Saturday, February 16, 2019

MY FAVORITE MARTIAN - "Pilot Episode" (1963)

Tonight's Saturday Night Special is locked and loaded!

I was going to do another movie that featured Ray Walston tonight, but it got me to thinking that we never have discussed the show "My Favorite Martian" before, and since it was one of my favorite shows during my formative years, I thought it was about time.

This is Episode 01 of the first series, and it aired on September 29, 1963!

This portrait of Ray Walston was part of the opening titles sequence.

On the left is the intoxicating Ina Victor as Annabelle, and the amorous Ann Marshall as Angela Brown is on the right!

Something has gone awry at Space Central!

Long before "The Courtship Of Eddie's Father," and "The Incredible Hulk," Bill Bixby was Tim O'Hara in 107 episodes of "My Favorite Martian."
 It's hard to believe that he only lived to be 59 years old!

Among his many other accomplishments, Bill was also OOD in "The Twilight Zone" episode titled "The Thirty-Fathom Grave."

Tim discovers the Martian's crashed spaceship, and decides to take the injured Martian back to his home to recuperate.

They don't know how to sneak the Martian in, so this is the first time he reveals the extendable antennas in his head that can make him turn invisible!

Tim tells the landlady that he is just doing a charade of carrying an invisible man, and she falls for it!

Ray Walston is The Martian! 
Ray is different! He's a character, he knows it, and he uses it, and he's very good at it!
Ray had 155 amazing credits spanning from 1954 to 2001, the year he passed away!
He was one of a kind!

Someone posted on IMDB that this story line was actually based on a true story of a real UFO event recorded by Time Magazine July 27th, 1962 when a Major White test flew the X-15 at supersonic speeds and claimed he saw a UFO out the window.

The Feds want to know where Tim got his confidential information and haul him off to the hoosegow, so he says good-bye to Uncle Martin just in case he leaves before he gets out!

Martin visits Tim while he's incarcerated, and almost gets caught when two voices are heard so he turns invisible, and Tim pretends to be throwing his voice like a ventriloquist!

After the ordeal is over, Uncle Martin tells Tim that he might be around for a while, because he needs some stuff to fix his spaceship, some of which has not even been invented yet!

Tim tells Martin that it sounds expensive, and Martin tells him how he just found out about a fascinating place called Las Vegas!

Who knows what a man can do that can read minds and get inside the heads of horses?

"My Favorite Martian" was on TV from 1963 to 1966!
The funniest thing is that in the Ray Walston movie I'm going to tell you about on Wednesday, he lives in a small town on a back road to Las Vegas, and it was filmed in 1964. It's kind of hard to watch and still not see him as The Martian who lost his memory, and all his powers and his money, and ended up in Climax, Arizona!

3 comments:

KD said...

One of my top faves of the '60s, never missed an episode! There was an episode in the !COLOR! third season, perhaps done to bump up the ratings, with a kid actor Wayne Stam as Uncle Martin's nephew from Mars, named Andromeda.

EEGAH!! said...

Thanx KD! All three seasons stream on Prime, so I'll have to check it out!

KD said...

Alas, poor Andromeda, we knew him well...for only one episode! I think they had him in mind to be a regular in Tim and Uncle Martin's house-above-the-garage, but somebody pulled the plug on that idea. Andromeda was not to be! Ah, but it must have been fun while it lasted, for Wayne Stam. Memorieees!

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