KOLCHAK PAPERS: Episode #3- THEY HAVE BEEN THEY ARE THEY WILL BE (UFO)

ORIGINAL TITLE: THEY HAVE BEEN THEY ARE THEY WILL BE… This episode is also known as UFO.

Aired Sept 27, 1973 Directed by Allen Baron

Written by Rudolph Borchert and Dennis Clark.

From IMDB: Kolchak connects a string of bizarre thefts committed by a powerful invisible entity that targets metal deposits to a string of suspicious animal and human deaths connected by the fact that the victims' bone marrow is missing.

Len Lesser and Darren McGavin face an alien attack.

The third episode in the series is one you’re probably going to have to watch more than once— there are some misfires in it including a strange slow motion sequence when the unseen monster first strikes. It feels odd and unbalanced but that plays into the overall episode about aliens and government coverups. This episode is one of the most obvious examples of its influence on Chris Carter when he would create THE X-FILES some twenty years later.

ODDBALL CHARACTERS; (this episode is loaded)

Mary Wilkes

There are some prime Kolchak highlights including a cameo by Dick Van Patten as a man who finds UFO goop on his front lawn (listen for his call in to a radio show where he talks about his grandfather falling in it) and a scientist role for Mary Wickes who spent part of the 40s sparring with Abbott & Costello and she shows those same comedy chops here. She’s the quasi Kolchak Gal Friday in this episode but she’s less involved than some of the other ones.

Monique is back and this time she’s taken over for Mail Boy as the office darkroom technician, she’s got a good scene with Carl in the INS Bathroom/Darkroom. She’s a really great addition to the office and its a shame that she only has three appearances in the series as a new producer will be coming in and decide she doesn’t make the cut very soon.

Fritz Feld provides Vincenzo’s gourmet meal.

A sub-plot running through the episode is the World Series in which the Cubs are playing the Red Sox- and lifetime baseball fan Kolchak wants nothing more than to get to the game with a ticket provided to him by Ron Updyke (after some convincing) who is filling in as Sports Editor at the news organization, but the UFO story is getting in the way, there’s a clever bit where the radio reception is messed up so Carl can’t even listen to the game— obviously a result of our alien invasion.

Carl’s boss Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) is at the top of his game enjoying a gourmet meal he’s won in a World Series bet with a rival editor. Fritz Feld has a small role as the waiter that brings the exotic meal to Vincenzo, Feld was in literally thousands of TV Shows and one of his trademark moves was to make a popping sound by smacking his mouth with his hand— he often played fancy French waiters and that’s his role here.

Dick Van Patten talks about black goop on his lawn.

Len Lesser has a small role as a policeman, his name might not instantly be familiar but he was a veteran character actor who had appeared in many TV series including BATMAN and THE MONKEES but he’s best known as Jerry’s Uncle Leo in SEINFELD.

Carl’s visit to Gordie The Ghoul adds a level of dimension as we meet Gordie’s boss, the upright and proper Stanley Wedemeyer played by Rudy Challenger who was also well known to TV audiences of the time. Personally I think they should have just had him play Rudy Challenger because that’s a great name.

Phil Leeds and the UFO Support Group

Phil Leeds is another well known character actor who has a great role here as the head of a UFO Abduction Support Group which itself is made up of some very unique folks each of whom have their own story of Alien abduction.

HOW’S THE MONSTER: Uh, is there a monster? Not sure what we’re looking at but sometimes that’s the best way to handle these episodes.

James Gregory’s Police Captain.

HOW’S THE SEASONED COP WHO HATES KOLCHAK: James Gregory was General Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and the Inspector on BARNEY MILLER— he’s great here too, although he doesn’t seem to hate Kolchak so much as just dislike him. Gregory has a great presence.

KOLCHAK EXCERPT: (After Carl reluctantly accepts an assignment from Tony)

KOLCHAK: If that press bus leaves without me…agreed?

VINCENZO: You know the time schedule, you’ve got a watch, what do you want from me?

KOLCHAK RATING: 3.5 - I used to really dislike this episode but if you really pay attention to it you’ll get what they were trying to do and you’ll also see how X-FILES Creator Chris Carter was heavily influenced by this show. Carter even cast McGavin in two episodes of THE X-FILES— initially trying to get him to play Kolchak again, instead the character was lightly disguised as an ex-FBI agent.

NEXT: The Vampire Sequel to the first movie.

Delivery Companies-- who is the BEST?

