I'd Almost Forgotten About These TV Shows Quiz

Answer: "Salvage 1"

Premiering as a 'made-for-television' movie in January, 1979, "Salvage 1" became a series that lasted from January 20, 1979 until November 11, 1979. The show centered around junkman Harry Broderick (Andy Griffith), whose dream it was to build a rocketship and go to the moon to recover the scrap metal left there by the previous lunar landings. Broderick realizes this dream early on and goes on to have other adventures throughout the rest of the series' run. Joel Higgings, who went on to star in "Silver Spoons" as Edward W. Stratton III, played Addison 'Skip' Carmichael, a former astronaut and Broderick's son-in-law, on the show.

Answer: T

Pat Morita starred in "Mr. T and Tina" from September 25, 1976-October 30, 1976. Pat played Taro Takahashi, a Japanese inventor who had been transferred by his firm from Tokyo to Chicago with his family. The Takahashis were Japanese traditionalists and when they had to deal with their American-born housekeeper, Tina, you knew the sparks were going to fly.

Unfortunately, those sparks weren't intense enough because the show was cancelled after only five episodes. It did make history in two areas, though. First, it was the first American show that centered around a person of Asian descent and, second, it was the first of two cancelled shows that Pat Morita starred in during the SAME season (the other show was called "Blansky's Beauties"). Ted Lange, who also appeared as Harvard the Handyman on the show, found much better success in his next role as Isaac the Bartender on "The Love Boat".

Answer: True

"Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell" beat Lorne Michaels' more popular version by about a month, in 1975. Cosell's version began on September 20 while Michaels' show started on October 11. The only thing these two shows had in common was Bill Murray, who started on Cosell's show, but left in time to join the original "SNL" crew on NBC.

The two shows were both on Saturdays nights, naturally (Cosell's at 8pm; Michaels' at 11:30pm), until ABC finally put its 'dog' to sleep for good in January, 1976.

Answer: He was blind in one eye.

Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) piloted the skies of the South Pacific, in 1938, with his trusty dog, Jack, who was blind in one eye, in "Tales of the Gold Monkey", from September 22, 1982-June 1, 1983. Cutter was a former Flying Tigers pilot who lived on the island of Boragora and fancied himself as soldier of fortune, a la Indiana Jones. This lifestyle led to lots of adventures for Cutter (much of which was unwanted) as he battled pirates, natives, and a few Nazis during the series' run.

Collins would go on to star in another series, this one for a much longer time period later on in his career called "Seventh Heaven".

Answer: Terrence

During an early episode of "The Job", shift commander Tom Williams (Keith David) gets a visit from the wife of one of his detectives. The exchange goes like this:

WILLIAMS: "Can I help you"
ADINA: "I need to speak with my husband, Terrence."
WILLIAMS: "Who the hell is Terrence? Anybody here know a 'Terrence'?"
ADINA: "(Sigh). Det. Phillips. Pip."
WILLIAMS: "His name is Terrence? Huh. I never knew."

And, with that exchange, the rest of us finally found out Pip's real name, as well.

"The Job" premiered on March 14, 2001, and revolved around Det. Mike McNeil (Denis Leary) and his fellow police officers at a New York precinct. The show had no laugh track, but was as funny a show as you'd ever find. All of the characters had some quirky flaw about them which just added to the hilarity. Pip was a huge African-American man with a booming voice and a strong fear of his wife, Adina, who was played by Janet Hubert-Whitten (who had also played Vivian Banks on "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"). Lenny Clarke was Det. Frank Harrigan, an overweight man with a love of food and kinky sex acts. Diane Farr played Det. Jan Fendrich, a single mom who was always falling for the wrong guy. But, none of them had anything on on Mike McNeil (Leary) who was the king of screwed up lives with his addiction to pain medications, his rocky marriage, and his girlfriend on the side who wanted to marry him and even brought him to meet her parents on one episode.

While the show garnered critical acclaim and received a nomination for "Outstanding Achievemant in Comedy ", along with two other nominations, ABC cancelled the show on April 24, 2002 because they wanted to present more family oriented programming. This show is a real gem, in my opinion, and one could not go wrong by picking up this series on DVD.

Answer: Iowa

"Apple's Way" took place in Iowa, in the city of Appleton. The show was not only a modernized version of "The Waltons", but both shared the same creator, as well, Earl Hamner, Jr.

Premiering on CBS on Sunday nights, on February 10, 1974, the series followed George Apple (Ronny Cox) and his family as they gave up the fast-paced, city hustle and bustle in favor of the simpler country life. George, an architect, takes his family back to his old hometown to live and discovers that it's much more difficult for the family to adjust to the slower pace than he realized. The show lasted only one season and was cancelled on January 12, 1975. Kristy McNichol also appeared on the show as Patricia Apple, the youngest Apple child.

Answer: Tim Conway

Before becoming a regular on "The Carol Burnett Show", Tim Conway starred as the inept Texas Ranger, Rango, from January 13, 1967-September 9, 1967. The show was very similar to the series "F-Troop" in that both took place in the old West and the lead characters were bumbling, stumbling morons that somehow always came out on top despite themselves.

Answer: False

"Shields and Yarnell" were a husband and wife mime team (yes, mimes) who had their own variety show from June 13, 1977-March 28, 1978. Lorene Yarnell met Robert Shields in California after he had finished a brief apprenticeship with the famous French mime, Marcel Marceau. She was a tap dancer and an actress of off-Broadway musicals and together they perfected their mime act. They married in 1972.

