Two Hundred A Day - Episode 90: Listener Q&A Special

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

Nathan and Eppy answer some listener questions! We talk about the origination of Angel, the relationship between James Garner and his writers, the place of the show in the continuity of detective TV, music from the show, and more. Thanks again for all the great questions, listeners! There's a clip in the show from this TelevisonAcademy.com interview with James Garner: Interview part 4 (of 6) (https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/james-garner?clip=chapter4#interview-clips). Here's the full interview (https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/james-garner). We have another podcast: Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday) at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files (http://tinyurl.com/200files)! We appreciate all of our listeners, but offer a special thanks to our patrons (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday). In particular, this episode is supported by the following Gumshoe and Detective-level patrons: * Richard Hatem (https://twitter.com/richardhatem) * Brian Perrera (https://twitter.com/thermoware) * Eric Antener (https://twitter.com/antener) * Bill Anderson (https://twitter.com/billand88) * Chuck from whatchareading.com (http://whatchareading.com) * Paul Townend, who recommends the Fruit Loops podcast (https://fruitloopspod.com) * Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app (https://rollforyour.party/) * Jay Adan's Miniature Painting (http://jayadan.com) * Matthew Lee, Kip Holley, Dael Norwood, Dave P, Dale Church and Dave Otterson! Thanks to: * Fireside.fm (https://fireside.fm) for hosting us * Audio Hijack (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) for helping us record and capture clips from the show * Spoileralerts.org (http://spoileralerts.org) for the adding machine audio clip * Freesound.org (https://www.freesound.org/) for other audio clips

Welcome to 200 a day the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show the Rockford files I'm Nathan Paletta and I'm Epidio Ravishaw and for this episode instead of looking at a individual episode of the show uh we're gonna do a little bit of Q&A we put out the call for some questions from our listeners um and we got a bunch of good ones so here we are uh yeah i i this is normally would we do the banter about why we chose the episode and whatnot so why a q a uh because we've been going for quite some time and yeah and uh maybe a little feedback back and forth with our audience would be nice, right? Yeah, for sure. Every so often, you know, we get a couple kind of responses to episodes,

and we'll put them in at the beginning of the next episode. But because of our time lag, that tends to be kind of a boom and bust, right? Like we'll get like some stuff for a short amount of time and then nothing for a while. So, you know, we try to put stuff in when we can but we're not always in a position where we're in constant dialogue with the listeners um so that'd be nice to kind of say hello and get a sense of what's on all of your minds um and also this is a bit of a easier lift episode uh to kind of fit into our time constraints towards the end of the summer as we're both dodging vacations and breaks and weather events and,

and whatnot. Yeah. It's, it's, it's been a busy summer, but speaking of time delay, this, this may be the most up to date back and forth we have here.

Cause we did, we have some, because we have some comments about Requiem for a Funny Box, which is the most recent episode? It should be our second most recent episode by the time this comes out. It was our episode 88,

which I believe is not the latest one, but the one before that. Okay, but pretty close by our standards. Very close by our standards. Hot on the the heels this is a very close chase here we got an email uh from listener jamie with some interesting stuff so in that episode if i recall correctly with the caveats that we don't remember what we say in the show. But this is the episode where we have the comedian, Kenny, who gets, you know, kind of draws Jim into not really his con, but his difficulties, shall we say. And there's the big twist with the mobster who turns out is gay and his dad doesn't like it. And it goes very sideways from there.

Anyhow, Jamie writes, I do not have any proof for this, but my guess is that Kenny driving his car into the lake is a reference to a real event. Shecky Green driving his car into the Caesars Palace fountains in 1968. So in the episode, there's a line where it's like, Management also told me that Kenny Bell has not been a headliner vegas since he drove his golf cart into lake mead kenny is very much in the vein of the borscht belt humor that shecky green was famous for uh though he was more of a stand-up guy pun intended than kenny and funnier apparently green is still alive and uh jamie heard him interviewed in the past few years on the Carson podcast. And there is a link.

