Batman was a surprise sensation in 1966, offering a bold, colorful, tongue-in-cheek take on DC’s caped crusader that remains a fan favorite 50 years later. So it’s not surprising that producer William Dozier tired to generate a second hit from the same foundation. But The Green Hornet lasted only one season, and the surviving footage from his Wonder Woman pilot is dreadful.
Less heralded was another pilot he produced in 1967, one that followed the Batman template even more closely than the others – an adaptation of Chester Gould’s square-jawed detective Dick Tracy.
I’m sure it seemed like an idea with potential. Like Batman, Tracy had been a fixture in the comics (albeit in newspaper strips more than comic books) since the 1930s. Both were strait-laced heroes who battled a bizarre rogues’ gallery. And both used futuristic technology in their war against crime.
They were also characters familiar to non-comics readers as well. Batman had been featured in a pair of 1940s serials, while Dick Tracy headlined serials as well as a series of B-movies. For most fans of Gould’s comic strip, the definitive Tracy was Ralph Byrd, who starred in most of these projects, as well as in the first television adaptation of the character, which debuted in 1950. It lasted one season on ABC, and one more in syndication, ending with Byrd’s passing in 1952.
Dozier’s Tracy was played by Ray MacDonnell, who fit the role well even if he didn’t have Byrd’s sharp right-angle features. When the series was not picked up, MacDonnell didn’t have to wait very long for steady work. In 1970 he joined the cast of a new daytime drama called All My Children, and spent the next 40 years playing Dr. Joe Martin.
Watching the Dick Tracy pilot for the first time seemed a strangely familiar experience – it was new to me, but the Batman blueprint was so clear it was like revisiting an old friend.
We open with a series of daring kidnappings of ambassadors, orchestrated by the villain of the week, Mr. Memory (played by Victor Buono, perhaps between appearances as King Tut). Following an animated opening credits (again, just like Batman), we’re off to police headquarters, where standard law enforcement finds itself in over its head. There’s only one man capable of outwitting the brilliant Mr. Memory. So it’s time to pick up the Batphone…no, instead, Tracy is contacted via his two-way wrist radio, a phone that plays video. So futuristic back then; now everybody has one.
To stop Mr. Memory, Tracy retreats to his crime laboratory beneath where he lives, accessed by a secret door (the Tracy Cave?). He uses his detective skills to locate Mr. Memory, but the bad guy lures him into a hotel room and tries to kill him with poison gas. Is this the end of Dick Tracy? Tune in tomorrow, same Bat-time, same….no, this cliffhanger is more quickly resolved, and our hero infiltrates the villain’s lair, engages in a fistfight with his gang, and saves the day.
Can something this derivative of something else (and something better) still work? It’s been done. Though to be honest I can’t say for certain if I enjoyed this pilot on its own merits or because it reminded me of one of my favorite classics. Even the scene transitions were the same, but instead of the spinning Bat logo they used Tracy’s fedora, which struck me as very funny.
Victor Buono’s IMDB listing laments how too much of his career was “squandered on hokey villainy.” Well, “squandered” is in the eye of the beholder. Hokey villainy is not that easy to pull off, as anyone who watched Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman in Batman and Robin could attest. Buono is wonderful here, by far the most enjoyable part of the episode, putting little verbal spins on standard dialogue and delivering death threats with courtly manners.
Unfortunately two actors cast in the series do not appear in the pilot: Davey Davison as Tracy’s girl Tess Trueheart, and Eve Plumb (!) as his daughter, Bonnie Braids. If Dick Tracy sold, MacDonnell would have missed out on four decades in Pine Valley, and Plumb would not have been available to join TV’s most famous family.
Other regulars included Ken Mayer as Chief Patton, Monroe Arnold as Sam Catchem, Jay Blood (his only IMDB credit) as Tracy, Jr. and Jan Shutan as Liz, a policewoman who joins Tracy on his cases.
I’d have stuck with it, just to see if the series would continue to play as Batman without the costumes, or gradually carved out its own identity, one closer to the more violent urban crime stories in Gould’s strip. Or maybe just to hear its unforgettably silly theme song once more. Credited to The Ventures (of “Walk, Don’t Run” fame) it consists of the following lyrics:
“Dick Tracy…He’s a good cop. Dick Tracy…He’s a good cop”
Yep, that’s it. Not exactly “Stardust.”
You can read a longer history of the proposed series and why it never went further on the Television Obscurities website.
For Your Information:
ReplyDeleteIn 1967, Ray Macdonnell was in his sixth year appearing on The Edge Of Night, in a prominent role as a local businessman who was friendly with many of the other residents of Monticello.
A few years before this, Macdonnell's character, 'Phil Capice', had a problem with a tough criminal who looked exactly like him, 'Jack Lambert'; Macdonnell played both parts, which meant that Edge, which was normally live, had to use videotape for the first time (and had to announce that fact on the air).
Ray Macdonnell's peformance got some notice in the business, and by 1967 he was sufficiently known to attract the attention of Bill Dozier, who made an offer to come out to Hollywood and test for Dick Tracy.
Procter & Gamble, Edge's producers, sprung him from the soap to make the trip; Macdonnell made the test, filmed the Tracy pilot, and returned to his Edge role to await word of a sale.
When the sale didn't happen, Ray Macdonnell stayed at Edge as Phil Capice until 1969, when ABC got him to jump to the newly-minted All My Children, and the rest you know.
There were at least a half-dozen finished scripts for the series if it was sold as it would have been a mid-season replacement producer William Dozier had some, but not all, still in his papers when he donated his collection (including a treatment for an episode of "Green Hornet" written by Bruce Lee that was never made!) to a major university. Several others have turned up on eBay over the years.
ReplyDeleteNBC would have put this in mid-season 1967, but instead opted for both "Captain Nice" the Bill Daniels Superhero spoof from the team behind GET SMART (Then the network's #1 comedy) and "Dragnet : 1967" (having opted not to air the pilot TV Movie till next season ,and ordered it straight to series)
Ironic that 23 years later, the producers of Dick Tracy the movie would gamble (and lose) on the success of Batman once again.
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