Route 66: The Complete Series

Follow Todd and Buzz on their manifold adventures through late-Eisenhower/early JFK America, in glorious b&w. Each episode is separate and distinct. Watch Robert Duvall steal an episode as a heroin addict and blow the socks off Maharis and Martin Milner with his acting. Watch Rod Steiger play a creepy gangster. The best part of the series: The contrast between the two acting styles of the main characters: Maharis is the East coast Method Actor; Martin Milner is the West coast USC-trained actor. A favorite is when Todd and Buzz become school teachers in a small New Mexico town. See Susan Oliver play a platinum blond Polish woman who wants to bury her dead alcoholic mother in a "proper" cemetery. See Tuesday Weld wearing a weird mask as she re-visits her childhood Texas home and ignites a fight between Buzz Murdoch (our anti-hero) and a young Burt Reynolds. Most of the episodes are "good" to "excellent." But there are a few "dogs" in the mix. Boring: Buster Keaton episode; episode with Texas woman wanting to become a nun. The best part of the series is the repartee/chemistry between Maharis and Milner. They work good off each other. Rated on one list as one of the top 75 tv shows of all time. Show yanked--I believe--on Friday November 22, 1963 because of the JFK assassination. It came on on Fridays at 8:00 or 8:30 pm on CBS, sponsored by Chevrolet. Right before The Twilight Zone. See Robert Redford play a Polish man who accidentally kills his girlfriend in Cleveland. See Keir Dullea help save Buzz and Todd before they're lynched by creepy, southern bigots. A lot of fisticuffs and fighting and bare knuckle brawling between both Buzz and Todd and their various adversaries--including a near psychotic David Janssen, as a near-demented fisherman. You also get to see TV actors and actresses who appeared on Route 66, but who later snagged starring roles on TV shows later in the decade: Ed Asner, Suzanne Pleschette, Marion Ross, etc. A strange but good episode is when Buzz goes temporarily blind and falls in love with Barbara Barrie, who plays a blind woman. Actress Lois Smiith pops up a few times. So does Lee Marvin. The late Inger Stevens visits a chicken farm in Boiling Springs, PA only to encounter an ogerish Pat Hingle. White "Tea Party" conservatives with an ultra-right wing agenda nearly blow up the public square in Boston (this episode is remarkably prescient). This series is so unique that I highly recommend it to anyone interested in early TV.

Many of us have been waiting a long time for season 4 of the classic TV series ROUTE 66, which can be described as "two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling across the country in search of America and themselves." Stirling Silliphant's great scripts for the series set me on the road to being a writer (FIRST BLOOD, Rambo). As a teenager, I wrote Stirling a letter about how he inspired me. He encouraged me, and years later he and I worked together on the NBC miniseries of my novel THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE. The stories are an intriguing combination of action and ideas. LSD, mercy killing, the hunt for Nazi war criminals, miscegenation, right-wing hate groups, the VIetnam War (in 1963!): these and similar topics were almost never dramatized on other series. But ROUTE 66 loved controversy. In fact, for the hate group episode, TO WALK WITH A SERPENT, the sponsors pulled out, but CBS alliowed the show to run without breaks (and with a lot of previews for upcoming ROUTE 66 episodes). Another episode GOOD NIGHT, SWEET BLUES featured Black actors, except for the two stars. The great jazz singer Ethel Waters received an Emmy nomination (at a time when no series had a continuing Black actor). Each episode was filmed entirely on location across the country (no studio shots). Nelson Riddle composed an original score for almost every episode. Well known directors such as Arthur Hiller, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Altman worked on the series. The who's who list of guest stars includes Robert Redford, Suzanne Pleshette, Anne Francis, Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Lee Marvin, Michael Rennie, Dorothy Malone, and Robert Duvall. I'm not as enthusiastic about the Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney Jr. comedy Halloween episode LIZARD'S LEG AND OWLET'S WING as another reviewer expressed, but it is definitely a conversation piece, and its feminist sub theme is typical of the topics that Stirling Silliphant found interesting. I was glad to have Infinity's earlier release of the first 3 seasons, even with the problems of season one (the first attempt to release those episodes cropped the 4:3 image into 1.79) Some of those transfers were dark, also. For later seasons, there wasn't a list of which episodes were on which discs. But the episodes themselves are such treasures (a Smiithsonian-like depiction of the American landscape from 1960-64) that I forgave those problems. Let's hope that the Shout Factory gets it right, and no matter what, finally having season 4 with TWO STRANGERS AND AN OLD ENEMY, THE STONE GUEST (Silliphant's favorite script for the series), and LIKE THIS IT MEANS FATHER, is cause for celebration.

AWESOME

1,2,3と出しておいて、4だけ1,2,3,4まとめて出すとは。先に買った1,2,3がムダになってしまいました。しかし、特典映像が付いていたので、その分だけお得。

I really hate most of the plots of these shows, but the picture quality is excellent and they just keep drawing me back in. Maybe it's the car? The era? I'm glad I bought them. Watching them for the third time around and there are enough that I manage to forget significant portions of the plots. You get to season 3 with Linc and you find some of the best episodes. WHAT A FIND GENTLEMAN WAS OUR YOUNG LIEUTENANT is arguably the best of the whole series and alone justifies the price. Flawed, but not by much. Things were starting to pick up plotwise, and you finish off wishing there'd been a fifth season. Forget the nonesense about picture quality. I've watched them all, every episode, and they're flawless. Black & White, of course, and the little screen so popular in 1959. Car changes every year too.

Any fan of the program Route 66 will enjoy this series. Watching it I pretend that I am traveling with them. I miss my road trips with my parents.

Interesting concept - Corvette driving across the U.S.A. See a little bit of different parts of the country - some good "social comment" type of stories are presented. Too bad George Maharis became ill and wasn't able to continue doing the series - he was good in the show.