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Friday, January 31, 2025

BOTNS Episode Club #2: Streets of San Francisco

 BOTNS Episode Club #2 is here! This week's selection:

The Streets of San Francisco, Season 2, Episode 4, "Before I Die."

(Available free on demand on Pluto TV, uncut with ads)
From IMDB: Stone and Keller are forced to defend a mob boss from an inspector with a terminal illness and nothing to lose.

Guest stars include Leslie Nielsen, Joanne Linville, and Ray Danton.
I haven't seen this one, but it sounds like a winner! I'll share my thoughts here next Thursday in our Facebook group, and I invite all of you to join me!

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Top Ten #338: "Can the Commanders do it?" Edition

1) Batty Season: It kicked off this week with voting in two listener-chosen award categories! Keep watching this space for info and announcements about the Season 12 edition of the biggest night in retro TV podcasting!

2) Jessica Fletcher: Our NECA Murder, She Wrote action figure--yes, you read that right--arrived, and it is awesome! I think it's too much to hope for Seth and Sheriff Mort, but we are happy with this:




3) Otherworld: Here is a rarity that has been discussed in our Facebook group! The series premiered 40 years ago tonight on CBS.



4) Chico and the Man: Our new Episode Club premiered this week, and I have to confess I picked a subpar example of the series. Don't judge the whole series on "Mucho Macho Ed!" Thanks to everyone who did participate, even if only by reading our comments. We'll reveal another selection later this week.




5) Saturday Night Live: As the show celebrates 50 years on the air, a Peacock docuseries premiered last week, and tomorrow night, a 3-hour special devoted to musical moments debuts on NBC. It may be weird to say this, but one of my personal favorite musical moments was when Eddie Murphy imitated Stevie Wonder. As a kid, I thought that was amazing and hilarious!

6) National Spouses Day: Let me take a moment to acknowledge, right here in public, one of the best spouses a guy could ever have, someone who has had a huge influence on my life. That's right, Alice Kramden on The Honeymooners! The woman was a saint.

Oh, hey, Laurie, you are great, too!

7) The Goodyear Blimp: I very much enjoyed this look at blimps from Fun Fact Friyay. He speculates there are "25 blimps in existence, with maybe 12 or 13 of them being used." After reading about the cost of operation, I appreciate the blimps we do have even more! I hope to see some blimp action in the football games today.

8) The Dukes of Hazzard: The series premiered on this day in 1979, and I can remember when the biggest controversy was the size of Daisy's shorts. This video by Secret Galaxy has a shot of an article by BOTNS fave Gary Deeb:



9) Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington: 50 years ago tonight, CBS' Andy Rooney unveiled this special, in which he went to the nation's capital and complained a lot.

10) Rudy Martzke: As I said on our Facebook group, I give myself either a Dreaded Glitch or an Oops for not catching the news of his passing several months ago until this weekend. His Sports on TV column helped make the weekend edition of USA Today essential, and his Monday column was a great way to start the week.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Vote for the Season 12 Battys!

As longtime listeners know, we select the majority of the Battys LIVE after spirited discussion and an occasional random number generation. However, we want you to have a voice as well! Here are this season's two listener-determined awards:

OUTSTANDING BERT/BURT

*Burt Reynolds (Dan August, "The Manufactured Man")
*Burt Mustin (Rhoda, "The Honeymoon")
*Bert from Sesame Street

OUTSTANDING CHARACTER NAME

*Rudy Desautel (The Kid with the Broken Halo)
*Dan August (Dan August)
*Nick Lobo (Rhoda)
*Jonas Grumby (Gilligan's Island)
*Roj Blake (Blake's 7)
*Count Von Count (Sesame Street)

You can leave a vote here in the comments, email us at mailbag@battleofthenetworkshows.com, or vote on our Facebook page. Voting closes Saturday night, January 25!

Sunday, January 19, 2025

BOTNS #337: Special "it's freezing all the time now" edition!

1) Bob Uecker: A legend left us this week, and let's not forget that, as hilarious as he was, he was an excellent baseball broadcaster. I am saddened by the loss, but I take some solace in the fact that so many of the classic Miller Lite ads are popping up all over the place this week. Here's another:


2) Relatively Speaking: It's obvious what the big story in the world is this week: The fact that I just discovered the obscure 1988 game show Relatively Speaking is on Tubi. A panel of celebs tries to identify the famous relatives of the contestants. John Byner hosts, and, wow, guess who is in the first episode (I am not giving it away).


