Lisa Picotte | Through the Shattered Lens

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 Tubi and several other services!

This week, it’s time for yet another student protest.

Episode 5.8 “Goodbye, Mr. Zelinka”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on June 23rd, 1989)

The students at Lincoln High are upset to learn that beloved English teacher Mr. Zelinka (Lew Ayres) is going to have to retire because he’s reached the mandatory age of 70. The school’s new maintenance workers — Jonathan Smith and Mark Gordon — suggest that they should all conduct a walk-out to demand that Zelinka be allowed to keep his job. The evil school board president (James Karen) says that Zelinka can stay if he takes and passes an exam. However, the exam is rigged for Zelinka to fail. Jonathan uses “the stuff” to make sure that Zelinka not only passes but that he also gets the highest score ever. In the past, Jonathan always refused to use “the stuff” to help people cheat. Instead, Jonathan would have shown the school board president the error of his ways. But, for this episode, Jonathan rigs the rigged exam and the villain is left in power so that he can presumably continue to make Mr. Zelinka’s life miserable.

I did not like this episode. Yeah, it’s heart was in the right place but the entire school walking about in support of Mr, Zelinka just felt kind of silly. I mean, did every student at the school have Mr. Zelinka for English? What did everyone’s parents think about the protest? If Mr. Zelinka had been a compelling character, may be I would have felt differently but Mr. Zelinka was instead a pretty passive character and I have to admit that I wondered about all the other good teachers who had been forced to retire at 70. Why didn’t Jonathan show up to help any of them out? What made Mr. Zelinka so special? It didn’t help that Lew Ayres was 80 years old when he played Mr. Zelinka and that he looked and sounded even older. The obviously frail Ayres comes across as someone who maybe does need to retire.

I’ve sat through a lot of Highway to Heaven episodes about clean-cut teenagers walking out of class so that they can protest injustice. Highway to Heaven was a very earnest show and that was one of the things that made it likable. But, by the fifth season, Highway to Heaven‘s formula was a bit less effective than it had been in the past. This is an episode just just seems to be going through the motions. This is also the rare Highway to Heaven episode in which I wanted someone to tell Jonathan and Mark to just mind their own business.

Welcome to Late Night 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 Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Plex!

This week, dreaming saves the world.

Episode 1.12 “The End of the World”

(Dir by Jonathan R. Betuel, originally aired on January 15th, 1989)

Weird episode.

The first half of the episode featured Mary Kohnert as Amy Collins, a young woman who starts to have dreams about the past and discovers that she can change reality depending on what she does in her dream. Most of the dreams center around the accidental death of her mother. Amy sets about to save her mother’s life but she discovers that changing the past will always lead to unforeseen consequences.

Unfortunately, her psychiatrist (George Lazenby) rats her out to the CIA and Amy is soon being forced to work for the U.S. military. When she senses that a soldier is planning on launching a nuclear attack and plunging the world into war, Amy is forced to do a mind-meld of sorts with him. She watches as the army manages to break into his bunker and gun him down right before he launches the nukes.

I can’t complain about a show trying something different and I actually found it interesting how the two stories were totally different in style and tone. The second story featured a dream about a nuclear war that was pretty disturbing. On TV, Gumby and his horse melted from the atomic heat. That said, this episode suffered from the same flaw as many of the episode of Freddy’s Nightmares, in that it really didn’t have the budget necessary to achieve what it was hoping to accomplish.

Still, who can forget the image of Freddy Krueger riding a nuclear missile in the style of Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove?

Along with having an interesting premise, this one also had some interesting guest stars. Along with George Lazenby and Gumby, Walter Gotell, Andrew Prine, and Albert Hall all made appearances. I guess when Freddy Krueger invites you, you don’t say no.