Starring David Janssen as The Fugitive

It appears The Fugitive is off the Sunday night schedule of MeTV, just as they got to the end of season 3. I hope that I'm wrong about that, as I can't imagine why they wouldn't show the color episodes of season 4.

 

But sister series THE INVADERS goes into the Saturday Night lineup.

 

What’s the complete dvd box like ?

 

The guest stars in tonight's story:

John Cassavetes

Sally Kellerman

Joe E. Ross

Special guest star, Miriam Hopkins

Tonight's episode:
INSUFFICIENT POSTAGE AT THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE

 

Supposedly it should be like the MOST WANTED set but without the CD, I believe. Initially, there were some problems with the set and CBS was sending out MOST WANTED sets to replace the cheaper COMPLETE set. The picture quality on these sets is sterling - pristine black & white for the first three seasons, and vibrant color for the last.

 

Region 1 or region 2?

 

R1

 

The guest stars in tonight's story:

James Franciscus

Sally Field

Peter Falk

Special Guest Star: Ray Collins.

Tonight's Episode:

PARALLEL LINES SOMETIMES MEET.
(Confession -- I unashamedly stole that title from an episode of Secret Agent, since I thought it also works perfectly for a Fugitive story!)

 

The guest stars in tonight's story:

Robert Fuller

Chita Rivera

Tom Simcox

Special guest star, Chill Wills

Tonight's episode:
HANDS OF IRON, FEET OF CLAY

 

David Janssen -- "The Hidden Island"

During the run of the series, "The Fugitive" David Janssen recorded a narrative of "The Hidden Island" accompanied by The Tradewinds Orchestra and Chorus in the Fall of 1965.​

 

The guest stars in tonight's story:

Richard Long

Charles McGraw

Yvonne Craig

Special guest star, Aline MacMahon

Tonight's episode:
REFLECTION IN A BROKEN MIRROR

 

Any preference for the black and white episodes?

 

Definitely! I think the B&W seasons were far superior. The series lost something with the change to color.

 

I tend to agree - but grudgingly. The fall of 1966 was an exciting time for color TV viewers, and particularly for viewers of THE FUGITIVE. After three seasons of black & white images, we were going to get to see it all in color. I remember the physical excitement I felt on that Tuesday night in September of 1966 as THE FUGITIVE IN COLOR flashed across our color TV screen.



But then, the actual episode started and it was "The Last Oasis", a show that took place in mountains and deserts with their largely monochromatic vistas, and it was largely unimpressive. Little did I know at the time that the behind-the-scenes folks had changed and that the series was being helmed by a different bunch. Early stories in the fourth season were rather bland and just not-quite-right. The show soon turned itself around, but I think it was too late, and there was a pronounced effort to feature more one-armed man stories, which kind-of diluted his usually suspenseful appearances.

So I REALLY wanted to love the show in color, but it just wasn't the same show, most of the time. To be sure, there are some color episodes that are great to near-great, but the number of them pales in comparisons to the more mundane tales.

As with other shows that were made around the transition to color, I wonder if the earlier episodes would have been as great as they were in black & white if they'd been filmed in color. I guess we'll never really know,

 

Agreed with everything you said above. The behind-the-scenes changeover had a lot to do with it. It seemed that the ratio of good-to-bad episodes was inverted from previous years. Before, each 30-episode season, IMO, contained 20 good-to-great episodes with 10 poor-to-fair, while the fourth season had only ten good-to-great stories with 20 being poor-to-fair. That being said, the fourth season contained some classics I consider some of the best of the series: "The Ivy Maze," "Nobody Loses All The Time," "The Evil Men Do" and "Dossier On A Diplomat."

 

Now that was funny! There was a time when Mad was fun.

 

Mad : No longer.

 

"A Clean and Quiet Town"

 

That and "The Walls of Night" would have been next on my list...

 

I would think the original version of the intro, on the series premiere episode "Fear in a Desert City," as ABC used to broadcast it, had this version of the intro...

(part of the pre-title narrative was cut here; the cut bits were: "Richard Kimble is innocent. Proved guilty, what Richard Kimble could not prove was that..." and "A man he had never seen before.")

In syndication, this intro was shortened somewhat by removing the line "A man he had never seen before," and this edited version of the first intro was also grafted onto a few other episodes thereafter, which (when on ABC) would otherwise use this shorter version of the pre-title sequence:

~Ben

 

The guest stars in tonight's story:

Larry Parks

Carole Eastman

Dan Tobin

Special guest star, Joe Besser

Tonight's episode:
EASY STREET CAN BE A LONELY ROAD

 

1971 rerun of "The Judgment, Pt I"on KTLA. The opening credits are heavily cut, and the teaser is gone completely.

 

One slight issue re the fourth color season - which was no one's fault other than I suspect them knowing it would be the final season - was that the one armed man began turning up on a semi regular basis when in the previous three seasons he had featured only very occasionally

while his color episodes were all great it somehow seemed a bit strange that after three years of very rarely seeing him Kimble suddenly seemed to be hot on his trail quite a number of times in that final season which stretched credibility somewhat

 

Probably the most unusual episode of The Fugitive, in my opinion, was one from the second season: "The Iron Maiden."

It opens thus...

The reason being... many years later (last year, in fact), the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden titled one of their albums The Fugitive (a compilation album of their '90s singles). How coincidental is that?

~Ben

 

"The Iron Maiden" is a top-flight episode. Early in its DVD releases it was bogged down with the crappy replacement music. Thankfully, the MOST WANTED set restored all of the original score.