I recently wrote a piece here about producer David L. Wolper and mentioned that one of the series that he produced was Police Woman for NBC. Starring Angie Dickinson as sexy LAPD detective sergeant Pepper Anderson, Police Woman ran for four seasons and liberated the airwaves for other two-fisted, female-anchored action dramas of the era (Charlie’s Angels, Get Christie Love!, Amy Prentiss, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, Cagney & Lacey). It also provided guest-star work for actors like…William Shatner.

Yes, you’ve stumbled into The Shatner Observatory.

William Shatner appeared in “Smack”, the eleventh episode of Police Woman’s first season (December 6 1974). On “Smack”,  Mr. Shatner worked with director John Newland, who had previously directed the actor in episodes of The Defenders, The Bold Ones and Star Trek.

But what we’re interested in today is the collaboration between William Shatner and Angie Dickinson. Thirty-six years after “Smack”, that single Police Woman episode marks the last time that Mr. Shatner and Ms. Dickinson would act with one another. And here’s the really interesting part: The actor and actress, in twin careers that have each spanned fives decades, appeared with each other only three times…and all within one year.

Three months before their 1974 Police Woman, Mr. Shatner and Ms. Dickinson shared the big screen (and a couple of nude scenes) in a low-budget, Roger Corman Bonnie and Clyde riff, when Big Bad Mama was released in September of 1974.

And it was at the beginning of that same year (January 23 1974, to be precise) that had Bill and Angie appearing with Andy Griffith and Robert Reed in the ABC Wednesday Movie of the Week presentation, Pray for the Wildcats.

Again, in over 50 years in the same business, William Shatner and Angie Dickenson only worked together three times, and all roughly within one single 12-month period. Strange, no?

Certainly no stranger than this clip from Pray for the Wildcats. Shatner plays one of three advertising executives who get bullied by potential client Andy Griffith into risking their lives on motorcycle trip through Mexico. Mr. Shatner doesn’t have much to do here, but check out his white-sideburned wig and the enormous pause he takes before delivering the last word of his line. And what’s that bit of business he’s doing with his glasses..?

One of the country’s most influential comedic institutions turn 50 just a couple of weeks ago and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

The Second City Theatre opened in Chicago’s Old Town on December 16, 1959, on a mission to bring smart improvisational comedy to the masses, with a cast that included Barbara Harris (Family Plot, Nashville), Roger Bowen (Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H), Severn Darden (Conquest of and Battle for the Planet of the Apes) and Mina Kolb (Curb Your Enthusiasm). It also included Andrew Duncan (Network, Slapshot), who bears the distinction of being the only first generation Second City actor to appear on the first season of Saturday Night Live, along with other, later Second City alums John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd and Gilda Radner.

Since then, The Second City has functioned as kind of unofficial talent farm system for SNL, discovering, training and featuring generations of performers that have included Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, Jim Belushi, Tim Kazurinsky, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, Horatio Sands, and others.

Over the years, Second City has creatively fueled not only Saturday Night Live, but other entertainment franchises as well. From SCTV to Not Necessarily The News To Late Night/Late Show with Dave Letterman to The Colbert Report, to sitcoms (Cheers, The Simpsons) to Movies (Ghostbusters, Anchorman, I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With), Chicago’s favorite house of improv has given us actors, writers, directors and comics like Joan Rivers, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, David Steinberg, Del Close, Fred Willard, Peter Boyle, Joe Flaherty, Robert Klein, John Candy, Eugene Levy, George Wendt, Shelley Long, Richard Kind, Dan Castellanta, Bonnie Hunt, Nia Vardalos, Adam McKay, Jeff Garlin and many, many more.

The origins and first 20 years of the Second City were chronicled in Jeffrey Sweet’s oral history, Something Wonderful Right Away, published in 1978. It’s a terrific book that delves deep into the theory and art of Second City’s brand improvisational theater. It is still in print and well worth reading, especially for budding actors, writers and directors.

