THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1965, part 2

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!

1965-66

Six years into its eventual fourteen-season run, Bonanza was the king of TV in the 1965-66 season with a massive 31.8 rating, four ratings points higher than its nearest rival – Gomer Pyle, USMC – but five points lower than the previous year. It was a downturn that would continue in 1966-67 and, aside from the adventures of the Cartwrights on the Ponderosa ranch, NBC did not enjoy the best of years, their second highest rating show coming in at twelfth, as wacky spy show Get Smart debuted. CBS had much better form across the board, with Gomer Pyle joined in the top ten by The Lucy Show, The Red Skelton Hour, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and new arrival Hogan’s Heroes, while ABC looked to Bewitched and new sensation Batman, two high rating genre shows in a fertile period for such fare.

Other notable shows making their debuts in the 1965-66 season included talking pig sitcom Green Acres, eventual soap juggernaut Days of Our Lives, quiz shows Supermarket Sweep and The Newlywed Game, and a clutch of new genre outings as The Wild Wild West, Lost in Space, and I Dream of Jeannie all made their bows. They joined The Addams Family, The Avengers, The Flintstones, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, and The Man from UNCLE as America embraced the fantastic, but those were all shows that made their mark on the annals of TV history: what about those that didn’t stick around? This is the story of four more shows that didn’t outstay their welcomes…

Gidget (ABC): After fleeing Germany in 1933 when Nazis began removing Jewish credits from feature films, Czechoslovak screenwriter Frederick Kohner settled in Los Angeles, where he found work with Columbia Pictures. In the early 1950s, Kohner’s teenage daughter Kathy fell in with the local surfing crowd and the writer became fascinated by their subculture, penning a novel based on the scene, with the character of Franzie Hofner – dubbed Gidget, a portmanteau of “girl and “midget” – standing in for his daughter, guiding her father through the surfing world. Released as Gidget, The Little Girl with Big Ideas in 1957, the book was a success and Columbia bought the film rights for $50,000, of which Kohner gave 10% to Kathy.

Columbia released the first Gidget movie in 1959, starring Sandra Dee as an Americanised Francine Lawrence, drawn into surfing through an infatuation with James Darren’s Moondoggie. Columbia produced two sequels – Gidget Goes Hawaiian and Gidget Goes to Rome – but only James Darren was consistently cast, with Deborah Walley and Cindy Carol succeeding Dee. Although that was it for the films, Columbia’s TV production arm – Screen Gems – were keen to continue the series on television, recasting once again and bringing in Kohner as a consultant.

The show reoriented the focus back onto the relationship between Gidget and her father, Russell, which had been at the forefront of the novel but sidelined for the movies. Cast as Gidget was Sally Field, an eighteen-year-old Californian fresh out of high school, who beat out seventy-five other girls for the role. Don Porter reprised the role of widowed Russell that he played in Gidget Goes to Rome, and with Gidget’s boyfriend Moondoggie away at Princeton University, the TV show can be taken as a fresh take on the novel or a sequel to the movies (although there are obvious timeline and character difficulties with that approach). Gidget’s romantic status certainly didn’t prevent her from chasing other boys in the course of the series, with guest stars including Richard Dreyfuss and Daniel J Travanti lining up as objects of her affection, and she would often break the fourth wall to explain what she’d learned from the episode to the audience at home, signing off with the Field-improvised, “toodles!”

Gidget debuted on Wednesday nights on September 15^th 1965, where it struggled against strong opposition, and a move to Thursdays proved no better. ABC cancelled the show, but summer re-runs proved to be very popular and the network scrambled to find a new show for Field, resulting in 1967’s The Flying Nun. In 1969, ABC greenlit a pilot for a possible sequel series starring Karen Valentine, Gidget Grows Up, based on Kohner’s 1968 novel Gidget Goes to New York, and tried again in 1972 with Monie Ellis in Gidget Gets Married. Later that year, Hanna-Barbera made an animated TV feature – Gidget Makes the Wrong Connection – but it wouldn’t be until 1986’s The New Gidget, spun out of pilot movie Gidget’s Summer Reunion, that the character would make a regular return to TV.

