4/18/2023 0 Comments High chaparral the hostageIt’s not going to be easy for the Family Cannon the ranch-which Annalee names “High Chaparral”… as you can see in the post title-is in the dry desert, where the slightest trace of drought could spell ruin for a man. “Blue” Mark Slade), and brother Buck (Cameron Mitchell) at his side. The premiere two-hour episode, “Destination Tucson/The Arrangement” (09/10/67), finds rancher “Big” John Cannon (Leif Erickson) arriving at the new spread he’s purchased in the Arizona Territory (not far from Tucson) with wife Annalee (Joan Caufield), son William (a.k.a. The cast of The High Chaparral: Leif Erickson, Mark Slade, Linda Cristal, Henry Darrow, and Cameron Mitchell (My mother does enjoy watching two out of the three “Chicago” franchise series on NBC and Law & Order: SVU, in the interest of full disclosure.) In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been so stunned: I’ve long considered Chaparral to be a most underrated boob tube western, so I’m most pleased that Shout! will be bringing the show’s sophomore season to fans this December 11th. To my gobsmacked surprise, The High Chaparral was warmly received by both parents…and I’m talking about people who normally shun episodic TV as a rule. So that’s what the ‘rents and I watched for two weeks I’d put on a pair of Chaparral installments (each episode runs 50 minutes, so it wasn’t that much different from watching a full-length feature) in the evening until we exhausted all twenty-eight first season episodes. I had purchased the first season of The High Chaparral when Shout! Factory released it to Region 1 DVD at the end of August. As I sat in front of my desktop computer, hoping for inspiration to strike from the blue…it came to me in a flash. I distracted him momentarily with the 2011 Ken Burns documentary Prohibition (our local PBS station resurrected this one about a year ago) but he didn’t care for it as much I did. But the occasional forays into watching a black-and-white movie Western have been met with stiff resistance (he even vetoed Dakota one night…and that one stars John Wayne!) and since I’ve worked through practically all of the color oaters that are shown on Starz Encore Westerns on a regular basis, I knew I had to think quickly. He does make allowances from time to time he’s a big fan of the Have Gun – Will Travel and Maverick reruns that air on MeTV on Saturday mornings, plus I was able to convince him into checking out some of the B&W Gunsmokes after he had exhausted the color episodes that are an afternoon staple on TVLand. My father claims that his vision problems prevent him from enjoying movies in monochrome…an assertion I find highly skeptical, since he bitched about black-and-white movies/TV shows before his eyesight problems. (Hence the urgent request that I take charge of the after-news programming.) My mother sweetly explained to him one day that if she had to sit through another hour of Matthews’ bleating, she would have an Elvis-Robert Goulet moment where the TV was concerned. It wasn’t always this way, you understand for a long, long time, he would switch over to MSDNC for Hardball with Chris Matthews, and then after that move onto the second and third tee vee punditry courses of Chris Hayes and (for as much as he was able to stay awake for) Rachel Maddow. Once ginormous-forehead-news-reader Lester Holt has finished with his nightly spiel, I am pressed into service to find something with which to entertain my father until he decides to call it a day. (WSB’s news coverage runs until 7, followed by ABC’s national news…yet the habits of an evening news lifetime are hard to break, so that’s why Dad insists we change the channel at 6:30.) She arranges for us to have supper around 6pm, and we enjoy this repast in front of the TV…where we watch WSB-TV Atlanta’s always riveting local newscast before switching over to WXIA (11Alive!) at 6:30 for NBC’s nightly news. In the House of Yesteryear, we adhere to a standard (and arguably, fairly predictable) schedule when it comes to mealtimes-primarily because my father is diabetic and if he doesn’t eat regularly Mom goes into her ZaSu Pitts-number (“Oh, dear…”).
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