He sends a link to a news story that, if I recall correctly, might be behind a paywall. Oh, no, it's I was able to access. OK, and I I don't pay for my news. So it's kind of funny. This is this is he hit the fountains at Caesar's Palace. And apparently when he hit it, he ran into the fountain. This is how the story goes. He ran into the fountain.

He put on his brakes and he put on his windshield wipers and waited for the cops to arrive. And when they showed up, he said, no spray wax. As if he was just in a car wash. This is funny. This is great stuff but uh it's a short little article and i'm just kind of paraphrasing what it is but like one of the things about it is that he's been in this business for a long time and that is the number one question he gets asked is if this story is true if this is the thing that actually happened

and he says that it is and that um uh he blames or doesn't blame but attributes that to they had like lampposts that were breakaway at that point. They had just put them in like they apparently, you know, we used to think that the best way to have safety on the road was to have something giant and sturdy and transfer all of that energy of a collision into the human body. And later we discovered that it's maybe better to have things crumple and take up a lot of that energy. And this is one of those moments where the lamp was designed to crumple so that he wouldn't kill himself on it. And so that's why he had a long and storied career after. Yeah. And we didn't really talk. I mean, the borscht Belt, this is we didn't really talk about that in our episode, but that's absolutely the kind of. Yes. You know, again, take my wife, please. Kind of humor that the that Kenny is riffing on the character of Kenny Bell is riffing off.

Yeah, it's it's fun in the episode. And we may have commented on this, but watching how Rocky just I don't even know if rocky gets the humor so much is that he just knows that something funny is happening and he should laugh he knows the shape of the humor yeah yeah exactly and you can tell that jim is just like oh come on like why are we still doing this and uh that's good stuff jamie also uh mentions so in that episode we also talked about car inspection stops because there's that point about jim's car getting stopped for a routine inspection and we talked about how i don't think either of us have experienced those jamie writes that i grew up in new york and in the 70s and 80s there were there were routine stops to make sure people had done their yearly car inspection i

think they also checked to see if you're taking your snow tires off by a certain date and then of course much later there were police roadblocks to check for drunk driving, but those would have been at night. And that reminded me that I definitely, when I first started driving in New Mexico, you know, as a teenager, there definitely were those nighttime drunk driving checkpoints. Oh, yeah. Where there would be barriers and you get funneled down into one lane and then, um,

basically just like roll down your window and it was up to the cop to decide whether you were drunk or not, I guess. Um, uh, but yeah. And so I don't think I've ever been stopped for a routine inspection, but those drunk driving stops definitely happened.

And that feels very much like a transition from the 70s to the 90s. Yeah. Transitioning from the, let's make sure that you've gotten your car safety inspection to let's see if you're drunk. You know, it's interesting because I was thinking about this because I just went on a big, long car journey. There was one point in it where we had to stop at a toll booth, which in and of itself is a very archaic thing nowadays because you would use your transponder. So high tech. I actually thought about this episode and I thought about like the this. If I wasn't crossing a border and the police were stopping people, the fear I would have about what dangerous situation is happening yeah like are they is there a fugitive or is there something else is there like a gas leak or they're

trying to get people to you know or whatever um so yeah it's definitely something that has fallen by the wayside as far as i understand but 100% believe they, they existed because it was in the Rockford files. Right. Right. That stuff is documentary. And then we have a follow-up comment from Rebecca on our Patreon. This is now the third shout out for getting us involved in this episode. So thanks again.

But she says that this episode is one of my favorites because it has so many curve balls. I remember being a little shocked on the first watch that Jim was so open about asking if Lee was gay because it was the seventies after all the fact that they even use that as a plot point. And that, uh, as far as I know, it didn't get any major pushback from the network blew my mind. I wanted to throw this in here because I feel like this is something that is absolutely

true. I thought that also, and I don't think we talked about it in the episode yeah but how there was kind of a moment of like oh oh he just said that huh yeah yeah uh it would be a perfectly comfortable uh conversation to have today uh but um given the time period uh yeah i i agree um yeah and also i think nowhere in doing the little the little amount of background research that we, that I do for these, uh, did I see anything about the network having any kind of problem or any kind of, I mean, certainly nothing to the level of, uh, making sure that there were seatbelts in all of the, all of the cars from, uh, our last episode. Uh, all right.

