RIP. Caught all the eps a few times on Nick-at-Nite back in the '80s and early '90s. She was a cutie.
Posted on 12/22/2009 10:17:51 AM PST by pissant
Connie Hines, an actress who portrayed Carol Post, whose husband Wilbur was the only person who could talk with Mister Ed in the 1960s television show, has died. She was 79.
Hines died Friday at her home in Beverly Hills from complications of heart problems, said Alan Young, her "Mister Ed" costar. "I lost a great friend. She was always joyous," Young said Monday.
In the show, which ran from 1961 to 1966 on CBS, the Posts moved into a rambling country home and found a horse in their barn. The center of the show became the banter between Young and the horse, Mister Ed, which left Hines trying to make the most of her opportunities.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I hated Roseanne and I don’t watch those un-reality shows.
American Idol really sucks too. When do you ever see talent on that show? It is nothing like the Ed Sullivan show was.
Yeah, Topo Gigio was a class act.
Those shows had a lot of heart. An emotional bond existed between the writers and the audience.
The current programs are to me absolutely soulless. Not that I've seen that many, but what I've seen (same with movies) has left me cold. The writers seem to have no connection with their audience, rather a contempt and cynicism.
RIP. Caught all the eps a few times on Nick-at-Nite back in the '80s and early '90s. She was a cutie.
That is so true. At least up until the '80s, the shows had some sort of conscience to them. When the vile garbage like "Married With Children" and "Roseanne" (to a lesser degree) came on the scene, it became widespread soullessness by the '90s. I find myself watching the pre-'80s stuff on TubeTime, it's astonishing the contrast.
Hehe I love that vile garbage “Married with Children”. And think “Roseanne” was ok.
I used to watch Mister Ed on Nick when I was a little kid. The husband never did tell her the horse could talk did he? Better to risk divorce huh, moron. (they wanted to keep the tension in the show of course)
She quit acting after that huh?
RIP
I first began watching this show when the old KOFY would run them weeknights at 10:00PM back in the 1980's. I found that after getting used to the black and white episodes, the last seasons' color episodes started to look different, like I no longer believed they were in France in WWII.
-PJ
They recently released the entire series on DVD of Hogan’s Heroes. The three seasons of Gilligan’s Island has been available for several years.
I really enjoyed Mr. Ed.
Me too! I wish they’d put the good stuff back on Nick at Nite!!
Well, it was the trend MWC started that I had the main problem with. Overall, it was plain too mean-spirited. Too much of those type shows were reactionary to Cosby, for whom, to his credit, was trying to elevate the medium (how many people can claim to want to do that ? It’s always a race to the bottom, and unfortunately the bottom-dwellers won). You can still watch Cosby reruns, Married is almost unwatchable now (I think the most embarrassing aspect of the show was the audience itself, which sounded like a bunch of knuckle-dragging drunken neanderthals coming to a public sex show).
As for Mr. Ed, I can’t recall if the wife ever found out the horse could talk. They didn’t have a real “finale.” I was struggling to recall if on “I Dream of Jeannie” if Dr. Bellows ever definitively found out the truth, either (I think they implied that he did), or Abner Kravitz on “Bewitched” finding out that his busybody wife Gladys really WASN’T nuts and that she really had seen all that craziness because Samantha was a witch.
The problem in revealing the truth is that you don’t really have a show, anymore. The promise for more comic situations is lost and you have to rely on strangers or guest stars to play off of. After all, Jeannie couldn’t have Sammy Davis, Jr. on every week to baffle.
As for Miss Hines, it looks like she just made occasional guest appearances on shows after Mr. Ed ended. With the popularity of the show as a classic in later years, she went on the classic tv convention circuit with Alan Young to meet fans, sign autographs, etc. I’m sure many of the actors doing the show at the time probably couldn’t have imagined how beloved they’d become over the years. She may have considered it just a paycheck at the time, but it took some time to realize it was a whole lot more than that. How many tv shows being made today will have such a similar following almost a half-century later ? I’d say almost none. Yet another example of what’s happened to the tv culture.
One the last episodes of “Jeannie” had Bellows find out the truth. But it was just a dream by Major Nelson.
