Terry and the Pirates (Serial)

Terry and the Pirates (1940) was the 10th film serial released by Columbia. It was based on the comic strip Terry and the Pirates created by Milton Caniff. In his biography, Meanwhile..., Caniff stated that he hated the serial for changing so much of his comic strip, and that "I saw the first chapter and walked out screaming." Terry and the Pirates was turned into a television series in 1952, this time with John Baer as Terry and William Tracy as comic relief character Hot Shot Charlie.

Terry of the Pirates told of how young Terry Lee goes in search of his father (J. Paul Jones, who has vanished in the Asian jungles. Dr. Lee, it turns out, was kidnapped by the jungle pirates of Fang (Dick Curtis), a local warlord attempting to solve the secret of the Temple of Mara. Attacked by Fang, his henchman Stanton (Jack Ingram) and an army of Tiger Men, Terry and his friends, Pat Ryan (Granville Owens, Normandie Drake (Joyce Bryant and the beautiful Dragon Lady (Sheila Darcy), manage not only to locate the missing Dr. Lee but also the hidden treasure of Mara.

Cast

William Tracy as Terry Lee

Granville Owen as Pat Ryan

Joyce Bryant as Normandie Drake

Allen Jung as Connie

Victor DeCamp as Big Stoop, magician

Sheila D'Arcy as Dragon Lady

Dick Curtis as Fang

J. Paul Jones as Dr. Lee

Forrest Taylor as Mr. Drake

Jack Ingram as Stanton

Charles King as Blackie, henchman

Duke York as Leopard Man

Jack Perrin as Mr. Harris

Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe

Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (or Commando Cody) was both a Republic Pictures multi-chapter movie serial and a syndicated television series. It consisted of twelve 25-minute episodes directed by Harry Keller, Franklin Adreon, and Fred C. Brannon, starring Judd Holdren, Aline Towne, Gregory Gaye, and Craig Kelly. Originally intended to be broadcast on television as a limited-run weekly series, Sky Marshall was first released theatrically in 1953 as a 12-chapter weekly serial; it was finally syndicated to television on NBC in 1955 with added new footage and music score changes.

The Commando Cody character was first introduced in Republic's earlier serial Radar Men from the Moon. The odd choice of character name "Commando Cody" was possibly an attempt to make young audiences think they were going to see the adventures of Commander Corry, the hero of the ABC TV and radio series Space Patrol (1950–1955). The equally strange title Sky Marshal of the Universe was probably the studio's imitation of Corry's title, "Commander-in-Chief of the Space Patrol," proclaimed at the beginning of every Space Patrol radio and TV broadcast. There is, however, no concrete evidence this was ever a consideration by anyone at Republic Pictures.

Commando Cody was originally filmed as a twelve-part television series, but union contract issues forced Republic to first exhibit it through regular movie theaters as a 12-part weekly serial. While the TV episodes build on each other in chronological order, the serial episodes lacked the traditional cliffhanger endings that characterized all previous serials.

The Sky Marshal TV series is a prequel to the Radar Men from the Moon theatrical serial. The first episode has characters Joan and Ted, Commando Cody's established sidekicks in Radar Men, applying for their jobs and meeting Cody for the first time.

There was a substantial break between filming the first three and last nine episodes of the TV series, during which time Republic set about filming a new Rocket Man movie serial called Zombies of the Stratosphere, also starring Judd Holdren and Aline Towne. Originally intended to be a Cody serial, and a direct sequel to Radar Men, Zombies was subject to last-minute revisions to its principal characters; most notably Holdren's "Commando Cody" character became "Larry Martin" instead. Meanwhile, the third TV episode was filmed in a way to show the apparent death of The Ruler, suggesting that Republic may have reconsidered filming the remaining nine TV episodes by converting the three it had finished into a regular science fiction feature film.

By the time work finally resumed on the Sky Marshal series, Republic had lost actor William Schallert as Cody's male colleague "Ted Richards" (played by William Bakewell in Radar Men). A replacement was found in Richard Crane, a year before his best-remembered role as the title character on the science fiction TV series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. The Ruler also gained a female sidekick, played by Gloria Pall, though she had almost no screen dialog.

As the television series opens, it is the near future as seen from the perspective of the early 1950s. Earth is in radio contact with civilizations on planets in our solar system, as well as planets in other, distant solar systems, and Commando Cody has just built the world's first spaceship. The rest of the world appears unchanged by these galactic developments. (The exterior of Cody's headquarters building is actually a Republic Pictures office building.)

In each episode The Ruler tries to take over the Earth with a new scheme, each one designed to make maximum use of Republic's stock footage library of various disasters and previously used action long shots. For the series, a number of new outer space scenes were filmed that had not been seen before in Republic serials, including "space walks" for several exterior spaceship repairs; aerial raygun duels between "hero" and "enemy" spaceships; and black star fields (rather than daylight and cloud-spotted skies) for backgrounds when Cody's or the villain's spaceships were shown outside the Earth's atmosphere.

