Tag Archives: George Sperdakos

Late Night Retro Television Review: Check It Out! 3.10 “Shrink from Sendrax”

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 the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and Peacock!

This week, corporate sends a visitor to Cobb’s for reasons that are never exactly clear.

Episode 3.10 “Shrink From Sendrax”

(Dir by Jayne Schipper, originally aired on November 15th, 1987)

I’m just going to do a mini-review of this episode because I’m busy working on our big St. Patrick’s Day extravaganza here at the Shattered Lens!

  1. Remember that new company that bought out Cobb’s?  It can be easy to forget about them.  Well, in this episode, they send a psychiatrist named Dr. Matthews (Graham Harley) to check on everyone’s mental health.  Why would they do that?  I mean, is Cobb’s grocery store really that important to them?  It seems like a lot of money to spend on checking whether or not the cashiers are feeling good about themselves.
  2. Admittedly, I haven’t had that many jobs and I’ve never worked in a grocery store.  If you told me that I had no choice but to sit down and talk about my life with a psychiatrist as a condition of my employment, I would probably quit.  It’s not that I have anything against psychiatrists.  It’s just that I believe therapy should always be voluntary.
  3. The episode’s highlight was Leslie wanting to spend hours talking to the psychiatrist about the party that was thrown when he turned two years old.  Aaron Schwartz, who is often underused on this show, really got a chance to show off his comedic skills in this episode.
  4. Gordon Clapp’s Viker also got a few good scenes.  In general, any episode that features Clapp is, at the very least, going to make me smile.
  5. Howard freaks out over the psychiatrist and the questionnaire that he’s forced to fill out.  He gets some advice from 14 year-old stockboy Brad, played by T and T‘s Sean Roberge.  This is Brad’s third appearance on the show and I get the feeling that he was originally meant to be a major character but the show’s writers couldn’t figure out what to do with the character.
  6. This third season has had a lot of weird detours and characters.  We haven’t heard anything else about Howard’s brother.  The corporate liaison, TC Collingwood (Elizabeth Hanna), is occasionally pictured in the opening credits and occasionally not.  What happened to the stockboy who had a crush on Marlene?
  7. Anyway, to prove that he’s not crazy, Howard dresses up like a clown because he knows that only way to prove he’s not crazy is to act crazy while realizing that he’s acting crazy or something.
  8. Marlene and Christian, the two most consistently interesting characters on the show, were not in this episode and that kind of made the whole psychiatry angle feel useless.  The idea of Marlene and Christian reacting to ink blots is such a good one that I personally would have delayed production on this episode until Kathleen Laskey and Jeff Pustil were available to appear in it.

Gordon Clapp and Aaron Schwartz were great but, overall, this was pretty dumb episode.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 2.6 “Master of Disguise”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

The search for cursed antiques continues!

Episode 2.6 “Master of Disguise”

(Dir by Tom McLoughlin, originally aired on November 11th, 1988)

A side job delivering antiques for use in a horror film leads to Micki meeting her favorite actor, the amazingly handsome and charming William Pratt (John Bolger).  And when the film’s leading lady refuses to shoot a scene because of Pratt’s method obsessiveness, Micki finds herself cast as her replacement.  Soon, Pratt and Micki are having a torrid romance.  Ryan feels that there’s something wrong with Pratt but then again, we all know that Ryan has unrequited romantic feelings for his cousin (ewwww!).

That said, Ryan is right.  Pratt is actually Jeff Amory, an actor who was so disfigured that he was previously typecast in horror films.  Amory disappeared after the murder of one of his co-stars, an actress who looked a lot like Micki.  Using a cursed makeup box that once belonged to John Wilkes Booth (“the actor who shot Lincoln,” Ryan helpfully explains), Amory has transformed himself into the handsome Pratt.  Unfortunately, the box needs to constantly absorb blood to work and Pratt has become a one-man murder spree.  (One of his victims is played by Aaron Schwartz, of Check It Out! fame.)  Will Micki become his next victim?

(An interesting piece of trivia: Booth is often described as just being “the actor who shot Lincoln,” but he was actually a legitimate star and a celebrity in both the North and the South in the years leading up to the Civil War.  The youngest and best-looking of the Booth brothers, he was an acclaimed and popular Shakespearean actor who was so handsome that women would flock to the theater whenever one of his show’s came to town.  He was the 19th century stage’s version of Ryan Reynolds.  Everyone who was into theater knew his name, even before he shot Lincoln.  America has seen many assassins who wanted to be celebrities.  Booth was a celebrity who wanted to be an assassin.)

This was an okay episode.  I liked the fact that Pratt was a bit more tormented by his actions than some of the other villains who have appeared on this show and I was also happy that Micki got to be at the center of the action, even if the episode’s script did make her a bit more flighty than she’s ever been previously portrayed.  Ryan’s romantic feelings for Micki are a little bit awkward, seeing as how they’re related but, again, they were necessary to establish why Micki was originally dismissive of Ryan’s concerns.

This episode ended with a bit of trivia, with Jack mentioning that William Pratt was also the real name of one of the gentlest men in show business …. Boris Karloff.  Again, you have to wonder why no one else noticed that is before Jack and why it took Jack so long to mention it.  Still, it’s nice that Karloff got a shout out.

Retro Television Reviews: T and T 2.11 “Hard Way Home”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing T. and T., a Canadian show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990.  The show can be found on Tubi!

T and T is back …. with a kidnapping!

Episode 2.11 “Hard Way Home”

(Dir by Al Waxman, originally aired on January 23rd, 1989)

Joe has the worst luck when it comes to making new friends!

One of the main themes of the second season of T and T has been T.S. (and, occasionally, Amy) acting as a mentor for teenage Joe Casper.  The season began with Joe losing his mother to a bomb that was set by Canadian Neo-Nazis.  T.S. apparently adopted Joe and now, the kid spends all of his time at Decker’s gym.  Whenever Joe makes a new friend, they either turn out to be a criminal or a victim of a crime.

This week, Joe’s new friend is George Papadopolous (David Stratton), who invites Joe to toss a football around with him in the park.  However, once they get to the park, George is grabbed by a couple of thugs and tossed into the trunk of a car.  Joe chases the car and even grabs onto the bumper but ultimately, he can’t save George.

When a banged-up Joe returns to Decker’s gym, T.S. assures him that his new scars will make him the most popular kid at his school.  Joe then calls George’s father and is told that the whole kidnapping was a prank and that he shouldn’t call the police.  This sounds strange to T.S. so he investigates on his own.

It turns out that George’s father is Peter (George Sperdakos), a big man in Toronto’s Greek mafia.  Someone has kidnapped George and is demanding a huge ransom.  Members of the Greek community are all donating their own money to help Peter raise the amount.  Because Joe was able to get the license plate number of the car that George was tossed into, it doesn’t take long for T.S. to discover that George was abducted by Peter’s rival, a used car dealer named Frangos (George Touliatos).  However, Frangos is not working alone.  It turns out that Peter arranged the kidnapping of his own son so that he could pocket the ransom money!

Needless to say, thinks work out in the end.  George is freed and Peter is arrested.  At first, Amy tells T.S. that there is no way that she would ever agree to represent Peter because 1) she knows that Peter is guilty and 2) Peter can’t afford to pay.  But then the members of Greek community (who are apparently very forgiving) donate their own money to convince Amy to defend Peter in court.  Does Amy win the case?  The episode ends before we find out.

This episode really showed the disadvantage of trying to tell a story like this in just 30 minutes.  There was never any suspense over who kidnapped George because there was only time to introduce one suspect!  Peter turning out to be in on it was a nice twist but it came out of nowhere because there really wasn’t any time to properly set it up.  This would have been a good hour episode but, at 30 minutes, it just felt rushed and it didn’t have any fun Mr. T line readings.  Toronto looked nice and cold but otherwise, this was a forgettable episode.