THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1973 – PART 3

Written By:

Alan Boon

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!

1973-74

With a massive 31.2 rating, CBS’s All in the Family had no competition for the top spot as 1973’s most popular show, with over twenty million viewers tuning in weekly to see what daft old racist Archie Bunker would do next. In fact, CBS controlled the top ten shows to such an extent that only NBC’s Sanford and Son (like All in the Family, a British transplant) earned a spot on the rundown. NBC really couldn’t cope with a CBS line-up that also included The Waltons, M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-O, and new arrival Kojak, and Police Story seemed to be their only new show to make any impact.

ABC, though, had new smash The Six Million Dollar Man at number eleven, and scored decent placings for Kung Fu, The Streets of San Francisco, and the debuting Happy Days. Although ABC would have preferred to land more blows on the Tiffany Network, they could still rely on Monday Night Football and their various movie slots to pull in viewers, although their schedules – like those of CBS and NBC – were very light on sci-fi and fantasy shows. That was what was happening in terms of shows that people watched but what about those shows that didn’t make it to air, instead only existing as one-off pilot shows? This is the story of 1973’s never-weres…

Lady Luck (NBC): Supernatural shows were thin on the ground when the Fall 1973 line-ups were announced but the arrival (and subsequent departure) of The Girl with Something Extra might have been joined by several other shows had their pilots been picked up for full series. Among their number was Lady Luck, broadcast as a TV movie on February 12^th 1973 with an eye on securing that all important series order.

Scripted by The Man from UNCLE writer Dean Hargrove, Lady Luck starred a rookie Valerie Perrine (Eve Tessmacher in 1978’s Superman) in the prim yet beautiful title role, a woman who may or may not have supernatural powers. Known only as Laura, she dedicates her life to helping out strangers in need, whether they want her help or not!

The pilot aired as part of NBC Monday Night at the Movies but there wasn’t enough support for a full series and Hargrove went on to create both Jake and the Fatman and Matlock but will best be remembered by British audiences for producing Hex, Sea of Souls, and Demons in the wake of the return of Doctor Who to British screens.

Genesis II (CBS): After finishing up with Star Trek in 1969, Gene Roddenberry felt he’d become pigeonholed as a producer of sci-fi and decided to break out of that corner by writing and directing a sexploitation comedy. Pretty Maids All in a Row did not fare well at the box office or with critics and so Roddenberry took a break from Hollywood to appear at conventions and give lectures on college campuses.

It was while he was on this break that he found he missed the work and set about writing a script for a new sci-fi series, completing the pilot script for Genesis II in just six weeks over the Summer of 1972, one of three new projects he hoped to bring to air as series the following year. Genesis II told the story of Dylan Hunt, a NASA astronaut thrown forward in time to a post-apocalyptic future, with the civilisations of Hunt’s time destroyed by The Great Conflict. New societies have sprung up in their place and, through Hunt’s eyes, the viewer explores the strange new world of 2133.

The pilot script was accompanied by a 45-page guide, outlining future storylines which would have seen Hunt encounter a mysterious suicide squad, visit the London of the future, be captured as a pet for a female-dominated cult, and travel to 1975 as a spectral spectator. Alex Cord, who would go on to play Archangel in Airwolf, was cast as Hunt, with back-up from Ted Cassidy, Mariette Hartley, and Percy Rodrigues, all of whom had worked with Roddenberry on Star Trek.

The pilot was scheduled for March 23^rd 1973 in CBS’s Friday Night Movies slot and Roddenberry had already been asked to produce scripts for four more episodes before it aired. However, an airing of Planet of the Apes on CBS in September 1973 had done blockbuster ratings and it was decided to make a series of that instead, which eventually found a slot for the Fall 1974 season. Roddenberry reworked the pilot as Planet Earth in 1974, with John Saxon in the lead role, but this also failed to make it to series, as did the Roddenberry-less Strange New World a year later.

Questor (NBC): With Genesis II failing to earn a series (and supernatural detective drama Spectre eventually showing up four years later), Gene Roddenberry’s other 1973 project was Questor, the story of an android with incomplete memory tapes. Written with his Star Trek comrade Gene L Coon, Questor’s task was to save humanity from itself, and the eventual series would have seen him attempting to find the missing pieces needed to complete his mission.

The role was written with Leonard Nimoy in mind, and he agreed to do the weekly series if it was picked up but Robert Foxworth, a stage actor trying to make the transition to TV, played Questor in the pilot. Reaction at the network to the pilot was strong enough that a series of thirteen episodes was ordered, for a Fall 1973 debut, and Roddenberry set about working on scripts for the run, with the Friday time slot that finished off Star Trek earmarked for the show.

