"I'm not surprised THE AVENGERS has such enduring popularity, because it was a groundbreaking series that changed television. It was the first show that put its leading man and leading lady on an equal footing."
— Patrick Macnee (1922–2015) #BOTD
@LoneLocust Here’s the problem: what actually is#TheAvengers? It completely abandoned its original concept, arguably fairly soon after Hot Snow, certainly after season 1. It’s not the concept that made it, it was the people… Macnee and Clemens especially. The actual IP that Canal+ own basically gives them… the names of the characters. So yeah, they’ll want to recast… [1/2]
@LoneLocust And so here’s the fundamental problem. Everything I described, you could do without owning the IP. So what is the value of #TheAvengers IP? Almost nothing. Even Steed and Peel are so little known now it won't jump-start a new show. Not dismissing the value of the back-catalogue itself (and my one hope from this sorry mess it that it draws enough interest for someone to finally restore #TheNewAvengers on BluRay) but I can't help feeling this is a completely pointless endeavour.
63 years ago today, #TheAvengers debuted on British television. From 1961-9, 161 episodes were produced, both in B/W and color.
John Steed teamed up with various partners, including Dr. Keel, Cathy Gale, Emma Peel, Tara King - and for a few nerdy bonus points we'll throw in Dr. King & Venus Smith.
We start with wishing you all a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
Time to Choose What’s Next
While the episodes are still dropping, Kenneth and I have completed our recording sessions for Space: Above and Beyond. Oh, the Fightin’ 58th, we hardly knew ye.
That means the search has begun for the next show we’ll look at. I have a shelf full of shows, mostly American and some British, but what are the criteria we use to pick a new show?
There was once The List, but sadly, it is now lost in the great digital dustbin in the sky.
The List started in the days before the podcast began and was a stream-of-consciousness document that I created and later Ben and Simon contributed to. To some degree, I can recreate it, for it is the list of shows that I remember from my childhood, and then later my university years.
In no particular order, The List probably looked a little like this:
Star Trek
Doctor Who
The Wild, Wild West
The Avengers
Blakes 7
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
Space: 1999
UFO
Planet of the Apes
The Invisible Man
Logan’s Run
The Gemini Man
Beyond Westworld
Manimal
Quark
Battlestar Galactica/Galactica 1980
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
Fantastic Journey
Otherworld
The Prisoner
War of the Worlds
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Bionic Woman
The Invaders
The Immortal
The Time Tunnel
…and I’m confident there were more. There were programs like the Starlost, which I had never managed to watch but had a legendary mythic status to it (and not in a good way), and programs like Sapphire and Steel, which had a great reputation but limited exposure in the United States.
Mostly, though, I think I was eager to relive and revel in all those wonderful childhood memories.
Now that I mention that, I’m fairly certain Land of the Lost was on that list, too.
So, the question is: What criteria do we use to pick a new show?
Initially, we pulled one off the list more-or-less, but we’ve learned some lessons along the way.
For example:
The Blakes 7 Lesson: 52 episodes take a long, long time to complete. We started on Blakes 7 in January 2013 and finished in November 2017 – almost five full years.
And while we’ve done some shows with 40+ episodes since then, we always give them a lot of thought before undertaking them. Space: 1999 is the exception because there was no way we wouldn’t do that show.
The Man From Atlantis Lesson: This show is really bad. It crushed my childhood memories and stomped on them with cleats long past the point that all the blood had drained out of them and soaked into the Earth, which, in turn, nurtured the seeds of despair and enmity in the world. It can be really difficult to make it through an entire series like that.
The Man From Atlantis Corollary: Some hour-long shows don’t have enough substance for an entire podcast episode.
The Invisible Man Lesson: Not everything billed as “science fiction” is science fiction.
While we had fun looking at The Invisible Man, and while H.G. Wells’ original novel is undeniably science fiction, the David McCallum series only used invisibility as a plot gimmick to tell ordinary action-adventure melodrama stories. There are no aliens, time travelers, self-aware computers, or mad scientists plotting world domination here, just Soviet defections, casino heists, art thieves, and industrial espionage. There was that fake psychic once (Only on make-believe TV shows do I need to include the word “fake” in front of “psychic.” In the real world, that’s a given.)
The Bugs Corollary to the Invisible Man Lesson: Some shows change midstream.
Of that list of 26, we’ve done 12. (One has yet to drop, the second is being recorded.)
Let’s look at what remains.
Series
# Episodes
Comments
Star Trek
79
Too many episodes. Too many podcasts have gone here before, boldly or otherwise.
The Wild, Wild West
104
Too many episodes. Also, I love it dearly, but there are a lot of episodes that are either just Westerns or 60s-style Spy genre. There are a fair number of episodes with racist and outdated depictions of Native Americans and US immigrants. That wouldn’t necessarily stop us from looking at the series, but it does get tedious calling out the outdated stereotypes. We’re considering doing an “All Migelito Loveless” mini-series.
The Avengers
161
Too many episodes… ish. The first 78 episodes or so hardly have any aspect of the bizarre at all, and many no longer exist. This might be the subject of much debate, but let’s just say we carved out the Peel/King era, that’s still 83 episodes, and even if we went with just the color episodes that’s 57 episodes. Like the Wild, Wild West, it’s too many and too varied.
Planet of the Apes
14
This will be done
The Gemini Man
11
This attempt to re-work The Invisible Man has, to my knowledge, never been released. Very, very poor copies are available on YouTube. Obviously, this show probably might be the same format as The Invisible Man, with the same limitations.
Beyond Westworld
5
I’ve not seen this, but have reason to believe this is another basic action adventure with nothing more than a sci-fi gimmick. It’s short. We’ll probably get to it someday.
Manimal
8
Definitely just an action-adventure show with a sci-fi gimmick. It’s short, though; we’ll probably do it.
War of the Worlds
44 24 (S01) 20 (S02)
This show might as well be two different TV series. Series 1 has some fascinating world-building and an interesting, if quirky, format. We might do this as two different series separated by a long interval… or we might never do series 2.
The Six Million Dollar Man
99
Too long. Plus, there are many action-adventures with sci-fi gimmick episodes. (Most of them?) For every “Bigfoot is a robot controlled by space aliens,” there are five “Steve has to stop spies from stealing something” episodes.
The Bionic Woman
58
See “The Six Million Dollar Man”
The Invaders
43
This one is a bit long, but it’s a fascinating mashup of aliens using diabolical plans to wipe out humanity mixed with Cold War paranoia. A low-key series, but I see us still getting to this one.
The Immortal
16
This is just The Fugitive with a guy with valuable blood that a rich guy wants to control. I cannot see us doing this.
The Time Tunnel
30
What Doctor Who might have been if they’d leaned almost exclusively into the historical episodes and followed the rules outlined in The Aztecs. Randomly trapped at the worst points in history, our heroes struggle to extricate themselves whilst being unable to change history – not one single line. This is probably not going to happen.
That’s looking back on our initial list, written when we were young, wide-eyed, and innocent, now assessed based on hindsight and aged wisdom.
But, of course, we’ve learned other things. There are more obscure programs from different eras or different countries, and some of the more rewarding series we’ve done have been these lesser-known gems. I think that’s where we’re going to go from here,
Right now, I’m looking at this list to pick something. What are your thoughts? What should we cover?
Ahoy! It may be Talk Like a Pirate Day, but 'tis also National Voter Registration Day! So make sure everythin' be in order with yer voter registration, and if ye ha'nae registered t' vote yet, what ye be waitin' fer? Raise the mizzenmast; jib the topsails! Do it now!
Whoa. Marvel's Avengers is getting one last massive price cut, and then it's going to be removed from stores forever. There aren't many games I can think of (especially based on such popular IP) that flopped this hard.
For $4, I might grab it... https://www.gamescensor.com/2023/09/marvels-avengers-minimized-to-399-to.html?m=1
I was younger. People knew who #JackBenny and #GeorgeBurns were, and why they were important to popular mass media entertainment. They wouldn't have a clue what the #JusticeLeague or #TheAvengers were. When you told them, they would think you were really, really weird. :ablobcatwave:
Venus Smith, the forgotten Avengers girl. She was Steed's partner in six 1963 episodes. Fascinatingly different from the other Avengers girls. She had zero combat skills but she was a useful agent. And quite charming.