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When thinking about old TV shows, "Mannix" is one that comes to mind. Apparently I'm not alone. If money was not an object, I could see myself getting the Mannix DVDs for old time's sake (sports jacket flapping in the wind, like a superhero's cape), provided that the series does eventually come out on DVDs. While browsing at Amazon, after being inspired by this article, I also develop a hankering to see the first season of "Police Woman".
None of this is going to happen. I find myself running tight for books that I have counted on getting into this winter. I don't expect to get any DVDs for a while.
___ ___ ___
Mannix Was the Man
A Great TV Detective, Gone? Criminal.
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007; M01
Somewhere out there, in the weird, quivering underbelly of the American dream, "Mannix" still lives.
Somewhere out there, there's a place where a sport-coat-clad private eye can whip around L.A. in a convertible, get beat down by some goons, shake it off with a Scotch on the rocks, then solve the case of the week with an assist from his leggy secretary.
Somewhere out there, but not on DVD.
"Mannix," one of the longest-running, most violent (for its time), most popular television detective shows in the medium's history, has been left out of the DVD trade. It's fading into the forgotten realm of old television shows nobody remembers. Mannix was, by one count, shot 17 times and knocked unconscious another 55 during the show's eight-year run, and how great is that? Could those "Law & Order" twits take that kind of abuse?
Mannix was the last of a certain type of American manhood, circa early '70s. He wore a tie and a wistful smile. He did not know doubt but was a friend of irony. He didn't worry about giving women "their space," and he wasn't "in touch with his feelings." He was kind to small dogs, little old ladies, and femmes fatales in deep trouble and short skirts.
He drove too fast, drank too much and smoked like he got paid for it. He slugged people and shot guys and never got pulled in by the cops. "The body count, even in the first few minutes of the show, could sometimes be appalling," notes one television reference guide. This was the era of "Who loves ya, baby?" "Book 'em, Danno!" and "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds."
Sigh.
"I've never really understood it myself," says actor Mike Connors, who became one of the highest-paid stars on television (earning a then-stratospheric $40,000 per episode) at the height of the show's Top 10 heyday. "We had a better average [rating] than 'The Rockford Files' or 'Hawaii Five-0' over eight years. And yet it's like it never occurred, it never existed, it never happened."
More than three decades after the show died, there are at least two Web sites devoted to it and more than 1,100 people have voted for it to be brought back on TVShowsOnDVD.com. It was popular on TV Land in reruns in the late 1990s but never translated to DVD.
"We've called, we've had hundreds of people petition, I just don't know why Paramount/Viacom won't release it," says Pat Talley, a university librarian in Tennessee who runs a Web site ( http://17paseoverde.tripod.com) and is a charter member of the Barracudas, the unofficial fan club of the show. (It's named for the Plymouth that Mannix drove.)"We've really pursued this thing, and we just cannot get an answer. We made tapes of the show during its TV Land run and given them to Mr. Connors. It's all he has of the show, either."
Montreal's Helene Gagne, an assistant manager at a pharmacy, has collected more than 100 scripts from the show, many of them originals. She tracks down locations used on the show via the Internet, then leads fellow fans on a "Mannix" tour of Los Angeles every year or so. She once met Connors in a restaurant there, and now they exchange Christmas cards.
"Every year we say, 'This'll be the year,' because Paramount keeps putting out old shows, but they just won't put out 'Mannix,' " she says. "I just want to see the eighth season [never shown in reruns] before I die."
Meanwhile, the rest of the gang has been pretty much rescued from oblivion by DVD, that pre-"Hill Street Blues" generation of stand-alone cops and anti-hero private dicks who bend the law to save the day: "Kojak," "Columbo," "Banacek," "Baretta," "Police Woman," "Starsky and Hutch," "Mission: Impossible," "Hawaii Five-0," "The Rockford Files," "Ironside," "The Streets of San Francisco" and, coming this Christmas, "The Mod Squad." (Peggy Lipton, we love you!) Even -- and this is hard to believe -- the sixth season of "Magnum, P.I." was rolled out on DVD earlier this month for Memorial Day, because Magnum had been, in the story line, a Vietnam vet.