The pilot was to be reshot with Nimoy in the role but conflict between Roddenberry and the network eventually put a halt to proceedings before a single episode had been completed, and the original pilot was shown as The Questor Tapes in January 1974 as part of NBC Wednesday Night at the Movies. Despite the abandonment of the series, the pilot was well-received and earned a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Production in 1975.

Poor Devil (NBC): Other than an appearance on a TV special by his good friend – and Las Vegas residency buddy – Elvis Presley and some sketches for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Sammy Davis Jr’s had taken a break from the screen after 1970’s One More Time, his final film with Peter Lawford. In 1973 he was tempted back to play a demon – called Sammy, naturally – who is given a chance of promotion in Hell if he can convince an accountant to sell his soul.

A stellar cast, including Christopher Lee as Lucifer and Jack Klugman as the target of Sammy’s attentions, were assembled by producers Earl Barret and Arne Sultan, who had worked as writers and producers on such shows as Batman, Get Smart, and Bewitched. Barret and Sultan also wrote the screenplay from a story by former Bewitched and The Munsters writer Richard Baer, and it was intended that a series would see Davis Jr try – and ultimately fail, with comic results – to try and tempt a new soul each week.

The pilot as a TV movie on February 14^th 1973 in the slot usually reserved for the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie, but no series was forthcoming and Davis Jr went back to making guest appearances on various shows, usually playing himself or a thinly-veiled version of his larger than life personality. Barret and Sultan also went back to work, writing for such shows as Welcome Back, Kotter and the legendarily bad Holmes and Yoyo, their last big hit being Too Close for Comfort, a generation gap sitcom about a cartoonist which ran for six seasons from 1980.

The Stranger (NBC): Stealing the set-up from 1969’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, this pilot movie for a potential TV show was created by Gerald Sanford, a jobbing screenwriter who had recently worked on Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone follow-up, The Night Gallery. The project was brought to screen by Bing Crosby Productions, which had been set up to produce the crooner’s own films but had lately enjoyed TV hits with Hogan’s Heroes and Ben Casey.

Glen Corbett (Route 66) played NASA astronaut Neil Stryker who, after a routine mission goes awry, finds himself on a planet that is alarmingly like our own. Kept in quarantine for longer than he’d like, Stryker eventually escapes and discovers that the planet – which the locals call Terra – is different in some very important ways, with everyone being left handed, there are three moons in the sky, and that there is no such thing as Florida!

Stryker is hunted by the government of the planet, an organisation calling themselves The Perfect Order, and discovers that it might be possible to return home before he has to disappear into Terran society, which presumably would have formed the bulk of the ongoing series. A decent cast, including The High Chapparal’s Cameron Mitchell and the veteran Lew Ayres, gave Corbett solid backing but as a standalone piece Journey to the Far Side of the Sun did it much better.

Although a series was not forthcoming, The Stranger did have something of an afterlife, acquired by the repackaging oddballs at Film Ventures International and released on VHS in the mid-1980s as Stranded in Space, cut with footage from an entirely unrelated movie, Prisoners of the Lost Universe. It was this version that got the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment in 1991 and that is available to watch on YouTube if you’re curious, as is the original.

The Norliss Tapes (NBC): From a story by horror novelist Fred Mustard Stewart (whose The Mephisto Waltz had been adapted for the screen in 1971, with Alan Alda as a musician searching for a lost composition), The Norliss Tapes followed the investigations of David Norliss, told through tapes found after his disappearance.

The Invaders’ Roy Thinnes starred in the title role, a debunker of supposedly supernatural happenings who is called in to aid Angie Dickinson, who claims her recently-deceased husband is behind a recent attack on her person. The story unfolds from there to involve ghouls, ancient Egyptian deities, and the customary romantic tension, and the pilot ends with Norliss’s publisher wondering if this case had anything to do with the disappearance of his friend, before slipping another tape into the cassette player.

Writer William F Nolan (responsible for the original novel of Logan’s Run) wrote the teleplay and claims he did much of the gruntwork on the story, with director Dan Curtis earning plaudits for his tense, atmospheric film, which aired as a TV movie on February 21^st 1973 as part of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie. Despite the critical success of the movie, no series was ordered and all involved must have eyed ABC’s decision to take The Night Stalker (which Curtis had produced) to series the following year with some envy.

Curtis, who had created Dark Shadows, was never really able to escape his TV chains but nevertheless brought some stylish tension to the small screen, delivering adaptations of classic horror texts including The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, and The Turn of the Screw. The Norliss Tapes was released on DVD in 2006 but is now out of print but you can find it pretty easily on the internet if you’re a curious soul like David Norliss…

Next time on The Telephemera Years: the kids are alright and they’re watching Goober and the Ghost Chasers!

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)