No, “Bonanza” was just another weekend ritual that you had to get through, like my mother’s overcooked rump roast.īut then, in the mid-1960s, came “The Big Valley” and the Barkleys, led by Victoria (Barbara Stanwyck), the widow of rancher Tom Barkley. Years later, he was back on Sunday nights as “Trapper John, M.D.” In 2010 he went to the Great Actors’ Studio in the Sky, where perhaps, at this very moment, he and McLean Stevenson are teaching a seminar on Great Career Moves. Not to mention the uniquely unsubtle and intrusive music scores by David Rose, who early in his career must have traded his baton for a trowel.Īnd the characters, for the most part, were at best bland, with the possible exception of Pernell Roberts’ Adam, but even he didn’t stay for very long Roberts eventually quit the show, figuring he could do better. It also didn’t help that the show was on Sunday nights, which to me often had an ominous feel because I knew another week of school was lurking around the corner.Īnd although I don’t remember the early “Bonanza” episodes, some of which might have been interesting (Robert Altman was one of the directors, and he later dedicated the “The Long Goodbye” to the memory of Dan “Hoss” Blocker), the episodes I recall often had a leisurely, even sluggish pace.
#The hostage bonanza tv#
So for me, color TV was not a selling point for “Bonanza.” This was also when you could control the colors with knobs on the set, and it was sometimes fun to look at a color TV that had been tampered with (though not, of course by us, oh no). My mother bought it, and we six kids played along with it for a while we knew it was the best my parents could do.īut that didn’t stop us from lusting after the color TVs we saw each week at a local department store. It had a thick strip of blue at the top and green at the bottom, with a more neutral color in between. Some enterprising soul had invented a rectangular plastic sheet that you could place over a black and white TV to make it seem like a color TV.
Oops – your honor, let me rephrase that: We didn’t have a color TV set until the early 1970s.įor there was one period, in the 1960s, when we did have color TV of a sort. I don’t think we had color TV until the early 1970s, when I was about to begin college.