shino

Act I opens with Joe entering a sophisticated Tudor-style mansion, but once inside, he finds himself right in the middle of the Brady living room, even that big Mondrian is above the foot of the stairs.

In early 1970 I suppose that set was not quite so iconic as it is today.

Of course, in a couple of years Mike Brady himself Robert Reed would portray Mannix's police counterpart Lt Tobias, working Mannix concurrently with his Brady day job.

The XKE-driving costar is Jessica Walters, famous today as the matriarch of Arrested Development.

I'm a big fan of both Shirley Jackson's novel and then the 1963 Robert Wise film. Whereas the Wise film subscribes to the "Less is More" school, the 1999 filming falls victim to the "More is Less" approach. Despite a promising cast, the film gives them nothing to do except wander about in absurdly grandiose CGI interiors. The CGI itself is often disappointing, caught in that lost decade when the technology was more ambitious than convincing. But worse, the terrific dialog that Jackson wrote into the book, and that Wise remained faithful to, is lost. Indeed, the story bears little resemblance to the novel, except the broad outline of the four investigators plus the Dudleys and the name of the house and its builder.

While there are a couple of creepy scenes (think of the flip book), the film overall has the sensibility of a low-rent Monster House.

based on Max Shulman's collection of short stories, this youth-oriented series was witty and irreverent with sharp writing and a peerlessly eclectic cast (Warren Beatty and Tuesday Weld, in particular shine) in addition to the leads Hickman and Denver. Hickman is the sensitive youth who aspires to be a poet under a hard-nosed father and doting mother. The father, played by Frank Faylen is outstanding as the hard-working store owner who fails to understand his impractical son's fancies and who frequently intones "I just gotta kill that boy, I gotta." Denver is particularly fun to watch, his comic style which would occasionally suffocate Gilligan's Island is tuned to the right intensity as Hickman's beatnik sidekick.

What particularly makes Dobie successful, particularly in the early seasons, is the almost surreal and self-contained world created by the writers. Just the names of the characters Thalia Menninger, Milton Armitage, Chatsworth Osborne Jr., Maynard G Krebs and Aphrodite Millican gives an idea of the tone of the series. Dobie begins every episode before Rodin's Thinker, speaking directly to the viewer with a pithy observation, which by the framing end sequence has been demonstrated or refuted. Unlike Father Knows Best and other family shows of its era, the Gillis family is dysfunctional, and the differences between Dobie and his father are not of a dramatic Rebel Without a Cause sort, but a gentler divergence of life views of a depression-era father and a postwar teenager.

The later seasons, much less inspired, take Dobie and Maynard out of high school into college and other adventures.

I hope at least the first season comes out as a season box set. It's an important part of our pop history.