Day 18 - Favorite title sequence

I love the opening credits for A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2001-02).  They're different every episode, with snazzy animation and music to fit that ep's theme.  Here are a couple examples:





They set the tone so nicely for the feel of the whole series, as well as cluing you in to what the particular ep will involve.  While the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout span several decades, the series is set solidly in the 1950s, which is brilliant because it lets them give the series a distinctive, retro feel with fun costumes, cars, and furnishings.  And opening credits.

I love this series -- Cowboy has given me both seasons, and they're completely awesome.  Maury Chaykin makes a superb Nero Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton seems to have been born to play Archie Goodwin.  Hutton also directed and produced several eps.  And the rest of the cast rocks too, including the ensemble players.  Regular characters like Inspector Cramer, Fritz Brenner, and Saul Panzer are always played by the same actors, but the only-in-this-story characters get played by a pretty consistent set of actors, rather like a local playhouse's acting troupe.  Seeing the same faces in different roles felt a bit disconcerting to me at first, but once I got into the groove of the idea, it was fun to see who would pop up in what role next.

Day 17 - Favorite mini series

The Blue and the Gray (1982).  This is another one I grew up with -- my parents rented it several times when I was a kid, and for years, whenever I thought or read about the American Civil War, images from this series were the first to come to my mind.  Although it's pretty long and would take my family a couple days to get through, I always wanted to watch just a little more.

The Blue and the Gray centers around a young artist named John Geyser (John Hammond), who grows up on a Virginia farm along with three brothers and one sister.  John leaves home to work as an artistic correspondent for his uncle's newspaper in the North, where he gets to attend the trial and execution of John Brown (Sterling Hayden).  While he's home on a visit, one of his friends, a former slave named Jonathan Henry (Paul Winfield), is lynched for harboring runaway slaves.  John Geyser renounces his Southern ties, breaks with his parents (Lloyd Bridges and Colleen Dewhurst), and leaves home for good.

John Geyser and Jonas Steele

John keeps doing dispatch art for his uncle, and keeps meeting up with my favorite character, a mysterious man named Jonas Steele (Stacy Keach).  Jonas is in the Secret Service, sorta.  As the Civil War erupts, John's brothers enlist in the Confederate Army, while the cousins he now lives with enlist in the Union Army.  John falls in love with a lovely nurse named Kathy (Kathleen Beller), whom he rescues during the first battle of Manassas.  Kathy's dad is a senator (Robert Vaughn) who doesn't think John's a suitable match for his daughter, but of course that doesn't really bother John and Kathy, being very modern young people.  Meanwhile, Jonas Steele falls in love with John's cousin Mary (Julia Duffy).

Gregory Peck as Abraham Lincoln

The war rages on around John and Jonas, various other characters die, and before the war ends, both John and Jonas go a little crazy in their own ways, but survive.  And John gets to draw the portrait of President Lincoln (Gregory Peck, to me the best Lincoln ever).  The war ends, and John eventually reconciles with what's left of his family.

Andrew V. McLaglen directed the whole miniseries.  According to imdb.com, it was originally more than 6 hours long, but all you can get on DVD is a recut version that's about 5 hours long.  I saw it many times on VHS, and I honestly can't tell what they cut out, and, so either it was recut for VHS also, or what they cut out was entirely unmemorable.  If you like Civil War movies, family dramas, and epics that follow around a couple characters and watch them change (what Deb Koren calls my Rambley Movies), you'll dig it.  I like it better than North & South -- it's less soap-opera-esque, for one thing .  And Stacy Keach more than makes up for the absence of Patrick Swayze, in my opinion.

Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show

 

Definitely Friends.  It makes me laugh, I enjoy it, but whenever I watch it, I feel like I'm sneaking candy on the sly.  Maybe it's because it does get into some naughty subject matter at times, or because there's no "nutritional value" to it -- it's pretty much fluff.  But Joey and Phoebe tickle me to no end, and I enjoy the reruns whenever I stumble across them.

Day 15 - Favorite female character

This is even tougher than yesterday's subject.  Because while I'm fond of many female characters, I don't get as attached to them as I do to male characters.  Plus, a lot of the shows I love don't even have regular female characters.  So I could blog about Kaylee Frye, or Willow Rosenberg, or Kate Austin, or Abby Sciuto, or Angela Montenegro, or Kate Wallace, or Yeoman Janice Rand... but I think I'll blog about the one female character that I want to be more like.  And that would be Victoria Barkley (Barbara Stanwyck) from The Big Valley.

Barbara Stanwyck as Victoria Barkley

Victoria is one classy lady.  Whether she's making a shrewd business deal, being kidnapped by outlaws, or reminding one of her children of what it means to be a Barkley, she never loses her dignity and integrity.  She's gutsy, determined, and intelligent.  And she rules the Barkley universe with a suede-gloved fist.

Heath (Lee Majors) and Victoria (Barbara Stanwyck)

But I love her most for her treatment of Heath, her husband Tom's illegitimate son and my favorite character on the show.  When Heath showed up in the pilot episode, claiming he's got a right to the Barkley fortune, she doesn't ignore him, she doesn't order him off the property, and most importantly, she never blames him for her husband's indiscretion.  Once she establishes the validity of his claims, she welcomes him into the family, treats him as one of her own children, and insists everyone else do the same. And she doesn't try to mother Heath -- after all, he had his own mother, even if he never knew his father.  Instead, she befriends him, which is precisely what he needs.

