Gary Coleman and Mr. T (Lawrence Tureaud) on Diff’rent Strokes in 1983. Mr. T appears as himself, shooting an episode of The A-Team in the Drummond family penthouse apartment. Arnold (Coleman) gets jealous when a young girl pays more attention to the TV star, so Arnold dresses like Mr. T to charm her.
I’m a loyal watcher of the old “Mission: Impossible” TV series. Right now, you can catch one episode a week on METV. Monday mornings at 3 a.m. I expect that whenever the next Tom Cruise “MI” movie comes out, it’ll run more often. That’s what usually happens.
What I love is how it’s a time capsule of making TV in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The same character actors show up season after season. Sid Haig played eight different people. Arthur Batanides played six. John Vernon, four. They’d play a priest in one episode, disappear for a year, and then reappear as a gangster. It was easier to have that kind of career before DVDs and streaming.
I’m working my way through all the episodes of “The Muppet Show” on Disney+ and I noticed that when a Muppet picks up a musical instrument, they almost always play left-handed. Kermit plucks banjo strings with his left flipper in “The Muppet Movie.” In The Electric Mayhem, Janice and Floyd hold their guitars like lefties, although Floyd’s sax grip looks like a rightie. (It’s tough to tell with drums and impossible with keyboards.) Scooter plays guitar to the left. Marvin Suggs plays the Muppahone with the mallet in his left hand. Even The County Trio – Muppets that look like, and are puppeted by, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and Jerry Nelson – all play like southpaws.
Last night, I was re-watching the first of Disney’s Dexter Riley trilogy, 1969’s “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.” If you haven’t seen it – or even if you have – Kurt Russell plays Dexter, a college kid who accidentally gets a punch-card mainframe shocked into his brain and uses all that new mental ability to … win a college game show. Dexter had accidents two more times in later movies – becoming invisible in 1972’s “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t” and eating super-vitamin cereal in 1975’s “The Strongest Man in the World.”
In the middle of “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,” I spotted a familiar face and heard a familiar voice. Olan Soule was playing a reporter, but you might know him as John Masters, choir director on “The Andy Griffith Show” – or as the timid professor or bank teller or clerk in a million shows. Here he is, using that face to sell the sexiest of products, prune juice.
