Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch, which ran on NBC and then in syndication from 1989 to 2001. The entire show can be viewed on Tubi.
This week, a floating drug lab means trouble!
Episode 2.15 “Sea of Flames”
(Dir by Gregory J. Bonnan and Douglas Schwartz, originally aired on February 17th, 1992)
Hobie has a nightmare in which he sees Mitch floating in the ocean and looking confused as a speedboat roars up behind him. “BEHIND YOU, DAD!” Hobie yells right before waking up.
Mitch says that the bad dream is no big deal, but Hobie is convinced that he’s seen the future. Mitch laughs off Hobie’s concerns. Mitch is more worried about convincing the city council to approve a funding increase so the lifeguards can buy some supercool wave runners.
Mitch should be worried about Eddie, who is such a terrible lifeguard that he doesn’t even notice that Scorch (Devino Tricoche) is wandering around the beach and setting fires. Scorch is a street performer who eats fire as part of his act. But after he gets a batch of bad designer drugs, he sets Eddie’s lifeguard tower on fire. Even though Eddie is sitting in the tower at the time, he doesn’t notice the flames until it’s nearly too late. After jumping off the tower in slow motion, Eddie drags Scorch to safety. “Sumo! Sumo! Sumo!” Scorch says.
Hey, there’s a boat called Sumo that’s docked in the harbor. Could it be a floating drug lab? Of course it is! When the drug dealers decide to sail away, Mitch gets a chance to show off on a wave runner! But when Mitch falls off the wave runner, he finds himself stranded in the ocean. Uh-oh, there’s a speedboat coming up behind him!
Mitch ducks out of the way just in time. OH MY GOD, HOBIE IS MAGIC!
While Mitch is busy capturing the drug dealers, Ben is once again depressed over getting old. When he investigates a house that has supposedly been empty for decades, he meets the actress (Constance Towers) who once lived there. Back when he was a young lifeguard, Ben had a crush on her. When she invites him into the house, he discovers that she has a framed picture of him that she took when he was young and standing on his lifeguard tower. She had a crush on him as well, but back then, dating a lifeguard would have led to a career-ending scandal. And now they’re both old, so what can anyone do? Oh well. Sorry, Ben, your life sucks.
But Mitch’s life is great! At the end of the episode, he thanks Hobie for having his nightmare. Hobie says he also had a dream where Mitch got married. “Blonde or brunette?” Mitch asks.
This was another silly episode of Baywatch, but as we all know, this series is at its most entertaining when it’s silly. As usual, Hasselhoff delivers even the most ludicrous of lines with an earnestness that is actually kind of charming in its own weird way. Ben’s storyline was kind of sad, but since the only reason Ben is on this show is to show that getting older sucks, it’s to be expected.
The important thing is that Mitch gets his wave runners and the ocean is now a safer place.
“Put on your Sunday best, kids. We’re going to Sears.”
Ah, the 70s. Or actually the 90s. All I know is that the Sears that was located near our house closed in 2014 and the empty parking lot briefly became a flea market before the police showed up and told everyone to go home.
Today’s scene that I love is from 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.
Let’s celebrate cats!
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957, dir by Jack Arnold)
Sleepwalkers (1992, dir by Mick Garris)
Team America: World Police (2004, dir by Trey Parker)
Captain Marvel (2019, dir by Anna Bolden and Ryan Fleck)
Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny is one of the strangest, most technically dazzling, and culturally revealing comic series ever to run in a mainstream American magazine. Published in Playboy from 1962 to 1988, its basic premise was deceptively simple: Annie Fanny, a gorgeous and spectacularly underdressed young woman, wanders into the social fashions, political anxieties, entertainment crazes, and sexual hypocrisies of the modern United States. Each installment then turns into a lavish full-color farce—part pinup, part Mad-style parody, part period satire, and part frantic visual scavenger hunt.
At a glance, it is easy to dismiss Little Annie Fanny as upscale smut for the Hugh Hefner readership: a glossy excuse to place a naked blonde in absurdly elaborate situations. And, to be fair, nudity was indisputably the commercial engine. Annie’s body is constantly on display, and the series depends on a recognizably male-gaze-centered Playboy sensibility. But that description alone misses why the strip endured for 26 years, or why the names Kurtzman and Elder matter. This was not merely an illustrated centerfold with punch lines. It was a sustained comic chronicle of postwar American fantasy, packaged in airbrushed color and crowded with some of the busiest, funniest, most viciously observant artwork in magazine comics.
Kurtzman had already helped create the language of modern American satire through Mad, while Elder was one of the great comic illustrators: capable of drawing beautiful people, grotesques, slapstick chaos, fake advertising, background gags, and social types all in the same image without losing the picture’s momentum. Their collaboration gives Little Annie Fanny a peculiar tension. The comic invites readers to look at Annie as an object of desire, then surrounds her with a world so ridiculous that the reader’s own desire becomes part of the joke. Annie may be the apparent target of everyone’s attention, but the real targets are the industries, subcultures, politicians, celebrity machines, and self-important movements that use sex, youth, rebellion, or status as branding tools.
The central comic mechanism comes directly from the Kurtzman/Elder school of satire: take a recognizable cultural phenomenon, exaggerate it just enough, and fill every inch of the panel with visual evidence that the whole thing is already absurd. An Annie story is rarely about plot in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a comic demolition derby of styles and attitudes.
One issue might send Annie into a parody of Hollywood, another toward fashionable psychology, youth culture, television, advertising, political campaigning, or a new spiritual fad. The stories often treat Annie as an innocent visitor entering a supposedly sophisticated environment. She is not exactly naïve—she is too adaptable and too knowingly glamorous for that—but she functions as a blank surface onto which the era projects its competing fantasies. Everybody wants Annie to be something: liberated woman, celebrity accessory, corporate mascot, hippie goddess, suburban temptation, political prop, or consumer-product spokesperson.
That flexibility was the strip’s key strength. The character did not need a rigid continuity because Annie was really a cultural barometer. Her changing hairstyles, outfits, settings, and social circles told the reader what America was obsessed with at any given moment. In that sense, Little Annie Fanny was less like a daily newspaper comic and more like a monthly satirical illustrated essay.
Elder’s art is especially essential to that effect. Even when the writing takes a broad, obvious swing at a target, the images add layers of parody. You can linger over a panel and find corrupt executives, ridiculous brand knockoffs, celebrity caricatures, awkward spectators, and small visual jokes functioning at the margins. The comic’s surfaces are glossy, but its worldview is densely cluttered. America in Little Annie Fanny is a carnival of people selling things, performing identities, chasing erotic freedom, and discovering that every supposedly spontaneous cultural movement somehow has merchandise attached to it.
The strip arrived at a perfect moment for Playboy. The early 1960s were still shaped by Cold War respectability, corporate conformity, suburban aspirations, and an increasingly polished mass-media culture. Yet beneath that surface, sexual attitudes, youth identity, popular music, civil rights activism, antiwar politics, and drug culture were transforming the country. Little Annie Fanny made all of this grist for its satirical mill.
Its version of the counterculture is not reverent. Kurtzman was too suspicious of slogans and Elder too alert to visual pretension for that. Hippies, gurus, psychedelic entrepreneurs, radicals, and bohemians appear as part of a world that wants to overthrow the establishment while rapidly developing its own uniforms, poses, and commercial opportunities. The series understood something many period commentators missed: rebellion could be sincere, necessary, theatrical, and exploitable at the same time.
Annie herself could be read as a conflicted symbol of the sexual revolution. On one level, she embodies Playboy’s ideal of sexual availability: glamorous, cheerful, and perpetually presented for heterosexual male consumption. On another, she moves with a freedom that was still startling in American popular culture. She has agency in the loose, comic-strip sense—she travels, experiments, participates, adapts, and refuses to remain confined to the domestic roles older mainstream media had assigned women. The problem is that this “freedom” is filtered through a magazine created largely for men.
That contradiction is one reason the strip is more interesting now than it may have seemed to its original audience. Little Annie Fanny does not stand outside the culture it mocks. It is deeply implicated in it. Its satire of commodified sex runs inside one of the country’s most famous commercial sex-and-lifestyle brands. The comic can laugh at male vanity and consumer lust while simultaneously feeding both. Rather than invalidating the series, that tension makes it an unusually revealing artifact of the era’s confused ideas about liberation.
By the 1970s, the national mood had changed. Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, oil shocks, institutional distrust, and general exhaustion had eroded the breezier confidence of the previous decade. Little Annie Fanny was well suited to this shift because Kurtzman’s comedy had always assumed that authority was partly a performance and that institutions were vulnerable to humiliation.
