Joe Santos has finished his tour of duty.
Santos, who died this week at 84, had roles in “The Sopranos” and movies but is best known for his role as Dennis Becker, James Garner’s LAPD buddy on the classic tv series “The Rockford Files.”
Santos was great as the disgruntled but ultimately helpful cop.
We’ll miss you, Joe.
I’m startled that, after I finally made a pilgrimage to 3490 Bluff Road, it’s now gone.
A few weeks back in this spot, I talked about visiting 3490 Bluff Road this fall. The address, on Indianapolis’ south side, was for decades the studio of WTTV 4, the independent TV station that was the home of Dick the Bruiser and other wrestlers, kids’ show hosts Cowboy Bob and Janie and late-night horror host Sammy Terry.
I just got around to going to see the station building, which hadn’t been used in a decade and had been for sale for several years … and now it’s gone.
The Indianapolis Star reported recently that 3490 Bluff Road was demolished.
It’s no more.
I’m glad I got a chance to check it out before it was gone.
When I was a kid, I loved everything about Halloween, including the way it changed TV.
For days leading up to Halloween and definitely on the day itself, TV channels and networks would run Halloween-themed specials. Not just Charlie Brown but old movies on the local channels.
When cable exploded in the 1980s, the selection was even greater. I loved the movies and specials that aired on AMC and TCM.
Tonight I’m confronted with more movies than I’ll have time to watch, from “The Lost Boys” on VH1 to “Dead of Night” on TCM to the “Blacula” movies – both of em – on Bounce, the local “urban” station.
It’s a seasonal embarrassment of riches.
I made a pilgrimage the other week.
While in Indianapolis with my family, we found ourselves on Bluff Road on the city’s south side.
Bluff Road didn’t mean anything to them, of course. My wife didn’t grow up in Indiana and my son is too young to remember the address.
For those of us who do remember, we know the address from our childhood: 3490 Bluff Road.
For a couple of generations of Central Indiana residents who paid attention to the “fine print” of television broadcasting, 3490 Bluff Road was, for decades, the Indianapolis home of WTTV Channel 4.
Nowadays, WTTV is CBS 4. For a year or so, it’s had a network affiliation and big-league status after decades as Indy’s premier independent station.
For decades beginning in 1957, WTTV broadcast from 3490 Bluff Road. The address was uttered on the air countless times and included in title cards that were broadcast.
Although I’ve been to a couple of Indy TV stations, I’d never been to the home of WTTV 4.
I thought about it a lot, though. During the station’s heyday, in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, it was easy for my imagination to populate the station with its biggest on-air personalities.
Kids show hosts Janie and Cowboy Bob. Sports broadcaster Chuck Marlowe. Station owner Sarkes Tarzian, whose name my young mind turned into Circus Tarzan.
And the dean of midwest TV horror hosts: Sammy Terry.
Sammy Terry – embodied by Bob Carter from around 1962 until his death in 2013, now played in personal appearances by his son, Mark – was perhaps the best known of WTTV’s on-air personalities.
But 3490 Bluff Road was an iconic address. So I had to seek it out.
It’s not easy to find, the little building that is the focus of so many memories. Sure, there’s still a TV tower, but no sign, no historical marker, to designate the station that WTTV used until the 2000s.
There are a few indicators, to be sure. I walked all around the building until I found this one.
And there’s this forlorn remembrance of the station’s years as a WB affiliate beginning in 1998.
Overall, there’s not much left there, not much to see considering all those years the station babysat, entertained and terrified us.
According to real estate websites, the main station building is only about 19,000 square feet and made of concrete block. One website lists the total value of the building and surrounding acres of land as $276,000.
We know that’s not the case, of course.
3490 Bluff Road is priceless.
For those of us who grew up Monster Kids in the Monster World, this marked the epicenter of that world.
Shock – also known as Shock Theater.
