The Magical Magnetism of Yvonne Craig

 

About 15 years ago I went to a Hollywood Collector Show, which was not held in Hollywood but at the Beverly Garland Hotel in Burbank. Yvonne Craig was there and she was the celebrity I was most excited to meet. 

I believe our conversation went something like this:

Me: Ummm…Hi

Her: Hi! Are you having a good time at the show?

Me. Ummm…Hi

Her: Would you like me to sign a photo for you?

Me: Ummm…Hi

And so on. But I did get a signed photo that was proudly displayed for years on my office wall.

As every fan of good TV knows by now, Yvonne Craig passed away last week. We have a no-obits rule around here, but when Mitchell Hadley, one of the TV bloggers I most respect, describes her passing as news that “no classic television blog worth its weight could ignore,” I listen. So let’s call this a tribute as we did with the James Best piece.

Actually, a piece on Ms. Craig was roughed out several months ago. She was going to be one in a series of blogs on Comfort TV stars that were blessed with an exceptional magnetism that always drew your eye and captivated your attention. With these actors it wasn’t about the role they played, it was the charisma and personality they brought to it that made it special.

It’s a quality that is hard to define but you know it when you see it. James Garner and David Janssen had it. So do Kate Jackson and Diana Rigg. Craig, like Jackson and Rigg, could have coasted through a performance on her remarkable looks, especially when the script didn’t call for much more than a pretty face. But she never did. 

She appeared in memorable guest spots on more than 50 different shows, from westerns (Bronco, Wagon Train, The Big Valley) to sitcoms (McHale’s Navy, I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father). I can’t cover them all but here are some of the many highlights.

Yvonne Craig appeared in five episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (actually six including the pilot but that was just a walk-on). Dwayne Hickman as Dobie played a dumb guy but in a smart way; he was very nimble with dialogue and needed a strong female presence to play off of, which he always had in regulars Tuesday Weld and Sheila Kuehl.

Playing five different one-episode crushes, Craig always made a formidable match for the love-struck Dobie. In “The Flying Millicans” she was Aphrodite, the toga-clad daughter of a fitness-obsessed family; in “Dobie’s Navy Blues” she was Myrna Lomax whom Dobie loved enough to almost join the Navy to please her father. Even in “Flow Gently, Sweet Money,” working with a character clearly derivative of Tuesday Weld’s money-hungry Thalia Menninger, she delivered delightfully cynical dialogue with aplomb. 

In the Star Trek episode “Whom Gods Destroy” she was Marta, the green-tinted Orion slave girl. People remember her seductive dance but not the dialogue around it, and that’s where Craig really created a haunting, (and haunted) schizoid casualty that joins Khan and Harry Mudd among the series’ most memorable guest characters. 

In The Wild, Wild West Craig played an assassin named Ecstasy (“The Night of the Grand Emir”), who was so alluring that after her intended victim survives he asks her out to dinner. As in Star Trek this was a role that made delightful use of her professional dance training.

Craig also played a rich girl turned beatnik in the appropriately named Mr. Lucky episode “Little Miss Wow,” the feisty daughter of a missing sailor in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and a meter maid on My Three Sons.

But it was her one-season appearance as Batgirl opposite Adam West and Burt Ward that still overshadows a lot of other fine work, a plight experienced by any actor fortunate enough to create an iconic character. 

The show really didn’t do right by her much of the time. In the third and final season of Batman the writing had slipped, most of the stories were no longer two-parters with cliffhangers, and poor Batgirl was usually captured far too quickly by chumps like Lord Fogg and Louis the Lilac.

And yet, every episode in which she appeared was a joy. Craig’s Batgirl was a carefree superhero, the antithesis of the dark and brooding caped crusaders of more recent films. She smiled and high-kicked through every fight, and radiated confidence each time she bounced into a room, head tilted back, hands on hips, ready for action.

I bought the Batman series blu-rays about three months ago and have been getting reacquainted with the show ever since. The third-season is coming up soon and I expect the experience of watching it will be bittersweet. But I will still be happy to see Batgirl again. 

