Feature Category: Article

Your favorite movie star is playing roulette in a glitzy and popular casino club. Boom! He won the jackpot of $5000000, as luck would have it. But is this too straightforward to beat the odds while gambling? Of course, not! Casinos can be both a pure game of chance or skills. However, often Hollywood movies depict fictional stories far from reality. A plethora of casino myths and facts in movies paint a wrong picture in people’s minds.

Let’s uncover some famous Hollywood casino movie scenes that twisted the gambling facts and statistics.

1. Surveillance System Vulnerability

Blame the Ocean’s Eleven movie series that showed how easy it is to tweak the surveillance system in casinos. But again, it was just an appealing film plot.

Today’s advanced casino environment makes it almost impossible for anybody to pull the strings. Casino operators ensure to integrate state-of-the-art CCTV surveillance with features that can track every shady person or activity on the premise. Rightly called “eye in the sky” in the gambling industry, you’re always on the watch from the parking lot and dealer’s table to the bar counter.

2. Casinos Are The Mafia Haven

One of the most common gambling myths that many believe without a doubt. For instance, the storyline of the Hollywood movie Casino portrays a mafia-operated gambling club, unlike the real world.

However, gone are the days when mobs used to run the casinos. So drop this idea! Now several clubs run legitimately throughout the world only after getting a verification through local gambling regulators. Besides, some casinos even volunteer part of their revenue for various charity programs.

3. Gut Feelings Or Luck Help You Win

If you watched movies like Rainman and Casino Royale, you might have been impressed by the gut feeling of a protagonist winning a huge cash prize. But wait!

Not every casino game works on sheer luck. Unless you are reeling slots, games like poker require proper gambling skillsets and strategies to earn a payout. Usually, the gambler’s focus needs to be on the probability of winning the casino game rather than their intuitions.

4. Get Rich Quick Route With Cards Counting

Take a scene from the movie called 21. Within a year, actor Ben Affleck easily won $315,000 while his team earned nearly $3.15 million by duping the casino. Although it’s assumed to be a true story gambling movie based on the MIT blackjack team exploits, this prize figure was utterly unrealistic.

When it comes to counting cards in the real-world scenario, a gambler can roughly draw $10 per hour with $100 a hand. Here’s one more reality check – no one can win consistently by counting cards except for a hand or two.

5. No-limit Tables

The faux no-limit table is another common depiction in several casino-centered Hollywood movies. As per the storyline, high-rollers can place a million-dollar wager without a restriction while playing the no-limit table games.

One more myth busted! You will see that every table has a set limit in the actual casino setting. Don’t forget; the house edge is for real.

6. Security Guards Can Smash You

How often did you watch a scene in Hollywood gambling movies where security guards beat the cheating players? Beating players for wrong activities is another typical dramatic depiction in various films that creates a sense of fear among many viewers. But does the situation turn sour to this level?

Well, we’ll admit it sometimes happened in the past. But not anymore! Nowadays, security guards are highly professional individuals. They will politely stop shady players from an unlawful activity but won’t beat them black and blue. Instead, an operator may heavily fine or ban the culprit from the casino.

7. Dress Code Adherence in Casinos

Elegantly dressed actors in Casino Royale and many more movies give an impression to viewers that the club will deny entry to them without formal attire. It is true in some locations, but not all. You won’t find every other Las Vegas casino following a dress code.

So relax! There is no entry restriction if you aren’t wearing a formal black-tie outfit. To play even more comfortably, you can sign-up on virtual casino sites and gamble in your PJs. It is one of the top reasons online gambling is now more popular than ever.

Wrap Up

Even the best gambling movies in Hollywood falsely represent various casino aspects. From hitting the jackpot instantly to drastic gambling scams, the well-scripted films created several misconceptions about casinos for viewers.

Such fake casino scenes may offer an ideal action-packed plot to grab the audience’s attention. However, it is not how things work in the brick-and-mortar casino setting. Movies hardly show the real side of the gambling world. So next time you watch any recent gambling movies better to take them with a pinch of salt.

For more information about gambling news, visit Safest Betting Sites.

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1997-98

NBC’s Thursday night block of “Must See TV” dominated the 1997-98 US TV season, with Seinfeld, ER, Friends, and new hit (and Kirstie Alley vehicle) Veronica’s Closet filling the top four spots. Even Union Square, which NBC cancelled after fourteen episodes for lower than expected ratings, came in at number seven, and the rest of the networks floundered in the Peacock’s wake. Outside of football and the news, only ABC’s Home Improvement and CBS schlockfest Touched By An Angel could crack the top ten, but Fox had a strong trio in the youth demographic with The X-Files, King of the Hill, and The Simpsons all making the top twenty.