But no "Mannix." Who had been in Korea.
It is to weep.
DVD releases of old television shows have become something of a national pop culture library, and why something as cool as "Mannix" remains MIA is a minor mystery perhaps only the detective at 17 Paseo Verde himself could solve.
The people at Viacom, part of the corporate structure that oversees the rights to the show, politely referred us to a spokeswoman for their partners at Paramount, who very politely did not return our repeated calls for two weeks. Spokeswoman Brenda Ciccone finally offered in an e-mail that CBS, yet another branch of the shop, has the rights, and it might issue the show next year. We called CBS and got no return calls. We went back to Ciccone, asking who decided what shows get picked and how.
She replied via e-mail that it was "honestly all very complicated." Consumer demand just isn't enough! "Legal rights, music clearances, availability of supplemental material and access to talent for new interviews or commentaries" also go in the consideration. (Um, we kind of knew that anyway, but that's their story and they're sticking to it.)
"That's pretty much what I've heard from them for years," laughs Connors.
This is a shame, because Mannix was great, just great -- one of the last unapologetically masculine and completely unrealistic American icons, at least in the myths we tell ourselves on television. Cops and detectives got cute or complicated later on, and there really hasn't been much on television like it since.
It debuted at a turbulent time in American culture, 1967, and Joe Mannix was pretty much a modernized Lone Ranger -- no wife, no kids, no pets, no political views, no close friends. He was hip enough to listen to jazz and to mock himself as "a hard-boiled detective in the classical tradition," but traditional enough to wear a coat and tie and to have good manners.
And there was Gail Fisher as Peggy Fair, the husky-voiced secretary! She even shared top billing, the only actor other than Connors named in the opening credits. Her primary job description seemed to be getting kidnapped.
For the era, when television was the Great White Way, a black actress in a major role was extraordinary.
"Peggy was like the bright girl from church who got that good job," remembers Clarence Page, the Chicago Tribune's Washington columnist, who watched her as a love-struck teen, then wrote a farewell column to Fisher when she died years later. "You know, she was that girl who was the first to get hired in a white guy's office, and if she didn't do well, nobody else was going to get hired, either. She was representing."
Fisher gained screen time, and the show even skirted with -- gasp! -- an interracial romance.
See -- this also tended to happen a lot -- Mannix gets shot, right? And loses his sight because the bullet creases his left temple and, while not doing much physical damage, still shows him death! Heavy, baby!
"You live a dangerous and complex life," the optometrist tells him, in dialogue typical of the day. "You risk it constantly in your profession. To you, that's just an occupational hazard. But you're also a man, and a mortal. . . . In that split second, you felt death. Your eyes saw it, couldn't stand it, and they closed."
Mannix comes home from this diagnosis, blind, under serious medication, and what does he do?
He gets a drink, that's what! Like a MAN!
And right there with him is Peggy, in an orange miniskirt, an open blouse and hip little vest. She takes him for a walk on the beach, arm in arm.
He learns Braille and shows her his progress by spelling out "Hi Peggy" with his fingers.
She smiles and says, eyes flashing, in that bedroom voice, "Hi, Joe."
He regains his sight -- when he shoots the bad guy. (Mannix was so bad he could shoot people when he was blind.) Peggy rushes in, they embrace, and . . . and that was it. Kind of a downer. It was the early '70s. You could only go so far.
What happens to lost TV show legends? What happens to ghosts of pop culture?
Connors went on to work steadily in dozens of television roles, invested wisely and retired comfortably in Encino with his wife of more than half a century, Mary Lou Willey. He's 82 and has dinner with Robert Wagner a lot. Robert Reed, often appearing as Mannix's source at LAPD, went on to camp television history as America's Dad, Mike Brady, in "The Brady Bunch." He died from complications of AIDS in 1992.
Legendary composer Lalo Schifrin said in a telephone interview last week that the elegant music he composed for the show, a unique jazz waltz, is second only to his "Mission: Impossible" theme in popularity. People ask for it all the time, he says.
Gail Fisher largely vanished.
Shortly after the series ended, she was arrested for drugs. She got divorced. Work dried up.