The Trials of O’Brien (CBS): Early in his acting career, after a failed screen test, Peter Falk was told by Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn, “for the same price, I could get an actor with two eyes.” It was another setback for the actor, who lost his eye at three-years-old to restinoblastoma, but nevertheless became a star athlete in high school and served with the merchant navy when turned away by the marines. Having been rejected by the CIA, Falk took an office job, but began attending acting classes on the side, inveigling his way into a class taught by Eve La Galliene, who told him he should act full-time.

Falk found success on the stage, even acting on Broadway, and persevered in Hollywood, gaining small parts in movies and TV shows leading up to his breakout role in gangster flick Murder, Inc in 1960. Falk received an Oscar nomination for his performance and was cast by Frank Capra in Pocketful of Miracles, the director’s final film, for which the actor again received a nod from the Acacdemy. Further supporting roles in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Robin and the 7 Hoods added to his cachet and in 1965 he was cast in his first starring role on TV, as an over-the-top, Shakespeare-quoting lawyer in The Trials of O’Brien.

The Trials of O’Brien was created by Gene Wang, a California lawyer who began writing scripts as a sideline to his legal work, lending his legal knowledge to the production of radio-to-TV transfer The Amazing Mr Malone in 1950. Subsequent work led him to Perry Mason, the 1957 TV adaptation of Stanley Erle Gardner’s literary lawyer, both as a story consultant and script writer on the first three seasons. After one-off scripting jobs on the likes of Dr Kildare and Adventures in Paradise, The Trials of O’Brien gave Wang the opportunity to do a series his way, and in Danny O’Brien he created a character that was likeable and despicable in equal measure.

Perfectly portrayed by Falk, O’Brien was often late on his alimony payments to his patient ex-wife (Joanna Barnes), brusque with his secretary Miss G (Elaine Stritch), and every bit as rumpled as the LAPD detective he would later make his signature role. Across twenty-two episodes – written by an assortment including George Bellak, future Colombo scribes Richard Alan Simmons and Robert van Scoyk, and Ironside’s Don Mankiewicz – O’Brien’s clients included heist artists, bookies, underground filmmakers, burlesque comedians, and an eccentric judge, all seemingly innocent of the charges brought against them, with guest stars including Alan Alda, Milton Berle, Britt Eklund, Buddy Hackett, Burgess Meredith, and Roger Moore. Falk certainly seemed to revel in the role, later claiming he enjoyed it more than Colombo. Despite that, the show failed to earn the ratings CBS were after and it was among fifteen shows cancelled by the network at the end of the season, including Perry Mason. Although Falk found much more fame in his later role, Wang never wrote for TV again.

The Wackiest Ship in the Army (NBC): A flat-bottomed schooner that was originally topsail rigged but later also fitted with a diesel engine, the USS Echo began life as a cargo ship in her native New Zealand but was leased to the United States in 1942 to support the war effort against the Japanese in the Pacific. Sailing under a false Swiss flag, the age of the ship allowed it to slip under the attentions of the Japanese navy, supplying US Army outposts and Coastwatching stations until February 1944, when she was returned to New Zealand with a commendation from the Army. In 1956, the story of the Echo was featured in men’s adventure magazine Argosy in a story entitled “Big Fella Wash-Wash” by Marion Hargrove and Herb Carlson.

Inspired by the memories of Echo’s captain, Meredith “Rip” Riddle, the rights to Hargrove and Carlson’s article were acquired by Columbia Pictures a year later, engaging Herbert Margolis and William Raynor to write a screen story, which was later turned into a screenplay by Richard Murphy, who was also hired as director. Originally intended as a vehicle for Ernie Kovacs, who was unavailable when it came to make the film, The Wackiest Ship in the Army starred Jack Lemmon and teen singing sensation Ricky Nelson, and was released in December 1960, well-reviewed as an amusing farce.