Seems like few shows had planned finales, they were just canceled. I would like to have seen Mrs. Kravitz vindicated. I always thought after Alice Pearce died that the new woman was Abner’s sister or something but indeed they recast the role.
I seem to vaguely recall Dr. Bellows finding out, but I don’t remember seeing a lot of the final season (1969-70) eps rerun, and they didn’t run the first season black & whites from the 1964-65 season nearly as much, either (although I think the first season was best). It’s weird to think I remember when we first got cable, around ‘82 (?), I would get up at 5am to watch these shows (at least when school was out). At the time, these shows were no older than were we to watch a show from the late ‘90s today. To think they’re now 40 years old (from the time they were cancelled !) is so crazy...
Ditto with Bewitched, they often aired more of the Darrin2 Dick Sargent (1969-72) eps as opposed to Darrin1 Dick York. I didn’t know Sargent was gay until much later, but I don’t think he fully clicked with Elizabeth Montgomery as York’s Darrin did (and in the first season, they showed the two of them falling in love and getting married, and quite believable, something Sargent wouldn’t have been able to pull off — although surprisingly, Sargent was supposed to have been cast in the role initially instead of York in ‘64). I did like Sargent on the original WTBS series in the ‘80s, “Down to Earth” (back when they tried their hand at doing some original sitcoms, which almost nobody remembers now, but I’d faithfully rush home from middle school to watch), as with “Bewitched”, Sargent replaced the original actor as the male lead as the father.
I also didn’t learn until much later of York’s health problems that forced him off the show (a severe back injury, which eventually left him bedridden, and then he was ravaged by emphysema), and that he was in enough pain during the filming of the show that cast members had to help him around in the scenes, he had to abruptly quit after he simply collapsed on-set (yet, later after he’d been reduced to going on welfare and in terrible health, he even started a charity, too, a pretty remarkable guy).
Alice Pearce (Gladys1) was already dying of ovarian cancer when she started the show in ‘64, but figured, why go home and wait to die when you can still entertain millions ? She apparently kept it a secret. Of course, if you look at her eps now, you can tell she didn’t appear rather well, but it didn’t stop her performances, which got her a posthumous Emmy. I wasn’t a big fan of the second Gladys (Sandra Gould), whom I found more irritating (”ABNUHHH !”). Pearce reminded me of a female Don Knotts. My favorite on the show was probably Paul Lynde, who despite being about an inch away from being a total flamer, could believably play put-upon dads (for years, I always remember his single guest appearance as an “angry dad” on “Gidget”, railing about the hellish place known as “the (San Fernando) Valley” — which ep I finally got to see earlier this year after some 25 years). Lynde turned out to have terrible health problems, too, due to his personal lifestyle, drugs and alcohol. The infamous comment made by the coroner that when he died (at 55), he had the heart of an 88-year old. Ironically, he was probably terrified of dying of a heart attack, since his dad died of one at the same age.
I didn’t know Sargent was gay until I read it long after I’d first seen the show but it was clear he had poor chemistry with Montgomery. “Oh maybe that’s why”. York was much much better. I’m sure a sizable minority probably likes Sargent better but I can’t imagine why,
They needed some new scripts, they basically remade some episodes not once but twice!
I wonder if the IMDB info is accurate (some of it’s episode count info I know to be false or incomplete). It has the crappy Gladys # 2 appearing in just 29 episodes, just 2 more than #1 despite being on the show much longer. Only 33 eps for Larry Tate’s wife? A disparity of 14 between the combined number of episodes that both Darrins are listed as being in and the total number of episodes
“Gidget”
It’s too bad that only lasted 1 season.
I’m amazed the show lasted as long as it did, and considering the changes in the culture (1964-1972). You see shows from ‘64 and they were still barely out of the ‘50s in their sense of style. By the ‘70s and you were seeing something totally different. I think Elizabeth Montgomery must’ve been getting tired of the show. By the last season, she was heavy into an affair with one of the directors on the show, which destroyed her marriage to the show’s producer, William Asher. That might’ve contributed to its cancellation (that, and it simply had run its course).