3) Martin Luther King Day: I think my favorite quote of Dr. King, and I am going from memory, is how he encouraged us to judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his DVR.

4) Presidential inauguration: As we witness the transfer of power in the USA tomorrow, let's look back at 40 years ago tonight, when ABC broadcast a gala inauguration special featuring (I am guessing here and not looking it up): Frank Sinatra, Lee Greenwood, Pat Boone, The Beach Boys. 

OK, I looked it up, and I got Sinatra and the Beach Boys right!

5) The Jeffersons: Antenna TV is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the show all weekend.



6) Sally Struthers: She went on the Let's Talk About That! podcast and called Betty White a passive-aggressive and mean woman, but she said she used to have a great time gossiping with Bea Arthur in the supermarket. She also said Norman Lear cribbed the idea for All in the Family from Carroll O'Connor and then took credit for it for 50 years. I love it!



7) National Popcorn Day: Just the thing for when you watch the Sally Struthers interview!



8) Dolly Parton: Happy birthday, Dolly!



9) Gilligan's Island: Start gearing up for the Season 12 Battys with a marathon of the show on Catchy Comedy today. I think they're showing the one where Gilligan costs them a chance at getting rescued at about 2:00.

10) R.I.P. David Duclon, David Lynch, Black Bart, Leslie Charleson: What a rough week! Here we see a promo from one of the shows Duclon produced, a commercial Lynch directed, an early match of wrestler Bart, and a commercial with future General Hospital star Charleson.








Friday, January 17, 2025

BOTNS Episode Club #1 (Now in our Facebook group)!

If you have not joined our Facebook group, now is the time because during our offseason, we will be viewing a different episode each week and then posting comments the next week in the group. We hope that all of our friends who enjoy the podcast will share their thoughts, though, and participate with us!

We will post the episode choice here, too, if you want to comment and follow along. We will start by focusing on programs that we covered this latest season (It will be good ramping up for the Battys, too!) and programs that are available on DVD and/or on streaming.

Let's have some fun and talk TV!

First up, an episode that is free on Tubi: Chico and the Man, Season 3, Episode 9, "Mucho Macho Ed."
Description from IMDB: A young woman arrives at the garage proclaiming that Ed is the father of her baby.


Monday, January 13, 2025

New Year's Resolutions for Streamers

I have yet to see any of the major streaming video services offer up public resolutions for 2025, so I am stepping in to make some for them. I'll focus on those that bother with vintage television, meaning Netflix is off the hook.

AMAZON PRIME: License shows for a little longer. Recently they get some classic shows--that's good--but then lose them fairly quickly--that's bad--without notice. A recent example is My Three Sons, which left at the end of December, making a run of about 13 months.

In the real world, 13 months is a long time, but in vintage TV world, that's not much time for a program that ran for 12 seasons and aired 380 episodes.

TUBI: Pick up the pace a little. Tubi, you had a great year, continuing to pick up shows and movies and continuing to offer them free with reasonable ad interruption. It does seem like you tailed off a bit the last couple months as far as adding vintage television. There is a lot of stuff out there to be had since Warners and Sony in particular seem to be giving everything away.

PEACOCK: Don't let the old WWE stuff get away. Netflix is paying a lot of dough to WWE for Raw and other programming, but no one seems to have a firm grasp on what is going to happen to the lesser-viewed material like the 70s and 80s territory footage. Peacock, how about keeping a toe in with WWE by retaining the stuff you already have on there. Oh, there should be a ton more, but I'd be happy if you didn't just delete hundreds of hours of video that may not make its way to Netflix.

PARAMOUNT PLUS/PLUTO: Less Pluto, more Paramount Plus, please, for catalog shows. Actually, no, let me amend that. There is nothing wrong with putting The Fugitive, Cannon, and Barnaby Jones (Another show that came and went after a year or so on Prime) on Pluto. Free TV for everyone! Yay!

Yet why not put the same programs on Paramount Plus, the service that fans are actually paying for so they can watch quality television? It ain't all about Tulsa King; give subscribers more access to that vast CBS/Paramount library. Oh, I'm sure there is A reason devised by some number crunchers to justify being so stingy on Plus, but I ain't buying it. If a show is on Pluto, put it on Paramount Plus, too.

