Tag Archives: Barry Jenner

Late Night Retro Television Review: Good Morning, Miss Bliss 1.1 “Summer Love”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night 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 Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which ran on the Disney Channel from 1988 to 1989 before then moving to NBC and being renamed Saved By The Bell.  The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

With Check It Out! finished, it’s time to review a new show.  Continuing this feature’s tradition of highlighting the work of executive producer Peter Engel, it’s time for Good Morning, Miss Bliss, the show that would eventually become Saved By The Bell!

Episode 1.1 “Summer Love”

(Dir by Burt Brinckerhoff, originally aired on November 30th, 1988)

It’s the first day of school at JFK Junior High, located in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

Miss Carrie Bliss (Hayley Mills), our narrator, is looking forward to a new year as a history teacher.  The school’s principal, Richard Belding (a surprisingly thin Dennis Haskins) is worried about a new year of out-of-control students and angry parents.  Miss Bliss’s best friend, Ms. Tina Palladino (Joan Ryan), worries that Mr. Belding has given her a bad schedule because of a disappointing school play she directed the previous year.

Miss Bliss has a date, the first one since her husband died.  Brian (Barry Jenner) is handsome and successful but romance will have to wait as Miss Bliss deals with the problems of her homeroom students.  Over the summer, pathological liar Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) told a girl named Karen (Carla Gugino, in one of her first roles) that he would soon be starting the 9th grade.  Of course, Zack is actually starting the 8th Grade but he figured that he would never see Karen again so why not…. oh my God, this kid is a terrible human being!  Anyway, Karen transfers to JFK and Zack has to pretend to be in the 9th Grade.  He does this despite the fact that all of his friends, Mickey (Max Battimo), Nikki (Heather Hopper), Lisa (Lark Voorhees), and the nerdy Screech (Dustin Diamond), are in the 8th Grade and Zack’s homeroom is in an 8th grade classroom.

Got all that?

Needless to say, this episode would not be remembered today if not for the fact that it was the first appearance of Mr. Belding, Zack Morris, Lisa Turtle, and Screech Powers.  These characters were, of course, later retconned to be Californians when Saved By The Bell started.  Miss Bliss did not make the transition to California and for that, we should all be happy.  Even in this first episode, Miss Bliss comes across as being a self-righteous know-it-all who obviously feels that she’s too good for a junior high in Indiana.  In her first scene, she brags about getting a good class schedule, dismisses Tina’s concerns about her own class schedule, and then smirks as Mr. Belding talks about his anxiety.  This would pretty much be Miss Bliss’s signature style for the rest of the short life of Good Morning, Miss Bliss.

How do our regulars do in their first appearance as the characters that would make them famous?  Dennis Haskins gives a semi-realistic performance as Belding, playing him as being a harried pencil-pusher as opposed to the cartoonish figure he would become later on.  Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Lark Voorhies do well-enough as Zack and Lisa, though both of their characters are far more simpler here than they would become later.  Dustin Diamond was only 11 year old when he was cast as Screech and he looked and comes across as being several years younger.  (I recently saw an interview with Mark-Paul Gosselaar where he explained that the main reason why Diamond struggled to fit in with the rest of the cast was because he was considerably younger than everyone else on the show.  I would say that he was probably too young.  Imagine looking back on your life as an actor and realizing that you were permanently typecast by a role you first played when you were 11.)

Anyway, this was a forgettable but historically important episode.  Just imagine if it had never aired.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 2.9 “The Secret”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This week, Jonathan’s in trouble and so is the audience.

Episode 2.9 “The Secret”

(Directed by William Claxton, originally aired on November 27th, 1985)

This is an odd episode.

While heading to visit yet another one of Mark’s former cop buddies, Jonathan stops the car at a country store.  He spots a young man being bullied by three rednecks.  Jonathan politely asks the rednecks to back off.  When the main redneck tries to attack Jonathan, Jonathan responds by punching the guy out.

UH-OH, JONATHAN’S BROKEN A RULE!  He immediately gets summoned back to Heaven for a disciplinary hearing and, as a result, he’s not in the majority of this episode.

I’m going to assume that Landon had something else going on that caused him to skip out on the majority of this episode.  (This was also the first episode of the series to be directed by someone either than Landon or Victor French.)  Still, having Jonathan throw a punch seems out-of-character.  Over the course of the first two seasons, Jonathan has dealt with a lot of bullies and usually, he just uses his powers to make their car break down or to make them trip over a branch.  The Boss has never had a problem with that so you have to wonder why Jonathan didn’t just make the bully’s car radiator start to overheat or something.  As well, it seems like Jonathan was acting in self-defense and to protect the guy who was being bullied.

