BURKE'S LAW - "Who Killed Mr. X?" (1963)

 

This Wednesday's TV Extravaganza is from season one, episode two of the great 1960's TV show "Burke's Law."

"Burke's Law" was on for 81 episodes from 1963 to 1966, and went through some different transformations over the years.

The first two seasons all had episodes that started off with "Who Killed..." This particular one was called "Who Killed Mr. X?"

There's a party going on at an amusement park!

One of the guests is not going to make it to the party! Who is this mysterious man, and why is he dead? That's what Amos Burke and his crack team are going to have to try and figure out!

Amos Burke is a very wealthy man, but he is also a Captain in the Police Department. He's having a poolside party, and this woman is trying to get his attention! Novel, but it doesn't really work!

Burke gets a call that there's an unidentified dead body by a merry go round. The party wasn't really that important to him anyway, so off he goes to investigate.

The dead man has absolutely no identification, and the only clue they can find is a vintage book of matches from the "Crystal Pier Ballroom" with a number, possibly a phone number, written inside it.

This is Burke's main team. There's Regis (The Phantom Creeps) Toomey as Detective Les Hart, and Gary (I Was A Teenage Frankenstein) Conway as Detective Tim Tilson. Regis Toomey had an amazing career that went from 1929 to 1982, and included 272 credits.

 

Over it's three seasons, "Burke's Law" had a truly amazing array of guest stars, and beautiful actresses like Elizabeth Montgomery, and that's the reason my editor, Perry White Dittmar sent me on this assignment! Just for the record, if you're interested in hearing the very best in alternative music of all styles, he's the guy you need to go visit!

What can I say about Elizabeth Montgomery? I just think she's great no matter what she does, and Perry and myself agreed this might be one of her finest performances. Here she has the role of a Stacey Evans, a kept woman! It was her phone number found inside the matchbook.

Stacey is a bit of a lush! She's an actress that has been set up by a rich guy named Emery Flood. He gave her this nice house, and she gets $500.00 a week, but she has yet to get a job as an actress. She never sees him, and five years have passed by.

Captain Burke rather fancies Stacey Evans. Here he asks her what she'd like to listen to, classical music or jazz.

It's time to talk to this Mr. Emery Flood, but Mr. Flood is nowhere to be found. His main man here gets calls every day, but hasn't seen him in thirteen years. The man who watches over all his stuff is called Mr. Gregory, and was played by Charles (The Invisible Woman) Ruggles. Charlie worked consistently from 1914 to 1976.

What a cast is all I can say! Here's Dungeon Hero Soupy Sales as Henry Geller. Back in 1953, Soupy had his own Saturday morning kid's show that was unforgettable. Besides being a terrific comedian and a great actor, Soupy was also the Father of Fox and Hunt Sales, who were in the fantastic band Tin Machine with David Bowie, as just one of their musical accomplishments.

There are at least four kept women in Emery Flood's life, and Stacey Evans is just one of them!

Stacey gets the most on screen time, because she's the one that both Burke and myself are the most interested in.

Barrie (It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World) Chase is Alison Grahame, another one of Emery Flood's kept women. She too has a drinking problem. It seems to come with the territory!

A third kept woman is Dina Merrill as Barrie Coleman. Dina was Calamity Jan in three episodes of the "Batman" TV series. In the 80's and 90's Dina was in films like "Twisted," "Fear," and "Suture."

 To top off this all-star cast is another Dungeon Hero, Jim Backus as Harold Mason. Jim, of course was Thurston Howell III on "Gilligan's Island," and the voice of Mr. Magoo in countless cartoons.

 

It seems like they could have continued this story. Stacy's still drinking and Amos Burke just might get lucky! If you 'd like to see for yourself, and I recommend that you do, the Internet Archive is the place to go!

THE SCI-FI AND HORROR MOVIES OF 1954

For some reason the other day, I was wondering what it would look like if I compiled a list of all the sci-fi and horror movies from 1954. I thought the list would be strange, you know, 1954, and there are lots more sci-fi flicks than there are horror films. Movies are in random order.

We got our first television in 1953, so, I got to watch movies like KILLERS FROM SPACE on TV a lot because they re-ran them all the time, mostly Friday and Saturday evenings. I liked this one, it was just so weird, and for a kid, it delivered the goods. Love the ping pong eyeballs!

I swear, I cannot remember if my dad took me to see CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, there are a few parts I remember for some reason, and, this was not a movie that played very often on TV at all. Now, I cannot watch it, it's boring as Hell, but the Creature costume is superb!

GOG is another movie they played the crap out of on TV in the fifties. I was creeped out a little by the robots, I loved the sets, but that spinning two-seat centrifugal machine was plain ridiculous!

I can't tell you how many time I saw RIDERS TO THE STARS on TV, but many. The main thing I was interested in was the scene where the astronaut gets toasted by a meteor, of course!