Seinfeld was in its final season, as were Ellen, Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, and The Larry Sanders Show, but there were new arrivals in the shape of Ally McBeal, Dawson’s Creek, Stargate SG-1, and La Femme Nikita, while Oz began its gritty six-year run on HBO in July 1997. Fans of genre shows were also catered for by 3rd Rock from the Sun, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Star Trek: Voyager, but what about those shows that didn’t even make it to air? This is the story of four unsold pilots from the 1997-98 season…

Justice League of America (CBS): Weirdly, in the wake of this 1997 pilot film, there was no clamour to “release the Alcalá cut!”, presumably because what we saw that Sunday night on CBS purported to be the Alcalá cut (Cujo director Lewis Teague was brought in to salvage things but asked to have his name taken off), and also because five hours of this thing would have been insane…

In the wake of The Flash – six years later is still a wake, okay? –  Justice League of America was an attempt to bring DC Comics’ flagship group of heroes to the screen, slightly hamstrung by the lack of its Trinity (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) for licensing reasons. Instead, we got a curious mix of the classic league – Flash, Martian Manhunter, The Atom – and the Giffen/De Matteis era, with the pilot telling the (altered) origin of Ice, allowing her to line-up alongside Fire and the Guy Gardner Green Lantern.

David Ogden Stiers does some decent work under make-up and prosthetics as J’onn J’onzz and Miguel Ferrer is scenery-chewing great as always as the big villain of the piece – the, erm, Weatherman – but the tone of the piece is off from the start, the characters all wrong, and attempts at humour (and humanisation) clunky and ill-fitting. Alcalá had mostly directed episodes of action shows but the script by First Knight creators Lorne Cameron and David Hoselton seemed more intent on creating a super-powered version of Friends, and even an uncredited clean-up by Miami Vice and The Equalizer veteran Scott Shepherd couldn’t inject more than a touch of light peril.

The pilot was given an airing as a CBS Sunday Movie in December 1997 but by that point any plans for an ensuing series had long been abandoned (although none of the cast were so busy as to be unavailable should there have been a U-turn). Given an airing overseas (on the fledgling Channel 5 in the UK) and released on home video, you’d hope that Justice League of America would have, in time, gained something of a cult following but sadly not. Still, at least they didn’t try to shoehorn Cyborg into the thing…

Amazon High (syndication): Selma Blair was two years away from making her big splash in Cruel Intentions when she starred in Amazon High, a badly-titled attempt to create a third show within the Hercules and Xena universe.

Not that Kevin Sorbo or Lucy Lawless actually appear in the pilot, you understand, and instead we get the story of Cyane, an orphan girl magically transported back to the time of the Amazons where she has to learn to become one of the legendary female warriors (although, you’d assume, not be required to lop off a breast). Actually, they’re not the Amazons of legend, they’re just a ferocious female tribe whose men folk were all eaten by a rival tribe of cannibals, and when Cyane falls in love with one of that tribe (a broody Karl Urban), trouble ensues.

Blair is full of spunky promise, and is ably supported by Claudia Black as the tribe’s leader and by Danielle Cormack as her rival, but the pilot was not picked up as a series and was never aired outside of a few fan conventions. Footage from the movie was cut into the Xena: Warrior Princess episode “Lifeblood” as events that took place years before, with Shelley Edwards playing a grown-up Cyane (although Blair was still seen in flashbacks).

Amazon High writers RJ Stewart and Robert Tapert weren’t totally done with the idea of a time-displaced heroine, however, and reworked and retooled their project over the next three years until it finally emerged as Cleopatra 2525, all but unrecognisable but still retaining that strong female empowerment theme, just with less Karl Urban. The pilot itself has vanished and that eventual third slot in the Hercules universe was taken by Young Hercules a year later.

Legacy/Van Helsing Chronicles (NBC): A production of the Jim Henson Workshop, Legacy was created by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who would later go on to write for Charmed, Lost, Medium, and Marvel Comics. Grillo-Marxuach’s concept focused on Christian van Helsing, a descendent of the great vampire hunter, living a quiet life as a Cambridge professor.

