Last Friday I had a runny nose and opted to stay home in case I had a cold or something. It's taken me a while to finish this but now on Sunday morning my nose seems to have stopped. Hopefully it was one of those one day things or some allergy reaction. This has happened before, I get a runny nose for 8-24 hours and it stops. Boom. Everything is back to normal. My doctor once said, "Stuff like that just happens." Back to Friday.
Since I didn't have to wait I started watching junk on tv right after supper. I had been watching Have Gun - Will Travel for the last two or three weeks. I had the last disc in the second season to watch, so I put that in. There were a lot of shows in a season back in the 50's. HG-WT was a half hour show and there were 39 shows in a season. On dvd the shows were about 25 minutes long. Not so many commercials back then. Most shows are 21 to 22 minutes in length now a days. Richard Boone stars as Paladin. He's an educated gun fighter who hires himself out to people for money. He charges a $1000 a job, large fee for the time. On one show a ranch foreman was offered $50 a month and that was considered the best offer in the whole valley. Sometimes he worked for free, just helping people in trouble. June Lockhart, who some of you might remember as the mom on Lost In Space, plays a doctor. She's not very well accepted by the locals. Paladin enlists her aid and then helps her out with the locals. He often has clever solutions to the trouble in encounters and he's not always gunning someone down. That's the court of last resort, as it were. Usually the people who die deserve to die. They aren't very nice. Occasionally there's a sad show that has a message. They even did a show about Paladin and a deserter who encounter the massacre of Custer at Little Big Horn. Paladin lost an old army buddy in the battle. Some shows were more humorous and most had a good lesson. There were a wide and varied bunch of guest stars. Some people, like Richard Long or Jack Elam, you might not know, but you should remember Charles Bronson, Vincent Price and Lon Chaney Jr. I enjoyed these shows as a younster, and still enjoy them. I like the good strong hero who has a heart and a brain. I like The Saint with Roger Moore for the same reason. For some reason, probably poor sales, Paramount only put out the first three sets of the dvd's. They never followed up with seasons 4-6. The quality of the tranfer is amazingly bad. Still I can enjoy the ones that I have. I'll get to season three after I check out the 870 minutes of Canadian Comedy that my mother sent me.
I watched the first disc of Corner Gas season four. It's one of my favorite comedies. It's a Canadian show set in gas station in a small town in Saskatchewan. That's in Canada. There are about 500 people in the town of Dog River. There's only one gas station near the edge of town. There's a huge open field out it's front door. I like seeing that. Corner Gas is the name of the show and the gas station, and it's owner and operator Brent LeRoy is played by Canadian comedian and actor Brent Butt. He's also the creator of the show, and the son of a small town in Saskatchewan. The gas station is attached to a small diner called The Ruby. Gabrielle Miller plays Lacey, who inherited the diner from her aunt Ruby. Lacey is from Toronto. Big city girl with her weird ways. The other main characters are Hank, Brent's weird friend; Wanda, Brent's employee; Emma and Oscar, Brent's mom and dad; and Davis and Karen, the local police. Everyone has some quirks and the dialog is fun. The shows are heavy on short scenes with lots of dialog to move it along and there's usually some activity that one or another of them is doing to make me laugh. The episode where Hank tears down a barn was particularily funny, considering he never actually tore down the barn. A cow exploded, in a fantasy, then later in the show a tractor exploded. So there's always something. It plays in the US on WGN but after midnight. It's not because it's dirty or anything. It's because it's more adsurdist. It scores a 8 on the IMDb. People who like it seem to really like it. I'm in that camp.
Back in September we watched Rodan and War of the Gargantuas. There's a new two disc set out with Japanese and English versions of both movies. Tonight, to get at least one feature in, I watched the English version of Rodan. It's not so good compared to the Japanese version. There's a lot of narration that changes the story and it's shorter. What was more interesting on that disc was the documentary. It's mostly an interview, with subtitles, of three older special effects guys who worked on these movies. That was fun to watch.