Let’s face it Jeff Bezos has spoiled us— he built a company out of a garage on the premise that if you want something and you have to order it for delivery that you’ll have it in two days or less. Most of us dinosaurs can remember the days of mailing a check to some ad on TV and then waiting 6-8 weeks for the cheap junk to arrive. Jeff took this concept and said NAY NAY. We can do better. And he did. Sometimes we get our cheap junk THE SAME DAY.

That’s impressive.

Not quite as impressive is everyone else who moves packages from Point A to Point Z with “tracking” so we can follow along. Here then are my thoughts on the best and worst shippers out there.

#1 - USPS - as hard as it is to imagine a service run by the government, albiet in a strictly hands off government way— gets the top spot. If you send something PRIORITY MAIL it is very likely going to arrive in a timely fashion and in one piece. They have flaws. I’ve had occasions where something is listed as arriving on the following day and when you check it’s location its so far away it’s impossible. By the same token I’ve had cases where that exact thing happened and IT DID arrive.

I’ve also had AWAITING ITEM jump right to being in my mailbox before anything else is even updated. So despite a few hiccups the USPS is the way to go.

#2 - DHL Express— I don’t know how they do it but they get a package to me from Japan in three days.

#3- FEDEX AIR - make sure its air. It’s a distant third, it still gets items where it needs to go but they’ve fallen a long way from when they were the dominant mover of packages. They don’t update tracking barely at all, and it’s willy nilly when you might actually see your item.

#4- UPS Not Ground - whatever they call this— UPS is a distant fourth from Fed Ex’s third place — for a number of reasons, not the least of which is sometimes they deliver at 9pm. Tracking is worse than FEDEX and often estimated delivery days are off by a week.

#5 up— all the rest— because UPS GROUND, FED EX GROUND and the rest might as well say “Good chance your package is going to arrive in a month or not at all”. That’s not much of an exaggeration. I always grown when a shipper chooses this option and when I’m buying something myself I ALWAYS choose Priority Mail because the $4-$8 I save is worth it over the hours I’ll spend for the next month trying to figure out when the item I bought is going to arive.

Bond Tuesdays...ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969)

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is probably Ian Fleming’s most complex Bond yarn— keep in mind the novels are not great literature, they are pulp level action stories— but this one attempts to give Bond some depth and the film-makers for the first time stay closer to the source material than simply the title and minor plot elements and characters. Where they went wrong is mainly the tongue in cheek attitude that would hamper the franchise from this point until Daniel Craig’s turn as 007 forty years later.

Sean Connery seemed bored in the last film and he was, enough was enough and he decided to walk away from the role that had made him famous. A desperate casting call went out and the role eventually went to Australian model George Lazenby, who looked a lot older than his real age of twenty nine. Lazenby isn’t bad, but he’s not Connery and that might be the biggest flaw with the film, although by this time Connery wasn’t Connery either (and we’ll see this in the next film).

Telly Savalas is an interesting choice as Blofeld, who we last saw portrayed by Donald Pleasance. Savalas has a surprisingly strong screen presence but he’s so American and seemingly uncultured he doesn’t fit what we’ve come to think of as Blofeld.

The real win here is Diana Rigg fresh off her cult star status on BBC’s THE AVENGERS, following in the footsteps of Honor Blackman who left an earlier incarnation of the British Spy show to be the Bond girl in GOLDFINGER. Rigg is the strongest Bond girl to date, without throwing spoilers on a fifty year old film, and attains the highest level any Bond girl has ever achieved.

It’s got a great score, the first one without any lyrics, and it doesn’t need it, and a couple of really great ski chases as well as the only sled chase I can recall in the series. But it’s got it’s share of ridiculous parts notably Lazenby’s disguise as a Scottish Nobleman complete with kilt and a badly dubbed accent. But overall it’s a uptick in a series that was on a downward slide.

James Bond will be back (but Lazenby won’t) in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

• BOND: George Lazeny isn’t Sean Connery, but he’s better than Roger Moore and everyone after him until Danny Craig ****

• THEME MUSIC: The series highpoint. *****

• VILLAIN: If we hadn’t met Blofeld in the previous entry, Telly Savalas would have been better served, but he’s probably the most seriously threatening Bond villain in the franchise history ****

• OVERALL BOND RATING: 9.2 Get over Connery’s absence and embrace Diana Rigg. ****

KOLCHAK PAPERS: Episode #2- The Zombie

Wow— what a zombie!

Aired Sept 20, 1974

Directed by Alex Grasshoff

Written by David Chase and Zekail Marko.

IMDB SUMMARY: Carl follows up on a series of murders where key figures in the Chicago numbers racket are turning up dead, their spines snapped by someone with incredible strength. The body of a murdered numbers runner keeps turning up at the scene of each crime, and Kolchak soon learns that someone is using voodoo to gain revenge on the criminals in the form of a murderous zombie.

