Sunday, July 3, 2016

1966 TV Premieres


It wasn't only BATMAN who dominated the airwaves in '66. In fact, it's further testimony to just what a wonderful year it was that even the one season wonders remain memorable to anyone who saw them at the time.  Here are just a FEW of the great shows celebrating their 50th anniversary this year!
























4 comments:

  1. I actually remember several of these. IIRC, Batman debuted in January, as a mid-season replacement for some cancelled series. I would assume that the shows listed here premiered in September, at the start of the 1966-67 season.

    I never saw Love On a Rooftop, The Tammy Grimes Show, or Pistols & Petticoats. I seem to remember seeing ads for them.

    The Pruitts of Southampton starred Phyllis Diller, and I vaguely recall the theme song's line, "It belongs to the Internal Revenue." The premise had to do with a rich family that went broke, and the government was propping them up and making it look like they were still rich, because rumors of a stock market crash would cause a panic.

    I saw Hey Landlord in reruns ca. 1970. Which is odd, since one-season shows usually did not get syndicated in reruns.

    Hawk was rerun in the early 1970's, when Burt Reynolds became a big star.

    The Monkees and The Rat Patrol were popular with my third grade classmates, although the latter was not specifically a kids' show.

    I think It's About Time was produced by the same producer who created Gilligan's Island. There were two astronauts whose Gemini capsule went through the time barrier and crashed on Earth in prehistoric times. The format was changed halfway through; they repaired their spacecraft and got back to the present. Whether by accident or intention, a cave dweller family came with them, and then the show was about the misadventures of the cave people in 1967.

    Run, Buddy, Run was about a witness on the run from the Mob. There was a one-shot comic book from Gold Key or Dell. I think Bruce Gordon ("The Untouchables") co-starred as a gangster.

    I remember everyone complaining that all the cool action-adventure shows got crammed into Friday night: Tarzan and T.H.E. Cat on NBC, The Green Hornet and The Time Tunnel on ABC, The Wild Wild West on CBS. And there were no household VCR's or DVR's back then.

    I always liked Stefanie Powers, but 1966 was the peak of the spy-fi fad, and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. probably got lost in the crowd.

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    1. You are correct on every score, right up to the fact that HEY LANDLORD was oddly rerun a few years later on the network, RAT PATROL was strangely a kids favorite (with Aurora models) and you even spelled Stefanie's name right! I actually corrected it on an IMDB listing just today! BTW--You can order 15 surviving episodes of LOVE ON A ROOFTOP from my DVD page. I love a memory like that!

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  2. I was a big fan of T.H.E. Cat. They managed to tell a complete story in 30 minutes, lots of moody set pieces, great acting by Robert Loggia, and a hip jazz score by Lalo Schifrin. "Out of the night comes a man who saves lives at the risk of his own..."

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  3. I forget what a monumental year 1966 was until a little thing like this list reminds me. Thank you.

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