Despair is No Match for Champagne Music

 

I had a revelation while watching a 40 year-old episode of The Lawrence Welk Show. Which, to be clear, is not something I do very often. 

I grew up with the series, but like many in my generation it was against my will. How many of you also recall Sunday visits to the grandparents’ apartment, where conversation and card playing ceased the moment Welk raised his baton? To them The Lawrence Welk Show was one of the only good reasons to turn on the television. To me it was sappy music performed by sappy people who apparently wouldn’t stop smiling even if someone took a shot at them.

My appreciation for the music has grown since then, but that wasn’t the reason I recently spent a few moments watching Guy and Ralna, courtesy of PBS (which has been airing Welk reruns for years). I did it because there is a lot going on in the world right now, and much of it is not to my liking. Sometimes life in the 2010s is pretty lousy. And there was Lawrence Welk offering a respite, a temporary escape into simpler times. 

 That’s when I had my revelation – 40 years ago, my grandparents were doing the exact same thing.

From my current perspective the 1970s seem like a kinder, gentler time. But many seniors back then were convinced the world was going to hell. The popular music of the day was like a foreign language to them, and the nightly news brought stories of Vietnam War protests and Watergate and gas shortages and American hostages held in Iran, while a feckless government had no answer for what Ted Koppel called “terrorism in the Middle East.”

It was all a bit too much, so they watched Lawrence Welk. Here were tunes they recognized, performed in a style that harkened back to the entertainment of the 1940s – big bands, happy polkas, couples dancing together to songs with understandable lyrics. Everybody seemed so nice.

Say what you will about Welk’s refusal to change with the times, but he knew his audience. From local TV to the ABC network to first-run syndication, he stayed on television from 1951 to 1982.

And he didn’t completely ignore modern music – he just arranged it so it sounded like something Doris Day would have released when FDR was still in the Oval Office. The show’s infamously wholesome take on “One Toke Over the Line” has been watched nearly a million times on YouTube. 

That’s many more views than the clips of “Calcutta,” the instrumental that Welk took to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961. Take that, Chubby Checker.

If I feel nostalgic when I watch now, it’s as much for my grandmother’s traditional Russian cooking as for the show itself. But if you can get past the sight of all those ladies with the big round faces and pageant hair, and the guys wearing ties wide enough to land airplanes on, there was clearly a lot of talent in the cast.

The Lennon Sisters were the show’s biggest discovery, but there was also the wonderful Irish tenor Joe Feeney, peppy dancers Bobby and Cissy, the exquisite soprano voice of “Champagne Lady” Norma Zimmer, and the accordion wizardry of Myron Floren. Yes, I said accordion wizardry – it may be the most un-hip instrument ever, but Floren was its master and respect must be paid.

As proudly old-fashioned as it was, in its own way The Lawrence Welk Show could also be progressive. This was the first variety show to regularly feature an African-American in dancer Arthur Duncan. Welk was praised for that back in the day – today he’d probably be called a racist because the only black guy on the show is a tap dancer. With some people you just can’t win.

There was also a gorgeous Mexican singer billed as Anacani who performed songs in Spanish. I still remember her lovely version of "Eres tú," the song that should have won Eurovision in 1973. Another singer performed in a wheelchair. For its time, the show was inclusive.

Though I have recently achieved AARP eligibility, I’m not sure my fondness for The Lawrence Welk Show will continue to escalate.  But with the way the world is headed, I’m also not ruling out any return visits. If things don’t get better, I’ll meet you in front of the bandstand. Until then, Adios, Au Revoir, Auf Wiedersehen....Good Night.

Two-Part Episodes Revisited

In the Comfort TV era a “special two-part episode” was promoted as a big deal. Sometimes it actually turned out that way. Sometimes it didn’t.

As we explored back in March, there are good reasons to double the running time devoted to a story, such as character introductions and marriages, big-name guest stars and Emmy-bait scripts. But there were also times when the attempt to create something memorable only resulted in something twice as long.

Let’s take another look at some more two-parters from the Comfort TV era – 5 that worked, 5 that did not.

