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Which shows do you have the COMPLETE series for on DVD?
- Thread starter Snarky Oracle!
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Thriller was an ATV series and aired on ITV with built in commercial breaks, not on the BBC. On DVD, the episodes have their break bumpers intact.
Thriller used to have it’s credits removed for transmission in the USA. Then it would have extended credits stuck on, which frequently have nothing to do with the story and these US credits sometimes run for several minutes. The US credits are included at the end of each particular episode on the DVD set.
One Deadly Owner with a Donna Mills, the car and Jeremy Brett. I’ve met Freddie Jones, who was in a Thriller episode with Joanna Pettet. Joanna Pettet is in two episodes. Sounds like you watched A Killer In Every Corner, which is on disc 10 with Patrick Magee, Max Wall and Eric Flynn. She gets a Guest Star credit in the UK titles after them and second billing on the closing but gets top billing on the US titles. The US opening titles run for over 3 minutes on that. Joanna Pettet is also in A Midsummer Nightmare on disc 14, with Tony Anholt, Brian Blessed and Norman Rodway and she gets a Special Guest credit after them. The US title is Appointment with a Killer and Joanna Pettet is the only cast member billed above the title. The US end titles run for around three minutes.
ATV and it’s company ITC used to import American guest stars for Thriller, as they had done for the shows Espionage and Court Martial in the 1960s. In the 1960s we in the UK got Cameron Mitchell, Steven Hill, Dennis Hopper, Bradford Dillman, Jim Backus, Sal Mineo, William Smithers and Louise Sorel coming over for a few weeks. Peter Graves starred in three separate series for ITC, each shot in different countries. For Thriller, Gary Collins, Barbara Feldon, Lynda Day George, Carol Lynley and Bradford Dillman did some.
Oh, I got William Russell to sign my DVD set of The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (in which he played Sir Lancelot). He then told me that he didn’t know it was out on DVD and asked me where it was available from.
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I wonder why. Not that there's anything wrong with it (peeks at IMDB - Christina "Flamingo Road" Raines was Nancy Irving? Hadn't even noticed this!).
Or did these stories have so many American nieces and au-pairs?
Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense (the sister show of Hammer House Of Horror) did this too.
And while I enjoyed watching those actors (Dirk Benedict, Mary Crosby, Deborah Raffin etc) I don't think it made the stories look better. Or maybe it did...maybe that was exactly why they hired those pretty Americans.
Donna Mills is beautiful and a very good actress, but was she famous at the time she appeared in thriller?
To me, it didn't seem like those Special Guest Star stints they did on the 80s American shows (Hotel, Murder She Wrote etc).
Or was it (irony, irony!) because they wanted to have some un-familiar faces on Thriller?
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Thriller would have been 1973-76, if that helps. ITC were forever trying to secure sales to the US market. Even though some show’s did excellent business around the world, if they didn’t take off in America, they could get cancelled. They got Steve Forrest, Peter Graves, Bradford Dillman, Richard Bradford, Tony Curtis, Joel Fabiani, Robert Vaughn, Gene Barry, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Dan Dailey, Richard Conte, Vittorio De Sica, Brian Keith, Kaz Garas, George Dolenz and Nick Cravat to star as series leads. Gene Barry famously got his co-stars Stuart Damon and Catherine Schell sacked for being tall.
Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense wasn’t an ITC show though.
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Even if the shows were very popular in England? The episodes don't look as if it has cost a fortune to produce them.
Oops, this was a Hammer/20th Century Fox collaboration. My mistake.
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I just found Torchwood in a box. Better keep it secret.
Thriller however is a largely studio-bound production on video with some location shooting on film.
Oh, I was watching Joan Hackett putting in a very powerful performance in an episode of Court Martial (shot at Pinewood) as a wartime nurse, who has started euthanasia killing. Bradford Dillman defends her but it is a downbeat ending this week.
There is an interview (11mins) with the late Brian Clemens on the Thriller set. He talked about ordinary things being frightening. He mentioned that the Americans would take British actors, as long as they were known in America. He mentioned that Donna Mills was suggested by ABC television in America and he didn’t mind because she was good to look at and a competent actress. He said the US credits are puerile.
The UK 35mm film series that ITC did from the 50s-70s were frequently some of the most expensive shows on UK tv. UFO and Space:1999 had some of the highest budgets for UK shows at those times, lots of sci-fi props. The Persuaders! had location filming for half a dozen episodes in Europe. The Four Just Men had location shoots in Italy and Paris, as well as heavy location work within easy reach of Walton Studios. Man of the World had a large location budget and filmed in Spain, Paris and Scotland, as well as extensive location work within easy reach of Shepperton. Return of the Saint, The Protectors and The Adventurer had filming done in European countries. Gideon’s Way had extensive location filming. The Zoo Gang had extensive filming in France. Shirley’s World (starring Shirley MacLaine, who hated doing the show, so they had to finance films for her afterwards to stop her walking off the set) had extensive overseas shoots and heavy location filming. The Prisoner had four episodes with extensive shooting at Portmeirion and other scenes shot there. Danger Man also had filming done at Portmeirion and surrounding areas. The Saint had two episodes with extensive shooting in Malta, some filming done in Wales too. The Count of Monte Cristo had 12 episodes shot in Hollywood. The Adventures of Sir Lancelot had it’s second batch of episodes shot in colour, in 1956. Espionage had heavy exterior filming and an episode filmed in America. Whiplash was shot for ITC in Australia with Peter Graves. Sword of Freedom was done on the cheap though.