I'd say they started playing GODZILLA on TV in 1955, and soon thereafter, GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN. The original Godzilla is terrifying!

I'm not sure if I saw MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR on TV. As a kid, I probably wouldn't have stuck around for the 55 minutes it took before they showed the monster. Love that damn monster though, a small masterpiece of imagination.

I totally preferred anything sci-fi to horror, the ideas were fresh and space monsters were a new kind of horror. PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE just recycled another ape.

They played TARGET EARTH a bit on TV and it was okay, but watching it now is a real chore, and, there was only one actual robot!

I don't think I ever saw a Bowery Boys movie at the theater. In THE BOWERY BOYS MEET THE MONSTERS, the boys are stuck in a haunted house filled with creeps and ghouls, and a man eating plant. Here at The Dungeon, we prefer MASTERMINDS, it's so freaking hilarious!

Vincent Price gives another great performance as THE MAD MAGICIAN, and for a second time the movie's filmed in 3-D, a follow up to HOUSE OF WAX a year earlier.

Here's another one they played a lot on television, another boring movie, SNOW CREATURE. The monster looks like a guy in a suit playing a monster, you can practically see a zipper!

Here's the finest movie to come out of 1954, THEM! They may have played this one on TV but it would have been on some special occasion during prime time.

I can still watch DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS at times, and again, they played this one a lot on TV in our area (Fresno and Bakersfield) in the fifties. It definitely has atmosphere, and a refrigerator shaped robot, unlike the one shown on the poster.

I always loved to watch TOBOR THE GREAT when it came on, really terrific robot. But my very favorite part in when Russians are entering the scientist's compound and they play wartime sounds with dive bombers, machine guns and explosions over the loud speakers (with flashing lights), chasing off the bad guys in a hurry..

Never even saw STRANGER FROM VENUS until like 10 or so years ago. Boring, way too much yakkity-yak, ho-hum. Dude was trying to capitalize on his marriage to Patricia Neal.

Can't remember seeing THE ATOMIC KID but sure I must have. You can tell that a number of actors are going to be chewing lots of rug! Included this title for the Hell of it!

Then there's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA from Disney, another movie I have no desire to watch again. When the giant octopus attacks the Nautilus at the end, it just looks silly, or maybe just plain stupid.

Here's one for Eegah, our last movie on the list. GORILLA AT LARGE is one wild and weird horror movie starring the lovely Anne Bancroft. Well, there you go, the sci-fi and horror movies from 1954, a warm up for what was yet to come!!

MANNIX - "The Mouse That Died" (1970)

 

This Saturday Night Special is brought to you courtesy of Lord Litter in Berlin. There were 194 episodes of Mannix made, and I sure as Hell don't have time to sort through them all, so it's pretty cool that I have somebody I can trust to find one for you, and this is a good one!

 

"The Mouse That Died" was episode five of the fourth season of "Mannix," and aired in 1970. 

 Mike (Voodoo Woman) Connors is "Mannix." Mike's real name was Krekor Ohanian, and in his first few films he was billed as Touch Connors.

Mannix would be lost without Peggy, as played by Gail Fisher. Gail was a multiple beauty contest winner, and was the first black actress to win an Emmy, and she was also the first black actress to win a Golden Globe award.

"Mannix" is shot from a lot of different angles, and at times it feels like you're watching a German Krimi movie. The music swings like a German film too, and was composed by Laurence (Meteor)  Rosenthal.

Mike Connors was born in 1925 in Fresno, California, and lived to be 91 years old!

In this episode, Mannix has been poisoned, and the whole time is spent trying to find out who did it and why, because it's unknown what the poison is, but what they do know is that it's slowly killing Mannix.

Mannix suddenly finds himself in the middle of some ritual he doesn't understand!

And then he dies!

What was really going on was he was having some severe hallucinations, and he finds out about it when he wakes up in the hospital after falling down a flight of stairs.

Mannix keeps feeling worse but insists on trying to get to the bottom of the whole thing

.

While riding in the car he hallucinates that they are being attacked by an armed helicopter.

This is a very oppressive looking logo.

Hugh Beaumont has a small part as a guy named Hammond. Most people when they see Hugh's face immediately think "Leave It To Beaver," but Hugh also had some good monster movie creds like "Lost Continent," "The Mole People," and "The Human Duplicators."

Mannix is just getting sicker and sicker, and now has received the bad news that the mouse had died. They had taken a mouse and shot it up with some blood from Mannix, and they were monitoring it to see how long it took for the poison to work. That's where the title came from.

Mannix is getting so weak and pale, he's starting to look like Barnabas Collins.

Of course the guy causing all the problems, and doing all the poisoning was Walter White!

Longevity says a lot about quality. "Mannix" was on television for eight seasons from 1967 to 1975. I think that about says it all!