Cool but I wasn't familiar with Empty Nest. Some shows just escaped Me. Oh but I remember that Sledge Hammer clip though. Once again, another really good post here PB

Some sitcoms age like fine wine. Others look creepy as hell in the hindsight....



Ick, even the theme feels pervy in retrospect. Small Wonder told the story of the Lawson family exploits. Ted Lawson (played by Dick Christie) is a robotics engineer who secretly builds his own android. But unlike Hank Pym, he makes it look like a little girl he names V.I.C.I., an acronym for the word salad of Voice Input Child Indenticant, which totally sounds like a rational move. Why are the techies always so creepy? I mean, like people who make their own forums for action figures so they can read threads normal, really, really good-looking people make talking about old sitcoms and cartoons...total creepos, right? Or Bill Gates and his goal to "vaccinate" the whole world...sicko. So, Dr. FrankenTed decides to bring daddy's new little creation home so it can, ahem, develop in a family environment, so he attempts to pass her off as the families newly adopted daughter, Vicki. Totally innocent and not anything Jared from Subway ever fantasized about..



Small Wonder was a first-run syndication show (meaning instead of being restricted to airing on one network, it's airing varied from market to market similar to syndicated reruns--it could air on various dates and/or times). Around here I remember it airing on Saturday afternoons, and while it looks creepy now, I'll admit my family were fans of the show. It ran for 4 season, from 1985-1989. Rounding out the cast were Marla Pennington as Ted's wife, Joan. Jerry Supriran played Vicki's new 10 year old brother Jamie, while the nosey neighbors were played by pigtailed Emily Schulman, who played Harriet, and her mother was played by Edi McClurg who made a career out of playing nosey in films such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off and shows like Valerie which was eventually renamed Valerie's Family which eventually became The Hogan Family when star Valerie Harper wanted too much money and was fired, but that's a story for another post.



The show became a bit of a surprising hit, but problems will eventually arise when you cast a ten year-old to play a robot. Tiffani Brissette, who played Vicki, wasn't going to stay 10 for ever, and as the show progressed through several seasons, she would noticeably grow up.



To explain this, and since you couldn't have a child wearing the same clothes everyday if you're not in a cartoon, the writers came up with the idea of upgrades. So at the start of season 3 it was explained that Vicki's physical changes were due to upgrades Ted gave her (I bet he gave her a good RAM!), and now she regularly appeared in regular clothes, even eating (drinking, it was explained, helped cool her internal systems).



History, however, has not been kind to the show as it's been regarded as one of the worst sitcoms of all time due to a bit of a skeezy concept and special effects that made Ed Wood look likr Ray Harryhausen, ranking up there with such awful alleged comedies as Cavemen, The Ropers, and Are You There, Chelsea? (but then again, who would be surprised to see something starring Chelsea Handler would be awful?). While I really liked Small Wonder as a kid, I know we watched it regularly, the special effects, sadly, have aged like an opened bottle of milk on blacktop in the middle of a Florida summer.



Yikes! Looking at those clips, it's a...small wonder...the show is widely panned these days. See what I did there?



The technology has vastly improved in recent years and androids now even walk amongst us.



Yep, people actually watched Small Wonder for four seasons but LA to Vegas only lasted one. You suck, Fox!

Huh, I never knew about Small Wonder. Cool concept and fun stuff but yeah, pervy is right...to say it mildly. I'm just gonna say I hate Hollyweird Screw Gates and ya know, da ZuK actually said in an interview a few years ago that he was "once" human then nervously corrected himself that I "am human" and people as usual laugh at this stuff and think nothing of it but I never did and I knew better the interview is all over YouTube I never knew LA to Vegas either.

Once again PB, another great write up, keep'em comin

So as I said before a while back, there was some sitcoms that I actually liked which only about 4 or so. I'm not gonna go into detail about it much with certain exceptions.



I really liked Helen Hunt back in the day. The song was good. The show wasn't the all-time greatest but the feeling & atmosphere of it was felt good and I liked the idea of wife & husband like that.



I know it was a long while back when i said about it and it takes Me time to do things sometimes but I thought I'd add some more content here

I watched a little of Mad About You, but it wasn't something I went out of my way to watch. Maybe if it were in reruns I'd give it another go, but back then it wasn't really that interesting to me. The song is catchy and I like Hunt and Reiser (see My Two Dads) but the show was just meh. Helen Hunt's been around forever, though. One thing I love to do when watching old shows is try to catch famous actors who may've shown up as a guest star before they got really well-know.