Although mimes usually get a bad rap, Shields and Yarnell broke that mold and were very well respected for their work. In fact, their 1978 show featuring John Aylesworth was nominated for an Emmy award and their television special "Toys on the Town" actually won one. They divorced in 1986, but will reunite from time to time to revive their act.

Answer: SPIRIT

"The Magician" was a show about a guy named Tony Blake (Bill Bixby) who had been wrongly imprisioned in South America and decide to use his skills in magic to help those in need after he was released. He made a good enough living with his magic act that he was able to purchase a 707 airplane and that white Corvette I mentioned earlier. Both the plane and the car's vanity plates shared the same name, SPIRIT.

The show only lasted a season October 2, 1973-May 20, 1974. While this particular show wasn't one of Bixby's more memorable, his next venture into television was probably the one he's best remembered for, "The Incredible Hulk".

Answer: Beautiful

"The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show" premiered on NBC on September 15, 1968 and lasted only until December 22 of that same year. It was your typical variety show, hence the reason for its poor ratings (the late Sunday night slot didn't help it, either), because there were so many other better produced variety shows on at the time, i.e. "The Carol Burnett Show".

Phyllis was given a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame for her television work (she has been in a LOT of things), in 1993.

Answer: "The Men"

"The Men" premiered on the network ABC on September 21, 1972, and its first segment was "Assignment: Vienna" starring Robert Conrad as Jake Webster, who was an agent working for the U.S. government to stamp out international crime.

A few weeks later, on October 5, the second portion of the show, "The Delphi Bureau", premiered starring Laurence Luckinbill as Glenn Garth Gregory, a U.S. agent who also worked for a super secretive branch government to eliminate crime, although his territory was moreso within the United States than outside of it. What was really interesting about this show, however, was the fact that Gregory had a photographic memory that was extremely keen, but limited; his 'powers' only lasted about an hour before he'd forget what he'd seen or even what his assignment was about. If you were a fan of "Columbo", you'd probably like this show, too.

"Jigsaw", starring James Wainwright as Lt. Frank Dain, a L.A. detective, made its debut on October 12, 1972, to complete the anthology series. The shows rotated each week until January of 1973, when the series was moved from its Thursday night slot to Saturdays. When this happened, instead of keeping with the same format of rotating the shows, ABC chose to air one of the pieces of the show several weeks at a time. This meant that each show may have been aired for a month straight before switching to another segment of the series.

When "The Men" was finally cancelled, it met its end on three different nights during the Summer of 1973 . "Assignment: Vienna" ended on June 1, "Jigsaw" ended on August 1, and "The Delphi Bureau" ended on September 1.

Answer: False

Desi Arnaz, Jr. starred in this short-lived sci-fi series from December 15, 1983-April 2, 1984. In the show, Arnaz played computer programmer/policeman Walter Niebicher, who happened to create the world's first automated man by mistake. Automan (Chuck Wagner), with the help of his little friend, Cursor, who was just a small dot with the ability to create most any object such as cars, airplanes, boats, or what have you, was able to to talk to any computer and to phase in and out of sight. However, because of the amount of power that he used, Automan could only appear at night and, if he was overloaded with too much power, he would dissolve without a trace.

The show lasted only 13 episodes.

Answer: "Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law"

Born Harvey Lee Yeary on April 23, 1939, the actor better known to us as Lee Majors starred for three years as Jess Brandon on the series "Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law". The show was a viewed by many in the legal profession as being extremely well-done and won several public-service awards because of it. In fact, the series was created by a law professor from the University of Wisconsin named Jerry McNeely with the help of David Victor, a Hollywood screenwriter.

The show focused on Defense Attorney Owen Marshall and his staff as they took on cases in a small California town. In 1974, Majors co-starred in the show with another actor who would go on to bigger success named David Soul, who played Ted Warrick, and would go on to play Hutch in the show "Starsky and Hutch". Also, 1974 was the same year that "The Six Million Dollar Man" debuted, so you would see Majors defending cases one night and the next night he'd be lifting cars over his head.

"Owen Marshall" ran from September 16, 1971-August 24, 1974.

Answer: His wife was also killed

James Franciscus played insurance investigator Mike Longstreet for one season from September 16, 1971 until August 10, 1972. In the 90 minute pilot that set up the series, Longstreet was looking into a crime that had been committed and was close to solving it until the criminals made the attempt on his life to silence him. A bomb was placed inside a champagne bottle that not only blinded him, but killed his wife, as well.

Although he was sight-limited, Longstreet continued to stay on the job with the help of his seeing-eye dog, Pax, and the help of an antique dealer who was also a master in the martial art of Jeet Kune Do named Li Tsung (Bruce Lee). Longstreet eventually brings his wife's murderers to justice before the series ended.

Answer: Hooperman

"Hooperman", starring John Ritter, was a combination comedy and drama series (dramedy) that was the brainchild of veteran TV writers Stephen Bochco and Terry-Louise Fisher. Harry Hooperman was a cop struggling to juggle owning a run-down apartment building while working on his relationship with his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Susan.

The show was critically-acclaimed, but the ratings were always low. It struggled for two years trying to find an audience before ABC finally cancelled it in the summer of 1989.