I saw this ad bouncing around the internet recently and wanted to share it here. Regular readers of this blog know I’ve written a lot about Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and what an influence it had on a couple of generations of kids. FM came decades after the movies it celebrated – including the classic Universal monster films – so the 1960s monster craze might have seemed unlikely.
Except for Shock.
In October 1957, Columbia Pictures’ TV subsidiary, Screen Gems, released a package of 52 horror films – including the classic Universal horror films like “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” – to TV.
The Shock package was a huge hit. Usually airing late at night – as was the case, a few years later, with host Sammy Terry on WTTV Channel 4 in Indianapolis – but sometimes airing at other times, Shock popularized the old Universal pictures once more.
Everything that followed came because of this. Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, horror hosts, the wave of monster toys, cartoons, comics and novelties that began in the 1960s and continued for decades.
Long live Shock.
It was almost like a sickness.
For a few years in the 1980s, I stayed up every night and watched “Late Night with David Letterman” on NBC. But I didn’t just watch it. I also videotaped it.
And cut out the commercials.
That’s right. I was making my own commercial-free David Letterman video library.
I watched the show from its start just after 12:30 – following the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show” – until it went off an hour later. And, obviously, I loved the show enough to want to preserve it in that manner.
Letterman. Paul. Larry “Bud” Melman. All the rest.
The Alka-Seltzer suit. Dropping things off the tops of buildings. Interrupting other shows, like the bullhorn assault on the “Today” show.
My god, what fun.
Letterman, a fellow Hoosier who I remembered from his time on Indianapolis TV and – kinda – his time on my local radio station, had a masterful grasp of ironic comedy long before others followed. He was funny and absurd and disrespectful and everything anyone would want in a late-night talk show host.
I haven’t watched Dave in a while. The draw of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” was too great. Well, that and having to get up at 6 a.m. to deal with the demands of real life.
I’ve seen a little more of his show lately, since Dave’s departure was imminent. I wouldn’t have missed Bill Murray last night. And I’ll probably be watching tonight, for the final show.
Dave was ahead of his time and of his time. He was the late-night talk show host we deserved and needed. He ranked right up there with Carson in my book and always will.
So thanks, Dave, and so long.
There have been so many great TV dramas in the past decade. Too many, if you have a life like mine and have limited hours to watch TV live or even catch up later on demand or online.
With “Mad Men” winding down in curious fashion, “The Americans” getting out in front of me, leaving me unable to keep up, and “Walking Dead” uneven but still rewarding, I’m mostly keeping pace only with the superhero shows like “Arrow,” “The Flash” and “Agents of SHIELD.”
One show that I did keep up with, pretty much every week, was “Justified,” Graham Yost’s show, based on characters created by wonderful writer Elmore Leonard, about U.S. marshals, lowlife criminals and everybody in between in modern-day Kentucky, was too good to miss.
I watched the show live pretty much every week during the course of its six seasons. And I mourned a little bit when “Justified” ended its run six days ago.
If you’ve never watched, I highly recommend it. For so many reasons:
The lead characters, marshal Raylan Givens and criminal Boyd Crowder, are charismatic and fascinating and they’re portrayed by terrific actors in Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins.
Other lawmen (and law-women) came and went and a couple dozen wonderful bad guys (and women) have passed through these parts but Raylan and Boyd were, ultimately, the reason we watched every week.
The two – who grew up together, dug coal together, dreamed of getting out of Harlan, Kentucky, and had less than straightforward solutions to problems – did the most fascinating dance for six seasons.
As much as we rooted for Raylan, we agreed with his boss and co-workers that he could be an angry, danger-seeking jerk.
And as much as we wouldn’t want to be on the bad end of a deal with Boyd, we’d also like to have sat down the bar from him, having a beer and listening to him formulate schemes and recounting fascinating characters he met .. and, most likely, swindled or killed.
“Justified” never let us forget that, as shaded and shady as these two could be, they were our protagonists. We were as caught up in their stories – more so, really – as any tried-and-true, straight-arrow characters.