Well, thanks for those responses. And, responses and uh as always if you have thoughts or feedback about our episodes as we go rolling along you can email 200 a day podcast uh the let the letters uh 200 spelled out 200 a day podcast at gmail.com um you can tweet at us at 200 pod or join the patreon at patreon.com slash 200aday. All right. So that all said, let's move on to our cues that we can A. Oh, excellent. Yes.

We're going to take a quick break to say thank you to our patrons over at patreon.com slash 200aday. Thanks to you, we are a 100% listener-supported show. We extend special thanks to our Gumshoe patrons supporting this episode. Chuck from WhatYou'reReading.com, Paul Townend, who also recommends the podcast Fruit Loops, Serial Killers of Color, at FruitLoopsPod.com, Shane Liebling, check out his dice-rolling app Roll4YourParty for all of your online gaming needs at Roll4Your.Party, Jay Adan, check out his amazing miniature detective patrons enough for their generous support. and tenor on twitter brian perera at thermoware bill anderson at bill and 88 and of course richard haddam at richard haddam we follow them too at 200 pod why become a patron for as little as one

dollar an episode in addition to supporting the show and exclusive episode previews our patrons get plus expenses a bonus podcast where we casually chat about media we're enjoying and the things going on in our lives an episode of plus expenses comes out in advance of every episode of 200 a Day. Help out the show by leaving a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, tell a friend who you think would like it, and check out patreon.com slash 200 a Day to see if becoming a patron is right for you. We'll start with a couple from Twitter. When putting out the call, we did frame this as, ask us a question.

It can be about the show, or it can be about something that's not the show. Most of them are about the show. But we do have one from Twitter, from at 10stargames1, who asks, I have a question. Do you like RPGs? Can I send a free copy of my RPG about TV detectives?

Yes, and yes. So, yeah. So the question here that i have for you nathan yes um do you think the first question was meant to be a little facetious there may be a bit of a bit of a tongue-in-cheek uh yeah situation here 10 star games is uh in in in the in the biz as far as i know so yeah um i believe we have a little we're having a little bit of fun here but uh yeah i mean i would say currently direct all of your rpg submissions to epi because he probably has more time to read them i have a little more rpg bandwidth um yeah i actually went to tin star games um website uh to just kind of take a look at at the the stuff that they have there there's

a lot of like uh well i mean the name tin star has a very uh western sheriff feel to it um uh but i'm also very happy to just pick one up and take a look at it. It is this easy to, uh, yeah, to convince Epi to look at a role playing game. Right. Yeah. Um, I will say that there's a, so I, you know, as a long time listeners will, will know, cause we talked about a little bit, you know, I do have a, a detective RPG that's based on Columbo for the most part. Um, and that I think we may have talked at some point about like,

what would a Rockford role-playing game kind of look like? What would it entail? And I feel like that's actually been a much tougher nut to crack. Yeah. I mean, Columbo has a formula. Yeah. It has more of the formula. It has more of a dramatic formula yeah a format that is

very replicable yeah while i feel like the rockford files where i keep getting hung up with doing some you know because i'm not gonna lie i've made some notes about like what would a rockford files game look like as have i right um and i think i keep getting hung up on like um and i think i keep getting hung up on like once you take jim out of it like once you don't have this particular cast how much of it is just any detective show doctor who is another series that like there's been quite a few role-playing games doctor who role-playing games made uh but they all have to tackle that same thing where they're like so is someone going to play doctor who right someone's gonna play the doctor like is someone gonna play jim if not then so what is it what what are we what are we doing here what are we doing here uh as opposed to say something like