The 1970s version of the strip feels less enchanted by the promise of social change and more aware of bureaucracy, cynicism, fad culture, and the collapse of public trust. Government becomes an especially ripe target: not a grand moral force, but a machine full of evasive officials, empty rhetoric, paperwork, and people trying to turn scandal into public relations. In a country where political credibility had become a punch line, Annie’s comics could make officialdom look exactly as ridiculous as it felt.
The old counterculture also becomes a target of nostalgia, burnout, and commercialization. What once looked revolutionary now risks becoming a costume, a self-help brand, or an aging generation’s memory of its own glamour. This is where the series’ cynical streak becomes sharper. Kurtzman and Elder do not suggest that the establishment was redeemed; they suggest that American culture has an extraordinary capacity to absorb, neutralize, and resell its critics.
The final stretch of Little Annie Fanny lands in the Reagan 1980s, a decade that practically begs for Elder’s luxuriant visual excess. The cultural vocabulary had shifted again: wealth was louder, celebrity became more aggressively marketable, image management intensified, and the language of success increasingly revolved around luxury, ambition, consumption, and personal branding.
Annie fits naturally into this world because she had always been a glossy fantasy figure. But now the world around her starts to resemble an expanded version of the fantasy: power suits, high-end indulgence, media spectacle, fitness crazes, corporate opportunism, and a renewed confidence in money as a public identity. The strip’s satire becomes less about the dream of breaking free from conformity and more about what happens when conformity itself becomes glamorous, expensive, and aspirational.
There is something almost elegiac about the series ending in 1988. By then, the comic’s foundational ingredients—sexual satire, celebrity parody, consumer mockery, political caricature—were no longer unusual. Television, stand-up, magazines, and eventually the internet would make those modes ubiquitous. Yet few later works matched the tactile labor and visual density of Kurtzman and Elder’s pages. They made satire that looked expensive because it was expensive in attention, craft, and accumulated detail.
Little Annie Fanny remains messy, dated, funny, exploitative, sophisticated, and often astonishing to look at. It is not a cleanly progressive artifact, nor is it simply a relic of old-school Playboy sexism. It is both an expression of its magazine’s fantasies and a critique of the larger culture that produced them. Its real legacy lies in that contradiction: it captured America’s changing self-image from the optimistic, libidinal 1960s through the disillusioned 1970s and into the gold-plated theatricality of the Reagan era—always with Annie at the center, and always with the joke spreading outward until it included nearly everyone.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, #ScarySocial presents The Monster That Challenged The World!
If you want to join us this Saturday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
The Monster That Challenged The World is available on Prime! See you there!
Twist and Shout is a song that has been a hit for a lot of artists. Rodney Dangerfield took a swing at it 1987, performing the song for the Back to School soundtrack. The video is largely made up of scenes from Back to School and introduced a whole generation of MTV viewers to not only Rodney Dangerfield but also Sally Kellerman, Burt Young, and Ned Beatty. They probably already knew Sam Kinison.
Happy Birthday to Alicia Witt! Born on August 21st, 1975, I mainly know Alicia because my wife loves to watch Hallmark Christmas movies, and she was a mainstay on the channel for years. I’ll be honest, I love some of her Hallmark movies. Back in 2024, we went to the movie theater and watched her in the horror film LONGLEGS. I thought she was one of the best things about the movie.
In honor of her 51st birthday, I thought it might be fun to share this clip from LONGLEGS. It’s about as far from Hallmark as it gets!
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Daily Motion.
This week, John Doe No. 6 returns.
Episode 4.7 “Close Encounters”
(Dir by Eric Laneuville, originally aired on November 20th, 1985)
This episode begins with a jolt. Dr. Victor Ehrlich is actually choosing to be ethical as opposed to just kissing up. Ehrlich is currently doing a rotation in plastic surgery, where he’s working with Bobby Caldwell. Caldwell already disliked Ehrlich before Ehrlich even joined the department. Caldwell’s opinion is not improved when he discovers that Ehrlich has talked a patient out of getting an eye tuck that Caldwell recommended. When Caldwell confronts him, Ehrlich argues that the surgery wasn’t necessary and that Caldwell manipulated the man into agreeing because Caldwell’s department is currently on the chopping block. When Ehrlich threatens to go to Dr. Craig, Caldwell sneers. Dr. Craig is the one who personally recruited Caldwell to come to St. Eligius. Ehrlich, on the other hand, is just “the hospital clown.”