Good: Charlie’s Angels: “Angels in Paradise”

My first blog on this topic exposed “Terror on Skis” as a shameless cash grab padded into two episodes to justify a road trip to Vail, Colorado. But Charlie’s Angels could also deliver a first-rate two-part show. “Angels in Paradise,” the Hawaii-set adventure that introduced audiences to Cheryl Ladd, would be on any fan’s short list of the series’ very best moments. There’s a great jailbreak sequence, a charismatic adversary played by France Nuyen, and bikinis everywhere. 

Bad: The Dick Van Dyke Show: “I Do Not Choose to Run”/’The Making of a Councilman”

This season 5 story was sunk by its premise – Rob Petrie is recruited to run for a vacant city council position. It didn’t work because viewers of the previous four seasons knew Rob as an intelligent, eloquent, civic-minded gentleman who would probably make a great public servant. That didn’t serve the comedy, so he was presented as a dithering, uncertain candidate. Not buying it. 

Good: One Day at a Time: “J.C. and Julie”

The Norman Lear shows usually had a reliable sense of when to go two-part and when to keep it simple. One Day at a Time offered more than a dozen multi-part stories over its nine seasons. I’ve singled out “J.C. and Julie” because it pulls off a tricky concept – Julie joins a Christian youth group and annoys her family – in a way that is consistently funny without offending believers or non-believers.

Bad: Wonder Woman: “Mind-Stealers from Outer Space”

Yes, it delivers on the kitschy sci-fi promise of its B-movie title. There is an alien invasion story that leaves the fate of mankind in the hands of Dack Rambo, and flying saucer special effects that wouldn’t make the cut on Jason of Star Command. 

Wait – was this one in the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category?

Like a lot of old cheese it can be fun if you meet it halfway, but any show that releases a two-part episode where the special guest star is Vincent Van Patten is just asking for trouble.

Good: That Girl: Mission Improbable

Unifit Sleepwear hires Ann Marie to go undercover as a seamstress at Sleeptight Fashions to find out who is stealing the company’s designs. She takes the job, despite the danger of discovery and the fact that she can’t sew. “Mission Improbable” justifies its two-part status as a clever genre departure from typical That Girl stories, and in the presence of such familiar comfort TV faces as Sandy Kenyon, Lou Jacobi and Avery Schreiber.

Bad: The Waltons: The Outrage

Some shows don’t know when to go away. By its ninth and final season, The Waltons had lost several beloved cast members but soldiered on, with World War II-era stories and a fake John-Boy (Robert Wightman) with the personality of an eggplant. The story in this season premiere two-parter focused on one of the family’s neighbors, a sure sign that writers had run out of ideas for the remaining Waltons.

Good: Bewitched: “My Friend Ben”/ “Samantha for the Defense”

A standard Bewitched set-up – Aunt Clara tries to summon an electrician but zaps up Benjamin Franklin instead – is elevated into the series’ best two-part outing on the strength of its shrewd scripts and guest star Fredd Wayne. Wayne takes a gimmick and gives it real depth – he captures Franklin’s wit and principles as well as the scientific curiosity and wonder that you’d expect to see in a man suddenly transported 200 years into the future. 

Bad: Diff’rent Strokes: The Hitchhikers

It’s customary for a sitcom to get serious every so often, especially in those “very special episodes” that inspire two-parters, but I doubt family audiences were all that pleased when Arnold and Kimberly are kidnapped by a mentally ill child molester.

Good: Battlestar: Galactica: “The Living Legend”

Remember, this is Comfort TV, so we’re celebrating the original series with Pa Cartwright and not the critically acclaimed but relentlessly grim remake. In “The Living Legend” the Galactica encounters the Pegasus, a long-lost starship with a legendary leader in Commander Cain (Lloyd Bridges). The philosophic sparring between Lloyd Bridges as Caine and Lorne Greene’s Adama provides a substantive counterpoint to the show’s signature action scenes. 

Bad: Starsky & Hutch: “Murder at Sea”

Aaron Spelling shows were never above cross-promotion, so here we have our two streetwise cops sailing on a thinly disguised variation of the Love Boat, in the undercover roles of entertainment directors Hack and Zack. It’s doubtful this adventure’s tired antics inspired anyone to spend more time on the Pacific Princess.