NO POOFTERS!!
Posted on 01/14/2009 9:35:48 AM PST by the scotsman
'Emmy-winning actor Patrick McGoohan, best known for starring in cult 1960s TV show The Prisoner, has died at the age of 80.
He died in Los Angeles after a short illness, his film producer son-in-law Cleve Landsberg said.
McGoohan played the character Six in the surreal 1960s show, filmed in the north Wales village of Portmeirion.'
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
It guided me to conservative philosophy. It's surrealistic images and themes intrigued me. They made me wonder what the program was about, what it was trying to say. Like a Rubik's Cube to later generations, it became a challenging Gordian Knot that seemed impossible to untie, especially to a young mind that was constantly under attack by the then-so-prevalent 60's groupism.
It took a while but eventually I understood, or at least thought I did.
The information the Number Two's so desperately were after was in reality very simple. It's the Freeing of the Individual that allows a person to excel and create things of usefulness or beauty or wit that are beneficial to and appreciated by others.
When an individual enters into a relationship with a group that person invariably surrenders some individual rights to strengthen the rights of the group. In casual instances there is some mutual benefit.
For instance a herd of bison is better able to ward off a predator than an individual and with each addition the group becomes stronger. But for the individual to enjoy the security of the group it has limited it's freedom. It can't be as mobile as it once was.
In extreme cases it becomes "another brick in the wall." The wall may be strong and secure but the poor brick is forever mortared into place, locked in it's cell as surely as iron prison bars slam shut and hold a prisoner.
For me "The Prisoner" displayed the slavery of Cultural Marxism. You may find Your Village a very nice place indeed, but in exchange you will be forever locked behind the bars of it's conventions and your freedom will be only a distant dream.
When The Net was being formed...and I'm talking LONG AGO folks, well over 20 years...someone decided usernames would be an interesting, fun and useful feature. So we all chose names to hide behind. With "The Prisoner" such an influence on me...and in fact Prisoner oriented "online clubs" were some of the pioneering efforts that would later evolve into chat rooms and egroups...I decided to call myself "The Prisoner."
However that would have been confusing and imply that I was the center of the group, so I decided on just "prisoner" For security purposes we were encouraged to also include a number so that's how the "6" came into being.
In the decades since my web presence has almost always been "prisoner6" or some mutation. For example on YouTube I am "theprisonersix" because everything else had been taken by the time I got around to signing on.
And of course on FreeRepublic I have always been "prisoner6" although back in the Prodigy(?) days I believe I tried JohnDrake and several other "The Prisoner" related names but I always kept losing my password. Eventually John helped me get with the program and I settled in as "prisoner6."
And now there is the sad news of Patrick McGoohan's passing. An excellent actor, writer, director and a successful man. A man whose Freedom allowed him to excel and produce something...wonderful.
I thank you sir! God rest your soul and may He grant peace and comfort to your family.
BCNU
prisoner6 (I will not be pushed, filed, stamped indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered! My life is my own! I am a Free Man!)
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They called it "Rover" on the show. Whatever it was, it was apparently fatal to whomever it attacked. In an interview from the 70's, PM said they used many (thousands?) of weather balloons during filming.
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Evidence of a life well-lived. Rest in peace, Number Six.
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IMHO, Longshanks is one of the finest performances on film. When I first saw Braveheart, I did not even realize it was Patrick McGoohan in that role.
The Prince was a poof? I missed that.
I never saw Dr. Who before the current version, I liked it and Eccleston in the role. So I was glad when I heard he might by doing this. I remembered seeing the Prisoner on the SciFI Channel I think it was.
So few episodes, I thought it was a perfect candidate to be remade.
I hope they don’t put leftist crap in it.
But anyway it’s Ouchy Jesus in the role now instead of Eccleston. It says MacGoohan was gonna guest star.
If it stinks, it stinks. I hope it doesn’t.
Apparently Longshanks followed rule number 1.
"I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself… I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly… there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used…
…We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche… As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy. We're at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed…
…We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners."
— 1977 interview
What is "Prodigy" pray tell? Some Proto-Free Republic?
I was never able to get into Dr. Who (I mean the old version), and most of the SciFi Channel stuff all looks like the same subpar Canadian productions (everything they do, no matter what it is, ALL looks alike. The cheesy special-effects, Canadian actors with thick Canadian accents pretending to be Americans, “Eh ? and “Aboot.” I feel like it is all one step above “Terence & Phillip”).
I think part of the problem with remaking “The Prisoner” is that it is a part of the time it was made. There’s no way they could do some of the Beatles stuff and totally off the wall British Mod look and acid trip stuff.
Injecting leftist stuff is almost a given, they’d make the conspiracy predictably “right-wing” (nevermind there hasn’t been a right-wing gov’t in the UK in nearly 2 decades, aside from Blair’s non-moonbat foreign policy). Remakes are almost never as good as originals (one exception to that was probably “Lolita” where the remake was tragic drama as opposed to the black comedy original).
