My Living Doll with Julie Newmar

This is a really obscure show but I'd love to see it on DVD soemday.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Living_Doll

 

Me and bencasey already had a discussion on this in another thread, devoted to another show.

 

Whoa, that's a weird coincidence.

 

Yup, but as you may hear later on there's barely any episodes that were legitimately released onto vhs release. I knew of a guy that had almost all the series save for an episode or two, but he's dead or if he isn't, I haven't heard anything from him for years.

 

Some guy on the IMDB board for the show is trying to collect episodes for an official DVD release but I havn't heard anything about it in awhille. I assume all the episodes exist somewhere.

 

I think at least 23 or 24 episodes are out there. At least according to the guy I had been in touch with back then. If not then it's like 18 episodes circulating around because I had heard that number too but from other sources. I heard there was rights issues though with the program that's why it was not out and possbly may never come out.

 

The robot chick in the bikini that comes out of the box (not neccessarily with a warranty)? She haunts me to this day.

 

I have been working with the Jack Chertok estate on trying to find the episodes for at least 5 years now. All that has been found are 11 16mm prints through various sources. The biggest holdings are the 6 shows at UCLA. No one has any idea as to what happened to the 35mm prints or the negatives. CBS claims to have nothing and the vaults where Chertok kept My Favorite Martian don't have anything either. I briefly interviewed Chertok for an article I was writing about 25 years ago and he told me that he had destroyed all of the elements because he couldn't do anything with the show and was tired of paying the storage on it. I don't know for certain if that's true but as time passes and no one has ever turned a set of them up, it begins to seem more and more likely.

As to texastoyz claim that he knew someone with almost the whole run, all I can say is I've been in the hobby for over 30 years and I've heard tons of stories from people who claimed to have a lot of rare things or knew where things were. Anything is possible but there are very few shows that are in private hands which stay in the possession of just one person. Very, very few. There's a guy who's this big Patty Duke collector who claims that he had her super rare single, which no one has seen, for which there isn't a tape in the EMI vaults (although there is label copy). He says he sold it. Without putting it on tape or CD for himself first. Yeah, right. Or the guy who swears that he saw a print of London After Midnight in Warner's vaults, even though the film is considered lost. So, to me, any of these stories about lost items that someone "had", I put in the dog ate my homework category. I don't believe something exists until I see it with my own two eyes. Otherwise, its all just hearsay.

 

Films

That would be a shame, if the 35mm master reels are really gone. Those dubs usually look spectacular.

Well, if all the episodes could at least be recovered on 16mm and kinescope, at least the entire run would be available to see today.

How many episodes are missing in action as of now?

I'm still hoping that they issue the whole run of "I'm Dickens, He's Fenster" on DVD. in that case, they have all the 35mm masters and they look excellent.

 

You write that as if it is a bad thing. I wanted one for Christmas.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2s02qT5Eqc

 

....nope, good thing!

 

Ah, she did come with instructions..
(I'm gonna bite my tongue with the Christmas jokes)

 

I want Catwoman for Christmas.

 

I actually have two episodes of this show on VHS. It's super cheese but there's some good laughs and Newmar was just stunning.

 

Salt & Pepper?

 

Whoa, thanks for that link. I haven't seen that show since 1964! Man, what a weird theme song.

I once saw Julie Newmar in the late 1980s coming out of the restaurant she owned on Fairfax Avenue. I almost talked to her, intending to mention My Living Doll but thought better of it -- she looked pretty scary. (And she's still alive and kicking today, at the ripe old age of 77.)

 

Even in that title sequence, she looks like she could beat Bob Cummings up. He looks weirdly petite next to her.

 

She probably wanted to. They hated each other, so much so that he walked out on the series with 5 episodes left to shoot.

 

Isn't Ms. Newmar around 5'11" or Six foot tall ?

 

Not really so weird. It was in line with Sci-Fi themes like "My Favorite Martian", "Lost in Space" and "Star Trek".

 

Yeah, the theme is totally like the previous Jack Chertok show, My Favorite Martian. Only this one is a weird combination of 1950s big band jazz and avant garde early 1960s synth stuff, which is really bizarre. Man, this was a strange show. I can just see Chertok pitching this idea to the network: "so basically, what we have is a mechanical blow-up doll designed to obey any order, owned by a psychologist." Yikes...

I think Bob Cummings left mainly because the show was such a bomb, and he realized he'd made a career mistake. Sadly, he didn't work very much after this show.

 

Chertok didn't want Cummings for the show. He wanted Bob Crane for the part and Crane would have been much better. Cummings was too old at that point and he had already bombed the year before with The New Bob Cummings Show. But CBS jammed Cummings down Chertok's throat and insisted that he use him, not Crane. Not only that, but he was constantly telling Newmar and everybody else how to act. Having seen the episodes that still exist, it wasn't a bomb at all but it was actually hilarious at times and Newmar was hysterical. Unfortunately, they gave it the time slot opposite Bonanza, which was a death slot for CBS until The Smothers Brothers came along a few years later. But had they been able to go with Crane, they show might have been a hit. We'll never know.

 

I remember watching it as a kid. Hate to say it, it was kind of a weird show.

 

I have 2 episodes on VHS, and while Bob Cummings was definitely miscast (even Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. would have been a better choice), Julie Newmar was great as Rhoda the Robot. In one episode, her computers get short circuited after she reads and tries to compute "Alice In Wonderland," and in another, Bob programs her to go-go dance at a party, and a rich Texas millionaire sees her and falls in love with her.

Julie was sublime, but the supporting cast held her back. I'd still buy this on DVD with whatever episodes in existence they could restore.