The Barkleys

Plus, Victoria can ride and shoot with the best of them, she helped her husband Tom carve an empire out of the wilderness, and she never lets anyone ramrod her (or anyone else while she's around, either).  Now that's my kind of heroine.

Day 14 - Favorite male character

How am I supposed to choose one favorite male character?  I love so many!  Saunders, Angel, Sawyer, Captain Kirk, Mal Reynolds, Heath Barkley, Josh Randall, Archie Goodwin, Matthew Cooper, Cheyenne Bodie, Con Madigan, Leroy Jethro Gibbs... I have to choose one?

All right, fine.  If I had to choose one male character to spend the rest of my life watching, thinking about, and writing about, I expect it'd be Sgt. Saunders (Vic Morrow) from Combat!  No surprise there, I'm sure.  And since I've already blogged about him quite a bit here and here, I'll just post some of my favorite photos of him today.  They're worth several thousand words anyway.

  

  

 

Day 13 - Favorite childhood show

As a kid, there was only one show we watched on a routine basis, and it was already done airing and out on VHS.  In fact, it's the first show I saw every episode of.  That show is Five Mile Creek.  It's a little-known show that ran for three seasons on the Disney Channel from 1983 to 1985.  When I was a kid growing up in MI, we would watch two episodes every week, rented from the local video store.  I think we made it through all 39 episodes three or four times.

Five Mile Creek is loosely adapted from a Louis L'Amour book, The Cherokee Trail.  Only it's set in the Australian outback, not the American west.  It begins when an American named Maggie Scott (Louise Caire Clark) and her young daughter Hannah (Priscilla Weems) arrive in Australia in search of their husband/father, Adam Scott (Jonathan Frakes), who's already there hunting for gold.  He's supposed to meet up with them at the port, but he never does, so Maggie and Hannah find a temporary haven with Kate Wallace (Liz Burch).  Kate's just starting up a way station for the fledgling coach line, the Australian Express.  Kate asks Maggie to stay and help out until Adam comes to get her, as Kate's only help at the way station is a somewhat disreputable Irishman, Paddy Malone (Michael Caton).

Con and Jack driving a coach.

 The Australian Express is run by an Aussie named Jack Taylor (Rod Mullinar) and another Yank who came on the same ship as Maggie and Hannah.  His name is Conway Madigan (Jay Kerr), and he's an honest-to-goodness Texas cowboy and one of my earliest crushes.  These are the main characters, along with an orphan named Sam (Martin Lewis) and an old muleskinner pal of Con's named Ben Jones (Gus Mercurio) who join us later.  Eventually, in the later episodes, we also meet up with a former Pony Express rider named Matt Buckland (Shannon Presby) and a spunky sheepherder named Annie (a young and gorgeous Nicole Kidman).  And I can't forget Charlie Withers (Peter Carroll), the banker who grudgingly loans the Australian Express its start-up money.

Jay Kerr as Con Madigan

They encounter bush rangers, they fall in and out of love, they deal with all kinds of trials and tribulations, and they form a make-shift family in the process.  All that, with horses, a bit of gun play now and then (generally involving Con Madigan), and completely gorgeous scenery.  Because my favorite movie since I was 2 has been The Man from Snowy River, which is also set and filmed in Australia, I was primed to love this show, and love it I do.  I own the first season on DVD, and fervently wish Disney would release the other two seasons.  Meanwhile, I'm acquiring the VHS tapes of the remaining eps.

Nicole Kidman as Annie

Cowboy asked me why it's called Five Mile Creek.  It's because the way station is situated next to a creek called Five Mile Creek.  One can assume it is five miles long, or five miles from somewhere.  They never really explain, at least not that I can recall.

Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times

It's a good thing I'm not supposed to list every episode I've watched more than 5 times, or we'd be here all winter.  But instead of writing about just one ep, I'm going to write about three:  the first three episodes of The Lone Ranger.

When we were kids, The Lone Ranger movie was one of our favorites to get from the library when we had a cold or some other reason to rent videos.  We watched it a lot.  I still have most of the dialog memorized.  So for Christmas one year, Mom and Dad gave Johnnycake a VHS tape containing the first three episodes of the TV show.  We watched that tape over and over too, especially after we moved from MI to NC and no longer had access to the movie.  Those three eps -- "Enter the Lone Ranger," "The Lone Ranger Fights On," and "The Lone Ranger Triumphs" -- are deeply ingrained in my imagination.  The Lone Ranger's determination, honesty, fair play, and loneliness are all things that pop up in characters I write today.  What's not to love about a guy who befriends intelligent American Indians and gorgeous horses?  He was one of my earliest heroes, and one I still enjoy watching or listening to (I love the original radio show too).  While I have all 3 of those eps on DVD now, you can watch them here if you've a mind to.

"A fiery horse with the speed of light... a cloud of dust... and the hearty, 'Hi-yo, Silver!  Away!"