the Crawley family household, then it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that she was from the Hertfordshire area as that is the source for that surname.

When Beryl was about 22 years old, I believe her parents came to London to visit her in the early months of 1892, before she had found employment in Yorkshire at Downton Abbey.  I think the more... decadent side of life in the "Great Wen", the "Big Smoke" (both nicknames of London), was a bit more than Mrs. Patmore expected and she took a dim view of those who reveled in the brazen openness of their lifestyles.  

Here's why I think this to be the case: I believe this was a quick shot of the Patmores as they walked the city streets.  Mrs. Patmore is casting a VERY disapproving glance at Dorian Gray and his companion, the exotic Angelique.

This theory of relateeveety is dedicated to one of my bestest friends, Ivy Hurley, who is a big fan of both 'Downton Abbey' and 'Penny Dreadful'.

Happy birthday, Ivy!

MISSING LINKS: "BEWITCHED" & TOTINO'S PIZZA ROLLS

TOTINO'S:

http://youtu.be/cscqtNch5h4

http://youtu.be/OPYzp3CxsXU

A new batch of Totino's commercials for their pizza rolls invoke a Toobworld mainstay: that some foods are alive and even anxious for you to eat them. 

But also seen in these commercials are household objects which are also alive. 

In Toobworld, when a witch or a warlock feels he or she has reached the end of their usefulness, then they are supposed to use the last dregs and vestiges of their magical powers to transform themselves into something useful. 

On 'Bewitched', I've seen warlocks who were transformed into chairs and bedpans. In a feature I used to run, "Crossing Zone", I linked 'Bewitched' to the 'Twilight Zone' episode "A Thing About Machines" in which a man was eventually driven to death by the electrical machines he despised. 

It is my contention that each of those  infernal devices was an evil witch or warlock set on destroying their "owner".

So it is with the homes in these Totino's blipverts.  They are filled with such transformed witchy souls disguised as ordinary objects. 

BCnU!

TVXOHOF - WES CRAVEN

In 2015, celebrated horror movie director Wes Craven passed away. Currently my health prevents me from going into further detail on the topic, suffice it to say in this year in which the TVXOHOF honors the League of Themselves we have chosen the late Mr. Craven to be the inductee for the horror month of October. 

One of his qualifications is to be found in an alternate timeline but still makes him eligible. 

Here are the roles that put him in contention:

'The Chris Isaak Show'

"Storytime"

'Boston Legal'

"Spring Fever"

'Castle'

"Scared to Death"

Welcome to the Hall, Mr. Craven. 

At least in spirit.....

THE NBC FALL SCHEDULE - FOR 1969

With the 2016 TV schedule about to debut, here's a look back at what once.....