TELEMOVIE MASHUPS
BY AMANDA REYES

If there’s one thing Hollywood is good at it is repurposing material. The modern world is teeming with remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, and whatever else you can place the letters “re” in front of. While that might be the sort of thing that can make retro lovers throw their hands up in despair (can they please stop remaking everything?), it is certainly not a new concept, and television has always made the best of reusing footage in an effort to produce new moneymaking products. Mashups in episodic television is a well-worn concept that includes everything from adding flashbacks from previous installments to editing together full episodes into movie length form. This patchwork creates new formats that work for everything from episodic programming to telefilms to theatrical re-releases.

CLIFFHANGERS

Hoping to capitalize on the nostalgia of the melodramatic serials of yesteryear, in 1979 NBC used the cliffhanger serial structure to promote programs that had the potential to be turned into their own series. The one-hour format allowed for three serials to air each week—Stop Susan Williams, which riffed on The Perils of Pauline; The Secret Empire, which capitalized on The Phantom Empire; and The Curse of Dracula, which featured the world’s most familiar bloodsucker. Divided into short segments, each tale premiered as a story already in progress, as if several chapters had previously aired. This mid-season replacement ran against Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, and, as might be expected, flopped. The only serial that got to run its full course was Curse, starring Michael Nouri. This Dracula tale was eventually edited into the TV movie format and released under several titles including Dracula ’79, The Loves of Dracula and World of Dracula, and enjoys a small cult following.

THE DAN AUGUST COMPILATION MOVIES

In 1970, Quinn-Martin produced the telefilm House on Greenapple Road, which is based on the Harold Daniels novel of the same name. Starring Christopher George as Dan August (the character’s name in the novel was Dan Nalon), the TVM was successful enough to warrant a series, but George turned down a chance to reprise his role on a weekly basis. He recommended a then-unknown Burt Reynolds to take on the action packed cop show. The short-lived series hardly caught the attention of viewers, but Reynolds’ star was just beginning to shine and his prominent role in Deliverance (1972) and subsequent fame encouraged CBS to rerun the series during the summers of 1973 and ’75. In 1980, Quinn-Martin cobbled twelve episodes together, turning them into six feature-length telefilms. This economical mashup only involved editing the end of one episode with the beginning of another one.

Titles:

Double Jeopardy (aka Once is Not Enough)
compiled from Death Chain and Prognosis Homicide

The Killing Affairs
compiled from The Assassin and The Manufactured Man

The Trouble with Women
compiled from Epitaph for a Swinger (aka A Climate for Murder) and The Titan

The Lady Killers
compiled from When the Shouting Dies and The Worst Crime

The Jealousy Factor
compiled from The Jealousy Factor and Murder By Proxy

The Relative Solution
compiled from Dead Witness to a Killing and Days of Rage

EXPERIMENT IN TERRA

Hoping to coast on the success of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica was a gorgeous—and expensive—adventure into a new universe where man battled robots in their search for the planet Earth. With only twenty-one episodes under its belt when it was cancelled, Galactica seemed destined for obscurity. But, subsequent reruns, a disastrous spinoff (Galactica 1980) and a wildly popular and well-respected reboot in 2004 have kept Apollo, Starbuck and crew in our collective memory. Galactica’s legacy was also aided by several telefilms that were cobbled together from the series. The most interesting of the bunch uses the original title from the Battlestar Galactica episode Experiment in Terra, but combines that episode’s footage with several others, including Galactica 1980’s The Return of Starbuck. Terra begins with a co-narration from Patrick McNee and Lorne Greene, as they explain how Earth came to know about the Cylons and their war on humans. Using footage from the pilot movie, and beautiful illustrations showcasing the Cylons as “serpents” (as Greene refers to them), the bulk of the film reused and expanded footage from Terra, and cut down footage from other episodes. The combination of Galactica and its 1980 successor has made this TVM a highly sought out curio for sci-finuts.

Clockwise from above: Michael Nouri calls out to his children of the night in Curse of Dracula; Ben Murphy, Patricia Stich and Lorne Greene solve crimes in Griff; and Timothy Van Patten gets an education in ninja-ing from Lee Van Cleef, The Master.

Other titles in the series:

Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack
compiled from Living Legends Part One and Two and Fire in Space

Murder in Space
compiled from Murder on the Rising Star and The Young Lords

Phantom From Space
compiled from The Lost Warrior and The Hand of God

Space Prison
compiled from Man with Nine Lives and Baltar’s Escape

Space Casanova
compiled from Take the Celestra and The Long Patrol

Curse of the Cylons
compiled from Fire in Space and The Magnificent Warriors

Conquest the Earth
compiled from two episodes of Galactica 1980—Galactica Discovers Earth and The Cylons Landed

THE GODFATHER: A NOVEL FOR TELEVISION

Newspaper promotions heralded the re-edited Godfather saga as something that has “a sense of continuity and scope that simply could not be achieved in a theatrical presentation.” Put together in chronological order by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather: A Novel for Television, is a four-part miniseries that boasts over seventy extra minutes of footage, although it also tones down the language and violence. Considered a curiosity at the time of its original November 1977 airing, it was met with unexpectedly mild ratings, but is held by many Mafia movie fans as an enjoyable, and even superior, alteration on the first two cherished films. This miniseries is also known as The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television, The Godfather Saga, and The Godfather Novella, and should not be confused with the 1981 video release The Godfather 1902–1959: The Complete Epic or the Godfather Trilogy: 1901–1980.

