 This is the SF Productions podcast network The time that people used to tape shows, let me see. There's a tape already in here. Let me hook this up here and let me see what we got. Back with us to the 60s and 70s, the dwelling place of the lost generation. An era whose heroes, role models, and very lives were molded and formed by weekly installments of favorite television programs. Welcome to the place your parents didn't understand. The Vast Wasteland. Welcome home. Exciting episode of Vast Wasteland. I'm your host Mark Schmidbar along with Wilbur Neil and Marty Wiley. We're here to talk about 60s and 70s television. And tonight it's gimmicky detectives. But before we get into tonight's big show, I want to tell you as usual on Tuesdays at 6, Wednesdays at 10, and Thursdays at 3, here on ACTV, cable 21. And if you want to write to us, we're at box 15, 1526, Columbus, Ohio, 43215. And now, gimmicky detectives. Of course, all through the 60s and 70s, we saw this concept. It just wasn't enough to have a detective show because there were so many hundreds of them, it had to have a hook. It had to have a gimmick. And that's why we're going to talk about tonight, gimmicky detectives. And let's just jump right into this. Wilbur, let's go. Okay, well, as I mentioned before, now we're talking about gimmicky detectives. Probably the most gimmicky, the most gimmick laden show of the 60s. But I have to put an asterisk by this. Well, Batman. We've got to look at the guy. I mean, he's basically, that's what he's doing. He's out there doing detective work if you go with the original comic book for him. Right. He's doing detective work. Now the show just made him... He's hardly a detective. He had all the computer and everything to do it for him. He had all his other gimmicks to do. All the gathered clues and whatnot. Well, yeah, but they were like... That's detective-y. I don't know. That's that bat computer. That darn bat computer. That did all the work for him. Let's pour these noodles in here and see what it comes up with. Oh! Oh! It says the lady's trapped in the suit factory. We could have figured that out, but it's... Yeah. Well, certainly the first appearances of actually detectives on TV other than the classic gumshoe Mickey Spelane type character, anyone other than that, was probably all the stuff that Warner Brothers was churning out. The early 60s stuff like Surfside Six and 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye. And these were all the same show. Different locations. Different locations, same show. He basically had the two hunky guys and the girl Friday secretary slash bimbo that would be there just to keep the guys interested watching the show. No, no, you were supposed to be interested in the intrigue of the plot. Which there wasn't any. In the car. Yeah, in the car. So it was all the same show basically. And the gimmick of it was just two young guys as detectives. That was the whole gimmick. Two. Cool. Two young guys. Yeah, there you go. So that's really where it started. But I'd say the first, as far as I could find, of a truly, of a detective with a gimmick would probably be Burke's Law. Okay. You know, and the gimmick was he was rich. He could do it. What does a rich guy do with his extra time? He's a detective. That's right. And all that same theme has come up later in other shows. Well, they brought that same thing back. You get the rich guy that can afford to go out and spend some time doing detective work. I mean, I think the latest examples of that were like, oh, hot to hide. Yeah. Or what's his name? Matt Houston. There's another one there. Well, I guess you can look it up. Wasn't that the whole idea behind Remington Steel too? Well, no. I mean, isn't Remington a rich guy? He wasn't. No, not really. Because he was just a nobody. That was a sham. That was a rich guy. Wow. He picked up on the thing. See, because Laura Hoke had the detective agency where nobody would believe a woman. And so she decided to create this Remington Steel character. And then here he comes. This guy suddenly shows up. I'm Remington Steel. Well, that's a new gimmick. That's a totally new gimmick. But that's not further. We're dealing with old gimmicks. That's not further. Yeah, that's further ahead. But so, let's see. What do we have after Burke's Law? Well, let's see. I'm looking through here. Well, right off of Burke's Law, Honey West. No, Honey West, yeah. But she, well, they both kind of blended into the spy thing. But actually they were detectives. It's just that she had a lot of, she had some gimmicks and things there too. And then she had her show for bodyguards. And