ROKU CHANNEL: Be more transparent. Why is it so difficult to find out what is going to be added to your channel? Does everything get added at the last minute? Every other significant streamer issues a press release ahead of the coming month listing programming that is coming (and often but not always what is going). You get some interesting material, but it always comes as a surprise. It's often difficult to find what's newly added. Brag about it when you get something new!

DISNEY PLUS/HULU: Do something, anything, to get back in the game. Moonlighting was great. Maybe you can dig up something else that has been on the shelf for years. I'd settle for just putting some of the MTM library back on--shows like St. Elsewhere and The White Shadow.

BRITBOX: Pretty much keep doing what you're doing. Don't change unless it means adding more library shows.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Top Ten #336: Special "second of 2025" edition!

1) FETV: The channel has announced that beginning February 1, it will show "most" of its movies and shows, all of the vintage variety "original form and uncut." This could be huge for classic TV lovers if they can actually pull this off and figure out a way to have DVR-able schedules. Right now, FETV shows Perry Mason, Highway Patrol, Quincy, Barney Miller, Laramie, and more.


2) Winter weather: It's too cold! And I don't want more snow. That is all.


3) The Mad Dash: Charlie in our Facebook group posted a clip, and after that, I was off to the races trying to find full episodes of this funky late-Seventies game show.


4) All in the Family: The show premiered on this night back in 1971, and TV would never be the same due to the groundbreaking decision to stop showing To Rome with Love.

5) Golden Globes: Congratulations to BOTNS fave Ted Danson for winning the Carol Burnett Award (She ain't bad, either).

6) Hollywood Squares: As yet another version of the show debuts this Thursday on CBS, it's time again to appreciate the original, or at least the 1970s incarnation:



7) ABC Theater: The Court-Martial of Lt. William Calley: 50 years ago, this dramatic episode of ABC Theater premiered on NBC. No, just kidding; it was on ABC, of course, following a rerun of the more uplifting Free to Be You and Me.

8) Maverick: It's outside our time frame, but who can fault us for pointing out that the James Garner Western is now on Starz as well as Pluto?

9) Bosom Buddies: Catchy Comedy has a marathon of the sitcom today. I'm, uh, crazy about the blonde (I don't mean Peter Scolari).




10) National Kiss a Ginger Day: I have it on good authority that this one has "still got it."



Friday, January 10, 2025

What We Saw: The Mad Dash (Canadian game show)

In our Facebook group, our pal Charlie posted this bonkers clip from 1979 Canadian game show The Mad Dash. Everything about this amazes me--the graphics, the music, the way you feel right away, "Yes, this is quality low-rent television."


I will say that this is a loop, designed to be mesmerizing, and while it certainly works on me, the actual show is not quite as bonkers. It's still a tremendous watch, or at least this full episode is. Even the thumbnail makes me laugh:



First, let's get the disappointment out of the way. In this episode, there was very little of the random back and forth you see in the first clip. Contestants do dash around a giant track like a real-life Candyland, but they do it with purpose and deliberation, unlike the clip that shows a man and woman just prancing around with no evident direction, often on the verge of falling.

That said, this show is a riot. The host is Pierre Lalonde. Pierre Lalonde! We get two mixed-gender teams (Can we call them couples? The actual people seem to be both coy and not coy about that at the same time when Pierre asks) who compete for cash--not much of ii--and prizes. One representative of each team stands around a simulated dice table and answers questions, then rolls a die that dictates the movement of their partners on that goofy track. Each space has some associated prize or action. Oh, and you had better believe that everyone is dressed like the late Seventies, baby!

This episode seems like a debut or a very early episode. The direction is amateurish at times. At the beginning, when we meet the players, their backs are mostly to the camera, and we barely see one of them. The main gimmick of the game is seeing someone frolic on that track, yet each time it happens, the show cuts late and we miss the first step. Even Pierre Lalonde--it pains me to say this--forgets a few things. Plus, near the end, when he is counting out the whopping total of $110 in cash to the winners, there is an awkward moment when he says something like, "Let me take this 20 back and give you this." You never see Jim Lange making change on Name That Tune.