a star trek game where you can easily imagine a different uh starship and a different crew on it and just kind of play around in that universe there's uh 1970s uh la um you know malibu or whatever like i guess that's a fun world that you could play around in that's certainly a thing that you can role play in but it does it doesn't uh that's not what would carry right rockford files one so yeah it's a very interesting so i'll i'll throw out the one nugget that I think I've come, I've come up with and never, never done anything with. So maybe,

maybe for you or maybe for one of our listeners to, to run with at some point, which is that the dramatic content is kind of driven by the fact that, um, it's, it's, it's kind of a, you have three choose one dynamic.

Jim always has a set of pressures in order to get through each episode. And generally they're along the dimensions of like getting paid, keeping someone safe, and some variation of like stopping a crime or bringing a criminal to justice. And those three things need to be intention so that there's some element where if you're chasing money, it's either going to make someone more unsafe or less likely that you'll catch the criminal. If you're chasing keeping someone safe, it makes it less likely you're going to make money, less likely a criminal, et cetera, right?

That's kind of the dynamic that I think I would start building a game around. And that's as far as I've gotten. Because then get to the like so do you play jim or do you play a detective you know like what are we what are we doing here um but yeah that's the that's been the little kernel the little kernel of insight that i think has emerged for me out of doing this show for four years or whatever yeah i yeah i think that's a good very good starting point um the the sort of um cheat that i'm doing is that i'm i'm just doing a parody so it doesn't matter like it just doesn't like right the the whole thing i'm doing is just a complete joke so there's no need for me to actually be able to uh replicate a rockford files or not even replicate a rock profiles episode but

like the feel of the rock but yeah because mine is jim rockford meets the muppets you know and like so who cares like at that point you could absolutely just have a colombo character step in and start doing things or or but but why would you when you could have a muppet right exactly although i think peter falk would work really well with muppets but um i am intrigued like i will say we should state that that at no point in this tweet does tin star games claim to be making uh uh rockford files right it's a tv detectives one which is a broader genre and uh i'm curious to see how that gets tackled so yeah

i'd love to take a look at that and if the whole thing was uh just giving us a little a little humorous uh nudge then uh you should write a detective game why not and if you weren't aware that we were into role-playing games we are into role-playing games yes and in our in our early days the whole reason we were doing, not reason, the structure for the show was how can we use the lessons from the Rockford files to write better games and tell better stories. Yes.

And then we kind of covered all the lessons in the first 20 episodes. Now that there's not more depth there, but it's kind of, we're reiterating the same themes over and over. It used to be the second half or third of an episode. Yeah, the last half hour. Yeah, and we don't have that left in us. Yeah.

All right, so also from Twitter, at Steelers1288, which is how I like to read these numbers, asks, what episode did James Colburn direct? This is a very Googleable question however i didn't know off the top of my head uh and i was like huh james colburn directed an episode huh um and sure enough james colburn uh famous actor also winning actor i believe he directed season four episode eight irving the explainer which stands out to me because it's an episode that i am really looking forward to doing on the show but it it's one that i'm kind of like it's kind of in the slot for me of almost

like a movie where it's like i know this one's going to be a lot um right because it's it's it's an episode it's an extremely talky episode and it's very circuitous and weird and it might not be good but it's really good you know like right i don't know it's so it's one where we have to be on the top of our game yeah yeah i have to be like ready like i want to do it but i also want to be like ready to do it um so as it turns out it is the only thing that james coburn has ever directed um so i look forward to seeing yeah how how how that aspect of it stands out um uh james coburn was co-starred with james garner in three movies uh also so you can see the connection probably you know coming together there uh the great escape and the americanization of emily which i still have not

seen it was good so i'm told i think it was his favorite movie if i remember right james garner's favorite movie that he was in. And then and then he was in the Maverick movie in the 90s. So, yeah. Yeah. The Americanization of Emily is he plays a very Jim Rockford like character who's in the army. Like he's in acquisitions and absolutely does not want to get involved in, in the fight. And it has like a very moral ground for why he doesn't want to get involved

in. It's good. It's, um, it's also got, uh, um, Oh,

I'm blanking on her name. Julie Andrews. That's it. Yes. As Emily. Uh, and she's great in it too. And it's,

you know, uh, I think that one of the, the sort of kind of, uh, uh, what's the word I'm looking for here? Like a testament. One of the testaments to who James Gardner was that you always hear about people he's co-starred with and then like how they've been lifelong friends. Right. You know, like that.

