Counter-Currents
The Scarecrow & Who Am I This Time?
The Necessity of Role-Playing
Steven Clark
words
I was a modest, 20-year old television baby by 1972, and drifted on and off to the newly-minted network, PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). It had taken over in 1969 from NET (National Educational Television), and I found myself drawn to it, especially its drama. It’s hard to believe nowadays, but PBS in its early years actually aired American dramas that were free of English accents and upper-class angst.
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The Scarecrow & Who Am I This Time?
The Necessity of Role-Playing
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2 comments
Thanks for this trip down TV memory lane. For some reason, I don’t recall ever seeing any of these. I watched a ton of Masterpiece Theatre offerings, of course. Speaking of Vonnegut, I do recall a trio of PBS original sci/fi films, one of which was a mashup of Vonnegut stories called From Time to Timbuktu; it was pretty good, at least to my teenage mind. Another was Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, which I and apparently some others think may be one of the greatest sci/fi films to come out of the USA. Ironically, both were filmed on magnetic tape which PBS then re-used (i.e., erased) due to “budgetary reasons.” Current versions in circulation come from people who made their own VHS tapes. One wonders whether the PBS president might have spared a few bucks from his/her salary? Even the BBC used to do the same thing, despite its comparatively lavish budgets.
With further irony, the third offering apparently survived the tape Shoah, only to become one of the greatest episodes of Mystery Science Theater. I speak, of course, of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, staring Raoul Julia and Jackie Burroughs and a cast of over-acting community theater types (as in Who Am I This Time). Raoul and Jackie are further not helped by a ridiculous script that tries to imagine what would later be known as “cyberspace” in the hands of talents like William Gibson, and truly laughable special effects. The whole thing is best summed up by the scene where Raoul plaintively asks Jackie, his mother, if he’s losing his mind. The combination of his accent, bad sound miking, and his mouthful of soup, makes “I’m nuts?” one of the greatest unintentionally dirty lines in cinema history. Scroll it up!
https://youtu.be/F91JL7MN-bQ?si=vWa-9p3DGh4oF_W6
As a late Boomer, I disagree with many that we were glued to the Boob Tube compared to the kids of today who carry screens in their pockets ─ but I do remember a lot of events based on what I was watching on TV at the time.
Pete Duel killed himself in December of 1971 and not 1972 when I had been glued to Apollo 17.
The actual date of Duel’s suicide was on New Year’s Eve 1971 instead of 1972. I just looked it up and that is correct.
I remember the suicide of Pete Duel as I had been watching episodes of Alias Smith and Jones each week and there was some shocking news report shortly thereafter. Wikipedia says that Duel was depressed over his alcoholism. The TV show immediately replaced him with another actor hoping that we would not notice, like they did with Darrin on Bewitched.
Our family had owned a color TV set for only about a year; one of my sisters had just been born, and I had been watching the Apollo 15 Moon Landing in color earlier that Summer (1971). I knew Duel’s death was not 1972 because that was the year of Apollo 16 and then Apollo 17 in December, the last “Moonshot” as they called them then.
Alias Smith and Jones aired on ABC from 1971-73 and was often filmed in Castle Valley, Utah where my great-great-grandfather was deputy sheriff, town jailer, and the first town marshall. The TV show was loosely based on the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Hole in the Wall Gang out of Wyoming and the posses that tracked them.
My ancestor was one of the lawmen in the Moab and Castle Valley area who had a career spanning over three decades and went on a posse or two up to Wyoming as a result. He was later murdered by two outlaws at the age of 65 when he had taken them into custody at the Moab jail and failed to check them properly for a Derringer, which one of them had concealed in a back brace. They were soon caught and spent nearly the rest of their lives in prison. It is part of the local pioneer lore and police history.
The town jail started as a 19th century shack where my great-great-grand parents lived. While he was gone during the day as the town marshall, the “jail holding cell” was a blanket that my great-great-mother hung over a corner of the room. The prisoners were usually just harmless town drunks like Otis at Mayberry and they had to help bring in the firewood. She died a year or so after I was born and there is a 5-generation photo of me as an infant with her and my elders.
Anyway, lots of movies and TV have been filmed in the area. In the late 1980s my Grandmother was visiting her home town and relaxing in a park along the Grand (Colorado) River and met the actor Robert Duvall when he was filming Lonesome Dove. He is a very decent guy in real life and was very interested in talking to elderly pioneer stock.
I don’t particularly care for most Westerns or McMurtry novels myself. I actually liked Duvall better as the crazy Air Cavalry commander in Apocalypse Now. I don’t like Cormac McCarthy novels either. I thought that Tommy Lee Jones was badly miscast as the addlepated Texas Ranger in No Country for Old Men, although I found the movie entertaining with the weirdo serial killer.
🙂
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