then she had some gimmicks. Yes, gimmicks. Two very prominent gimmicks. Back to the rest there. You're noticing a body language there. She talked about her gimmicks. Tight black suit that she wore. She had gimmicks. Exactly. Anyway, that's one of the things you find though. A lot of these spy shows that we had talked about before kind of melded in there. Also kind of detective. And another thing we're going to run into here is the police shows that run into the detective thing. There's just that. The ones that are supposedly detectives, I mean that are policemen. But you rarely see them doing any real police work. You know, I mean you don't see them filling out reports. You don't see them even at the police station. You see them out there solving crimes. And it's like, well, there's hardly any difference. They're basically, they're detectives. That's all they do. Right. So some of those might be included as well in our travels tonight. Well, let's see. Really a lot in the 60s, unless you get into the spy area, there wasn't a lot. Not really. You had, I had another example here. Where is it? Johnny Staccato. Ooh. And this is, this is. Okay. It sounds like a music lesson show or something. Well, it was 1959 to 1960. And it was about this character. And yes, he was a jazz musician and a detective. So this is your gimmick here. Well, a lethal combination. Right. So we had that, we had another show called, oh shoot. I saw it here. Well, I can't remember the name of the show, but it's about a, about this British guy who comes over and he's a detective. Here, Mark Saber. There we go. 1951 to 1960. So it does actually count as a 60s show. Wow. You got this Bourbon Street beat in New Orleans. Right. But that's also, Bourbon Street beat is a lot like Hawaiian Eye or Surfside Six. Where the gimmick was the location. Right. The location was mostly the gimmick. But then it seemed like at one point you could turn on the TV and there wasn't anything on But Detective shows. Right. And that was the 70s. Yes. Really. I mean, you really don't see a lot of this. The 70s are just exploded. That's where the gimmicks really hit. Because they had to have them in order. Exactly. The guy different from that guy, from that chick. Well, they're really making them different from where the, your Jack Webb shows. Detect, they were police dramas. We're real policemen out here doing real police jobs. Only the names were changed to protect the innocent. Exactly. We're talking about fiction. Right. But Jack, that was true. Only the names were changed to protect the innocent. It's like, what's that now? We got all those cops there. This is nowhere near a life. That's a real cop. I know. This is nowhere near a life. It just funds out your face to protect the guilty. Exactly. Well, that's not to embarrass the guilty, I guess, is what it is. So there's so many things they do there. Attack the police dog. Come on. So I think the watershed year really was 1971. Because we had, in the same year, produced Cannon, Colombo, Longstreet, McMillan and Wife. And I think McLeod. Let me see here. Yeah, it wasn't McLeod and Colombo and Hecaramze. That was sort of a rotation. That was the all NBC mystery movie. And that's why all these things showed up. Except for Cannon. Basically, yeah, Colombo was part of that. McLeod, Hecaramze, McMillan and Wife. I liked Hecaramze just because it was different. It was detective show, but he was like an old west sheriff detective kind of guy. Right. And he had a horse. Right. Well. That's a plus in my book. Yeah, well McLeod was the cowboy. Cowboys in the city with a horse kind of guy. I think that kind of grew off of the, well, one Clint Eastwood movie. The cowboy detective who has to go to the city to find somebody. I can't remember the name. I can't read it right now. But I do remember there was a movie like that. Yeah, I just think it kind of spun off of that. Right. Well, we had Long Street. Now Long Street's a really fascinating James Franciscus as the blind detective. And what happened was he's looking for clues or something. He's in this place and oh no, there's an explosion. Boom! He loses his eyesight. But wasn't that the same thing that happened to Ironside? He's in some place looking for clues. Oh, there's an explosion. Boom! He loses use of his legs. Well, we'll use the explosion as the catalyst to create a new better detective. Exactly. Don't you think Ironside was obnoxious though? Oh, push me! I'm just like an obnoxious kind of guy. I'll get on my nerves. I'd push him down some steps anyway. There you go, yeah. Come on, let's go. Loose weight, man. I gotta push you. Of