Of course, that wouldn’t be much of a show at all, and so Christian (Tour of Duty’s Dan Gauthier) took up where his ancestor left off, hunting not just vampires but monsters of all flavours, with effects provided by the Henson crew. British director Geoffrey Sax (with both The New Statesman and Bergerac on his résumé) was brought in to helm the project and a pilot film was completed in the Spring of 1997. And then quietly shelved (although Ain’t It Cool News did get to see it and excoriated it).

That would have been the end for the show had it not been for NBC’s big new genre show Sleepwalkers failing so badly to find any kind of audience, which saw the project dusted off and retooled (with some parts recast) as Van Helsing Chronicles, planned to be inserted into the Sleepwalkers slot on Saturday nights. It was reported that NBC ordered six episodes on top of the reworked pilot but it never appeared on the network, with The Pretender instead being moved to a later time (and All-Star TV Bloopers filling the empty slot).

Officially, nothing has even been seen of either pilot, and there don’t even seem to be any extant set or publicity photos on the internet. Van Helsing did make it to TV in 2016, but this was Vanessa van Helsing, a distant relative and humanity’s last hope of cleaning up a post-apocalyptic future from all manner of nasties. That lasted five series and will soon enter syndication; we can only wonder whether Legacy might have reached the same goal had it been given a chance to stake its claim.

Hawaii Five-O (CBS): Hawaii Five-O ran for twelve seasons from its debut in September 1968 until its eventual retirement in April 1980, by which point Jack Lord was sixty. In continual re-runs, and with that killer theme by The Ventures, the show was never far from the popular imagination and in 1997 it was decided to bring it back.

Gary Busey had starred in 1991’s Point Break, the second best surfing movie of all time, and so had some experience of hanging-ten or whatever, and seemed perfect for the role of Steve McGarrett in a rebooted pilot, what with years of drug use already beginning to give him a Lord-like rictus grin. Except Busey wasn’t McGarrett, he was Jimmy Xavier Berk (yeah, we know), the new head of the Five-O, who brings back members of the old team to help find out who tried to assassinate the Governor – and killed the beloved Danno – on his watch.

Produced and written by Stephen J Cannell, Jack Lord was invited to appear in the pilot as Governor McGarrett, but was too ill through Alzeimer’s to take part and the script was revised to remove McGarrett altogether. Busey brought a maverick approach to his Honolulu cop, tasked with working with uptight Nick Irons (Russell Wong) to solve this most personal of cases.

The production was beset with problems, including not being able to get the rights to the original theme and the fact that one of the returning original team had actually died on-screen, and the finished product was never aired. Instead, it took another thirteen years for Hawaii Five-0 to return for another long run and all we have of the 1997 remake is a cobbled together cut on YouTube.

Next on The Telephemera Years: we take a look at what the kids were watching in 1997, including freelance police and EXTREME DINOSAURS!!!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1997-98

NBC’s Thursday night block of “Must See TV” dominated the 1997-98 US TV season, with Seinfeld, ER, Friends, and new hit (and Kirstie Alley vehicle) Veronica’s Closet filling the top four spots. Even Union Square, which NBC cancelled after fourteen episodes for lower than expected ratings, came in at number seven, and the rest of the networks floundered in the Peacock’s wake. Outside of football and the news, only ABC’s Home Improvement and CBS schlockfest Touched By An Angel could crack the top ten, but Fox had a strong trio in the youth demographic with The X-Files, King of the Hill, and The Simpsons all making the top twenty.

Seinfeld was in its final season, as were Ellen, Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, and The Larry Sanders Show, but there were new arrivals in the shape of Ally McBeal, Dawson’s Creek, Stargate SG-1, and La Femme Nikita, while Oz began its gritty six-year run on HBO in July 1997. Fans of genre shows were also catered for by 3rd Rock from the Sun, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Star Trek: Voyager, but what about those shows that didn’t hit the TV ratings charts? This is the story of four more shows from the 1997-98 season that failed to hit their mark…

Timecop (ABC): As seems incredibly appropriate, to tell the story of Timecop necessitates not one but two jumps into the past, beyond the 1994 movie of the same name to a three-part comic book serial in a 1992 anthology…

Timecop began in Dark Horse Comics #1, lining up alongside stories set in the Predator, Robocop, and Aliens universes, perhaps betraying that the strip had already been optioned by Universal Studios for the Jean-Claude van Damme actioner. Created by Mike Richardson, the first story was written by Mark Verheiden (with art by Ron Randall), and Richardson and Verheiden teamed to write the movie, which – and this is daming with faint praise – is one of van Damme’s best.

