There are several “old time” TV shows I really like. The original Star Trek series. Mission Impossible. The Wild, Wild, West. Mannix. The Twilight Zone. The Outer Limits.
I could go on, but let me get to the heart of the matter: This week Amazon is offering deep discounts on the DVD releases of another all time favorite TV show of mine, Perry Mason. Unfortunately, and like far too many other series, this one was released in “half season” versions. If you wanted all nine seasons of the show, therefore, you would have to buy 18 DVD sets.
And brother, they ain’t cheap.
The original price per half season was something like $50, which meant that to get the full series at the original prices cost you a whopping $900 for the entire run. The prices have since gone down, varying between $30 and $45. With Amazon’s current sale, you can buy each half season for between $10.99 to $19.99 (Sorry, the sale is now over!).
Over the years I have purchased roughly half the series and, with this sale, was certainly interested in buying the rest at more “reasonable” prices. The first thing I ordered were seasons 8 and 9. I was very curious about season nine, especially the second half of it, as from my understanding the folks in front of and behind the cameras knew by that point that the show was ending and decided to go out with a bang.
But before the second half of the ninth series was in the can, there was, at least for a little while, some hope for a 10th season of the series. Given the year it was filmed -1966- and the fact that pretty much all TV shows by that time were moving toward color, the episode The Case of the Twice Told Twist proved to be a singular curiosity in the series’ 9 year run: It was the only episode filmed in color.
When I received my copies of the series, that was the one I had to see once again. I had seen the episode a while back and remembered very little of it, other than the fact that the characters I knew so well looked so…odd…in color. When one gets used to seeing people a certain way, to change their “look” so radically practically invites comparison.
The other thing that I realized was just how much they had all aged. The Perry Mason TV series began in 1957 and while the main cast were already adults (some older than others) when the show began, the aging process had clearly taken much of the youth that one found in the cast in the early going (in the case of actor Ray Collins, who played the often times deliciously devious Lt. Tragg, he was 68 years old when the show began and passed away in 1965, thus not being around for the final couple of seasons).
Getting back to the color episode itself, The Case of the Twice Told Twist is essentially a riff on Oliver Twist (the episode’s title, suddenly, makes some sense, no?). It involves an underage gang of car strippers who, natch, strip vehicles down and sell their parts. Their leader is played by the great Victor Buono, an actor who appeared in many TV series during his lifetime, often portraying the same type of character…a well spoken bon vivant who usually had something devious going on.
While Perry gets a chance to grill Mr. Buono on the stand later in the episode, it is their individual, outside the courtroom meeting roughly half-way through the show that really zings, with Perry and Buono’s characters feeling each other out and offering double edged banter.
As I said, I recalled very little of the episode and, seeing it again, it struck me pretty obvious why: Apart from Mr. Buono and the novelty of color, the episode is pretty dull. The other guest actors/suspects, while competent, rarely rise to the level of Mr. Buono’s and he’s a relatively small part of the story. To add insult to injury, the murder mystery itself is curiously lacking. Most often the show’s fun lies in how many people, including the one Perry Mason is defending, could have been involved in the murder. In the best of the Perry Mason episodes it is a hoot seeing Mr. Mason whittle through the suspects on the stand or in private, often employing shady legal tactics. In this case, though, the murderer and the motivation behind it appeared to come out of left field.
Weak sauce indeed.
However, in spite of it all, it is interesting to see an original run episode of Perry Mason in color. Yeah, the principles might look a lot older and the case itself may not be as compelling as some of the best of them, but it is a curio nonetheless.
Below is that episode’s opening crawl if full color. Unfortunately, the copy here is pretty bad. What you get on the DVD is far, far better: