Even More Favorite TV Themes!

I have watched a lot of television in my lifetime, readers. Too much, some would say.   But there is always something in my favorite series that makes me go, “Yeah, I have seen a bit too much. But these shows were worth it!”

Andromeda Ascendant was kind of confusing, but I like Kevin Sorbo, so I am willing to rate that series as a win, weirdness and all. Gunsmoke, The Munsters, Bewitched and a couple of other series are old childhood friends. I still enjoy watching them. I recommend them to anyone and everyone for that reason.

Well, that is enough talk from me. You came to see the TV themes, not to hear me prattle on about them! Go ahead and enjoy the music, readers!

The Mithril Guardian

 

Andromeda Ascendant

Gunsmoke

The Rifleman

Viper

Beast Master

The Dukes of Hazzard

Highlander

Bewitched

I Dream of Jeannie

The Virginian

The Twilight Zone

The Munsters

The Pirates of Penzance

Years ago, I met a group practicing for a play. It was a Gilbert and Sullivan play, but I did not know that at the time. I enjoyed the singing and the lyrics, and one of the friends with me at the time said that I had to see The Pirates of Penzance.

I was more amenable to the idea than I might normally have been. There was something in the practice session that hinted at a great story worth seeing, and so I readily agreed to watch a film of the play.

A film copy of the play was found soon after. Starring Kevin Kline, Rex Smith, Linda Ronstadt, Angela Lansbury, George Rose, and several others, it promised to be a great deal of fun. And that, I soon discovered, was the understatement of the year. As the story started I began to smile. Within five minutes I was choking on giggles. In ten, I was laughing out loud.

For those of you who do not know, Gilbert and Sullivan were two playwrights who wrote comedies in the late nineteenth century. Both were knighted and neither of them could stand the other. They each had aspirations to be the greatest in their respective fields and this meant that neither of them wanted to write comedies, especially if it meant they had to work together all the time. This was in spite of the fact that they were making a veritable killing at this work. The weary duo ended their partnership some time before they died, to the dismay of their fans. Sullivan, who was the younger, died first.

The Pirates of Penzance is one of their best known plays, along with H. M. S. Pinafore and The Mikado. In Penzance we are introduced to a Pirate King (Kevin Kline) and his scurvy crew. The crew is having a celebration for their young apprentice, Frederic (Rex Smith), who turns twenty-two today and thus ends his indentured servitude to them. How did Frederic become indentured to a pirate gang?

It turns out that his nurse, Ruth (Angela Lansbury), misheard Frederic’s father when he gave her a commission. Frederic’s father wanted his son apprenticed to a pilot, but Ruth misheard him and thought he said pirate. So she accidentally indentured eight year old Frederic to the Pirate King’s crew!

Frederic does not hold this misunderstanding against Ruth – it is an easy mistake to make, after all. He has come to know the pirates aboard the ship over the years and likes them all individually. But the fact is that they are pirates, the scourge of the sea, the plague of merchantmen, the locusts of seaports. And so in a general way Frederic hates the pirates he grew up with as the vilest scum of the Earth. And in the abstract he cannot believe that he has been duty-bound to help them ply their terrible trade from the time he was eight years old.

The pirates do not hold this against him, though, since they cannot seem to “make piracy pay.” Frederic knows why this is; because they are orphans, the pirates give orphans a free pass. And word of this nobility on their part has gotten out. The last three ships they tried to take were all manned by orphans, so the pirates spared them.

If you are saying, “Yeah, right,” you would be correct. Frederic points out that everyone knows England does not recruit orphans to crew its merchantmen; they need men with families and titles to command the ships. But because the Pirates of Penzance are known to spare orphans, the crews for these ships pretended to be orphans in order to escape them.

Once the clock strikes noon, Frederic sets out from the pirate ship, taking Ruth with him. Ruth is an older lady by now, but she is the only woman Frederic has seen and known since he was eight. He expects to marry her, a prospect she very much likes, since otherwise she will die an old maid with no one to take care of her.

But on pulling up to an English beach, Frederic espies a group of girls his own age come to the waterside to have a little fun. Finding Ruth has lied to him about her age and beauty, he casts her off before going to see if one of these young ladies will marry him.

His attempt almost ends in disaster. But one of the girls, Mabel (Linda Ronstadt), appears on the scene before all hope is lost in the young man’s heart. It seems that she lagged behind the other girls and only caught up with them to hear Frederic’s entreaty for a wife. She tells him to “take her heart,” and he is quite happy to do so…

Then the Pirates show up, and the fun kicks into high gear!

There is another version of The Pirates of Penzance which is worth a viewing as well. This one was performed in New York with Patricia Routledge, the lead actress in the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, portraying Ruth. If you ever saw her as Hyacinth ‘Bucket’ Bouquet and thought she had a terrible voice, you will be surprised to hear her singing here. She pulled a fast one on those of us who watched Keeping Up Appearances, I can tell you!

Have fun with The Pirates of Penzance, readers!

McClintock!

Of all the Hollywood duos I ever saw onscreen, I think I enjoyed watching John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara most.

John Wayne I already knew from several Westerns. He reminded me strongly of my father, though I would not exchange the two for anything in the world. Maureen O’Hara’s characters were everything I wanted to be: independent, fierce, and strong-willed – something you would know if you watched her in The Quiet Man or today’s subject, McClintock!

McClintock! is Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew transplanted to the American West at the turn of the century. John Wayne plays George Washington McClintock, a rancher who came to Arizona when there was nothing but some old Spanish settlements and a lot of unfriendly Indians. O’Hara plays his firebrand of a wife who accompanied him on this journey but is in a snit with him. She is in such a snit, in fact, that she moved out of the ranch two years ago and has not been back – until now.

McClintock has a thing for drinking and saloons, but he loves his wife like no other man has ever loved his wife. When she tells him – again – that she wants a divorce, an uncommon practice in that century, he says no. He may be mad at her but he still loves her.

Matters are further complicated for McClintock by the arrival of settlers promised rich land on a nearby mesa. The problem is that the mesa is nothing more than a barren piece of rock jutting out of the ground, and he has to tell the settlers that “even the government should know that you can’t farm land 6,000 feet above sea level!” It is not his fault these settlers came, nor is it his fault that they were, essentially, swindled. But because he owns most of the territory and the town of McClintock, he takes the heat for both these things all the same.

One of the young men who came west with the wagon train, Devlin Warren (played by Patrick Wayne) asks for a job from McClintock and is hired on as a ranch hand. McClintock then ends up hiring Dev’s mother, Mrs. Warren (Yvonne de Carlo) as the ranch’s cook. This upsets his Chinese cook, whom he keeps around the house despite hiring Mrs. Warren because he suspects she will not be staying long. Besides, he considers his Chinese chef a friend and a member of the family.

But this decision makes Mrs. McClintock even more upset. She figures Mrs. Warren is just another harlot G. W. met and hired before he heard she was coming back. This is not the case at all, but how are you supposed to tell a jealous woman that and have her believe you? Neither Mrs. Warren nor McClintock can convince her until Mrs. Warren, under the influence of spirits, tells Mrs. McClintock that the sheriff has asked her to marry him. She intends to accept his proposal and will therefore have to stop working as a cook for the McClintock ranch.

And if all this mess was not enough, McClintock’s daughter Becky has come back west from school. She keeps company with a young gentleman from the town not long after, a young fellow with ‘social standing’ and the son of an old enemy of McClintock’s. On top of this, the young man also happens to be a sap, and it is clear McClintock does not really like him (who could!). He merely tolerates him to make his daughter happy.

Then Dev, who has taken a shine to Becky, puts the kibosh on the courting and – well, that would be telling.

McClintock! is not your typical Western. It has plenty of action, but most of it is humorous. There are many serious parts in the story, to be sure, but the laughs are never far away as you watch this wonderful, wonderful comedy. I love every minute of McClintock! Whenever I have the chance to watch it, I smile my face sore. If you have not seen this film, readers, then you had better go find it and watch it now. It is a classic in every sense of the word!

And please remember that it is NOT a “cowboy movie.” John Wayne plays a rancher in McClintock!, not a cowboy. In this film, his days of punching cows are long over. The West is closing, the Indians are being forced onto reservations, the buffalo are dwindling, and the days of the gun are numbered. But if McClintock can, he will go out with a bang. Or with a record. 😉

See ya later, Alligator!