But contemporary audiences might find Mike Thomas’ new oral history, The Second City Unscripted, of slightly more interest. Whereas Something Wonderful covers the mid-fifties to the late seventies in its 375 pages, Unscripted dispatches that same period in about 60 pages, before moving on to surveying the next three decades in nine lively chapters with contributions from everyone from Dan Ackroyd and Martin Short to Bonnie Hunt and Mike Myers to Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. Unscripted is a bit more the gossipy backstage tell-all than Something Wonderful, but it’s still compelling.

I’ve been a fan and supporter of the Second City for many years and, in fact, was lucky enough to spend a month or so inside the belly of the beast, making a documentary about Second City’s process. (During that production, Chicago Main Stage cast member Isabella Hoffman (Dear John, Homicide: Life on the Street) worked my name into a sketch. I’ve loved her ever since). But you don’t need any kind of personal connection with the troupe to enjoy both Something Wonderful Right Away and The Second City Unscripted. Taken together, they read like a secret history of contemporary American comedy. They’rehighly recommended and both available from our good friends at Amazon.com.

The year was 1963 and the United Kingdom was rocked by a political sex scandal.

John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, had a relationship with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model and burlesque showgirl who was also happened to be the mistress of a well-known Russian spy. When Profumo was questioned about Christine on the floor of the House of Commons, he lied. That act not only led to Profumo’s resignation, but also damaged Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government and caused the defeat of the ruling Conservative Party in the next election.

In 1989, Miramax Films released Scandal, director Michael Caton-Jones’ classy big screen version of the sordid affair, starring Joanne Whalley as Christine Keeler and Ian McKellen as John Profumo. It’s a great story, one told with lots of atmospheric style and plenty of lusty playfulness from a cast that includes Bridget Fonda, John Hurt, Britt Ekland and Roland Gift.

Scandal is a film well worth seeing…and a soundtrack well worth tracking down. Scandal’s theme song, “Nothing Has Been Proved”, was written and produced by 1980s pop icons Pet Shop Boys (”West End Girls”) and sung by 1960’s pop icon Dusty Springfield (”The Look of Love”). Their creative collaboration resulted in a haunting theme that re-plays the entire doomed affair in way that reflects the film’s tone perfectly.

The rest of the Scandal soundtrack is an eclectic mix of British and America pop hits that includes Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”; Jimmy Cliff’s reggae love song “Miss Jamaica”; Nelson Riddle swing standard “You Make Me Feel So Young”; Craig Douglas’ cover of Sam Cooke’s “Only Sixteen”; the George Martin-produced “Goodness Gracious Me”, sung by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren (!); Nat King Cole’s “Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer”; Eddie Cochran’s “Three Steps to Heaven” and a dozen other equally energetic singles from the era.

But it’s Dusty Springfield’s heartfelt and heartbreaking theme song “Nothing Has Been Proved” (available on iTunes) that earns Scandal its place as this…the Cyclops Central Soundtrack of the Week.

And if you’ve never seen the movie Scandal, here’s the trailer…

Tags: Bridget Fonda, Britt Ekland, Dusty Springfield, George Martin, Ian McKellen, Joanne Whalley, John Hurt, Michael Caton-Jones, Nelson Riddle, Pet Shop Boys, Peter Sellers, Roland Gift, Sophia Loren
Posted in Soundbooth

If you’ve been waiting for the next 007 film (currently known as Bond 23), you’ll have to wait a while longer. Pre-production on the continuation of Daniel Craig’s reign as 007, is on hold. The sequel to Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace is being help because the debt-ridden MGM is on the auction block. This means that EON Productions (who own the cinematic Bond) may have to wait for their distributor MGM’s troubles to end before they can begin.

So, while we’re waiting, how about some cool 007 trivia?

Michael G Wilson.

Executive Producer Michael G. Wilson has been associated with the James Bond series since 1972. Brought in by his stepfather, Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, Wilson worked first in EON Productions’ legal department before taking a larger role, assisting Cubby on The Spy Who Loved Me.