Van Damme’s Time Enforcement Commission Agent Max Walker does not return for the TV series, developed by Verheiden for ABC, and is replaced by Max Logan (Ted King). The world of Timecop saw time travel invented by the US government in 2004 and by 2007 the technology has leaked to all manner of ne’er-do-wells. Logan is tasked with tracking down those using the tech for their own selfish or nefarious means and fixing the timelines they put in danger.

Despite a decent supporting cast (with Cristi Conaway as the will they/won’t they sidekick and Don Stark as Logan’s boss), and stories from Verheiden and Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, audiences didn’t take to Timecop in any great number and ABC pulled the show after just nine of its thirteen episodes had aired. The other four were eventually shown in the Summer of 1998 but have disappeared since with only those first nine (minus episode two for some reason) available to stream on Tubi.

Invasion America (The WB): Prime-time animated shows were as rare as hen’s teeth in the Spring of 1998, despite the success of The Simpsons and a new show called South Park, and the prospect of an animated drama show in prime-time was unthinkable, a dream you might say…

Invasion America was an ambitious ploy by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Animation studio to break into the TV market, while also keeping an eye on the kids that formed their bread and butter audience. The show, which told the story of rival bands of aliens escaping the dying planet Tyrus and bringing their civil war to Earth, was presented in two versions – an edited version for younger viewers on Kids WB and the uncut episode for families in prime-time on The WB on Tuesday nights.

Thirteen episodes were produced for the show’s first season, intended to be book one of a longer story arc, and The WB premiered in on June 8^th 1998, a Monday night, before taking the slot recently vacated by the first season of Dawson’s Creek. Two episodes a week were aired, with the final three episodes shown as a bumper block on July 7^th, and DreamWorks’ lush animation was matched with a strong voice cast that included Mikey Kelly, Lorenzo Lamas, Rider Strong, and Leonard Nimoy.

Unfortunately, the somewhat thin storylines and teen pathos failed to resonate with audiences and critics alike, with Spielberg’s co-creator Harve Bennett possibly too long in the game, and a planned second (and third, and fourth…) season was cancelled before work could even begin. Two tie-in novels were released, however, and the show has earned a cult following in recent years, despite not being officially available to view. However, if you keep looking at the stars (and YouTube), you might just find it…

Meego (CBS): Bronson Pinchot shot to fame as Balki Bartokomous, the comical foreigner on the inexplicably long-running Perfect Strangers, but struggled to find a regular role after that show ended in 1993, largely retreating into voice work for animation, unable to find a home for his fish out of water comedy. In 1997, though, Ross Brown had a brainwave – what’s more foreign that outer space?

Brown had cut his teeth on The Facts of Life and Who’s the Boss? before taking two spin-offs of those shows to middling success in the early 1990s. Teaming with Miller-Boyett Productions, who had brought Happy Days, Full House, and so many more sitcoms to the world, Brown believed Meego would restore Pinchot to his place as America’s most beloved oddball, taking Ed Begley Jr, Jonathan Lipnicki, and a pre-Buffy Michelle Trachtenberg along for the ride.

Pinchot’s Meego is a 9,000-year-old shape-shifting alien from the planet Marmazon 4.0 who crash lands on Earth and is taken in by three children. Transforming into human shape, Meego tries to pass himself off as an ordinary human being, with the kids explaining his odd behaviour as his being from Canada. Their father – Begley Jr – is unaware that he is housing an alien (but somehow strangely fine with giving room in his home to a Canadian) and is the source of much exasperation comedy as the farce ensues.

CBS gave the show a strong lead-in on Friday nights, inheriting the audience of Family Matters (albeit a Family Matters in its final season), which had the added attraction of that show being a spin-off of Pinchot’s first big hit. Unfortunately, audiences failed to connect with this imperfect stranger and just seven of its thirteen episodes aired before the network replaced it with The Gregory Hines Show. Pinchot’s still jobbing around Hollywood, with a turn in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina a recent highlight, but he never recaptured that Balki magic. Well, of course not, don’t be ridiculous.

You Wish (ABC): Flushed with the success of Sabrina the teenage Witch and Boy Meets World, ABC attempted to turn their Friday nights into a must-see block of teen-aimed comedy with the addition of Teen Angel (see last time on The Telephemera Years) and You Wish, an I Dream of Jeannie with a twist (and no Larry Hagman).