Anyway, the important thing is that Mark has to visit his friend on his own.  Wes Fowler (Barry Jenner) has been married to Carol Fowler (Linda Miller) for nearly 18 years.  When they first married, Carol told Wes that she couldn’t have children and, as a result, they decided to adopt a young girl that they named Heather.  Shortly after adopting Heather, Carol did get pregnant and gave birth to Shelley.  Having recently turned 18, Heather (played by Leslie Bega) is now curious about who her birth mother was.  A little research leads to her discovering that her birth mother is …. CAROL!

Carol explains that Heather’s father was an ex-boyfriend who left town as soon as he discovered that Carol was pregnant.  When Carol married Wes, she wanted to adopt the daughter she abandoned so she lied about not being able to get pregnant so that Wes would agree to the adoption.  When Wes finds out about this, he gets angry and, along with Shelley (played by a young Shannen Doherty), he moves out of the house.

Can Mark put this family back together again?  Of course, he can.  And you better believe Jonathan returns to Earth during the show’s final moments.  This is Highway to Heaven, after all.

This episode felt off to me.  Some of it was the absence of Jonathan.  Some of it was the fact that, even when working solo, Mark didn’t really do that much other than stand in a corner and observe.  Both the soap opera dramatic and the performances were so over-the-top that they were impossible to take seriously.  This almost felt like a parody of Highway to Heaven as opposed to an actual episode.

Oh well.  So much for this episode.  Hopefully, next week’s episode, which apparently involves a man being mistaken for a monster, will be a bit better.  We’ll find out soon!

October Hacks: Popcorn (dir by Mark Herrier and Alan Ormsby)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1991 film, Popcorn, tells the story of what happens when an experimental film goes wrong.

In the late 60s, a freaked-out hippie named Lanyard Gates directed a short film called Possessor.  Possessor featured footage of him apparently preparing to sacrifice a woman on an altar.  Gates declined to film a third act conclusion to the film.  Instead, he murdered his family on stage and in front of a terrified audience.  The resulting panic caused a fire to break out, killing almost everyone at the Dreamland Theater.  As a result, Possessor has become a legendary film, one that is believed lost.  Of course, it’s not lost, as a group of film students and their professor find out over the course of Popcorn.

Years later, one of those film students, an aspiring screenwriter named Maggie (Jill Schoelen), has been having disturbing nightmares about being caught in a fire and being pursued by a madman.  When she sees Possessor, she realizes that much of the imagery in her dreams comes from the film.  When Maggie attempts to talk to her mother about all of this, Suzanne (Dee Wallace) denies knowing anything about Possessor or Lanyard Gates but it’s not hard to tell that she’s lying.

Still, Maggie does have other things to worry about.  Her school’s film department has been hit by budget cuts and neither she nor her classmates will be able to make their student films unless they raise some money.  One of the students, Toby (Tom Villard), suggests holding a fundraiser at the Dreamland Theater, where they could show old movies and even recreate some of the old gimmicks that were used to promote those movies.  Professor Davis (Tony Roberts) thinks that is a great idea!  Why, he could even control the giant, remote-controlled bug that was used to promote Mosquito!

Filmed in Jamaica (and featuring a somewhat random performance by a reggae band), Popcorn was originally offered to director Bob Clark.  However, Clark didn’t want to return to the horror genre so, instead, it was Clark’s frequent collaborator, Alan Ormsby, who was hired to direct the film.  Reportedly, Ormsby was replaced a few weeks into filming by Mark Herrier, with the assumption being that the producers felt that Ormsby was spending too much time on filming the three fake movies that are screened during the fund raiser.  Those films are Mosquito, The Attack of the Electrified Man, and a dubbed Japanese film called The Stench.  In the film’s credits, Ormsby is credited with directing the three fake film while Mark Herrier is credited with directing the “modern” scenes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the three fake film are actually the best thing about Popcorn.  If Alan Ormsby was taking a lot of time to shoot the fake films, it obviously paid off because all three of them perfectly capture the feel of the era when they were supposedly shot and all of them are filled with the type of details that only a true fan of old horror movies would think to include.  Mosquito is a giant bug film that feels as if it could have come straight from 1957.  The Amazing Electrified Man feels like one of the films that poor Lon Chaney Jr. would have found himself starring in after leaving Universal.  And The Stench is the perfect import — slow-moving, a bit pompous, and terribly dubbed.

As for the rest of Popcorn, it’s a well-made slasher film.  Mark Herrier did a good job directing the “modern” scenes, with a scene in which the killer’s face seems to literally melt after he kisses one of his victims being a definite creepy highlight.  The kills are reasonably creative and, in one case involving electrocution, rather disturbing.  Jill Schoelen is a likable heroine, Derek Rydall is cute as her hapless boyfriend, and Tom Villard’s uninhibited performance gives the film a much-needed jolt of energy.  Though the old films may be the highlight of Popcorn, the “modern” scenes hold up as well.