What’s rule #1? Defenestrate the sons of Sodom? :-p
Well the New Who is a BBC production and it surely has good production values. I think it’s one of the top shows there
It can be a tad fruity but I largely like it. It’s weird an different from most shows I watch.
The new Dr. they just picked to take over though. Uh well I’ve never seen him in anything of course just his picture, It’s *kinda* like Alan Colmes knocked up an English girl.
“I think part of the problem with remaking “The Prisoner” is that it is a part of the time it was made. There’s no way they could do some of the Beatles stuff and totally off the wall British Mod look and acid trip stuff.”
Sure they’d have to change it some but the general theme fits well in modern times. And drugged up visions and whatnot are always fun.
There's also the fairly famous response to the "Pop Goes the Weasel" song and the letters POP in the credits. IIRC PM said POP stood for nothing, then "Protect Our People" and finally nothing again.
I think it was his intent to NOT answer questions directly or sometimes give misleading answers. That way people would have to keep thinking to try and resolve the solution to TP for themselves.
Of course like many film and TV stars PM was most likely left wing oriented. Sadly it seems to go with the territory, with precious few exceptions.
Despite that I believe PM would have no quarrel with my solution to TP. While there is the overall message of individual Liberty there are many sub-messages. In other words TP is multi-faceted and TP can represent many different things to many different people.
There is a line of thought that because of the surreality the message of TP is the complete freedom to use drugs.
I of course disagree. To me it's a question of balance. At what point do we stop trading individual rights for group rights? The liberty of the one for the good of the many?
There is no single answer, it's different for for different people.
And the iron gates slam shut once again. We are trapped in a conundrum.
In any case you are sort of correct about the Prodigy service being a proto FR. After ARPAnet there were several attempts to build a public web. Some of use would just use our blazingly fast 300 baud acoustic modems to call the next computer nerd down the line and transfer data. FIDOnet worked like that I think...sorry it's been awhile, LOL. I may have the exact services confused. But with one of the services put together basically by computer enthusiasts we'd all use each others machines along with large machines at universities or corporations and connect at say 2AM.Traffic would then be exchanged. An email - and traffic in proto groups would move a node or two down the line. An email from one part of the country might take a couple of days to make it to another part and back!
Of course we all saw the eventual possibilities and thought it was amazing.
Then corporations stepped in in an effort to make the early web profitable. Compuserve was probably the most famous but there were a bunch including Prodigy, GEnie, and eventually AOL.
I could be VERY wrong here but I think FR was a group of only few dozen on Prodigy or GEnie. I was on Compuserve, Prodigy and GEnie (with monthly service bills in the hundreds of dollars, it's one of the reasons I'm so broke today...sigh) and had seen or knew of the group but wasn't particularly interested then.
A couple of years later I spotted a Drudge link to FR. It sounded familiar so I clicked and I figured FR was the evolution of the old group.
It was also about that time that Wife was getting irritated with me having several machines in one small room off our bedroom and me spending huge amounts of time - and money - on them. She put her foot down and I was limited in my online time.
Because of that and because I never wrote anything down I would forget my FR user names or passwords or otherwise screw something up.
Eventually I got the hang of things and a FReeper was born.
So getting back to TP the message for me - and one that no matter what one's political point of reference - is that there is a balance to be struck between the rights of the individual as opposed to the rights of the group, and that the more Individual Freedom we have, the more a person is able to learn, grow and blossom. It is then that one uses his God given talents to provide for his family, help his neighbors and take care of himself.
In the end the group still profits, although this way the individual's contributions are freely given to the group instead of being taken forcibly.
Sadly I'm at work so I gottas run.
BCNU
prisoner6
“She put her foot down and I was limited in my online time.”
WOAHOH! :-O
Keep freeping the night shift she’ll never know.
I’m gonna watch the old episodes online and gleam a message, it must have been 3-5 years since I saw it, with my weak early 20’s brain and not my strong mid-twenties brain. ;)
NO POOFTERS!!
Scarecrow!
Scarecrow!
The soldiers of the King feared his name.
Scarecrow! (Scarecrow!)
Scarecrow! (Scarecrow!)
But the country folk all loved him just the same!
Here is the Daily Telegraph obituary. Well worth a read. I especially liked this quote. So different from any actor of today I can think of:
He was not always easy to work with. He decided that he wanted to direct Danger Man, then said he wanted to produce it; on one occasion, he asked to rewrite the music for one of the episodes. Nor did his demands end there. He once recalled: "When we started Danger Man the producer wanted me to carry a gun and to have an affair with a different girl each week. I refused. I am not against romance on television, but sex is the antithesis of romance. Television is a gargantuan master that all sorts of people watch at all sorts of time. and it has a moral obligation towards its audience."
I’m not a neilsen number. I am a fan.
Bullocks!!!
Too bad the US Congress doesn’t follow this rule.
BCNU prisoner6
Buy the DVD set of the Prisoner and you will get it, fascinating stuff.
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