The movie did well enough that, five years later, Screen Gems considered turning it into a TV series, ordering a pilot starring 12 Angry Men‘s Jack Warden and newcomer Gary Collins, and written and directed by Danny Arnold. Arnold’s treatment renamed the ship the USS Kiwi but sailed closer to the real-life story of the Echo, with Warden and Collins playing rival commanders, one in charge of the ship while she was ashore, and the other when she was at sea. Mike Kellin, who played the Chief Mate in the movie, was the only actor to make the transition, and the resulting pilot was sufficient for Screen Gems to order a series, sold to NBC for the Fall 1965 season. Twenty-eight further episodes were produced, with the crew not only having to deal with the Japanese but also double agents, native tribes, and pirates.

At an hour in length, with no laugh track, and with characters dying, the show sometimes sailed closer to an adventure drama rather than the comedy it was billed at, a world away from the hijinks Lemmon and company got up to on the big screen. That’s not to say The Wackiest Ship in the Army wasn’t funny, more that it resembled M*A*S*H rather than the exploits of Sgt Bilko on The Phil Silvers Show. It may be that US TV audiences were not quite ready for that kind of thing because The Wackiest Ship in the Army lasted just a single season. The real-life Echo returned to carrying cargo between Marlborough and Wellington, bridging the gap between the country’s South and North Islands, and served latterly as clubrooms and a museum before being broken up in 2015.

Honey West (ABC): One of the first female private detectives in popular fiction, Honey West first appeared in the 1957 novel This Girl for Hire, by husband-and-wife team Skip and Gloria Fickling, writing under the combined pseudonym GG Fickling. Gloria gave Skip credit for most of the writing, but noted she added a female point of view vital to the character, who her husband imagined as a cross between Mike Hammer and Marilyn Monroe. Following This Girl for Hire, West appeared in a further ten novels, with three spin-offs featuring side character Erik March published in the early 1960s.

In April 1965, Honey West appeared in an episode of Burke’s Law, a show starring Gene Barry as Amos Burke, a millionaire LAPD captain tasked with solving some of the most difficult murder cases in the City of Angels. In “Who Killed the Jackpot?”, Burke finds himself in a race to solve the murder of a wealthy banker with the glamorous private eye who was working for the victim, and the reaction to Anne Francis’s performance as West was positive enough that a Honey West series was commissioned on the strength of the backdoor pilot. The series was developed by Gwen Bagni and Paul Dubov, who also wrote “Who Killed the Jackpot?” and a third of the thirty first season episodes.

Francis – who had shot to fame in 1955’s The Blackboard Jungle before appearing in Forbidden Planet the following year – was not producer Aaron Spelling’s first choice to play the character, but Honor Blackman turned down the role. Despite that, she was a great fit for the “private eyeful” (as she was referred to on more than one occasion) and earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress, as well as an Emmy nomination in the same category. Her West has a pet ocelot named Bruce, and a partner/man-Friday named Sam Bolt. She is an expert in judo and has several James Bond-like gadgets, switching her wardrobe from revealing animal print dresses to a slick, black bodysuit she uses for sneaking around and the majority of her fight scenes.

Debuting on Friday nights from September 17^th 1965, the series ran into tough competition from Gomer Pyle, USMC, the second-highest rating show across the whole schedule. This, coupled with the relative expense for filming such a slick, high action show, led to ABC making the decision to import The Avengers rather than continue with Honey West after its first season. The series is notable for a number of firsts, however, as it was the first network show to feature a titular female character (a decade after Annie Oakley did the same in syndication) and it was one of the first TV shows to refer to cocaine as “snow,” a popular street name for the drug at the time. A new Honey West novel and a new collection of short stories featuring the character were published in 2014 amid rumours of a film version starring Reese Witherspoon, but to date the girl remains for hire.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: What 1965 shows didn’t make it past the pilot stage?

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1965 (part 1)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (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: 1970 (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: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)