So, yeah, I should definitely should watch it at some point. But, yeah, simple question. But interesting little delve. Looking forward to that, looking at that episode whenever we get to it. So we had a trio of strong questions in our email from listener Mary. And we'll start off with where did the costume department get those jackets? My dad got his from post office auctions and rummage sales or when mom bought him one from sears i don't have a specific answer for this because it's awfully difficult to find information on the logistics of

1970s tv costuming departments however i would not be surprised that Sears is probably an answer. Yeah, that seems like a legitimate. This made me think of lament that I don't see this stuff at like thrift stores and whatnot that much anymore so that I can't pick up my Rockford look. I don't have a Rockford. I wish I had a Rockford. I'm saying if only. Yeah. So like everything about the show and i think we'll touch on this a lot through a lot of these questions but like there's so much

of james garner in jim rockford right he's almost always like he always has like big not big not like obnoxious but like fairly fairly visible belt buckles yeah right and stuff like that and i feel like that's just kind of a someone who grew up in oklahoma and was the size of man that he was kind of thing right like he's also a fairly large dude so his clothes kind of have you know fit that body type um yeah and so there's probably not a huge difference in just stuff that he would wear i would imagine this is one of those areas where we have to we're not not the authority on this matter. So we're just speculating at this point. But I just recently learned that, speaking of Columbo, that Peter Falk provided Columbo's

wardrobe, like that was his own clothing. So it would not surprise me if a lot of that did just come from James Gardner's own wardrobe. The real question is, where did Angel get his clothes? Yes. So there's that. And I was just thinking about the episode with the woman who is also a detective that hired him. Oh, the real easy red dog? Yes.

And that one scene. We talked about the color blocking in that scene. Yeah. I mean, I don't mean to say that like everyone was just wearing their street clothes. Like clearly there's to greater or lesser degree, some episodes are more have more specific and thoughtful framing that includes the clothing than others. And obviously there was a costume department and everything um yeah i just think in terms of like the style and cut and that kind of stuff was probably like the same kind of things that that garner would wear um there was one little nugget

that came up when i was trying to look into this which is that there was a the costume designer for like the later part of the series it was like 78 to, uh, by the name of Kent Warner, his internet claim to fame is that so MGM auctioned off a bunch of stuff in 1970 that they had from movies, you know, throughout the golden age of Hollywood and everything, including Ruby slippers from the wizard of Oz. And this guy, Kent Warnerer he helped organize the auction and somewhere in that process procured four of the five pairs that had been made for that movie of the ruby slippers oh and those are like big collectors items and there was recently a story

like i think from like a couple months ago of either a pair of ruby slippers or maybe one of dorothy's dresses or something that had been uncovered in the like office of a somewhat of a professor who worked in a theater department somewhere um and it's it's a big discovery because there's only so many of these that are out there anyway little nugget that has nothing to do with the Rockford Files. But I was like, huh, what do you know? You have to wonder if he only managed to get four of the five pairs,

what powers awaited him if he had ever accomplished, if he ever put together all five pairs in the same. I don't know. I mean, those were powerful slippers. They're very powerful slippers. Question two from Mary.