The questions are basic trivia material, but the contestants go for it with gusto, especially the ladies. Loretta in this clip seems right out of game show contestant casting, making a running commentary the whole time and reacting to everything. In the beginning, her hapless partner Jim rolls a 3, which means she has to go tot eh "Back 3 Spaces" square and return to the starting point. She pouts in a friendly sort of way that she actually has to go through the motions of walking it out. 

There are multiple awkward moments like this that you don't often see in more polished game shows. Sure, you get bloopers all the time on, say, Family Feud, but you don't see ill-conceived spots like when the woman on the track, after choosing "Brawn" over "Brains," attempts the physical challenge of...peeling two oranges with her bare hands in 15 seconds? Not only is it not even captured well visually, there isn't any kind of timer on the screen. The whole thing just ends, and everyone laughs it off and goes back to the trivia, die rolling, and dashing.

Is the dashing MAD? No, but it sure is goofy, and that is good enough for me to want to see more examples of this. The book TV North calls it a syndicated show from 1979, but the credits clearly show it was on CTV, and Wikipedia says it ran from 1978-1981. A few full episodes are on YouTube. Someone salvage the rest and put them up!

Monday, January 6, 2025

Similar to "Chico and the Man"? You be the judge

Tubi continues to send me emails urging me to watch a show I am already watching, Chico and the Man. "Yeah," the thinking must be, "you have been watching it, but you aren't watching it right now."

The latest one broadened the scope of the Tubi recommendations and suggested other titles that might interest me since I am enjoying Chico and the Man. Here is the list of "MORE LIKE CHICO AND THE MAN" titles "for my next binge watch.":

The Super (the movie with Joe Pesci)
Easy Money (movie with Rodney Dangerfield)
At War with the Army (Martin and Lewis movie)
Neighbors (Belushi/Aykroyd movie)
Rescue from Gilligan's Island
The Heavenly Kid (1985 movie with Richard Mulligan)

None of these are TV shows, but I will concede some of them have people who were TV stars, and all of them have people who were on TV.

An oddity is that two of these are public domain, meaning presumably Tubi isn't spending anything to license them. At least they aren't like some streamers that insist on pushing what they want you to watch.

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Top Ten #335: Special "First of 2025" Edition!

1) New Year: It's 2025, and we all have the chance to make a fresh start. Remember, do it now because that opportunity expires before the end of the month. Don't even think about trying to improve yourself or make life changes on February 1.

2) Presidential Medals of Freedom: Among the recipients this week were noted star of St. Elsewhere Denzel Washington, noted star of High School USA Michael J. Fox, and noted talk show host Magic Johnson.


3) VH-1: 40 years ago this week, the cable network launched with nary a reality show in its lineup.


4) All That Glitters: The rare 1977 Norman Lear show, which featured Patrick Sim--uh, Gary Sandy, is being uploaded to YouTube. Hat tip to Friend of the Show and podcaster extraordinaire Ian for letting me know. I would link to the YT channel, which has other rarities, too, but I am too paranoid as it is that it's gonna get taken down!

5) National Whipped Cream Day: Must...not...eat...more...desserts...this week...


6) Rumble in the Jungle: 40 years ago today, ABC's Wide World of Sports replayed the historic Foreman-Al fight from October 1974. Around the country, many people tried to con their dumb friends into betting on it.

7) Ted Lange: Pour one out for Lange's birthday! He's more than just Isaac, though:


8) Berrenger's: The prime-time soap set at a department store (I guess K-Mart was taken) premiered 40 years ago tonight on NBC and promptly tanked despite featuring BOTNS faves like Art Hindle and Ben Murphy. In the paper the same day, "Madison Avenue" sources were bemoaning the fact that NBC put a soap on Saturday night.




9) Pamela Sue Martin: Happy birthday to Pamela Sue as well. Maybe she can have a drink with Ted Lange.


10) R.I.P. Linda Lavin, Wayne Osmond:






Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Happy New Year from BOTNS!

We hope you all have a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2025! Let's watch TV like it's 1975 or 1985...only without the rabbit ears, limited channel selection, edited episodes on TV, lack of home video...OK, forget I said anything after "happy, healthy, and prosperous 2025."

There ought to be more New Year-themed specials. Rudolph's Shiny New Year has had to carry too much of the load for the last 50 years.