Things I Learned:
- Don Knotts is still funny; while many of the situations his scrawny, hapless Everyman are thrown into are hopelessly dated, period pieces now quaint as gas light, his well-intentioned befuddlement is a universal constant.
- It is nearly impossible to watch McMillan & Wife as a simple lightweight detective drama. Did the scriptwriters and directors intend to set up situation after situation, line after line, fraught with multiple meaning, or is it irony by hindsight? I ended up changing the channel instead of speculating further.
- There were plenty of good-hearted Night Gallery segments. For some reason, I only remembered the scary ones from childhood.
- I occasionally hear the expression "Bazinga!" used as a fill-in for "Wow!" or "Eureka." ...But it appears to refer to a Japanese equivalent of the 19th-Century Gibson Girl. Who knew?
"...irony by hindsight?"
ReplyDelete...as it were.
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ReplyDelete"...while many of the situations his scrawny, hapless Everyman are thrown into are hopelessly dated, period pieces now quaint as gas light"
ReplyDeleteI had not watched The Andy Griffith Show for a long time (various uninteresting reasons involving my lack of cable TV, etc.) until I was on the road recently and staying in a motel.
The plot of the episode I caught involved a typical backwoods character who was obsessed with a woman; the woman was engaged to someone else, and the backwoodsman was determined to stop the wedding, even if he had to fire shots at the wedding party. (Andy ended up defusing the situation by having Barney dress up as the bride to create a diversion.)
I know it was a simpler time and all that, but all I could think of as I watched this was "That man is a creepy stalker. If he was doing this today, they'd be talking about protective orders and throwing him under the jail."