Speaking of culture shock, I remember when Nick at Night also used to run “My Three Sons.” That show ran from 1960-1972 and even NaN used to remark in commercials the difference between the start of it (which was clearly ‘50s stuff, barely past “Ozzie & Harriet”) and the end of it, when one of the younger sons wanted to take his g/f to a motel for the weekend (for a little mattress r&r). It sure wasn’t 1960 anymore. The title didn’t even fit anymore midway through its run (after the eldest son vanished from the show when the actor couldn’t work out a deal), and should’ve been renamed, “The Douglas Family.” Guess not as snappy a title.
No, the IMDb is far from accurate, they often only have info for some episodes, but not for all of them. When they were running, for example, “One Day At A Time”, on TubeTime, yours truly was adding info as to which people were in each episode and guest stars. For some odd reason, they dropped the show midway into the 3rd season, so I couldn’t add anymore. I’ve also added some info for “The Facts of Life” as well (right now, they’re running the George Clooney season, where he pretty much just stood around and made wisecracks, his character literally had nothing to do and looked like he was just there to collect a paycheck — it was also the year that Charlotte Rae left, too, the reason the show was created. You could tell she was getting tired after having played the role for 8 years, her role was diminishing and the girls were already grown and didn’t need a “den mother” anymore. The writing was getting stinky, too. I still watched it faithfully at the time, as I had since its premiere in ‘79 when I was 5 (and “Diff’rent Strokes”, too). Still, it was hard to let go of a show you had grown up with (I have to admit, though, that the first season is still my favorite, when it had all the girls, not just the 4).
“Gidget”
Back in those days, a tv season produced a lot more eps than they do now, so you didn’t have nearly as many reruns. They apparently did a whopping 32 episodes (if that was on a movie channel, that’s enough for 3 seasons). For a single season, they probably did enough of it. It was straining credulity for them to be playing high schoolers. Sally Field could’ve only pulled it off for the one season, otherwise she should’ve been off to college by season two. It actually was cancelled because of poor ratings (they put it opposite “The Beverly Hillbillies”, which holds records for its consistently enormous ratings - along with “I Love Lucy”, one of the biggest megahits in tv history, some of their average eps scored higher than long-awaited series finales years later), not becoming popular until afterwards (as happened to so many other shows). ABC decided to reward Field with another series as a result of Gidget’s reruns, giving her “The Flying Nun” (which to me, I always thought of as “Gidget Goes to the Convent”). Apparently, she loathed the show with a vengeance (she’d have rather continued doing “Gidget”). I haven’t seen an ep of the show since the ‘80s when they used to run it and another Screen Gems sitcom, “Hazel”, on the Family Channel (along with the ‘60s Western, “The Big Valley” — now almost forgotten, except for Stephen Stucker’s one-liner in “Airplane !” referencing the show, “Nick, Heath, Jared, theres a fire in the barn !”).
Y’know, I’m often embarrassed just how much I know about these shows...
One really ought not to be embarrassed for knowing anything.
I’ve seen the Flying Nun, I don’t find it at all memorable.
I liked the Big Valley. Bonanza with a Ma instead of a Pa (and a young Linda Evans). I was disappointed when they stopped showing it on whatever channel I was watching it. It probably can currently be found on the Western Channel.
When I first saw “Buck Rogers” I was totally convinced that Buck was played by Lee Majors.
I had momentarily forgotten “Nun” ran for three seasons (kept thinking it was just 1 & 1/2 or 2). They still ran into the same problems so many of those gimmicky sitcoms faced, how to keep the storylines fresh without recycling plotlines. It was getting absurd by the last season, since Miss Field was pregnant and they had to find ways to cover her belly (and as somebody asked, how come she was always interacting with co-star Alejandro Rey ? He shouldn’t have been constantly involved with a nun’s shenanigans). I remember the show more for her romping around Old Town San Juan (PR) and being hung by a crane in front of a blue-screen/rear-projection of the city. Apparently Catholic organizations adored the show, since it portrayed nuns in a positive light (and perhaps a recruiting tool ?), but I’d have thought the “flying” aspect might’ve troubled them.