course, a lot of these shows in the early 70s and late 60s were just incredibly demeaning the blacks. Oh, true, true. I mean, Ironside had the, I turned to remember the guy's name that was just basically his, the guy who pushed him around. It's your job to push me around. I'm gonna berate you all the time. And don't make it look like it's hard to do. That's right. Detective Sergeant Ed Brown. Detective Sergeant Ed. That's right. Thank goodness he wrote this lofty position so he could push another guy around. Geez. Yeah. That's fine. Find me up for that promotion. Yeah, but I'm Longstreet. That was a good one for what I saw of it. I mean, because you've got this guy, he's blind. James Franciscus actually wore dark contact lenses. So he actually had the effect of really being blind. So that he, I mean, he really got into the character and he had the white German shepherd and he had the coolest martial arts instructor ever to hit TV. Bruce Lee. Oh yeah. Martial arts instructor. There you go. Yeah. This was like his big break after, well, after years after the Green Hornet, because he was really out there doing the martial arts things. He was a teacher and all. And then somehow they got together there and he decided, let's have Bruce Lee be the instructor on this show. This will be great. And so he did a few guest appearances there. Like it was about the second show really. Right. Where Longstreet's walking around here. Some guys jump him. And then all of a sudden you see him come flying back out of there. There's Bruce Lee's out there. And he's knocking him back, kicking him and everything. And so then he decides to, you know, take on Longstreet as a student and helps him out. It was great. Now let's see. We've got, of course, Colombo. Colombo was kind of an anomaly because it was on the NBC mystery movie. And yet there was never a mystery because in the first scenes of every Colombo, they show you not only what happened, but who did it? The mystery was how did Colombo trick this guy and figure out, trick this guy into admitting, you know, admitting some little clue. And, you know, it's like, excuse me. Didn't you, I remember you, weren't you the guy that... Do you remember the Mad Magazine parody? My wife had stew this day. Excuse me. It was the stew, I remember. Anyway, you're the guy because there's the stain. The stew stain is right here. Do you remember the Mad Magazine parody where they called him Claude Dumbo? And that's just how I thought of it forever. But, of course, he's now come back in this new ABC mystery movie. Colombo is just like an institution. And near the end, he was, I'm sure, for the new series. But for the last few episodes of the original series, he was making big bucks. I mean, they were paying him at the time. He was an enormous figure for a television personality, like a hundred grand an episode. Which today, for is a lot of... It's almost as much as we made. Well, I mean, today for, you know, I mean, a supporting player on a mediocre sitcom can make a hundred grand without too much trouble. But then, then that was a lot of money. A lot of money to me today, but, you know, but anyways. Say you had Colombo, you had McLeod, the cowboy detective. You had McMillan's wife, the husband and wife detective. Who weren't they rich? Because it seems like the paradigm that was McMillan's wife. He was kind of rich. He wasn't like overly rich, but they were well off. They were willing to fuck their Nancy Walker as a maid with a housekeeper. And then by golly, well, poor Miss McMillan gets killed somehow. Then they just bring it back as McMillan. McMillan. Boy, those were some years later, and those kind of... Have they had like a whole four episodes of that maybe? Yeah, that just didn't work. Well, let's see some other things for the NBC Mr. Movie. You had Banachek. Yeah. George Pruppard is the Polish detective. So, and he always give like these Polish sayings and phrases. And that was basically the gimmick there. You remember? You're losing me. Well, if the gimmick is race, then Beretta had it. Right. Mr. Italian. He's an Italian, yes. And that's the name of that tune. And every woman that he ever ran into was his cousin. This is my cousin. Billy, this is my cousin. From, you know, this is my cousin. Beretta was the one I watched the most, though. It had a word. You got Beretta, but Beretta sprang from the whole Serpico thing. Yeah, Serpico and Toma. Serpico became Toma, and then Toma became Beretta. But it was Robert Blake that made it because, I don't know, I didn't take a whole lot of Toma. Took the same thing with Robert Blake, and for somehow I liked it much