Speaking of Julie Newmar, have you ever seen her episode of “The Twilight Zone”? She was never hotter, not even when she became a mom at 40 after a long time out of the public eye. I mean, what was I doing nine months earlier, I’m sure it wasn’t as interesting as, well...
Of course, I was one of those goofy kids who actually liked “My Mother the Car”.
I always tried to give “My Mother the Car” a chance. Because I’m actually quite open to comedy fare with wild and surreal premises (as indeed, I love a lot early-30s anarchic comedy like Marx Bros, Wheeler & Woolsey, Clark & McCullough and such).
But even within the perimeters of wacky humor, “Mother’s” premise was lacking some very basics of sense. How can one get ‘reincarnated’ as an inanimate object? Wasn’t his mother quite alive and kicking when the car would have been manufactured? Isn’t the car supposed to be from about 1928, yet the look and design of it appears more like something from around 1916? And sometimes Jerry Van Dyke seemed to come across as more mentally ‘afflicted’ than funny, sort of like the territory that Jerry Lewis or Huntz Hall used to walk a fine-line with, but worse.
The odd thing is that it actually was a rather well-filmed and well-produced series. It “looked” slick and nicely made, not like some rock-bottom cheapo show.