I almost said Ruby. Question two from Mary. How close were Stevevie j cannell and james gardner the scripts all had such a melancholic outlook tempered with an abiding sense of honorable behavior that i wondered how much of it was the design of the rockford character and how much of it was the personal outlook of the writers writer slash writers good question and i i the phrasing here is great um and i think this is bang on the the melancholic outlook tempered with the abiding sense of honorable behavior yeah that's uh i wish i had written that sentence i mean it's it's definitely a solid draw for me for the show like i I've lately been thinking about how much just having, um, that sort of

melancholy being a part of something, uh, that just pulls me in, in, in ways where if it's absent, I'm not, I'm less interested in what's going on. So go on. Yeah. Uh, so I think from here on, we're going to have a lot, uh, a lot of the stuff that I'm going to be saying is basically going to have a lot uh a lot of the stuff that i'm going to be saying is basically paraphrasing out of the ed robertson book um 30 years of the rockford files which uh note for anyone who's interested there's a new edition out 45 years of the rockford files oh that i think came out last year or something so i'm not sure how much is is new or updated or changed um i know it's out i have not gotten a copy yet. I plan to at some point.

But yeah, I mean, we reference it all the time just because it's a great kind of one-stop shop for all the Rockford Files information you'd really ever want to know. So a lot of this stuff kind of comes from my read of that. Basically, anything interesting that we say is probably pulled from someone else who was either there at the time or interviewed people who were there at the time. We don't have like particular insight into things.

Like how it worked or whatever. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Or just a couple of knuckleheads watching a show. We enjoy the product and we like to analyze the product. Right, right. But part of that is finding out how the sausage is made, if you will. So to this question, how close were Cannell and Garner?

So I think probably pretty close. First of all, pretty much every oral history interview account of this show includes a mention of how like tight tight-knit everyone was how it felt like a family um even though it was you know anything like this is a difficult process they're always you know rushing it's always needs to be on a certain budget certain time like it's hard but that is the the people were all great people and everyone liked working together for the most part extending to with the movies bringing back people in roles that they'd had in the 70s that they had since surpassed in their careers. Right. Coming back into those older roles just because this was – I was the assistant sound person on the show in 1974. So now in 1994, I'll do that again even though now i'm you know like right some big shot right

um so that's one element and then another element is that so not without going like again this is stuff i guess one one could read all the details but the show was developed the original concept of the show by roy huggins was essentially developed with the idea that james garner would be the star like i mean it was originally a toma episode which was but he kind of had this idea of it would be something else and they could get garner back because he'd been doing movies and coming back from that like going back to the maverick days um like this is jim rockford is maverick, but a detective, right? Right. So that's the conception. And then Roy Huggins gives the pilot story to Stephen Cannell to write, right? So he writes the teleplay.

And we'll talk about this more also with the next question. But writing the actual script is where a lot of the Jim Rockford character emerged. And that's like from the pilot right that's like a candle knowing that James Garner is going to be this character writing towards his strengths and developing the character and then seeing it come to life right in the pilot so it seems like it's all intertwined like it's kind of well I don't know what do you so I'll throw back to you at this point because I was I was about to say it's kind of like going back and forth. But also, you know, Garner was always the I just say what they give me guy, right?

Yeah. We talked about this last episode. We were talking a little bit about improv. Yeah, I think we talked to we talked about this in the plus expenses. Plus expenses for our last episode. Yeah. So I'll just kind of restate because again because colombo keeps showing up in this one right a little secret colombos here and there um tiny

tiny colombos tiny little tiny guys just hanging out peter falk uh would improv a lot of the colombo mannerisms and would sometimes drop lines on people and you can kind of see that in the show sometimes like you'll ask them for a pen or something and and the actor will look a little befuddled um which is perfect for the show because this is exactly what the character of colombo is doing he's kind of taking people off their guard or whatever um then as we were talking about that we were talking about how james gardner like he reads what's written for him uh but that doesn't mean he doesn't breathe absolute life into the character right like there's different ways to collaborate and we do know that uh you know like we were just talking before about our assumptions that he