In 1979, Wilson took a larger role in the making of the Bond films. He produced Moonraker and he was on his way. Michael G. Wilson, along with his producing partner and half-sister Barbara Broccoli, eventually replaced Cubby Broccoli as the hearts and minds behind the James Bond film franchise. Wilson also wrote or co-wrote five of the 007 films (starting with For Your Eyes Only and ending with License to Kill).

Perhaps Michael G. Wilson got his writing talent from his mother. Before Dana Broccoli married Cubby Broccoli, she was a novelist and actress named Dana Wilson. Her first husband (Michael’s father) was a man named Lewis Wilson.

Like his wife, Lewis Wilson, was an actor. He had some success in the 1940s, landing nameless, thankless roles in small, unremarkable films like The Racket Man, Sailor’s Holiday and Wild Women (co-starring with his wife). He starred in one TV series in the 1950s, Craig Kennedy, Criminologist, before he retired from acting to work for General Foods.

Here’s the cool trivia part:

If Lewis Wilson is known at all today it’s as the star of Columbia Pictures’ 1943 fifteen-chapter serial Batman, in which Wilson played the dual role of Batman and Bruce Wayne…making him the first actor to do so. Before Christian Bale, before Michael Keaton, before Adam West, there was Lewis Wilson…the father of Michael G. Wilson.

And there you have it:

The boss of James Bond is the son of Batman.

It does not get much cooler than that.

Posted in Trivia Den

Ryan Gallagher and his fellow cinephiles Travis George and Rudie Obias over at their The Criterion Cast report that Netflix has added at least 35 Criterion Collection titles to its streaming Watch Instantly feature.

Back in the early days of home video, when movie studios were dumping low-quality, pan-and-scan versions of their movies on the growing VHS marketplace, The Criterion Collection video company took the high road, leading the way in creating special editions of films.

Criterion took a great deal of pride and, more importantly, care in releasing movies with the correct aspect ratio preserved, filmmaker commentary tracks, missing scenes recovery and hours of film restoration to present definitive versions of cinema classics, all on laserdisc.

Eventually, Criterion migrated their library of titles to DVD and Blu-Ray. Two years ago, The Criterion Collection began offering video-on-demand downloading services for their films in association with The Auteurs.

Criterion has now teamed up with Netflix and whether you’re looking to experience Fritz Lang’s M, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien or Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters for the first of fiftieth time, they’re all just a click away with, we are told, more to come.

This is nothing but good news for cinema fans.

Tags: Fritz Lang, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Schrader
Posted in Newsroom, Screening Room

Sometime back, I did a piece here on television producer David L. Wolper and mentioned some of his crime shows, including an obscure one called Lady Blue, which had a 13-week run on ABC beginning in September of 1986. I did some work with the show and had a pleasant experience with everyone involved, but that doesn’t blind me to the show’s many faults.

Lady Blue starred Jamie Rose as Katy Mahoney, a tough Chicago homicide detective with a big gun and even bigger attitude. Katy was the daughter of a hard-hitting cop who had little use for the police rulebook. Once she’d earned her badge, Katy followed in Daddy’s footsteps as the second Mahoney to become famous for using excessive force in her detective work.

Katy and her boss, Lt. Terry Nichols (Danny Aiello), frequently butted heads over her aggressive and abusive method of fighting crime, but that didn’t stop the show from becoming the target of anti-TV violence watchdogs groups, one of which reported a whopping 50 acts of violence in a single Lady Blue episode.

Truth be told, the show needed its violent because it didn’t have much else going for it. If it weren’t for the energizing presence of Aiello (The Godfather Part II, Broadway Danny Rose, Fort Apache the Bronx) and the fact that Lady Blue was shot on location on the streets and El trains of Chicago, there’d be no reason to be writing about it now.

Except for the Main Title Sequence., which is a solid example of a bad Main Title Sequence.