Single-mom Gillian Apple (Arachnophobia’s Harley Jane Kozak) takes her kids to a rug shop owned by Madman Mustafa – John Rhys Davies doing his funny foreigner schtick – where they buy an antique rug, unaware that it contains a genie! Imprisoned within the rug for 2,000 years, Genie (it’s his name as well as his job) joins their family, introduced by Gillian as “Steve” from Canoga Park, an area of Los Angeles notable for its high percentages of Latinx-Americans and never-married men.

Genie is soon joined by his 50,000-year-old grandpa, played by Jerry van Dyke (who was also in Teen Angel at the same time), and hilarity was supposed to have ensued, although your mileage may vary on the degree of that merriment. For its seventh episode, You Wish was part of a crossover event which began in Sabrina and ran through the rest of the block’s shows, using Sabrina’s cat Salem and a time-travel theme as its anchor, but that would prove to be the last we saw of Genie, Gillian, and the old man.

Ratings for You Wish were less than ABC had hoped for and it was replaced by re-runs of Sabrina and Boy Meets World, before the final six episodes were eventually aired as a Spring 1998 replacement for the cancelled Teen Angel. ABC tried again the following year, with the hit Two of a Kid and non-hit Brother’s Keeper filling the other slots, but You Wish faded into obscurity, perhaps trapped in an antique rug lost in the back room of a rug shop owned by a comedy Arab…

Next on The Telephemera Years: it’s pilot season as we discover four shows that didn’t make it to series for the 1997-98 season…

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1997-98

NBC’s Thursday night block of “Must See TV” dominated the 1997-98 US TV season, with Seinfeld, ER, Friends, and new hit (and Kirstie Alley vehicle) Veronica’s Closet filling the top four spots. Even Union Square, which NBC cancelled after fourteen episodes for lower than expected ratings, came in at number seven, and the rest of the networks floundered in the Peacock’s wake. Outside of football and the news, only ABC’s Home Improvement and CBS schlockfest Touched By An Angel could crack the top ten, but Fox had a strong trio in the youth demographic with The X-Files, King of the Hill, and The Simpsons all making the top twenty.

Seinfeld was in its final season, as were Ellen, Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, and The Larry Sanders Show, but there were new arrivals in the shape of Ally McBeal, Dawson’s Creek, Stargate SG-1, and La Femme Nikita, while Oz began its gritty six-year run on HBO in July 1997. Fans of genre shows were also catered for by 3rd Rock from the Sun, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Star Trek: Voyager, but what about those shows that didn’t hit the TV ratings charts? This is the story of four of 1997’s greatest misses…

Teen Angel (ABC): Beginning as it does with the death of a likeable teenage boy, Teen Angel promises something dark and immediately eschews it in favour of something stupid. And that’s not a bad thing…

High school student Steve Beauchamp watches his best friend Marty die after daring him to eat a six-month old hamburger they found under Steve’s bed. Rather than become a moralistic tale about the fragility of life and the recklessness of dares (and, also, CLEAN YOUR ROOM!), Marty returns to Earth as Steve’s guardian angel, guided only by a floating head named Rod who is apparently God’s cousin.

Yes, this is ridiculous stuff and it was ABC’s attempt to cash in on the success of Sabrina, Teenage Witch with their own supernatural teen comedy, casting Corbin Aldred (a practising Mormon) as Steve in his first feature role. Mike Damus, with an unsold pilot and a failed sitcom already filling out his brief résumé, played Marty with a touch of mischief that went far beyond Clarence Odbody, and Barney Miller’s Ron Glass is good value as Rod (who Marty assumes wants to eat him when they first meet).

There’s also a chance to see Maureen “Marcia Brady” McCormack as Steve’s mum and Jerry van Dyke as his granddad, but it’s all too brief as low ratings caused ABC to cancel the show after just seventeen episodes had aired, not even giving it a full season, despite the caché of creators Al Jean and Mike Reiss of The Simpsons fame. It’s never been released on home video but several enterprising souls have uploaded most of the episodes to YouTube, where it’s well worth at least twenty-two minutes of your time.

The Visitor (Fox): The Visitor has a place in history that often goes unrecorded and probably for good reason; it was the first TV show to have accompanying webisodes, those annoying extras that hardly anyone can be bothered to watch, even though they contain precious lore. Debuting on Fox in September 1997, The Visitor also hit at the height of fever surrounding its stablemate The X-Files and was possibly doomed to fail in such company.