I’ve been to and through Kentucky many times. I’m not sure I pined for the characters of “Justified” – Mags Bennett, Dewey Crow, Wynn Duffy or any of them – to sidle up next to me at a diner.
But it would have been fascinating.
I might not watch a whole lot of tonight’s 40th anniversary special for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” and not just because, as someone else pointed out, the actual anniversary is sometime this fall.
And not just because I’ll be watching “The Walking Dead” and “Talking Dead” during the middle couple of hours of this marathon-length SNL fete. (And don’t even get me started on “The Walking Dead” right now, because I’m not gonna be another of those people who goes on about how the show has become an endless march through an unending storyline with the only mile markers being the death of characters great and not-so-great and I don’t know how much longer i’m gonna watch it … because I’ll keep watching it, almost without question.)
And not because I haven’t been a fan of “SNL” since virtually the beginning. One of my friends had a record album – an LP, a vinyl disc you played at 33 and a third RPM, for the young folks – of bits from the show’s first season. He would bring it to school and one of our teachers was cool enough to let us listen to some of it on a turntable. We all watched the show every week, but these were the pre-VCR, pre-online days when you couldn’t see it again unless NBC decided to replay it. So we were riveted to the audio soundtrack of the show.
No, I might not watch a lot of tonight’s special because, as I was watching last night’s replay of the very first episode, hosted by George Carlin, from 1975, I was struck by how much of it I remembered so well.
And it struck me: “Saturday Night Live” has been on eternal replay pretty much for the past two decades-plus.
NBC and show creator Lorne Michaels have relentlessly rerun episodes and bits and pieces of episodes over the decades. The show has been cut down to fit hour-long timeslots (and I think half-hour slots as well) and repackaged into so many anniversary shows on NBC and retrospectives on VH1 and elsewhere and so many “Best of Chevy Chase” and “Best of Will Ferrell” specials … sheesh, this material has been run into the ground.
Still, there are bits that I want to still want to see. Anything with that genius Phil Hartman (the unfrozen caveman lawyer skits especially, or his Bill Clinton in McDonald’s), for example. Or Ferrell’s “Get on the bag!” sketches.
But I don’t need to see more Chase, who I can’t believe we ever thought was funny, or even more Aykroyd or Belushi, who indisputably were.
And if I do, I’ll look ’em up online. Or maybe check various shelves and boxes in my house to see: Did I ever buy that old album?
Every few years, a new TV series is dubbed “The Twilight Zone” of its generation. Heck, even the 1980s “Twilight Zone” series was called the “Twilight Zone” of its generation. And it was really pretty good.
The designation shows the staying power of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone,” which began in late 1959 and ran several years into the 1960s.
But while “Black Mirror” might properly be called the “Twilight Zone” of its generation … it just might earn that title a bit more because its emphasis on technology and the way it is integrated into our lives makes it very thoroughly of our generation.
“Black Mirror,” created by Charlie Brooker, has been airing in England for a couple of years now, but its recent appearance on Netflix and online have made it widely known.
It’s a dark show. Dark. And if you don’t the title reference, it seems to me to be about that little slab of glass that most of us carry around with us every day: the smart phone. Dark until it’s activated and, as “Black Mirror” shows us, that little piece of glass and plastic and electronic innards can be mighty dark.
“Black Mirror” is set in a future that’s not very far ahead, when electronics have advanced somewhat but are still totally believable in this world of Google Glass and ever-present iPhones.
The series – two seasons of three episodes and a Christmas special – look at the way technology can be used to warp and twist us. Even by ourselves.
The opening episode, “The National Anthem,” is notorious because of its adult content, but it’s gripping and upsetting in an old-fashioned way. A beloved young British princess is kidnapped by terrorists. Their only demand? That the prime minister have sex. On live TV. With a pig.
As the clock ticks, the PM and his staff try to find a way to beat the demand and avoid the horrifying, humiliating and potentially politically disastrous ransom. Meanwhile, TV reporters scramble to find out what’s going on and the public watches, fascinated, as the drama plays out first on social media then on TV. It’s a fascinating commentary on new media and old media and how we shape them and they shape us.