It took four years before she worked again -- and that was a guest appearance on one episode of the ultra-cheesy "Fantasy Island," according to her bio on the Internet Movie Database. Another four years and another guest cameo on "Knight Rider."
She did a god-awful independent film called "Mankillers" and a bit role in the 1990 TV movie "Donor." She was 54 years old. She developed diabetes and emphysema and, according to IMDB, never worked again.
In 2000, the National Enquirer asked Connors if he'd go with a reporter to deliver flowers and cards from well-wishing readers. He said sure.
"It was really sad," he says. "I hadn't seen her in years. She was in a nursing home over on Olympic Boulevard. She was using a wheelchair." She died in December. She had fallen into such obscurity that, other than the Enquirer, no other media outlet reported her death for another month -- not even her hometown paper back in New Jersey, not even "Jet," the magazine focused on black America.
Her ashes were scattered in the Pacific, the same ocean by which she once walked arm in arm on the beach with handsome Mike Connors, and the sunlight had played upon her face and her smile and her future had looked so bright.
Los Angeles is a land of lies.
The only way to see one of television's great detectives now is on tapes somebody made during its run on TV Land. They are dubs and the quality is lousy, but you get the snazzy opening theme in that three-quarter waltz, the right hand of the pianist carrying the theme. Trapped in time, Mannix goes sprinting across a suspension bridge in Long Beach, tie flapping over his shoulder. His name spells out in rectangular boxes on the screen, M-A-N-N-I-X, over shots of him jumping out of a car, swimming, driving a race car or swirling a blonde around in the sunlight, her skirt twisting above her hips. Days were tough there at 17 Paseo Verde, what with gunfire, exploding cars and hit men trying to cancel your oxygen supply.
But it also had Peggy's smile, the convertible out front, the .38 in the top right-hand desk drawer, the promise of a date for dinner. A man could take it in, tie loosened, Scotch in the crystal decanter, smokes in the soft pack.
The rest of the 20th century hadn't happened yet.
It was a good life.
-- Neely Tucker for The Washington Post
xXx
When thinking about old TV shows, "Mannix" is one that comes to mind. Apparently I'm not alone. If money was not an object, I could see myself getting the Mannix DVDs for old time's sake (sports jacket flapping in the wind, like a superhero's cape), provided that the series does eventually come out on DVDs. While browsing at Amazon, after being inspired by this article, I also develop a hankering to see the first season of "Police Woman".
None of this is going to happen. I find myself running tight for books that I have counted on getting into this winter. I don't expect to get any DVDs for a while.
___ ___ ___
Mannix Was the Man
A Great TV Detective, Gone? Criminal.
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007; M01
Somewhere out there, in the weird, quivering underbelly of the American dream, "Mannix" still lives.
Somewhere out there, there's a place where a sport-coat-clad private eye can whip around L.A. in a convertible, get beat down by some goons, shake it off with a Scotch on the rocks, then solve the case of the week with an assist from his leggy secretary.
Somewhere out there, but not on DVD.
"Mannix," one of the longest-running, most violent (for its time), most popular television detective shows in the medium's history, has been left out of the DVD trade. It's fading into the forgotten realm of old television shows nobody remembers. Mannix was, by one count, shot 17 times and knocked unconscious another 55 during the show's eight-year run, and how great is that? Could those "Law & Order" twits take that kind of abuse?
Mannix was the last of a certain type of American manhood, circa early '70s. He wore a tie and a wistful smile. He did not know doubt but was a friend of irony. He didn't worry about giving women "their space," and he wasn't "in touch with his feelings." He was kind to small dogs, little old ladies, and femmes fatales in deep trouble and short skirts.
He drove too fast, drank too much and smoked like he got paid for it. He slugged people and shot guys and never got pulled in by the cops. "The body count, even in the first few minutes of the show, could sometimes be appalling," notes one television reference guide. This was the era of "Who loves ya, baby?" "Book 'em, Danno!" and "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds."
Sigh.