It starts with that Lady Blue Theme. The music is dated in a very mid-80s, Miami Vice-influenced kind of way, but we’ll give that a pass. It’s the lyrics–sung by a woman who sounds every bit as angry as Katy Mahoney–that are truly bad (”…back to the blue, the power’s in you…”). John Cacavas was a talented composer with a solid track record for TV music work (he scored almost 90 episodes of Kojak), but Lady Blue is not his finest hour.

And then there’s the editing. I don’t know who cut the Lady Blue Main Title (maybe show editors Richard Bracken or Ronald LaVine?), but they seem to have put in zero creative effort. Granted, at the time the Main Title needed to made, there were probably only a few of episodes of the show in the can, so the cutter didn’t have a lot of material to draw upon.

That said, the Lady Blue Main Title looks like it was hacked together in a lunch hour, with time left over for lunch. Let’s start with shot selection. It seems completely random. There’s no story arc, no sequence build, no internal logic whatsoever. Some shots are short; some are interminably long, both without any discernible motivation. In terms of rhythm, the shots in the sequence are cut neither to the music nor to the lyrics. And, you’ll notice, the two stars of the show never appear together in the same shot.

Put it all together and the Lady Blue Main Title sequence stands as a textbook example of how not to construct a Main Title. Give it look and see what you think.

Back to the blue, you’re breaking through. Go back, lady. Back to the blue…

Lee Pfeiffer and Dave Worrall, the publishers of the extremely terrific British film magazine Cinema Retro are putting together a movie location road trip that sounds like it could be a blast for anyone interested in action/adventure films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Running from April 23 to May 1 of 2010, the Movie Magic Tour is intended to celebrate the British film industry’s contribution to genre picture making by paying visits to some of its most famous locations. Here’s just some of what the Cinema Retro guys are promising for genre cinema fans:

An exclusive tour of Pinewood Studios and its famous 007 stage. This celebrity-stocked event will feature a variety of actors from the various James Bond films and a gourmet dinner fit for 997 himself at the exclusive golf club where Goldfinger was filmed.

A visit to the Portmeirion resort in Wales, the exterior filming location for The Village, where Patrick McGoohan’s character was imprisoned in the mysterious TV spy series, The Prisoner.

A night at the legendary 15th century mansion where Robert Wise’s 1963 classic horror film, The Haunting, was filmed.

A screening of MGM’s groundbreaking wide-screen epic, How the West was Won, in all its original, three-projector 1962 Cinerama glory.

A private cruise down the Thames River to the village where John Sturges’ World War II men-on-a-mission adventure, The Eagle Has Landed, was filmed.

A formal presentation of Cinema Retro’s Lifetime Achievement Award to the legendary Sir Christopher Lee (Dracula, Fu Manchu, The Man With The Golden Gun).

And, as they say, there’s much more. The festivities kick off in London at the Henry VIII Hotel on Friday, April 23. For more information on both the Movie Magic Tour and Cinema Retro, click here.  And tell ‘em Cyclops Central sent you!

Here’s some of what was doing in show business and the media this week in history…

On January 25 1937, the daytime drama The Guiding Light premiered on NBC radio from Chicago. In 1952, it moved to CBS and television, where it remained until its last episode in September of 2009.

The first Emmy Awards were presented at the Hollywood Athletic Club on January 25 1947.

The same day in 1960, The National Association of Broadcasters reacted to the Payola scandal by imposing fines for any disc jockey who accepted money for record airplay.

January 25 1961: President John F. Kennedy hosts the first live television news conference.

Filming began on producer David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind on January 26, 1939. Though the film was set in Civil War-era Georgia, it was shot in Culver City, California.

“To all who come to this happy place, welcome …” Disneyland breaks ground in Anaheim, California on January 26 1954.

CBS premiered The Dukes of Hazzard on January 26 1979. The series was inspired by an obscure 1975 United Artists film called Moonrunners.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera opened on Broadway at New York’s Majestic Theatre on January 26, 1988.

Hello, Larry (McLean Stevenson’s third series since leaving M*A*S*H), premiered on NBC on January 26 1979. Creatively weak, the show quickly became a regular punchline in Johnny Carson’s nightly Tonight Show monologue.