The basic story has Northern Exposure’s John Corbett abducted by aliens in the Bermuda Triangle during World War II. Fifty years later, he is returned to Earth having not aged a day and blessed with fantastic powers after his captors helped him unlock the portion of his brain that goes unused by ordinary humans.

Created by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, who had just enjoyed a massive hit with Independence Day, the anticipation for The Visitor was electric but despite Corbett’s usual charismatic performance, the show soon descended into an Incredible Hulk clone. A typical plot had Corbett’s Adam Macarthur on the run from the FBI, the army, and even more aliens, visiting a town in trouble and using his powers to solve the problem, before moving on to the next town and the next episode.

In more less heavy hands, and given more time, The Visitor might have turned into a small treasure but the thirteen episodes it was given just don’t allow the wider story to breathe and Corbett was reduced to becoming an object of the female gaze in Sex and the City within three years. It’s never been released on DVD but there are ways to see the whole series if you look hard enough, and the original website has been preserved by The Wayback Machine, although shorn of its innovative video content.

Sleepwalkers (NBC): Also a result of catching X-Files fever, NBC debuted its Thrillogy block in September 1996, pulling Dark Skies, The Pretender, and The Profiler together in an attempt to convince people to stay home on Saturday nights rather than drink to forget their miserable lives. When Dark Skies was shamefully cancelled after just a single season, Sleepwalkers was inserted in its place, keeping the three-show block intact but with less than spectacular results…

Created by David S Goyer (who would go on to write the Blade films, as well as the David Hasselhoff Nick Fury flop) and Stephen Kornish, Sleepwalkers focussed on the work of Dr Nathan Bradford and his team at The Morpheous Institute, a crack unit of sleep researchers who developed a way to go into dreams to help troubled souls.

an overarching conspiracy was afoot, continued in the second episode, which also set up the series’ “freak of the week” status. That was as far as most viewers got to see, however, as NBC decided to restrict the rest of the series (nine episodes had been filmed) to the West Coast only, and even gave up on that after only five of the remaining seven episodes had aired (although some foreign markets did get to see the full run, aborted as it was).

In exploring dreams and saving lives, it shares a similar premise with Satoshi Kon’s wonderful Paprika and maybe it took a man of his genius to figure out how to make it work? The truth is, of course, that people find other people’s dreams intensely boring, even if they do include succubi, serial killers, and sad dads. The show was released on DVD in Australia in 2005 but only six episodes were included, in no particular order, which sums up the way the world remembers Sleepwalkers, like a half-forgotten dream.

Tenacious D (HBO): It’s probably not too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that Jack Black would have always have made it big, such is the power of his charisma and his ability to fill (as well as divide) a room with his larger-than-life personality. But back in the mid-1990s, he was part of a comedy band, initially named The Axe Lords Featuring Gorgazon’s Mischief, that caught the ear of David Cross, enjoying cult fame as one half of The Mr Show on HBO.

Cross loved Tenacious D, as they soon became known, as was instrumental in them touring with Tool, while Black’s old college roommate got the duo cast in the Pauly Shore vehicle Bio-Dome, their first on-screen appearance as the band. The natural chemistry between Black and Kyle Gass was enough for HBO to give them their own show, which ran for three seasons. Wait… three seasons? Yeah, but that’s just six episodes…

Tenacious D starred the pair as a jobbing band, looking for their big break but confident that they rocked harder than Satan. The first two episodes – really, two half episodes at ten to twelve minutes each – aired on the same night in November 1997 and the world waited for more from this bright new comedy talent and their funny songs. Unfortunately, despite being filmed at the same time as the first two shorts, it would be two years before the next two aired, and another six months after that for a final pair. So what went wrong?

According to Gass, HBO had offered them a ten episode run but insisted halfway through the production that the pair relinquish their roles as executive producers and scriptwriters, instead just writing the band’s songs to be inserted in stories written by others. They balked at this and the project was cancelled, with Black and Gass retaining the rights to their creation, eventually releasing four albums and a feature film, 2006’s Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny.

By 2002, relations between the two parties had been repaired to the point that the HBO episodes were included as part of Sony DVD’s The Complete Masterworks, alongside live footage from a sold out Brixton Academy and a slew of extras.

Next on The Telephemera Years: more flops from the 1997-98 season, including time-traveling 5-0 and a less than perfect stranger…

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)