Yikes. When Bobby Caldwell was introduced two seasons ago, he was mild-mannered and likable and clearly on the show because Mark Harmon looked good without a shirt on. This season, Caldwell has been arrogant and self-destructive. The fresh scar on his face has become a symbol for the scar on his soul. Personally, I think Bobby is a much more interesting character now. Every soap opera needs a villain and, by the time the fourth season started, St. Elsewhere had definitely become a soap opera.
As for Dr. Craig, he’s not there to talk to Ehrlich because he’s accompanied his daughter-in-law to her hometown in Clinton, New York. Yvonne (Suzanne Lederer) has been in a coma ever since Stephen Craig flipped their car. In this episode, she finally opens her eyes but she still isn’t speaking or mobile. Along with helping to transfer Yvonne to a new hospital, Craig has another reason for going to New York. He’s promised Ellen that he will return with their granddaughter, Barbara. However, when Dr. Craig spends the night there, he discovers that Yvonne’s parents aren’t the backward monsters that he assumed they were. He sees that they love Barbara and that they are taking care of her. Though he doesn’t say it, one gets the feeling that Dr. Craig realizes that Ellen mostly just wants custody of Barbara so she can have a part of Stephen. In New York, Dr. Craig finally starts to understand why Stephen and Yvonne designated Yvonne’s parents as Barbara’s legal guardians. Dr. Craig returns to Boston without Barbara. “I hate you for this, Mark,” Ellen says.
Meanwhile, astronaut Col. Chuck Cochrane (David Ackroyd) has decided that his seizure and subsequent dream were all signs from God telling him not to return to space. NASA, concerned that Cochrane is going to give the program a bad name, sends Captain Gloria Neal (Betty White) to the hospital. (Gloria mentions that she was sent by Major Healey, which is undoubtedly a reference to Roger Healey from I Dream of Jeannie.) Because Gloria went to medical school with Dr. Westphall, NASA thinks that she’ll be able to influence him to discharge Cochrane from the hospital so that he can be taken back to Walter Reed and forced to rejoin the space program. Westphall, however, decides to support Dr. Morrison’s decision not to discharge Cochrane. Westphall goes on to tell Gloria that she’s not much of a doctor anymore. She’s just a PR agent for the government. “So, I guess we won’t be sleeping together,” Gloria replies.
Ugh, Westphall. I know that I spent a lot of time complaining about Dr. Westphall, but this episode really epitomized everything that I dislike about the character. When he’s not depressed, he’s self-righteous. Whenever anyone disagrees with him, he starts talking about his experiences volunteering at a clinic in Ethiopia, as if that experience automatically makes his opinion superior to anyone else’s. In this episode, he decides that it’s his place to judge Gloria’s life decisions. Seriously, Westphall is the worst!
Finally, John Doe No. 6 (Oliver Clark) is back. He’s recovered from the surgery that initially left him comatose. He can speak and move again but he still has amnesia. He’s back in the psych ward. While watching television, he suddenly realizes who he is. He’s Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show! He decides that a fellow patient, Mr. Carlin (Jack Riley), is Mary’s friend Rhoda. Dr. Auschlander is Mary’s co-worker, Murray. He tries to throw a party in the psych ward and it’s awful because Mary’s parties are always awful! When he sees Gloria Neal walking down the hospital hallway, he thinks that she’s Sue Ann Nivens, the happy homemaker! “Excuse me?” Gloria asks, confused.
Of course, Betty White did play Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. (St. Elsewhere itself was produced by Mary Tyler Moore’s production company.) Even more interesting, however, is that Jack Riley previously played Mr. Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show. Oliver Clark also appeared on The Bob Newhart Show, playing Mr. Herd, who was a member of the same therapy group as Mr. Carlin. As such, viewers who had previously seen The Bob Newhart Show (whether during its original run or, if you’re like me, via reruns) would have known that John Doe No. 6 was actually Mr. Herd. The episode’s biggest mystery is easily solved by those with a knowledge of television history. At the same time, it’s also interesting to note that Mr. Carlin presumably recognizes John Doe No. 6 but has yet to let anyone know.
It makes for a bizarre but enjoyable episode. Bobby is turning into a monster. The Craigs are headed for divorce. Dr. Westphall just insulted Betty White. But even with all that, it’s hard not to get caught up in John Doe No. 6’s joy. He’s going to make it after all!
Through the Shattered Lens 