On January 27 1940, 20th Century Fox’s production of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath opened in Los Angeles.

NBC chose January 27 1961 as the day to premiere Sing Along with Mitch, wherein amateur singers stepped on stage to sing along with Conductor Mitch Miller and his all-male choral group while the lyrics flashed across the TV screen. This home version of karaoke was sponsored by Ballantine Beer.

January 27 1970: After two years of confusing moviegoers, the Motion Picture Association of America modified its rating system and changed “M” to “PG”.

Opening with a Yiddish-American hopscotch chant, Laverne and Shirley (a spin-off from Happy Days) premieres on ABC on January 27 1976 TV. By its second season it had become the America’s most-watched TV show.

During the January 27 1984 shooting of a TV commercial for Pepsi, a pyrotechnics device explodes early and Michael Jackson’s head catches on fire.

On January 28 1956, Elvis Presley made his national TV debut on CBS on Stage Show. It was he first of six appearances for Elvis on the Jackie Gleason-produced variety series.

Buddy Ebsen became a private detective on January 28 1973 with the CBS premiere of Barnaby Jones. Originally intended as an episode of Cannon, the pilot features that series’ star, William Conrad. Three years later, Jones and Cannon would team up again for the two-part crossover “The Deadly Conspiracy”

On January 28 1975, filmmaker George Lucas completed a second draft of what he had titled Adventures of the Starkiller, Episode One of The Star Wars.

CBS News Sunday Morning premiered on CBS the Sunday Morning of January 28 1979.

For its January 29 1953 premiere, 20th Century Fox’s The Robe was billed as the first movie in Cinemascope. In truth, many theaters were not set up for CinemaScope. Two versions of The Robe were actually shot and edited, one in standard screen and one in widescreen.

Peter Sellers appeared in three different roles when Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opened on January 29 1964.

NBC bought some football on January 29 1964, when it paid $36 million for the TV right to the American Football League for the next five years.

January 29 1986: The nation watches as the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes and breaks apart, live on television. All seven astronauts aboard are killed.

On January 301931, motion picture producer David O. Selznick and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz exchanged in fisticuffs at a Hollywood Biltmore dance.

Radio’s masked rider of the plains, The Lone Ranger, was heard for the first time on January 30 1933. The production team behind the famous radio western would create 2,956 episodes over the next 21 years.

On January 301961, 25-year-old Bobby Darin became the youngest performer to headline a TV special, NBC’s Bobby Darin and Friends.

If you were awake late at night on January 30 1978, you heard the premiere of The Larry King Show on Mutual Broadcasting Network.

On January 30 1995, Kevin Eubanks officially becomes the leader of The Tonight Show band, replacing Branford Marsalis.

January 31 1936: The Green Hornet was first heard on radio via WXYZ in Detroit. The show stayed on the air for 16 years.

Television’s very first soap opera, NBC’s These Are My Children, was broadcast from Chicago on January 31 1949.

Baseball Hall of Fame legend Leo Durocher had himself a great January 31 in 1958. That’s when he debuted as the host of Jackpot Bowling on NBC.

After 35 years with the network, Edwin Newman retired from NBC News on January 31 1984.

The Cure for Insomnia, a film with an 87-hour running time, premiered at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois on January 31 1987.

ABC Sports’ legendary broadcaster Howard Cosell retired on January 31 1992.

January 31 1992: Homicide: Life on the Street debuts on NBC, starting a seven-season run.

