The Red Hot Car

Sandy (Luke Halpin), Bud (Tommy Norden), and Flipper find a sunken red car, while playing underwater. Bud notices bullet holes in the car's windshield. Naturally, the boys want to investigate, but Ricks (Brian Kelly) warns them to stay away from the vehicle. Sandy tries to convince his father to allow him to investigate by noting that he's getting "older now" and should be helping his father more - starting with an investigation of the sunken car. Ricks thinks neither of the boys is, "too big to put over my knee." Later, the kids are bored, and decide to dive for shells; conveniently, they decide to dive near the derelict car, and are exposed to unexpected danger…

After an explosive climax, Ricks declares, "Neither of you are too big to put over my knee! Now, who's first?" That doesn't happen, of course; Sandy, in particular, is too old to be spanked by his father. Their consequence is a lesson. Guest star Mart Hulswit (as Johnny) helps provide the lesson, after getting mixed up with punk Robert Reilly (as Dick).

**** The Red Hot Car (9/26/64) Leon Benson ~ Brian Kelly, Luke Halpin, Tommy Norden

A good set up in the personality of the Ricks men in this episode. Here we see that Sandy is the big brother in charge of watching over his younger one while they are out on the deep blue sea. Sandy is well grounded in his father's rules and what happens if those rules are broken. He's mature enough to know when he has done wrong.

Bud, however, is Sandy's demise. Bud is young enough and mischievous enough to want to tow the line, so to speak. His father wants him home at a certain time and Bud will see how long AFTER that time he can stay home. In this episode, we see that Bud is able to persuade his big brother to go along with him - in most cases - and the results could be disastrous.

In this episode, there is a red car at the bottom of the ocean. Apparently it was a common practice to dump cars to give fish some sort of protection from those bigger fish - but the windows are all removed before this happens. However, when Bud finds a car with bullet holes in the windshield, he will not rest until the mystery is solved. Their father lays down the law and demands they stay away from the car, but a pretext gets them to that location and the results could be deadly...