Helen Hunt played Murray's daughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show


She also appeared on The Facts of Life trying to get the girls to try marijuana


A few years after that she appeared as Katie's friend, an unwed pregnant woman on the previously mentioned Gimme a Break!



A year later she'd be cast in the short-lived family sitcom It Takes Two on ABC. Her mother was played by Patty Duke Astin (who's lived most everywhere, from Zanzibar to Berkley Square). And yes, her brother was a young pre-Revenge of the Nerds/Top Gun/ER Anthony Edwards (Goooooooooose!)



By then Patty Duke (of the 1950s The Patty Duke Show fame) would be known as Patty Duke Astin since she'd married The Addams Family (and frequent Night Court guest star John Astin). John Astin would adopt her son from a previous relationship, Rudy and Samwise Gamgee himself, Sean Astin, and together Patty and John would have a child of their own, Mackwnzie Astin who would go on to star in later seasons of The Facts of Life as Andy Moffett, and now the Facts of Life circle is complete, lol. I've been meaning to cover a bit on Mackenzie Astin in this very thread, perhaps this mentioning will provide me the impetus to do so soon.




I was talking about this elsewhere, and I recently started rewatching the Rebecca years of Cheers (a show that's too vast to do a write up around here and be fair to it's greatness), and it really holds up well after all these years. And I got to the episode where Carla's husband, Eddie, dies, and look, there's a young Batman (Kevin Connolly) as a Red Sox player that Sam knows:




Eddie died saving another ice capades cast member by pushing them out of the way of an accident. Later in the episode that cast member paid Carla a visit at the bar, and look, it's a young Thomas Haden Church a few years before he played Lowell Mathers on Wings or the Sandman in the Tobey Maguire Spiderman films.



A few episodes later, Woody is preparing for a play and he just so happens to be starring in it alongside a pre-Friends Lisa Kudrow.


Anyway, that kind of stuff amuses me. It's like a rerun treasure hunt.

Actually I didn't know a lot of that, cool PB One thing I always pay attention to is facial expressions and especially on women. Helen Hunt has some good expressions

I always liked her in Trancers.



I just digged her in Twister, gosh 96 was somethin' else



I'll post more soon

Haven't don one of these in a while, but I kind of brought this show up over in the movie trailers thread, so I thought I'd post this here. I didn't really watch Gilligan's Island a lot. I've seen many of the episodes, but it fell in line with many of shows from that time that looked older, so as a kid I wasn't really drawn to it. Even still, I think most people know the words to the theme even if they've barely watched the show. So go ahead, singalong, you know you want to...



Oops, wrong one.





Nope, not that one either. And yes, that was a really show. Hey, if the Partridge Family could travel to the future, than Gilligan could go to space.



What did those hippies do to the Jetson's car?



Here we go...

Same with Me, not a big Gilligan's Island fan but entertaining none the less. Yep, see, TV shows' themes like them aren't too far from music scores. In fact I was thinking that when you first created this topic. Classic composer George Wyle composed Gilligan's Island did a lot of other TV shows & classic movies. Guys like Alan Silvestri did the A-Team for example, he even did the music for the reboot film in 2010 that started Liam Neeson . It all rolls together which makes it all even more fun Another great one there PB

I've heard of Alan Silvestri. Wouldn't have been able to name a theme of his, though, lol. I've been watching A-Team reruns from time to time since they started re-airing them at 6 PM around here (it's better than the news).

My bad, Mike Post did the original A-Team theme (Law & Order), Silvestri only did the reboot movie but he did inlude Post's theme, I got a little mixed there, it happens

OK, Alan did a lot. Long story short. Like Elfman is to Burton & Raimi, SIlvestri is to Robert Zemeckis, he did the Back to the Future Trilogy, The Abyss, Predator 1 & 2, Ricochet, Super Mario Bros., Judge Dredd, Volcano, The Mummy Returns, Van Helsing, Beowulf, Polar Express, Captain America & The Avengers movies and so much more. He really became a household name here as much as Elfman, Goldsmith, Horner, Zimmer & Williams and you talk about a reconiqable sound, ah Silvestri is got one too

Here is a short interview with him at the Avengers: Endgame premier. It is a very rare occurrence that anybody interviews a music composer, another pathetic thing. He is 6'2 but always looks so much taller. His hair was almost jet black when he was younger, he's 72 now Check out the vid



After I'm done with Elfman, Silvestri will be the focus