BORN THIS WEEK: Newscaster Edwin Newman (NBC News); actor Dean Jones (The Love Bug); actor Gregory Sierra (Barney Miller); director Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist); actress Leigh Taylor-Young (Soylent Green); actress Dinah Manoff (Empty Nest); writer Philip José Farmer (Greatheart Silver); philanthropist and actor Paul Newman (The Verdict); film director Roger Vadim (Barbarella); cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer (Carnal Knowledge); film critic Gene Siskel; actor David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck); Playboy Bunny and Playmate Janet Lupo; comedian and TV host Ellen DeGeneres; newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Jr.; Donna Reed (The Donna Reed Show); actress Mimi Rogers (Lost in Space); comic book creator and movie director Frank Miller (Sin City) newscaster Keith Olbermann (Countdown); actress Bridget Fonda (Scandal); comedian and actor Patton Oswalt (The King of Queens); director Ernst Lubitsch (To Be or Not to Be); actor John Banner (Hogan’s Heroes); director Jack Hill (Foxy Brown); actor, writer, director Alan Alda (M*A*S*H); actress and Playboy icon Barbi Benton; Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings); John Forsythe (Dynasty); writer Paddy Chayefsky (Network); actor and producer Tom Selleck (Magnum, PI); talk show host Oprah Winfrey; actress Heather Graham (Boogie Nights); David Wayne (Ellery Queen); actor John Ireland (Farewell, My Lovely); director Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run); Dick Martin (Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In); actor Gene Hackman (The French Connection); actor Christian Bale (The Dark Knight); actor John Agar (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon); writer and journalist Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night);animation producer Norm Prescott (Fantastic Voyage); actor James Franciscus (Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Longstreet); actress Suzanne Pleshette (The Bob Newhart Show); actress Jessica Walter (Arrested Development); actor Anthony LaPaglia (Without a Trace); actress Kelly Lynch (Drugstore Cowboy); actress Portia de Rossi (Ally McBeal); comedian Bobby Moynihan (Saturday Night Live).

DIED THIS WEEK: Al Capone, iconic gangster of fact and fiction (Scarface, Capone, The Untouchables); actress Ava Gardner (On the Beach); author and TV astrologer Jeane Dixon (A Gift of Prophesy); pulp fantasy writer A. E. van Vogt (Slan, Empire of the Atom); Christian Brando, actor and son of Marlon Brando; producer and writer Bill Walsh (Disney’s Flubber series); actor Claude Akins (Battle for the Planet of the Apes); Tonight Show host Jack Paar; actor Tige Andrews (The Mod Squad); actor Hal Smith (Otis the Drunk of The Andy Griffith Show); writer Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman; cartoonist Burne Hogarth (Tarzan of the Apes); journalist H. L. Mencken; actor Alan Ladd (This Gun for Hire); comedian/actor Freddie Prinze (Chico and the Man); actor and comedian Jimmy Durante; actor Leif Erickson (The High Chaparral); Dead End Kid and Bowery Boy Huntz Hall; Tonight Show announcer Ed Herlihy; author A. A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh); film producer Samuel Goldwyn (The Best Years of Our Lives); comic book artists and writer Gil Kane (Blackmark, His Name is Savage).

Forget Leno vs. Conan. I’m much more interested in Shatner vs. Takei.

That’s right. I said it.

It all began on Tuesday, January 12 2010, when the dish array atop the Shatner Observatory locked on and pulled down the signals of Sirius XM Satellite Radio and The Howard Stern Show. And the word coming down from on high was this:

Howard Stern agreed, live on the air, to guest-host William Shatner’s Raw Nerve interview show on Bio for the express purpose of mediating the long-standing feud between Star Trek’s William “Admiral Kirk” Shatner and George “Captain Sulu” Takei.

The feud goes back decades. Basically, it started when George Takei started to make it known that William Shatner possesses “a big, shiny, demanding ego” and that ego emboldens an entitled William Shatner to treat other actors (i.e Takei) like so much set-dressing.

Over the years, Takei’s accused Shatner of being rude on the set; of line-counting; of “tanking” takes to make scenes unusable; of treating Takei and his fellow Star Trek supporting actors (James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig) like glorified day-players and extras.

Mr. Shatner’s always shrugged it off, noting that he (Shatner) starred in all 79 Star Trek shows, while Takei appeared only in a handful of scenes in just 51 of the episodes. To Shatner, the characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy were Star Trek. They were the series stars and their character drove the stories. All those other people on the bridge of the Enterprise? They were there, Shatner said, “to do what they do.”

