T.K. Carter | 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 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!

This week …. well, it’s all really stupid.

Episode 1.2 “Love Letters”

(Dir by Burt Brinkerhoff, originally aired on December 7th, 1988)

Miss Bliss thinks that Mr. Belding has sent her a love letter! Mr. Belding thinks Miss Bliss had sent him a love letter! Much awkwardness follows. Of course, the truth is that they both have a love letter that Zach wrote to Lisa (the character, not me) on behalf of Screech. Screech, meanwhile, writes Zach’s term paper on the War of 1812, which is probably the easiest war to write a paper on. I mean, if Zach can’t handle the War of 1812 on his own, he really is doomed.

This was a dumb episode, one that was later remade as an episode of Saved By The Bell during the infamous Tori season. The remake even went as far as to have Zach write a love note to Lisa for Screech and Mr. Belding and another teacher thinking that the note was written for them. Somehow, no one stopped and said, “Hey, hasn’t this happened before?” The remake was just as dumb as the original.

I will say this. Dustin Diamond is actually …. dare I say it? …. likable in this episode. Watching this episode, I could actually understand why Diamond was at the center of so many early episodes of Saved By The Bell because it appears that, before he started doing the squeaky, cartoonish voice thing and got totally typecast as the most annoying person on the planet, Dustin Diamond actually was a good child actor. There’s a sincere sweetness to his crush on Lisa in this episode. It’s quite a contrast to the deranged stalker that he would later become.

I should also note, for Saved By The Bell historians, this episode is the first to establish that Screech has a crush on Lisa and that Lisa, who is kind of mean in this episode, wishes that Screech would get lost. At the start of the episode, Lisa stuffs Screech in a locker. That seems a bit extreme to me. It’s always struck me as strange how the people on these shows were always getting stuffed into lockers. I went to a lot of different schools when I was growing up and I never once saw that happen to anyone. And yet, on Saved By The Bell and a host of other Peter Engel-produced sitcoms, it’s like a daily occurrence. I would think that it can’t be healthy to be stuffed in a locker. I can’t imagine the air quality is very good inside one of those metal caskets.

This episode also presents Screech and Zach as not being the childhood friends that Saved By The Bell later presented them as being. (Indeed, Screech mentions that no one will believe that he and Zach are actually friends.) Then again, this episode also takes place in Indiana instead of California so I guess it’s best not to worry too much about continuity.

On the How Condescending Is Miss Bliss scale, this episode score a solid 7 out of 10. She wasn’t anywhere near as a condescending as she would be in some of her later episodes but her comment when Mr. Belding asks her for the identity of the person who actually wrote the letter — “Why should I tell you? You just dumped me.” — pushes the score up to a 7.

Next week, Miss Bliss loses a lot of money when she stupidly allows the kids to invest it. What a terrible teacher. We’ll see what happens!

In 1985’s Runaway Train, Eric Roberts plays Buck McGeehy, a prisoner at Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison in Alaska.

Like the majority of the prisoners, Buck looks up to Manny (Jon Voight), a bank robber who has just been released from spending three years in solitary confinement. Manny is a tough guy who refuses to allow the prison system to beat him down. Warden Ranken (John P. Ryan) views Manny as being a threat to his authority and he’s especially angry that it was the courts that ordered that Manny finally be released from solitary. When Ranken tries to arrange for Manny to be assassinated at a prison boxing match, it’s Buck who saves Manny’s life. When Manny later manages to escape from the prison, Buck tags along.

Manny and Buck are a study in contrasts. Manny is as cold as the Alaskan landscape. He’s ruthless and doesn’t allow himself to get too close to anyone but, at the same time, he does live by a definite code. Buck is simple-minded, an earnest guy who talks too much and who probably wouldn’t have survived a day in prison if it wasn’t for his skill as a boxer. Buck and Manny manage to make their way across the frozen wilderness but, when they hop on a train, they soon find themselves trapped on the out-of-control locomotive, along with a railroad engineer named Sara (Rebecca De Mornay). The three of them have to find a way to either escape from or stop the train. At the same time, the obsessed Warden Ranken is determined to recapture Manny and, if that means flying a helicopter over the train so that Ranken can lower himself onto it, so be it.

Runway Train, which was based on a script by Akira Kurosawa, was one of the few Cannon films to find success with not just critics but also audiences and the industry. The Golden Globes nominated it for Best Film. The Academy didn’t go quite that far but they did nominate the film for Best Editing, along with also nominating Jon Voight for Best Actor and Eric Roberts for Best Supporting Actor. While Voight is a multiple-Oscar nominee (and one-time winner for Coming Home), Runaway Train is, so far, the only film for which Eric Roberts has been nominated. (He should have been nominated for Star 80 but his character in that film was a bit too realistically sleazy for the Academy to honor.) Roberts has described Runaway Train as being one of his favorite films and he even used the title for his autobiography. It was on this film that he met Danny Trejo, who not only trained Roberts for the boxing scenes but also helped Roberts kick his addiction to cocaine.

And Roberts has every reason to be proud. Runaway Train is a fast-moving, visually stunning thrill ride, a masterpiece of the pulp imagination. Yes, the symbolism of the runaway train is a bit obvious. Yes, the philosophical edge of the film’s dialogue can sometimes feel a bit out-of-place. Who cares? John Voight and Eric Roberts sell their characters with such skill that you don’t care that they’re both criminals who have done terrible things. From the minute we see that frozen jail and the prisoners tossing burning pieces of paper at the guards, we know why both Manny and Buck have to escape. John P. Ryan turns the warden into everyone’s worst nightmare of a small, pretty man with power, an authoritarian who uses the system to control the lives of others and who resents anyone who does not bow down before him. Even though her role is largely limited to reacting to what everyone else does around her, Rebecca de Mornay still turns Sara into a compelling character and never allows her to become merely a damsel in distress. Runaway Train is a heart-pounding action film and one that still holds up today.