"I've never really understood it myself," says actor Mike Connors, who became one of the highest-paid stars on television (earning a then-stratospheric $40,000 per episode) at the height of the show's Top 10 heyday. "We had a better average [rating] than 'The Rockford Files' or 'Hawaii Five-0' over eight years. And yet it's like it never occurred, it never existed, it never happened."
More than three decades after the show died, there are at least two Web sites devoted to it and more than 1,100 people have voted for it to be brought back on TVShowsOnDVD.com. It was popular on TV Land in reruns in the late 1990s but never translated to DVD.
"We've called, we've had hundreds of people petition, I just don't know why Paramount/Viacom won't release it," says Pat Talley, a university librarian in Tennessee who runs a Web site ( http://17paseoverde.tripod.com) and is a charter member of the Barracudas, the unofficial fan club of the show. (It's named for the Plymouth that Mannix drove.)"We've really pursued this thing, and we just cannot get an answer. We made tapes of the show during its TV Land run and given them to Mr. Connors. It's all he has of the show, either."
Montreal's Helene Gagne, an assistant manager at a pharmacy, has collected more than 100 scripts from the show, many of them originals. She tracks down locations used on the show via the Internet, then leads fellow fans on a "Mannix" tour of Los Angeles every year or so. She once met Connors in a restaurant there, and now they exchange Christmas cards.
"Every year we say, 'This'll be the year,' because Paramount keeps putting out old shows, but they just won't put out 'Mannix,' " she says. "I just want to see the eighth season [never shown in reruns] before I die."
Meanwhile, the rest of the gang has been pretty much rescued from oblivion by DVD, that pre-"Hill Street Blues" generation of stand-alone cops and anti-hero private dicks who bend the law to save the day: "Kojak," "Columbo," "Banacek," "Baretta," "Police Woman," "Starsky and Hutch," "Mission: Impossible," "Hawaii Five-0," "The Rockford Files," "Ironside," "The Streets of San Francisco" and, coming this Christmas, "The Mod Squad." (Peggy Lipton, we love you!) Even -- and this is hard to believe -- the sixth season of "Magnum, P.I." was rolled out on DVD earlier this month for Memorial Day, because Magnum had been, in the story line, a Vietnam vet.
But no "Mannix." Who had been in Korea.
It is to weep.
DVD releases of old television shows have become something of a national pop culture library, and why something as cool as "Mannix" remains MIA is a minor mystery perhaps only the detective at 17 Paseo Verde himself could solve.
The people at Viacom, part of the corporate structure that oversees the rights to the show, politely referred us to a spokeswoman for their partners at Paramount, who very politely did not return our repeated calls for two weeks. Spokeswoman Brenda Ciccone finally offered in an e-mail that CBS, yet another branch of the shop, has the rights, and it might issue the show next year. We called CBS and got no return calls. We went back to Ciccone, asking who decided what shows get picked and how.
She replied via e-mail that it was "honestly all very complicated." Consumer demand just isn't enough! "Legal rights, music clearances, availability of supplemental material and access to talent for new interviews or commentaries" also go in the consideration. (Um, we kind of knew that anyway, but that's their story and they're sticking to it.)
"That's pretty much what I've heard from them for years," laughs Connors.
This is a shame, because Mannix was great, just great -- one of the last unapologetically masculine and completely unrealistic American icons, at least in the myths we tell ourselves on television. Cops and detectives got cute or complicated later on, and there really hasn't been much on television like it since.
It debuted at a turbulent time in American culture, 1967, and Joe Mannix was pretty much a modernized Lone Ranger -- no wife, no kids, no pets, no political views, no close friends. He was hip enough to listen to jazz and to mock himself as "a hard-boiled detective in the classical tradition," but traditional enough to wear a coat and tie and to have good manners.
And there was Gail Fisher as Peggy Fair, the husky-voiced secretary! She even shared top billing, the only actor other than Connors named in the opening credits. Her primary job description seemed to be getting kidnapped.
For the era, when television was the Great White Way, a black actress in a major role was extraordinary.
"Peggy was like the bright girl from church who got that good job," remembers Clarence Page, the Chicago Tribune's Washington columnist, who watched her as a love-struck teen, then wrote a farewell column to Fisher when she died years later. "You know, she was that girl who was the first to get hired in a white guy's office, and if she didn't do well, nobody else was going to get hired, either. She was representing."