GRIFF

Griff ran on ABC during the 1973 season and only produced thirteen episodes. Lorne Greene played a cop turned P.I. and Ben Murphy was Mike, his beefcake sidekick. Despite its short run, two telemovies were compiled out of four episodes. The telefilm The Case of the Baltimore Girls was assembled by stringing together the episodes The Last Ballad and All the Lonely People. Death Follows a Psycho was clumsily patched together from the episodes Countdown to Terror and Elephant in the Room. For Psycho, the editor attempted to make the two episodes seem as though they were occurring simultaneously by adding extra footage with voiceovers. For instance, in one shot there is a radio with an announcer talking about one of Griff’s cases while the audience sees him investigating the other one. Despite the awkward inserts, Death is worth visiting for Ricardo Monatalban’s harrowing turn as a man determined to avenge his son’s death.

THE MASTER

In 1984 NBC was hoping their two Friday night mid-season replacement shows would help the fledgling network out of their low rated bind. Legmen and The Master targeted a young male audience by featuring lots of cool eighties action. Legmen was about bail bondsmen and it quickly faded into obscurity after a mere eight episodes. The Master, which one journalist reviewed simply as “Master a disaster,” seemed destined to the same fate when it was cancelled after only thirteen episodes. However, the pilot caught a young Demi Moore somewhere between General Hospital and St. Elmo’s Fire. To capitalize on the newfound popularity of some of the show’s guest stars, The Master was redubbed The Master Ninja, and re-edited into a series of telefilms, featuring two episodes loosely strung together (essentially the end credits of the first episode and the opening titles of the second episode were omitted). These quasi-TVMs were then released on VHS in at least six volumes, making most of the series available on the home video market. Again, Master was headed for relative obscurity, when in 1992 Mystery Science Theater 3000 saw fit to air two of the TV movies. The goofiness of the premise and the witty commentary by the MST3K crew introduced the series to a new audience, and it has properly claimed its cult status.

Titles:

Master Ninja
compiled from Max and Out of Time

Master Ninja II
compiled from State of the Union and Hostages

Master Ninja 3
compiled from Fat Tuesday and Juggernaut

Master Ninja 4
compiled from High Rollers and The Good, the Bad and the Priceless

Master Ninja 5
compiled from Kunoichi and The Java Tiger

Master Ninja 6
compiled from A Place to Call Home and Failure to Communicate

ROMANCE THEATRE

Telenovelas have a long and prosperous history in Latin America, dating back to the 1950s. Like the American soap opera, the genre concentrates on many of the same romantic fundamentals but, unlike those counterparts, the telenovela is most noted for featuring stories that have a distinct ending, as compared to the soap opera’s infinite universe. Now the genre is better understood and more accessible to the American public, although that was not the case in 1982 when the series Romance Theatre appeared in syndication throughout the country. Romance Theatre was an anthology series that featured five thirty-minute episodes, which culminated in one weeklong standalone tale. It was high Harlequin, indeed, and the original host Louis Jourdan only whispered musings of love through his irrepressible French accent. The episodes were shot on video and looked every bit the soap opera format they were aping. The series lasted two seasons, and many of the stories were edited together and released as feature films on home video in 1986. This market proved to be beneficial to the melodramatic romance series, and the original six-film release sold over 100,000 units. Still, Romance Theatre remains rare, with scant information available.

Some of the titles in the series:

Isle of Secret Passion

The Awakening of Cassie

Lights, Camera, Action, Love

Love in the Present Tense

Bayou Romance

Gamble on Love

TALES OF THE HAUNTED

It can be hard to remember a time when horror anthology series were all the rage. Shows like Thriller, The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents began a legacy of small screen terror that eventually morphed into Tales from the Darkside and Monsters, while Hitch and Serling got their own remakes. In between many of these well-loved shows, are the ones that didn’t fare as well. Darkroom was an excellent early eighties anthology that ran for six short episodes, and Tales of the Haunted only got one story told before moving into horror oblivion. Tales was a Canadian series that ran in syndication for thirty minutes every weeknight, and like Romance Theatre, told one story throughout those five days. Christopher Lee was the narrator. Their lone tale was titled Evil Stalks This House, and features Jack Palance as a menacing interloper who terrorizes a pair of elderly women located in a remote and appropriately creepy house. However, the tables are turned as Palance goes from terrorizer to terrorized. This intended shot on video series ran in July of 1981 on various independent channels and didn’t seem to cause too much of a stir (although Lee’s involvement generated some press). Evil was eventually edited together, cutting out much of the footage (including any existence of Lee’s involvement), and squeezed into a one-hour format, which aired on CBS’s late night schedule in 1987.

TURNABOUT

This gender-bending 1979 sitcom based on Thorne Smith’s popular 1931 novel tells the tale of a successful and happy couple that find themselves in a pickle when they wake up in the other’s body after making a wish. Turnabout attempts to bring the story into the world of second wave feminism, and has a lot of charm going for it, but little in the way of genuine laughs. The quirky but short-lived series got a new life in an early eighties re-edit, when four episodes of the series appeared as a TV movie. The pilot episode was combined with Penny’s Old Boyfriend, Statutory Theft and Till Dad Do Us Part. The new ending, which shows the couple switching back to their original bodies appears to be reversed footage from their switch in the pilot.

MASHOUT? SHOGUN

As a twelve-hour miniseries event, Shogun was hard to beat. The finale drew close to 100 million viewers and one liquor store in Burbank reported a 700% rise in the sale of Saki thanks to Shogun’s popularity. That’s what we call a success! However, the running length made it an unlikely European theatrical release, and the 547-minute blockbuster was condensed down to a two-hour version that incorporated some extra violence and nudity while excising the heart of the story. This version debuted on network television in July 1984 and was later turned into a failed Broadway musical!