Episode 8 is Danno heavy. First, he’s shot and held hostage in “King of the Hill” and then in “Uptight”, he goes undercover after failing to save a young woman from a cliff. Come for the Yaphet Kotto excellence, stay for the acid trips.
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No, it’s not the crappy quality of the picture. That really is Richard Bull with a mustache.
Episode 7 features two more episodes from Season 1: “Deathwatch” and “Pray Love Remember, Pray Love Remember”. We’ve got Nehemiah Persoff and James Shigeta being smug bastards while Denny Miller and Ron Feinberg break our hearts.It’s a tonal shift between episodes that’ll drop your transmission if you aren’t careful.
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I thought I had a picture of Denny Miller from this episode, but I don’t. So here’s one of him in Emergency! about five years later.
Episode 6 covers “By the Numbers” and “Yesterday Died and Tomorrow Won’t Be Born”. Johnny Crawford exhibits poor decision making skills and has a rough time in Honolulu. Steve has an even rougher time on the beach. It’ll be the first of many times our main man is either shot or blown up during the run of the show.
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Visual reference for when I mention Johnny Crawford’s less-than-attractive shirt.
Episode 5 of Book ’em, Danno is all about “The Ways of Love” and “No Blue Skies”. Dating men with criminal tendencies turns out to be hazardous to your health and theirs. Who knew, right? Steve goes undercover for the first time and we’ve got a singing cat burglar. It’s a real good time.
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I don’t have any pictures that go with this specific episode, so here’s a picture of Danno. He goes with every episode.
Things get heavy for episode 4 of Book ’em, Danno, which covers “…And They Painted Daisies on His Coffin” and “24 Karat Kill”. Danny is at the center of a police involved shooting, there’s a convoluted plot involving smuggling gold in fish, and Big Chicken isn’t the only fowl in town.
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Don’t let Big Chicken down.
Season 4 of The A-Team featured a lot of what I call stunt casting: guest stars that are extremely popular at the time and are put on a show to capitalize on that. Now there can be a fine line between a genuine guest starring role and a stunt casting, but you’ll know it when you see it because you really can’t ignore it.
During The A-Team’s fourth season, they had Hulk Hogan (twice!), Rick James, Pat Sajak and Vanna White had cameos because Murdock went on Wheel of Fortune for some reason, and, of course, there was Boy George.
I know, right?
The episode is called “Cowboy George” and the basic plot is Face is doing some talent booking, working with some dude named Dash, who screws him over on his contract by exercising a clause that allows for substitutions. So instead of getting Cowboy George for some honkytonk gig, he gets Boy George and Culture Club, who have been led to believe they’re going to be playing the Arizona Forum, not a dance hall called The Floor ’em. This poses a problem to LQ Jones, who demanded Cowboy George to insure the show would be a sellout. The he and his buddies could rob the audience’s payroll. To get help get out of the jam, Hannibal impersonates Cowboy George, but Boy George and Culture Club perform, which first angers and then charms the audience. The A-Team also thwarts the robbery and takes the bad guys to the sheriff, but it turns out the local replacement sheriff isn’t really a sheriff; he’s in on the whole thing, too, and the real sheriff is dead in one of the cells were Hannibal, BA, and Face are being held. Outside, a mob of angry workers are trying to break in to hang them because they think the three men stole their payroll. Which means it’s up to Murdock (who has an obsession with the Lennon Sisters in this episode) and Boy George to get them out of trouble.
Now, here’s why I think this is the greatest bit of guest casting in the history of television.
Unlike the Hulk Hogan or Rick James episodes (which I enjoy, don’t get me wrong), The A-Team aren’t hired by Boy George to do a job. They just sort of stumble into this scenario and Boy George happens to be involved and he goes along for the ride.
And he is clearly having a good time.
Boy George is an amiable guy, willing to cut down the band’s contracted fee from $1.2 million to $600,000 and he’s confident that Culture Club can draw the kind of crowd necessary to make that kind of money if they can get some advertising. Everyone loves Culture Club (fact check: this is true). He’s not put off by the booing rednecks, either, though his first impression of the dance hall isn’t the best. He and the band go out and start their set. Of course, the crowd falls in love with them.
When the trouble starts and Face, Hannibal, and BA get thrown in jail, the not-sheriff interrupts the show to tell the crowd what happened to their payroll, hoping to work up a lynch mob. It’s Boy George to the rescue. He acts quickly, going to the radio station where Murdock has locked himself in a booth to both get publicity for the Culture Club shows, and to also play every Lennon Sisters song he can get access to.
The two of them then break into a shop because they need some supplies and a plan to save the guys. Murdock struggles to pick the lock, even when Boy George provides him with a bobby pin. In the end, Boy George just kicks the door in. He even has a funny quip!
Murdock: See, a really honest man doesn’t really have an appetite for this sort of thing.
Boy George: Yeah, but who needs honesty?
Isn’t that great?!
Murdock gets the idea to smuggle some explosives into the besieged jail by dressing up as the pregnant wife of one of the guys and Boy George gives helpful critiques of Murdock’s clothing choices.