Cody and his associates use special badges that conceal radios to communicate with one another, prefiguring similar communication badges used more than 30 years later in Star Trek: The Next Generation. There were futuristic props and sets, as well as shots of the intricate model-rocket special effects work of Republic's Howard and Theodore Lydecker; the spaceships of Cody and The Ruler are the same basic shooting miniature with different attachments and markings added to make them appear different


Cast
Judd Holdren as Commando Cody

Aline Towne as Joan Gilbert. (Towne was the only performer from Radar Men from the Moon to reprise her role.)

Gregory Gaye as The Ruler

Lyle Talbot as Baylor (six episodes)

Craig Kelly as Mr. Henderson

Damsels in the News: "Woman Bound and Gagged By Two Young Burglars"

Found in my wanderings, in this article from an issue of The San Francisco Call dated December 16th,  1902 details the robbery of a bakery by two ruffians, as the owner Mrs. Margaret Downie lay taking a nap in the residence upstairs.

Captain Nice

Captain Nice was an American comedy TV series that ran from 9 January 1967 to 28 August 1967 on NBC. Reruns aired on Ha! (aka Comedy Central) in 1991.

Riding the tide of the camp superhero craze of the 1960s, the show's premise involved police chemist Carter Nash (William Daniels), a mild-mannered mama's boy who discovered a secret formula that, when taken, transformed him in an explosive burst of smoke into Captain Nice.

Captain Nice didn't behave much differently from Carter. In fact, the Captain ran around in a white, red, and blue pajama-like costume, complete with cape, lovingly sewn by his domineering mother who had basically bullied him into his crime-fighting career. Carter selected the name Captain Nice since he already had items monogrammed "CN." His superpowers included superhuman strength, invulnerability and the ability to fly, but he was nervous about doing the latter as he was afraid of heights, and his natural clumsiness was increased exponentially whenever he drank his super serum.



Carter had a would-be girlfriend in the police department, meter maid Sgt. Candy Kane, although he seemed mostly oblivious to her obvious attentions. The series was created by Buck Henry, who was a co-creator of the hit series Get Smart.

Ann Prentiss, younger sister of actress Paula and sister-in-law of actor Richard Benjamin, played Candy.

Alice Ghostley played Carter's mother. She later won fame as neighbor Bernice on the comedy Designing Women. She also played the forgetful Aunt Esmeralda on Bewitched.

Glen A. Larson, Creator of TV’s 'Quincy M.E.,' 'Magnum, P.I.' and 'Battlestar Galactica,' Dies at 77

From the Hollywood Reporter:

The writer-producer also was behind 'Knight Rider,' 'Fall Guy' and 'Six Million Dollar Man'

Glen A. Larson, the wildly successful television writer-producer whose enviable track record includes Quincy M.E., Magnum, P.I., Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider and The Fall Guy, has died. He was 77.

Larson, a singer in the 1950s clean-cut pop group The Four Preps who went on to compose many of the theme songs for his TV shows, died Friday night of esophageal cancer at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, his son, James, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Larson also wrote and produced for such noteworthy series as ABC’s It Takes a Thief, starring his fellow Hollywood High School alum Robert Wagner as a burglar now stealing for the U.S. government, and NBC’s McCloud, with Dennis Weaver as a sheriff from Taos, N.M., who moves to Manhattan to help the big-city cops there.

After ABC spurned the original pilot for The Six Million Dollar Man (based on the 1972 novel Cyborg), Larson rewrote it, then penned a pair of 90-minute telefilms that convinced then-network executive Barry Diller to greenlight the action series, which starred Lee Majors as a former astronaut supercharged with bionic implants.

Other shows Larson created included Alias Smith & Jones, B.J. and The Bear, Switch (another series with Wagner), Manimal and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. He spent his early career at Universal Studios, inventing new shows and reworking others, before moving to 20th Century Fox in 1980 with a multiseries, multimillion-dollar deal.

With Lou Shaw, Larson conceived Quincy M.E., which starred Jack Klugman — coming off his stint on The Odd Couple — as a murder-solving Los Angeles medical examiner. A forerunner to such “forensic” dramas as CSI, the series ran for 148 episodes over eight seasons on NBC from 1976-83.

CBS’ Magnum, P.I., toplined by Tom Selleck as a charismatic Ferrari-driving private instigator based in Oahu, Hawaii, also aired eight seasons, running from 1980-88 with 162 installments. Larson created the ratings hit with Donald Bellisario, with whom he had worked on Quincy and Battlestar.

NBC’s Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff as a crime fighter aided by a Pontiac Trans-Am with artificial intelligence (K.I.T.T., drolly voiced by William Daniels), lasted four seasons and 90 episodes from 1982-86. And ABC’s Fall Guy, with Majors as a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter, prevailed for five seasons and 113 episodes spanning 1981-86.

If you’re counting, Quincy, Magnum, Knight Rider and Fall Guy accounted for 513 hours of television and 21 combined seasons from 1976-88.

Popular Mechanics For Kids: "Escape" *Hq Ws Web Rip*

In this segment, hostess Vanessa gets a sample of what it's like to be a real escape artist as she's fastened into a canvas straitjacket and hung up by her ankles from a power crane. The escape artist working with her teasingly has her hoisted higher in the air when she complains, but she's eventually lowered to the ground and set free. Afterward, Vanessa awkwardly hops away with a ball and chain locked around both ankles.

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