Wild Wild West
Please don't talk to me about the horrendous movie of the same title-I'm talking about the TV show. I don't want to talk about the movie (which I have to say I've never seen) merely because I think it was a travesty of the series.
Yes, I grew up watching this show. I was too young to remember when it was on at night (I think it came on after I had to go to bed and my parents may or may not have let me watch it anyway) but when I came home from school...(this was in grade school and middle school-not high school when I started watching soap operas with my friends-we had a good time mocking them). I would come home from school-my brother would be there and luckily we always agreed on what to watch. The Brady Bunch, anything with Lucille Ball and Gilligan's Island were all out but Star Trek, Wild Wild West and anything with Bugs Bunny were okay. So of course I had to get WWW when it came out on DVD (not the first season in black &white though, I couldn't deal with that). I was a little concerned-would it really hold up? I had loved the mixture of adventure, science fiction and western, Robert Conrad's stiff acting and Ross Martin's love of costumes and accents-what would it look like after all these years?
To my relief, the good episodes were still very good and even the crappy ones had something to recommend them. The funniest thing is seeing who is in them-how did this happen? It seemed like everyone and their brother were making guest appearances on WWW in 1965 (ohhhh-that explains it. I don't think I HAD a bedtime then-I was practically still a baby. Okay, a toddler.). Anyway, in just the few episodes, I watched, I saw: Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Junior (in the same episode!), Agnes Moorehead, Hurd Hatfield (in a role that was a nice nod to The Picture of Dorian Gray), Richard Pryor (what was HE doing on this show? And playing an evil ventriloquist?) Beverly Garland from My Three Sons? It was all a little weird. However, the show was still great fun, with Doctor Loveless (a wonderful Michael Dunn) and his endlessly complicated plots to take over the world, a living house, a submarine and underwater city and a tontine (an agreement made by a group of people over money or land-whoever lives the longest gets the goods). And people wonder why I am the way I am-the more I write about this show, the more I realize the sc-fi thing started fairly early for me. Go watch it-at least one episode. If you know old TV actors and some old movie stars, you might be surprised who shows up on it.
Fun bonus fact! Every time I watched this show as a child, my older brother said "Oh, I think this is the one where they die". It wasn't until he said it during a show I had seen before and therefore KNEW they didn't die, that I realized he had been lying to me. I was simultaneously relieved in knowing that they never died and irritated that I had actually believed him when he said (I was eight or nine, I think). I never trusted him again without verifying what he had to say myself.
Yes, I grew up watching this show. I was too young to remember when it was on at night (I think it came on after I had to go to bed and my parents may or may not have let me watch it anyway) but when I came home from school...(this was in grade school and middle school-not high school when I started watching soap operas with my friends-we had a good time mocking them). I would come home from school-my brother would be there and luckily we always agreed on what to watch. The Brady Bunch, anything with Lucille Ball and Gilligan's Island were all out but Star Trek, Wild Wild West and anything with Bugs Bunny were okay. So of course I had to get WWW when it came out on DVD (not the first season in black &white though, I couldn't deal with that). I was a little concerned-would it really hold up? I had loved the mixture of adventure, science fiction and western, Robert Conrad's stiff acting and Ross Martin's love of costumes and accents-what would it look like after all these years?
To my relief, the good episodes were still very good and even the crappy ones had something to recommend them. The funniest thing is seeing who is in them-how did this happen? It seemed like everyone and their brother were making guest appearances on WWW in 1965 (ohhhh-that explains it. I don't think I HAD a bedtime then-I was practically still a baby. Okay, a toddler.). Anyway, in just the few episodes, I watched, I saw: Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Junior (in the same episode!), Agnes Moorehead, Hurd Hatfield (in a role that was a nice nod to The Picture of Dorian Gray), Richard Pryor (what was HE doing on this show? And playing an evil ventriloquist?) Beverly Garland from My Three Sons? It was all a little weird. However, the show was still great fun, with Doctor Loveless (a wonderful Michael Dunn) and his endlessly complicated plots to take over the world, a living house, a submarine and underwater city and a tontine (an agreement made by a group of people over money or land-whoever lives the longest gets the goods). And people wonder why I am the way I am-the more I write about this show, the more I realize the sc-fi thing started fairly early for me. Go watch it-at least one episode. If you know old TV actors and some old movie stars, you might be surprised who shows up on it.
Fun bonus fact! Every time I watched this show as a child, my older brother said "Oh, I think this is the one where they die". It wasn't until he said it during a show I had seen before and therefore KNEW they didn't die, that I realized he had been lying to me. I was simultaneously relieved in knowing that they never died and irritated that I had actually believed him when he said (I was eight or nine, I think). I never trusted him again without verifying what he had to say myself.
posted by SHbookworm at 11:55 AM
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