I liked “The Entire History of You” but winced at its tale of obsessive love and jealousy in a world where a “grain” of technology implanted in your head makes it possible to review – and share – your memories. The Christmas episode featuring Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” seemed to bite off too many stories.
The best of the episodes I’ve seen is “Be Right Back,” with “Agent Carter’s” Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson as a young couple separated by his death in a tragic accident. But Atwell’s character learns there’s a way of being with her love again, thanks to technology. But what’s the price?
“Black Mirror” probably benefits from the cool, blue-tinged modern Brit TV atmosphere of shows like “Sherlock.”
Not to mention the pervasive feeling of technological dread each episode is infused with.
The weekend nights – Friday and Saturday nights, really – are and always have been special to young people. They were nights of freedom, with the promise of being able to stay up late because the next mornings were not school mornings.
I grew up watching “Sammy Terry” on WISH-TV 4 on Friday nights – a double-feature of classic and/or cheesy movies beginning at 11 p.m. – and “Science Fiction Theater,” a double-feature of more SF-oriented – as opposed to horror – movies without a host that aired on WISH on Saturday nights.
Of course, despite the enduring memories of Sammy Terry on Fridays, Saturdays have always had an edge is airing great old horror and science fiction. The legendary “Mystery Science Theater 3000” ended its run on the then-Sci-FI Channel on Saturdays (I still miss that viewing experience so much) and “Commander USA’s Groovie Movies” aired on USA Network in the latter half of the 1980s.
Considering I’m in the demographic for MeTV, it’s not a surprise that the channel, which specializes in airing classic TV of the 1950s-1980s, is one that I’m always checking out. And it’s not surprising that MeTV has me – and a loyal fanbase – hooked for its Super Sci-Fi Saturday Nights programming block.
MeTV’s Saturday night line-up has varied a bit over the past couple of years but has only grown more solid recently with its selection of TV shows and, as its crown jewel, the selection of classic horror films hosted by longtime Chicago horror host Svengoolie.
I’ve written about Svengoolie here before, but I’ll note for the record that the show, written, hosted and almost totally performed by Rich Koz, is perhaps the most entertaining geek-oriented two hours on TV right now.
That’s because of how much TV has changed in the past two decades.
With a proliferation of channels – and channels devoted to geek-friendly fare that include (now) SyFy – it seemed like a safe bet that lots of classic TV shows would be available to fill our days and late-nights.
(And yes, I know that virtually anything that airs on TV these days is available on disc, streaming or online. But I like a well-curated TV lineup.)
But any dreams I might have had of being able to see classic sci-fi or horror movies on these 24-7 channels were dashed when I saw what the channels actually chose to air: Tons of “reality” programming and hour after hour of reruns of network shows like “CSI.”
MeTV, which began airing in Chicago in 2005 and went national in 2010, appealed to Baby Boomers and others of nostalgic mindset by airing classic sitcoms and dramas.
The channel’s Saturday night lineup doubles down that appeal by programming for the growing geek base.
The night starts strong with episodes of “The Adventures of Superman,” the 1950s George Reeves series that hasn’t been widely seen in recent decades. That’s followed by the 1960s “Batman” series, the 1970s “Wonder Woman” series, “Star Trek,” “Svengoolie,” “Lost in Space” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”
I’ve never been a big fan of the last two, Irwin Allen kids’ shows from the 1960s, but they’re good fare for insomniacs who haven’t been lulled into peaceful sleep by Svengoolie’s airing of some classic Universal monster movie.
And while “Wonder Woman” never met a villain she couldn’t subdue by throwing him into a swimming pool – just watch a few episodes; you’ll see what I mean – the Lynda Carter series plays nicely along with the campy “Batman” series and the crime-busting noir “Superman” show.
MeTV’s whole lineup is comfort food for those of a certain age, of course. Its Saturday night lineup is comfort food for geeks of a certain age.
keithroysdon 