Boy George rides along after the jailbreak to stop the bad guys at the airport. And then he and Culture Club perform one final song for a very pleased crowd of cowboys.
I know. It sounds ludicrous. It shouldn’t work at all. And it probably would fall absolutely flat if not for Boy George being slightly amused the whole time. It’s not that he doesn’t take any of it seriously. He’s not goofing nor is he acting like it’s all beneath him. He comes across as very oh-you-crazy-yanks bemused and decides to enjoy the craziness. He gets the spirit of a show in which cars flip and explode and the people in them crawl out looking a little disoriented and disheveled.
Boy George brings the joy to the episode. Pure, blessed joy.
And we are all better for it.
This episode of Book ’em, Danno covers “Tiger By the Tail” and “Samurai”. Sal Mineo has terrible friends, a terrible father, and the humidity hates his hair. Ricardo Montalban is Japanese for an hour, something I’ve written about before.
Listen on Soundcloud, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher.
In the meantime, here is your reference picture for when I start rambling about fake eyelids.
In this episode of Book ’em, Danno, we look at “Full Fathom Five” and “Strangers in Our Own Land”. We learn a valuable lesson about meeting men on cruise ships and why it’s best never to accept briefcases that aren’t your own.
Listen on Soundcloud, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Also, when I go on about Steve’s undercover Hawaiian shirt, this is the beauty I’m talking about…
My long-rumored Hawaii Five-O podcast is now available for your listening pleasure. Hopefully. This is my second attempt due to technical difficulties.
So, check out Book ’em, Danno before the gremlins get it again.
This first episode covers, well, the pilot, “Cocoon.”
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Listen and enjoy my disclaimers.
You can blame Tom Elliot and The Twilight Zone Podcast for this. And then you can go listen to Tom Elliot and The Twilight Zone Podcast (and support him and the show on Patreon!) because both the host and show are damn nifty.
In a recent episode of the podcast, Tom discussed The Twilight Zone episode “The Fugitive”. While I encourage you to give the whole episode a listen, particularly if you’re not familiar with the episode at the heart of the discussion, I’ll give you a quick rundown here:
J. Pat O’Malley plays Old Ben, a kindly old man that plays with the neighborhood children and has a particular kinship with one little girl with a lame leg named Jenny. Jenny has it pretty rough. The other kids don’t like playing with her because she’s a girl and she wears a leg brace. The aunt whom she lives with is horribly abusive towards her. Old Ben is a bright spot in her life.
Old Ben can do magic, like turn himself into other things, because he’s really an alien. When two men show up looking for him, he first tells Jenny it’s because he’s a fugitive. He then heals Jenny’s leg and leaves. In an attempt to get Old Ben to come back, the men zap Jenny into a kind of coma. He shows up to heal her and that’s when the real truth comes out: Old Ben is actually a king. In the end, he takes Jenny with him to his planet. Rod Serling’s closing narration informs the audience that the picture Jenny left under her pillow for her aunt to find is of Ben’s true form. He’s actually a young man. And her aunt will never guess that her niece will one day be a queen.
The discussion of this episode brought up an uncomfortable, but valid interpretation of the relationship between Old Ben and Jenny, insinuating that Old Ben’s interest in Jenny was more than platonic and the fact that he’s actually a young man in disguise doesn’t really make it better since the king in the picture could easily be nineteen or twenty and Jenny is only about twelve. It makes certain scenes and some dialogue rather squicky and distasteful when viewed in this particular light.
Now, like I said. It’s a perfectly valid interpretation of the episode, though I don’t think it was all written with that intent. It was meant to be something like a sci-fi fairy tale. And I’ve never even thought of it in that light when I’ve watched it. That could, of course, be my J. Pat O’Malley bias here. I love that man and I really need to write a post on him. It might be why I always looked at Old Ben as a kindly grandfather figure, someone who went an extra mile to be caring with Jenny because she had so little caring in the rest of her life. Even the reveal at the end didn’t sway my perceptions. I never took the relationship to be anything more than innocent.
And that’s probably because of the fairy tale aspect of the story.
Little girls are groomed from baby-age to be princesses and aspire to be queens. That Old Ben was really a young king and wanted Jenny to be his queen is supposed to be every little girl’s dream, age of consent be damned. We’re actually taught to look for someone older to take care of us. That this would be the ending to this fairy tale isn’t at all out of the norm.
It also plays on another trope common in children’s stories: the abused/neglected kid somehow being special and escaping their situation. That’s what the story really struck me as. That fairy tale of escaping some hostile situation that you, as a child, are powerless to change. That Jenny became queen later never felt that important; you could have left it out all together and the story would ring just as true. If Jenny had been Danny, there would never have been a need for any postscript crowns.
And if Jenny had been Danny, I doubt that as many people would arrive at the less-than-innocent interpretation of the episode because people still struggle with the idea that boys are also sexually abused.
There’s a societal conditioning concerning gender roles that I think plays into both interpretations of the episode. Old men prey on little girls. Little girls want to be princesses and queens.
And while the episode is definitely a product of its time, the lens we view it through hasn’t aged as much as we think.
aka KikiWrites 