Monique knocks over Carl’s coffee which he’s not supposed to have in the office.

With the second episode Kolchak has found his legs. We have all of the trappings down now and we’ve expanded the base cast with the addition of intern Monique (played by Carol Ann Susi who would go on to play the unseen mom in THE BIG BANG THEORY) who here is the niece of the owner of INS news service who has forced Bureau Chief Tony Vincenzo to give her a job. She becomes a semi regular in the series and rounds out the oddball cast.

Carl calls on Gordie the Ghoul

This episode introduces another semi regular, Gordon Spangler aka Gordie the Ghoul played by John Feidler who is better known for his appearances on THE ODD COUPLE and for being the voice of Piglet in Winnie the Pooh. Gordie runs a lottery based on the birthday of the corpses he’s charged to watch over. He acts as an informer in his appearances.

“What’s a Kolchak?” The Mob discovers Carl eavesdropping on their meeting.

The oddball supporting cast goes full tilt in this one, besides the aforementioned Monique and Gordie, we’ve also got a pair of Italian Mafia bosses who throw around some Italian babbling which is laugh out loud funny, played by veteran actors Joseph Sirola and Val Bisoglio.

Sweetstick

Sweetstick Weldon is their black gangster competitor played by Huggy Bear from STARKSY AND HUTCH Antonio Fargas.

Scatman Crothers plays a voodoo shop owner and numbers runner who leads Kolchak to the person behind the Zombie, who, by the way is played by a former NFL lineman Earl Faison who stood 6’5” and weighed 260lbs.

The Monk is a secondary informer who has no lines but meets Kolchak in a dark alley to give him information. The character’s face is never shown. Ben Frommer played the character.

Mentioned but never seen for the length of the series is Charlie Creech, who is the obituary writer for INS and Kolchak reveals that the last time Vincenzo asked him for a favor it was to fill in for Charlie who was off on “one of his benders”.

J. Pat O’Malley as the county grave digger reveals all to Carl Kolchak

Lastly J. Pat O’Malley is the grave digger and you’ll know him from many Disney films.

KOLCHAK EXCERPT: The mob catches Kolchak easedropping on them when his tape recorder malfunctions;

Mobster Friese: (Holding Kolchak by his neck) It’s a Kolchak.

Mobster Sposato: What’s a Kolchak?

Mobster Friese: He’s a reporter.

Kolchak: That’s right Mr Sposato, I’m a reporter for INS.

Mister Sposato: What’s an INS?

Carl resists Tony’s charm in trying to convince him to take Monique on a story with him.

HOW’S THE MONSTER: Wow. Great job on the Zombie here. Probably the best makeup in the series.

Captain Winwood Hates Carl.

HOW’S THE SEASONED COP/AUTHORITY FIGURE WHO HATES KOLCHAK: Captain Winwood (Charles Aidman) might hate Carl more than any other cop in the series. He seems to have a more personal hatred, and Aidman was well versed at playing seasoned cops.

A middle of the night call to Captain Winwood’s office to bail out Carl finds Tony in his slippers.

Interestingly this is one of the few episodes without Ron Updyke.

Despite no Ron, this one ranks a perfect

This one hits on all cylinders. This one is a serious contender for BEST EPISODE of the series. The monster is great, the characters are great and there are plenty of great Kolchak/Vincenzo bits.

NEXT up: The Longest Title in a Kolchak Episode

HOW TO SPEED UP iCLOUD SYNC

The internet is a funny place.

I use iCloud to connect all of my devices, so I can work on a file down on my Cintiq Tablet connected to my laptop and then go upstairs to my studio and continue working on the same file. iCloud keeps everything updated and connected- except when it doesn't.

I worked on a page from my upcoming book DOC SINISTER in the living room on my birthday (I don’t normally work on my birthday but I’m buried) and the following morning I went to my studio to continue on it— I opened the file and sure enough it wasn’t the updated version I’d saved to iCloud.

Checking the little icon next to the iCloud folder in Finder there was a dot there— normally it would look like a clock if it meant that everything was syncing. In this case it was solid. Clicking on it was the answer— it said updating 4 items at 395MB. But there was no advancement of the update line, it appeared frozen.

A quick google search gave me a funny answer- “get a faster connection”— okay that’s not real helpful. I ran a test of my internet connection…

Well that’s not the problem.

I figured waiting might do it, so I checked my email, wrote a few replies and then checked the status again, no progress at all.

I then did the most basic thing I could think of— I turned off the Wi-Fi on my desktop, counted to 10 and turned it back on again.

INSTANT upload.

So there you have it.

