One of Bill Woodson's earliest face acting jobs came in season 2 of Burke's Law (1st series). Paul Lynde just happened to be in the rotation of Aaron Spelling's repertory company during the course of the series.
In "Who Killed Merlin The Great?", Bill is a newscaster on-site at a magician's convention. Paul plays the hotel doctor. This episode was remade almost completely 30 years later in the remake of the series.
In the 1994 version, retitled, "Who Killed Alexander The Great?", Mark Hamill (Batman: The Animated Series, etc.), Tom Bosley (ex-Happy Days, Father Dowling Mysteries, The World of Peter The Gnome), and John Astin (ex-Attack of The Killer Tomatoes, The Addams Family) were among the guest stars. You'll see that another day.
2 comments:
A couple of points here:
- Bill Woodson's career, both on- and off-camera, goes back to the late '40s; his major gigs then were narrations for feature films, mainly in the crime and adventure genres.
Woodson also played cops and lawyers and such on-camera, in many film shows as far back as the early '50s (check IMDb).
- "Who Killed Merlin The Great?" was written by William Link and Richard Levinson, during their tenure at Four Star; L&L did many Four Star series in the early '60s (not limited to crime and mystery shows).
30 years later, as noted, nuBurke's Law repurposed the story into "Who Killed Alexander The Great?"; the writer was James L. Conway, who was nuBurke's showrunner, with a credit (and royalty payment) to Levinson & Link.
But wait - there's more ...
In 1986, L&L, in collaboration with their protege Peter Fischer, mounted a new series on NBC, Blacke's Magic, with Hal Linden and Harry Morgan (you wrote it up on the other blog in '14).
The two-hour pilot film was "Breathing Room", which took place at a magic convention, just as the two Burke's did.
The story details were different in each of the shows - but the murder gimmick and the ID of the killer were the same in all three.
This happens in movies and especially in TV all the time, and has for years; there's even a term for it: Haircutting, as in "give this script a haircut to make it fit the other series".
In this case (or these cases, if you like), Levinson & Link got to reuse their murder gimmick on Blacke's, because it was theirs in the first place.
When nuBurke's decided to do "Alexander", they had to pay L&L for the gimmick (the script credit was an extra).
As I said, it's commonplace - and has been for years in TV.
- By the way:
When you embedded the episode here, did you notice the face on the screen?
That's Robert Easton, in one of the many TV appearances he was doing at the time.
Remember back a few years, when you wrote up a Ghost Busters episode about the Red Baron?
Bob Easton was in that show too - years after this one.
Just for fun, why not go back and check it out?
I may do that.
We just lost, I think, Link, the other day. The end of a long, distinguished career.
As for Bill Woodson, I am going to pull up his IMDB file soon. I had some F-Troop appearances here, but they were deleted by Dailymotion due to WB putting in a claim, I would assume. He was the Secretary of War, appearing in 3 season 1 episodes.
It's the voice work he's mostly known for, as I've documented here previously---The Invaders, The Odd Couple, Ellery Queen (1975), and his toon work.
Post a Comment