Retro Television Review: Fantasy Island 6.1 “Curse of the Moreaus/My Man Friday”

Posted on January 14, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1984. Unfortunately, the show has been removed from most streaming sites. Fortunately, I’ve got nearly every episode on my DVR.

Welcome to the sixth season of Fantasy Island!

Episode 6.1 “Curse of the Moreaus/My Man Friday”

(Dir by Bob Sweeney, originally aired on October 16th, 1982)

A new season has begun and the fifth season’s Julie experiment is officially over. Mr. Roarke is back and Tattoo is once again his only assistant. Julie is not only missing but she’s not even mentioned in this episode. Personally, I think Julie went to college on the mainland or maybe she married Gopher from the Love Boat. Either way, Julie is gone and Fantasy Island is back to normal.

This week’s fantasies both felt familiar. It was another haunted house fantasy and another “secretary-becomes-the-boss fantasy.” After spending nearly ten years as a secretary at an ad agency, Linda Whitney (Pamela Hensley) has watched as her stupid boss, Ed Turner (Avery Schrieber) has taken credit for all of her ideas and as everyone has gotten promoted but her. Linda wants to be an executive and fortunately, Mr. Roarke knows the president of her company. Linda has received a promotion to the executive suite. She has 48 hours to prove herself or she’ll be “demoted” back to secretary.

(Demoted is in scare quotes because, right out of college, I worked as an administrative assistant and let me just say that a good assistant is the most important person in any office.)

What’s odd about this fantasy is that Mr. Roarke arranges for Linda’s office to be transported to Fantasy Island. But all of Linda’s co-workers are transported to the Island as well. In fact, the entire building seems to now be on Fantasy Island. I mean, at this point, we all know that Mr. Roarke can pretty much do anything but even this seems a bit extreme for a fantasy that is clearly established as not being something that’s just happening in Linda’s head. Mr. Roarke is somehow transporting office buildings now. Were Linda’s co-workers given any warning before being transported to the Island?

It’s not easy being an executive. Her old boss wants her to fail. All of her former secretarial colleagues want her to fail. Can Linda get land the big account? Sure, she can. Luckily, she has a male secretary named Jack Friday (James Houghton) to help out! By the end of the episode, Linda has come to realize that she treated the handsome Jack almost as poorly and objectified Jack almost as much Ed Turner did to her. Then again, Jack does introduce himself by saying that he likes working for women because they have “better legs.” All that said, I liked the fantasy. I liked that Linda kept her promotion. I liked that she worked with Jack without falling in love with him. I like that she left the Island on her own, satisfied with her new career.

As for the other fantasy, Jack Moreau (Stuart Whitman) is haunted by nightmares in which he kills his wife, Kathy (Barbara Rush). Agck! It turns out that Moreau men are cursed. They murder their wives on their 50th birthday. Jack failed to mention this to Kathy when they got married. That’s probably grounds for divorce. Anyway, Mr. Roarke sends them to spend Jack’s birthday weekend in the Moreau plantation, where they are watched by a mysterious servant (Raymond St. Jacques) who seems to be all about driving Jack to murder his wife. Fortunately, Jack does not murder his wife. Kathy tells Jack that she loves him and the curse is broken. Hey, that was easy! That said, I enjoyed this fantasy. The Fantasy Island haunted house stories always have a lot of atmosphere to them. They’re fun to watch.

This was a good start of the season. It was nice to see Tattoo and Roarke joking again. Tattoo points out that a good boss needs good people working for him and Tattoo’s absolutely right.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979, directed by Daniel Haller)

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

In the year 1987, NASA launches it’s final manned mission. Captain Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard) is sent into space but, while he’s orbiting the Earth, he and his spacecraft fall victim to a strange space anomaly which leaves him in suspended animation. On Earth, Buck Rogers is believed to be lost. 500 years pass. Buck’s ship continues to orbit the Earth while, down below, mankind nearly destroys itself in a nuclear war. Eventually, Earth is reduced to radioactive rubble and what remains of human civilization lives in the city of New Chicago. (Old Chicago, meanwhile, has been taken over by mutants.)

Finally, in the 25th century, Buck and his ship are discovered by Draconia, a spaceship that belongs to the intergalactic Draconian Empire. Buck is brought out of suspended animation and meets the beautiful Draconian Princess Ardala (Pamela Hensely) and her second-in-command, an Earthling named Kane (Henry Silva). Ardala would obviously like to make Buck her prince but, after being in suspended animation for 500 years, Buck just wants to return to Earth. The Draconians allow Buck to return home.

Upon landing in New Chicago, Buck discovers that the world is much different now. Everyone wears skintight uniforms and a little robot named Twiki (voice by Mel Blanc) is the only person willing to be Buck’s friend. Commander Wilma Deering (Erin Gray) is in charge of defending what’s left of human civilization and she’s immediately suspicious of Buck and his story. When it turns out that Ardala and Kane implanted Buck with a tracking device, Deering want to execute him. Can Buck prove his loyalty and also thwart Ardala and Kane’s plot to conquer humanity?

Buck Rogers In The 25th Century was originally a pilot for a Glen Larson-produced televisions series. (Larson was also responsible for the original Battlestar Galactica, another sci-fi show whose pilot was given a theatrical release.) Hoping to appeal to the same audiences who made Star Wars a monster hit, Universal spent a little extra money to upgrade the special effects, added a few suggestive scenes to prevent the pilot from getting the dreaded G-rating, and then released it in theaters a few months before the TV show premiered. That was a good idea because the movie did become a minor hit and the TV series went on to run for two seasons.

As the movie itself, it never feels like anything more than an extended episode of a television series. Gil Gerard is bland in the lead role and most serious sci-fi fans will probably lose interest as soon as the child-friendly robot shows up. Buck Rogers may have been made to capitalize on the success of Star Wars but it doesn’t have any of the attention to detail or the careful world-building that went into George Lucas’s original space opera. On the plus side, though, the Dads who took their kids to matinee showings of this film were probably happy to see Erin Gray and Pamela Hensley prominently featured in the film and Henry Silva is a great villain as always. As with a lot of the sci-fi films that were released in the immediate wake of Star Wars, Buck Rogers In The 25th Century does have a definite camp appeal. It’s bad but some people will enjoy it on a nostalgic level.

Probably the most memorable thing about Buck Rogers In the 25th Century was its James Bond-inspired title sequence. Here it is, in all of its glory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BINijYepahA

I’ll Be Superamalgamated!: DOC SAVAGE, THE MAN OF BRONZE (Warner Brothers 1975)

Posted on November 27, 2017 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

I used to devour those Doc Savage pulp novels reissued as paperbacks by Bantam Books. You know, the ones with those cool James Bama covers? They were filled with action, adventure, intelligence, and good humor, as written by Lester Dent under the pseudonym ‘Kenneth Robeson’. Doc himself was a paragon of goodness, trained from birth in the arts and sciences, a perfect physical specimen adept at all the fighting disciplines with near super-human strength. In fact, one could make a case for Doc Savage as the world’s first mass-market superhero, the Man of Bronze predating DC’s Superman (The Man of Steel) by a good five years.

Doc’s amazing adventures screamed for a screen treatment, but it wasn’t until 1975 that producer George Pal bought the character’s rights from Dent’s widow Norma and made DOC SAVAGE: THE MAN OF BRONZE. Pal, whose credits include sci-fi classics like WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, WAR…

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