better. Well, it worked because he was a little, he was just a pretty much a street guy. Right. A street guy who went by his own rules, but yet he was a detective, and he got along with everybody. I mean, he's got Rooster, this pimp that helps him. He's got Billy, the old guy. The old wider street guy. Well, one needs the superintendent of the building. Yeah, he kind of lived in the building, too. And then Fred here is cockatoo. Hello. Well, at least Fred didn't, like, solve the mysteries for himself. Oh, that's true. He would go out and do the work. He'd do the footwork himself. And he would dress up like a woman sometimes. Oh, he'd dress up like anybody. But when he was a woman, it was funny, because he was just a homely woman. Kind of like when Sylvester Stallone did the woman thing in that one movie where he was a detective. That was funny. He did it twice, too. They liked it so well, they had him do it twice. Maybe he liked it so well, he had to do it twice. We won't get into that. That's why I'm going to do it once away. Well, let's see. In the mystery movie, we had ones that didn't work nearly as well, the ones that just kind of came and went, the Snoop sisters. And this wasn't just like two old ladies, kind of that kind of thing. It was kind of like Miss Marvel times, too. Right, basically. Doing the whole mystery thing. But that's less of a detective and more of just a straight mystery type show. Well, let's see. Then you kind of switch over to CBS for a lot of this stuff. Wasn't Queen Dwight involved? Didn't he do Cannon? Well, let's see here. I kind of think he did, somehow. I seem to remember that he did the whole, that he did like Cannon and Kojak. I know he did Barnaby Jones. All that whole string of them, because CBS saw that NBC was making a min-off of these shows, and so they just cranked out a bunch of their own gimmicky detectives. We had Barnaby Jones. We had Cannon. Cannon Fat. Barnaby Jones. Just plain old. Buddy Ebson, what can you do? He's getting old anyway. Let's make him a detective and an old detective. We had stuff like Switch. Gosh. Switch. Robert Conrad. No. Are you sure it wasn't William Shatner? They're interchangeable. They're interchangeable. Yeah, Robert Conrad and then William Shatner. Eddie Albert, there you go. Eddie Albert straight from Robert Wagner. Robert Wagner, Robert Conrad. What's the difference? Interchangeable. Hey, Charlie Callis. Pat. Oh, I'm sharing glass. Well, by golly, look at there. He's got all the great detective stuff. Well, I don't know. Cagney doesn't count, does it? Yeah, that's a detective show. Did it start in the 70s? I don't know, I don't think so. I still watch that on Lifetime and stuff. Well, let's see. It's like the only female show where the female detectives get out there and bust their chops. And be mothers. And date and have problems. It's wonderful. We had like the second wave of NBC stuff. They got into the David Gerber stuff. Like police woman. Detective Pepper Johnson. That's right. In the latest fashions, it's Pepper. And stuff like, oh yeah, Quincy. Oh, not like Quincy. Jack Lugman has that crusading corner. That was a fun show, though. I liked Quincy. Fun. Everyone was like, oh, he died because of this. No, he didn't. He didn't die because of that. I'm going to find out what he did. We're going to do all this testing. Oh, no, he did completely different. Do you think Quincy has given us the standard mortuary morgue scene of eating while doing the autopsies? Which you see in every chance they get. Oh, we've got a mortuary morgue kind of scene. We're going to chop some Yes, immediately. I think that's what kind of made that a standard now. In movies and everything. Let's see, we had what in Quincy, though, kind of based on a Gucci that's up here. There actually was a corner out on the west coast there for a long time. I think somewhat, but not a lot. No, it's fiction. Pure fiction. Well, we had the two well, one was much better known than the other, but we had Shaft and Tenefly, which was basically a clone of Shaft. The black detective. Yes, you've got one of my favorites there. Oh, yeah. Well, we're getting to that. So, yeah. And Shaft, the series just didn't really work as well because part of Shaft's thing was he's this street wise, he's pretty much a dirty downright detective guy. Yeah. If he's not sleeping with a woman by golly, it's just not a show. That's right. The movie's big and just couldn't do that very much on the 70s there on TV. It just wasn't done. So it was like one part of the thing they just kind of left out. They did the detective things. He got to wear the black leather. I mean, this