There have been other hurt feelings. Takei was miffed because Shatner didn’t come to his wedding. Shatner claimed that he never got an invitation. Takei was irritated that Shatner didn’t call Takei inquiring about the missing invitation. Shatner released a YouTube-rant declaring that Takei must have “some kind of psychosis.”

Mind you, these are grown men. In their seventies.

Is it any wonder, then, why Howard Stern would agree to leave behind his Sirius XM channels and Howard-TV pay network to re-enter the mainstream media in the form of Bio (Bio!) for the singular purpose of playing referee at The Big Kirk/Sulu Smackdown?

I personally cannot wait. But wait we must. Schedules have to be cleared, contracts need to be signed, the Raw Nerve set has to be re-configured before Mr. Stern can knock some sense into those two maniacs.

In the meantime, let’s all enjoy this, four minutes and fifty seconds of William Shatner’s own unique view of the Shatner/Takei feud…

Yesterday’s post about Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story seemed like a good set-up for this:

1974. Bruce Lee had been dead for nearly a year and the martial arts craze he kicked off was still going strong. Lee’s epic Enter the Dragon was still in theaters.  The song “Kung Fu Fighting” was a hit the radio. Producer David Wolper gave ABC a backdoor pilot, Men of the Dragon, the first ever American martial arts movie of the week (unless young count the pilot for Kung Fu, which was still on the air as a series). The paperback racks were filled with pulpy martial action novels featuring heroes like K’ing Kung Fu, SuperManChu, Black Samurai and Jason Striker, Master of Martial Arts.

Marvel Comics, meanwhile, had their own roster of martial arts stars including like Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu and Iron Fist, Sales were good, so Marvel decided to take their heroes to the magazine rack, with a larger-format black and white comics magazine. Free of the color comics rack and the authority of the Comics Code, Marvel wanted to amp up the action for their new magazine, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu.

To launch the new book, Marvel tapped artist Neal Adams, who had exploded onto the comic book medium after a career-building turns in commercial advertising art and newspaper strips (Ben Casey, based on the ABC TV series starring Vince Edwards). Whether he was drawing Batman, The X-Men, Green Lantern or The Avengers, Neal Adams employed a naturalistic, photo-realistic style. He didn’t draw characters, he drew people. He didn’t just depict action, he made it hurt. (One of the many reasons why Adams was tapped a couple of years later to draw the hand-to-hand action in Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. See sketch above)

And so what we have for the enjoyment of your eyeballs here in the Cyclops Central Picture Gallery, are the six covers artist Neal Adams drew as Deadly Hands of  Kung Fu covers, plus a bonus piece. Enjoy The Art of Neal Adams. And don’t forget to block.

We begin with a flying sidekick from Lin Sun, one of the stars of the new Sons of the Tiger series to be found inside Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #1.

Adams on Shang-Chi, Master of Fu, with Chi fighting for a lady’s honor. Deadly Hands #2.

Lin Sun is back and he’s brought fellow Son of the Tiger, Abe Brown, with him (evoking Bruce Lee and Jim Brown in Enter the Dragon). Deadly Hands #3.

David Carradine as Caine is out front and center for Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #4.

Deadly Hands #12. Adams takes on the Roger Moore version of James Bond, inspired by the martial arts-influenced 007 epic, The Man with the Golden Gun.

When Masters meet: Neal Adams pays tribute to Bruce Lee. Deadly Hands #14.

A perfect example of what makes Neal Adams great. He could have chosen to re-create any complicated martial arts scene from Enter The Dragon…but he goes for the impossible one with the fractured-mirror effects. Deadly Hands #17 was Adams’ last.

Finally, the bonus: Neal Adams’s poster for the 1974 low-budget movie known as both The Death of Bruce Lee and The Black Dragon’s Revenge. Adams went for a Bob Peak-style montage, making dynamic imagery out of what I would imagine was a fairly undynamic movie.

Neal Adams. We’ll get back to him at some point…