Sunday, June 3, 2018

Olde TV

I found a DVD of a few episodes of an old TV show called Follow That Man. It was also known as Man Against Crime.

The series was broadcast live for its yearly years. The last two years were filmed, so some of them are available.

If you want to see what crime TV was like 65 years ago, here's an episode:



4 comments:

  1. Sure seems they could run faster without their pants falling around their ankles...

    Reminds me a bit of Highway Patrol, with Broderick Crawford. Of course, that was about 56-59, call it 60 years ago.

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  2. You should try the orignal b/w "Mike Hammer" with Darren McGavin. Great jazz background, McGavins wit and every sterotype known to man.

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  3. Sheesh! I remember watching Ralph Bellamy in Man Against Crime when I was a kid. Sat on the floor —carpeted floor, actually — in the living room. The TV was, I think, 9 inches, but imbedded in about 16 cubic feet of dedicated mahogany cabinetry that hid a complex and vast array of vacuum tubes and wires. It was connected to one of the many roof antennas (everybody who had a TV had one) in our apartment building via something that looked like a flat piece of tape with two wires clearly inside of it. Although I liked to sit close, my mother was horrified by this — convinced that radioactive rays were coming out of the screen.

    Don't hold me to this because after more than 60 years I may have my private dicks mixed up, but I seem to remember that one of Man Against Crime's sponsors was some brand of cigarette (forget which) and that during some of the commercials, Bellamy would take a few deep inhales of on camera to show us how good the stuff was.

    Meanwhile, "Old Gold" cigarettes featured long legged dancing women wearing giant cigarette packs from the waist up, while an announcer (Was his name Dennis James?) promised, "Not a cough in a carload." But Chesterfield cigarettes were superimposing a T over the throat and jaw of somebody and promising it would be kind to my T-Zone. Pall Mall Cigarettes were "Outstanding! AND they are mild!" Uh oh, I got started. I'm getting outta here before I get as hooked on nostalgia for outrageous stuff as I was on cigarettes for the 32 years before I was finally able to quit.

    Yours very crankily (cough cough),
    The New YOrk Crank

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  4. You are correct, sir!

    The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Camel cigarettes) sponsored the series, as well as holding a monetary share in the program and a copyright on the series. Mike Barnett was frequently shown smoking a cigarette (and occasionally flashing a pack at the camera), and at the conclusion of the program, Ralph Bellamy would put on reading glasses and read a list of veterans' hospitals and military bases to which "the makers of Camels" was donating cigarettes that week.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Against_Crime

    ReplyDelete

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