is something that Robert Roundtree really appreciated. He liked wearing the black leather. Richard Roundtree. Did I say Robert? Richard Roundtree. Richard Roundtree. Richard, Robert, what the heck? Richard Roundtree. But anyway. Well, so we had some of the, then we went into the down and out type detectives like the Rockford files. No. Because this was just basically a guy, you know, everything went wrong for him and you see that reverberate all through. You see basically Magnum is pretty much he's a lot better off but it's still everything's like but we still have the old oh everything's going wrong and I'm getting slammed by people and hey guys. So we had that show and of course ABC went into the kind of went into the glamorous because it was the Fred Silverman era. We had to have Charlie's Angels. No. Are we really going to show them the detective? Are we going to stoop that low and call them detectives? It was a detective. They were detectives. They were bimbos. I just never really put them in a category. That's a TNA show. And again that reverberated into the 80s. With that show Partners in Crime with Lonnie Anderson and Linda Carter. Yeah. Basically the same basic concept. Although there weren't as many I mean Charlie's Angels I mean it was always three but yet you got into the part where there's like if you go back and count there's like six or seven Angels all together they lose one and get another. And that show was a lot more blatant. You know it's like there was a lot more blatant on that show the sexual content because it was like well Angels you're going to have to go to the massage parlor beauty pageant and from there to the topless bar and swimsuit factory you know and find out where those guys are you know. So we had that we had kind of like the beginning of the of the canal Stephen Jay Canal stuff like Richie Brockham and Private Eye or say right off of Rockford Files which of course began Riptide and all of the canal stuff where every stuff blows up and nobody dies shows. Like the 18. Everywhere the 18 was blowing the stuff up. The obligatory shot of the car jeep slash truck blowing up flipping over and the two guys kind of getting out and shaking their heads. What happened? Not a scratch. Good thing we had our seatbelts on. Good night those burritos. Well a couple I had a couple other ones here we had we had 1979 Big Shamus Little Shamus which is the tough guy team with the cute kid and this was I'm not I know I'm thinking the wrong actor I'm thinking Charles Durning but I know that's not right. It's Brian Dennehy Brian Dennehy. There you go Brian Dennehy and Ricky Schroeder I believe. I believe it's Ricky Schroeder. That sounds right. And then these are just kind of like miscellaneous stuff a lot of it reverberating into the 80s. Doug McKinn was the little kid. Okay Cassie and Company which was kind of a clone of police woman because it was also Andy Dickerson in the same role. We had Black's Magic, Al Linden and Harry Morgan as the father and son and the son was a famous magician and the father was a con man. Let's see. Some other stuff from the 80s. Oh cover up. Hmm. Fascinating show was the photographer and the hunky fashion model guys and this was the What year was that? This was 84-85 and had the and this was a fascinating show because this was John Eric Hexham this was a show where he was playing around with the gun that had blanks and shot himself and killed himself and then they had to have another character show up. Literally killed himself during the filming of the show. I didn't like the first time that it happened because I mean back with with it was a western show Aaliyah Smith and Jones one of them did that. So it's kind of the same kind of thing. Well it looks like we got to wrap up any closing comments. I forgot to mention 10 speed and brown shoe. I was going to go back to it. Jeff Goldblum Ann LeVar Burton Ben Vereen Ben Vereen all his life and you can't remember that. I'm sorry. We didn't mention stashkin hat either. I thought it was more police than detective. They learned to take this though. What about Kotec? Oh jeez. We just lost a whole bunch. We may have to have a second show. Who loves you baby? Who loves you baby? Who loves you baby? Next time on Vast Wasteland if we don't do a continuation of this maybe we will. We got to show on commercials of the 60's and 70's. So I hope you enjoy that. We got to take our marvelous crew of Brad and Giles because we don't have a chiron for this week. Sorry. For all of us here at Vast Wasteland we'll see you next time with commercials or something else. We don't know. Good night everybody.