Marathon Road Trip

Veronica’s sister got married and the wedding was in North Carolina which is like 72 states away from Massachusetts. We weighed the options for getting there;

We’ve flown to the area for conventions and it’s hard to find a direct flight, airports and airlines are requiring masks and I was not a fan of wearing a mask for 12 hours while driving would mean sixteen hours on the road. The benefit was that her aunt and uncle, of whom I am a big fan, live halfway between here and there and they have a full on apartment above their garage for visiting relatives so a chance to catch up, have an amazing meal and a place to stay all made driving the winning choice.

A huge mega plus was that #3 son just bought a brand spankin’ new car with so many fancy safety devices that it nearly drives itself, he was gracious enough to offer it for the trip and I gladly accepted handing him the keys to my convertible for the weekend.

The ride down we split into two eight hour days, some of the stops along the way for food, gas and the like were interesting. We opted to avoid I-95 all together because we’ve had some bad experiences with it so we went inland and came through Scranton Pennsylvania, the setting for THE OFFICE and even swung through Cooper’s Seafood which is a prominent location on the show.

The visit with the aunt and uncle was a high point, and because they’re Italian food like a Thanksgiving Day meal was the order of the day. We replotted the remainder of the trip to avoid some additional trouble areas and made excellent time checking in at our hotel ahead of schedule and grabbing dinner with more aunts and uncles who were in town for the wedding.

The wedding day itself went off nicely and everyone had a good time. Our original plan was to hit the road around 9PM to drive back a few hours to reduce the amount of time on the road on Monday but we’d already paid for the nights hotel in North Carolina and we opted to hit the sack and leave in the morning.

Because we had to get back for the dog and a live ask-me anything interview we had scheduled for Rose City Comic Con we ended up driving sixteen hours straight on Monday— that was tough but we broke the Waze trip down into smaller segments so rather than watching a brutal countdown we set it up so we’d have two hour jaunts which would time nicely with fuel stops and bathroom breaks.

I’ll say this, there are some interesting gas stations in Virginia and some beautiful country side and mountains through all those southern states.

BOND Tuesdays: YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)

Great Poster— this might be my favorite of the 60s Bond Film Posters.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) should be my favorite Bond film because it’s got it all— sixties style, classic Tokyo, secret volcano lair, Donald Pleasance as the villain and Sean Connery, but it’s weaker than everything except Doctor No mainly because Connery was tired of playing James Bond and it shows.

The plot is also overly ridiculous— Bond is “killed” in the opening scene, which lasts for about the length of the credits and for not much reason that I can think of other than some kind of PR stunt. The most ridiculous part comes later— when they decide the best way to tackle SPECTRE’s secret volcano base is to disguise 6’3” Sean Connery as a Japanese guy. Didn’t even come close to working.

All right— here’s the plot, Donald Pleasance is Blofeld, Bond’s archest of all arch nemesis and his evil cat have decided to work for a rogue nation and start a war between Russia and the United States by making it seem like each is attacking the other’s space program— remember this was the space age.

James Bond is on the case and he’s sent to Tokyo to sort things out. Bond shows genuine affection for one of the Bond girls this time around, but that lasts about the same as his opening death scene after she’s killed he’s already moved on to another conquest.

It’s also worth noting that there are some cringe-worthy moments regarding the mid-sixties attitude toward women, especially in Japan. I can tell you from experience that those attitudes still remain in the land of the rising sun, and I am the last person on the planet to be offended by anything because I tend to keep things in perspective, but some of the lines in this had me wincing*.

• BOND: Connery is ready to leave and he’s looking paunchy, but he’s still the best Bond **1/2

• VILLAIN: Donald Pleasance is the best Blofeld ever. Try to forget Dr Evil *****

• THEME SONG: Nancy Sinatra’s perfect 60s Bond theme. The whole soundtrack rocks *****

• HENCHMAN: Not much to see here.
  OVERALL BOND RATING: 7.5 Any Connery is better than No Connery.

*People who know me quite well are often surprised I’m okay with the rampant womanizing in these Bond films— I see those scenes the same way I saw them as a kid— essentially I don’t. I never noticed the love scenes when I first saw these because I ignored boring icky stuff— and the same holds true now. Bond is often a pig, and he’s not someone I would want to hang out with. It won’t be until 1987’s LIVING DAYLIGHTS that Timothy Dalton (if I remember correctly) shows some respect for the women he runs into. I’ve been saying it since I started Bond Tuesdays— I like the Bond films for the exotic locales, the style, the gadgets, the villains and then lastly for Sean Connery who when he’s really on his game like in GOLDFINGER he’s great.