Three years after that show was canned, Field did another Screen Gems sitcom (I believe the last one, since SG was retired in ‘74, although recently (and insultingly) revived for some horror films (!) that are about as far afield from the goody-goody sitcoms as one could imagine), one for which I’ve never seen, “The Girl With Something Extra” (her character had ESP). But it was considered derivative of “Bewitched” (it premiered a season after its cancellation), and it was also canned mid-season (though produced about as many eps as a regular series does, about 22).
The Western Channel... I’ve only watched that a couple of times. What I find amazing was that Westerns were once all over the networks, and quite highly-rated, especially from the ‘50s into the ‘70s, but seemingly petered out. I don’t know if there has been a single Western on network tv in the past decade, at least one that managed to make it through a whole season. Perhaps the genre sort of exhausted itself. I watched “Little House on the Prairie” as a kid, it was one of my favorite shows, although that wasn’t really a full-on Western, since it was set in a rather California-looking Minnesota (some eps rather defied the imagination, such as when little Laura went running off to the mountains, quite absurd on its face, since there are no mountains anywhere near the real Walnut Grove, Minnesota, that’s all virtually flat plains for a huge area).
Westerns were replaced largely with all those action/adventure shows set in modern time, P.I. shows and the like, more hospital and cop dramas. I’ve rather grown tired of all those crime drama shows, to be honest. How many Law & Orders and CSIs do you really want to watch ? One interesting thing I learned, that one genre almost died out in the late ‘70s, and it was none other than the old reliable sitcom. The networks were dumping out tons of them, many only lasting a season or less, and had grown so tired and hackneyed that it was looking more and more likely dramas, action/adventure and variety shows would replace them (remember that at one point in the decade before, some sitcoms were enormous ratings-getters, even through the mid to late ‘70s, but with the cancellation of a lot of the best shows and the decline of others, it looked like the sitcom would be dead by the mid ‘80s). Thanks to Brandon Tartikoff putting together those sitcom blocks of winners, it gave the genre a reprieve for at least awhile longer. Alas, today, there’s almost no sitcoms I watch on the networks anymore (although the networks as a whole are a shadow of what they were in the ‘90s and ‘80s). I watch some of the original ones on the movie channels (”Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Californication”, etc.), but those aren’t the kind of “sit down with your family” shows of yore.
“Buck Rogers”
I may have mentioned it before, but the premiere episode was shown in the theaters (!), which is something I couldn’t imagine them doing today. I went to see it there (this was back in 1979). I did know that Buck wasn’t Lee Majors (since they were still running “The Six Million Dollar Man” in reruns at the time, along with one of my kiddie favorites, “The Bionic Woman” — I remember my older neighbor kids in the house where those illegals live, used to have the huge-sized Lee Majors action figures). I liked Gil Gerard, it was too bad his career all but vanished after Buck’s cancellation in ‘81 when the show jumped the shark in becoming a space exploration show (using tons of stock footage from “Battlestar Galactica”, not to mention a lot of the same costumes !). I was surprised to learn Gerard pushed the show to be more serious, he disliked Buck’s being a smart-ass (since that was often apt to get people, or himself, killed). One thing I remember about the show that scared the crap out of me was that they predicted in 1987 a worldwide nuclear holocaust (back in ‘79, so I was 5, thinking, “Oh, great, I’m gonna die at 13 !”), which was why Buck’s space shuttle was never found for so long (of course, one serious problem with that, if it was in orbit as opposed to just being out in space, it would’ve deteriorated before long - and certainly as vehicles entered into space, he would’ve spotted a long time before then, nevermind unless he was properly cryogenically frozen, he’d have been dead anyhow — guess you can’t think about that stuff too deeply).
I actually liked the first season of Buck Rogers the way it was. It was kind of like the old Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon serials in a way, but done more in the style of say, James Bond in space. It seemed in almost every episode, Buck would end up with a different girl, not unlike 007.
The second season, ironically, got sillier than the first one. I mean, you have an episode where a bunch of dwarves use telekinesis to try and strip Wilma Deering. It made the first season look like Shakespeare. I did like the two parter with Mark Lenard, though.
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