Thriller however is a largely studio-bound production on video with some location shooting on film.
Oh, I was watching Joan Hackett putting in a very powerful performance in an episode of Court Martial (shot at Pinewood) as a wartime nurse, who has started euthanasia killing. Bradford Dillman defends her but it is a downbeat ending this week.
There is an interview (11mins) with the late Brian Clemens on the Thriller set. He talked about ordinary things being frightening. He mentioned that the Americans would take British actors, as long as they were known in America. He mentioned that Donna Mills was suggested by ABC television in America and he didn’t mind because she was good to look at and a competent actress. He said the US credits are puerile.
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You probably don't know this about Petrocelli, but that 1974-76 NBC legal series w/Barry Newman, Susan Howard and Albert Salmi was filmed in South Tucson, AZ; that is the place that stood for the fictional town of San Remo, AZ. In fact, in the second-season copyrights at the end of each show (IINM), Paramount actually thanked Tucson for helping in the filming of Petrocelli.
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I love Tucson.
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I've never been there! What is it you like/love about that place?
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Yes it is.
As I mentioned, I only have a set with seasons one and two which includes two of her episodes.
Both versions were broadcast here at various times. The US versions were made to look like individual telemovies, sometimes even with different titles. For example, the first "Lady Killer" was called The Death Policy. The lengthy animated titles portrayed half the plot.
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Yes. They give away the cliff bit from near the end! Some of those US titles have "menacing figures" lurking about on them, that have nothing to do with the story.
Espionage had both British and American writers working on it. Michael Powell directed three of them. Martin Balsam, Fritz Weaver, Dana Elcar and Joseph Campanella appeared in it. So you could get Steven Hill with Ingrid Thulin and Michael Gwynn one week. Or John Gregson, Dennis Hopper and Patricia Neal in one episode.
I remembered on waking that Court Martial started as a Kraft colour presentation called Sergeant Ryker in the USA, starring Lee Marvin, Bradford Dillman, Hal Holbrook and Peter Graves, and it was set during the Korean War. It was a Roncom-ITC co-production for Universal, shot at Pinewood Studios in the UK and on location where it was now set in World War 2 and in black-and-white. It won what became a BAFTA for Best Dramatic Series. Bradford Dillman recalls that they were allowed a limited number of American guest stars to be specially flown in, like Cameron Mitchell, Joan Hackett and Dennis Hopper.
Then they also had to use British, American, Australian and Canadian actors resident in the UK to do American accents, like Donald Sutherland, Kenneth J. Warren and Jeremy Wilkin. So you might get Dennis Hopper with Susan Hampshire one week.
Also, from the mid-1950s, Hannah Weinstein was using blacklisted American writers to work on the UK's The Adventures of Robin Hood, which starred Richard Greene. So Ring Lardner Jr. might be credited under the pseudonym of Eric Heath and other people.
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One other thing you probably didn't know about Petrocelli-- it was a Miller-Milkis Production IAW Paramount Television (Miller-Milkis has also been known as Miller-Boyett, and they were responsible for several of television's classic comedies [Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy, et al.]); Petrocelli was, IINM, their lone dramatic series.
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I was spring cleaning (either late or early) and out tumbled a copy of the complete Hi-De-Hi! still sealed. I don’t recall getting it, although it has triggered memories of When The Boat Comes In and whatever is left of The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads DVD’s somewhere about the place. I certainly don’t recall using any of my £726.61 Nectar points (which I’m saving for a Thundersnow and Sun pillar day) for it. Maybe someone put it there?
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Yes, and I think it's a warning.
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That Hi-De-Hi! set has the worst instance of rattling DVDs inside a case that I’ve ever seen. 11 discs out of their slots in a sealed package. Whereas The Avengers 50th Anniversary collection wins the prize for the most difficult to remove DVDs and ones where by putting them back in their slots, you might scratch them.
They’ll suffer for it. I promise.
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Here's the back side of that Wanted: Dead or Alive all-in-one (I did not depict that upon first mention, unlike what I did with the others); thought you might want to know also that not all of the 94 episodes contained within are actually as they were on CBS from 1958-61 (some first-season episodes apparently are syndie cuts that run only 22 min. or so).
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I dug the complete set of Moonlighting out today. I remember that I haven't watched that set yet. Well, it is only nine years since I got it. It had somehow slipped behind Danger Man: The Complete First series (in triplicate from Carlton, Network and Madman/Umbrella) and Danger Man: The Complete Hour-Long episodes from Network and Madman and Danger Man original soundtrack (2 separate music releases of the jazzy stuff and then the harpsichord stuff). Although the Network DVD set has bits missing from some episodes, despite it's complete and unedited tag. QUARK starring Richard Benjamin was there too! Joan Van Ark was the Princess Libido in a two-parter with the one who played Guzzler in a Dallas episode. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was in there too.
http://space1970.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/quark-all-emperors-quasi-norms.html
http://space1970.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/quark-all-emperors-quasi-norms.html