Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Friday, March 3, 2017

Mannix

I've been watching the episodes on MeTV, which airs old stuff.

I saw a few of the first season before he switched to private practice. As a corporate private copy, he carried a PPK. As a solo practitioner, he carried a Detective Special. Which he could shoot, including hitting a laterally-moving target at 50 yards or better. His car phone was a full-duplex radio set; the calls went through an operator.

The one thing that was really nice was the episodic nature of the show. Too much of television has gotten into long story arcs, where if you haven't seen the previous episodes, you've no clue as to what is going on. You can watch an episode of Mannix and as long as you know that he's a private cop and that his secretary, Peggy Fair, was a widow raising a son, you pretty much had all of the background that you need to know in order to enjoy the show.

Don't get me wrong, extended storytelling is very effective. The Americans would pretty much such with stand-alone episodes. Still, it's nice to look at a few episodes collected on the ol' DVR and know that it doesn't matter in which order they're watched.

As for the guns: Colt and S&W revolvers, mostly. The only automatics I've seen so far have been PPKs and 1911s. One episode had Mexican Caballeros patrolling a hacienda; they had SA Colts (or imitations, it being Hollywood in the late 1960s).

3 comments:

Borepatch said...

He gets beat up just about every episode.

Dark Avenger said...

The musical theme was written by Lalo Schrifren, who was a very good film and tv composer. It's in 3/4th time, which was unusual for a detective show for the time.

BadTux said...

Pretty much everything was episodic back then, because once it went into syndication, the order in which the shows got shown was pretty much up in the air. Remember that the original Star Trek series was the same way, for the same reason.

Bore, the formula for a tough guy PI show called for getting beat up on a regular basis. Read any of the classic hardboiled PI novels and that's what you see, if the protagonist doesn't get beat up at least once it's a rarity. Actually, that applies today too. See the Longmire novels for an example, Walt Longmire gets beat up in pretty much every novel (though he's a public cop and not a PI).