Fisher gained screen time, and the show even skirted with -- gasp! -- an interracial romance.
See -- this also tended to happen a lot -- Mannix gets shot, right? And loses his sight because the bullet creases his left temple and, while not doing much physical damage, still shows him death! Heavy, baby!
"You live a dangerous and complex life," the optometrist tells him, in dialogue typical of the day. "You risk it constantly in your profession. To you, that's just an occupational hazard. But you're also a man, and a mortal. . . . In that split second, you felt death. Your eyes saw it, couldn't stand it, and they closed."
Mannix comes home from this diagnosis, blind, under serious medication, and what does he do?
He gets a drink, that's what! Like a MAN!
And right there with him is Peggy, in an orange miniskirt, an open blouse and hip little vest. She takes him for a walk on the beach, arm in arm.
He learns Braille and shows her his progress by spelling out "Hi Peggy" with his fingers.
She smiles and says, eyes flashing, in that bedroom voice, "Hi, Joe."
He regains his sight -- when he shoots the bad guy. (Mannix was so bad he could shoot people when he was blind.) Peggy rushes in, they embrace, and . . . and that was it. Kind of a downer. It was the early '70s. You could only go so far.
What happens to lost TV show legends? What happens to ghosts of pop culture?
Connors went on to work steadily in dozens of television roles, invested wisely and retired comfortably in Encino with his wife of more than half a century, Mary Lou Willey. He's 82 and has dinner with Robert Wagner a lot. Robert Reed, often appearing as Mannix's source at LAPD, went on to camp television history as America's Dad, Mike Brady, in "The Brady Bunch." He died from complications of AIDS in 1992.
Legendary composer Lalo Schifrin said in a telephone interview last week that the elegant music he composed for the show, a unique jazz waltz, is second only to his "Mission: Impossible" theme in popularity. People ask for it all the time, he says.
Gail Fisher largely vanished.
Shortly after the series ended, she was arrested for drugs. She got divorced. Work dried up.
It took four years before she worked again -- and that was a guest appearance on one episode of the ultra-cheesy "Fantasy Island," according to her bio on the Internet Movie Database. Another four years and another guest cameo on "Knight Rider."
She did a god-awful independent film called "Mankillers" and a bit role in the 1990 TV movie "Donor." She was 54 years old. She developed diabetes and emphysema and, according to IMDB, never worked again.
In 2000, the National Enquirer asked Connors if he'd go with a reporter to deliver flowers and cards from well-wishing readers. He said sure.
"It was really sad," he says. "I hadn't seen her in years. She was in a nursing home over on Olympic Boulevard. She was using a wheelchair." She died in December. She had fallen into such obscurity that, other than the Enquirer, no other media outlet reported her death for another month -- not even her hometown paper back in New Jersey, not even "Jet," the magazine focused on black America.
Her ashes were scattered in the Pacific, the same ocean by which she once walked arm in arm on the beach with handsome Mike Connors, and the sunlight had played upon her face and her smile and her future had looked so bright.
Los Angeles is a land of lies.
The only way to see one of television's great detectives now is on tapes somebody made during its run on TV Land. They are dubs and the quality is lousy, but you get the snazzy opening theme in that three-quarter waltz, the right hand of the pianist carrying the theme. Trapped in time, Mannix goes sprinting across a suspension bridge in Long Beach, tie flapping over his shoulder. His name spells out in rectangular boxes on the screen, M-A-N-N-I-X, over shots of him jumping out of a car, swimming, driving a race car or swirling a blonde around in the sunlight, her skirt twisting above her hips. Days were tough there at 17 Paseo Verde, what with gunfire, exploding cars and hit men trying to cancel your oxygen supply.
But it also had Peggy's smile, the convertible out front, the .38 in the top right-hand desk drawer, the promise of a date for dinner. A man could take it in, tie loosened, Scotch in the crystal decanter, smokes in the soft pack.
The rest of the 20th century hadn't happened yet.
It was a good life.
-- Neely Tucker for The Washington Post