probably had a lot to say about the wardrobe or you know and we know he had a lot to say about the car you know we we have stories about um making sure like uh the same people were writing for him and you know like so there's obviously a dialogue going on there between um them and i like having never been an actor or a writer for television i don't know what that chemistry is like i can only only imagine. But in this particular case, my imagination is that it was probably really good. Like, you would have to be tremendously good at your job if that chemistry wasn't there and you were able to pull off a character like this with the life that this character has. Right. with the life that this character has, right? There's also something, there's an element, right,

of like once the show is established, the writers are writing towards the character that they know exists, right? Yeah, and this is a thing that people can engage in like recreationally. Like people do fan fiction all the time. The character exists, you have an idea of even how a certain actor plays that character and you can kind of write towards that and um yeah i mean i really find that feedback loop

very interesting like it's a it's a it's a neat creative process i'm vaguely remembering so there's there's on youtube there's definitely a series of interviews with Garner about the Rockford Files when he was, well, I think from the 90s. And I would have to look it up again. I did not have a chance in advance of recording. But I'm pretty sure in one of those interviews, he's like, Stephen Cannell was the greatest writer I ever worked with. What do you think makes Stephen Cannell a special talent for television? Most prolific writer I've seen in many, many years. He could just pour them out.

I watched he and David Chase. We needed a script on Monday, and this was like a Wednesday. And they started talking about a storyline, and David or Steve said, I'll write the first half, you write the other half. They put them together on Monday and they worked. That's how good they were. I was very fortunate. I had the three best writers,

and Steve Cannell, David Chase, and Juanita Bartlett. We had a good cast and good people and wonderful writers. It all starts with the writing. You're not going anywhere without writing. If I can find it, I'll throw it in the show notes. But I think all signs point to they were not only were they on the same wavelength about the character, but they had a very productive working relationship as friends and colleagues. Speaking of good, productive. Question number three from Mary. Angel Martin is one of the best characters ever written. No lies detected.

And Stuart Margolin played him perfectly. Again, no lies detected. Who came up with Angel? All right. So this was one I got to do a little bit of research on because I didn't know. So Angel's in the pilot. Again, famously, we haven't done the pilot yet. I want to do the little bit of research on because i i didn't know uh so angels in the pilot again famously we haven't done the pilot yet uh i want to do the pilot as our second to last episode so we still have a while before we get there um but but angel is in is in the pilot or and this was one of the great one of one of two great contributions to the show right from the jump uh from steven cannell which was was that apparently in the original story, Roy Huggins had him in there as kind of like a semi-important, heavy character.

And Cannell basically wrote in all the angel-ness into his dialogue and into the script for the pilot. The angel-ishness. The angel-ishness. Yes. So that's one great contribution. Cannell also basically wrote Rocky into the script. the pilot. The angelishness. Yes. So that's one great contribution. Cannell also basically wrote Rocky into the script. Oh, nice.

It's the other great contribution right from the jump. But then technically, on kind of the logistical level, Stuart Margolin was cast by Meta Rosenberg, who was the show's executive producer. But he was in contention, essentially essentially because he had been in nickels which was the the garner vehicle that had flamed out a couple years earlier and it was one source of why he like stopped doing tv for a while oh there's a whole history there but basically just uh it was another roy huggins joint that just didn't but this one it just didn't hit um it was another Roy Huggins joint, but it just didn't hit.

It was another Western. You liked James Garner and Maverick now in Nichols, but Nichols was just not right for the time or something. Again, there's a whole bit about it in the Ed Robertson book. But Stuart Margolin had been in that show, which I didn't know, in a similar role, in kind of like a Huckster kind of role. So now I would like to watch Nichols just to see how much chemistry is there. Cause it, cause it's kind of like, Oh,

well obviously this angel character should be Stuart, right? Like, right. Yeah. How much of that is there? I actually pulled a quote for this one from the Ed Robertson book. Jim Garner loves working with Stuart,

said Juanita Bartlett. From the moment they worked on Nichols, Jim said of Stewart, he gives you more than almost any actor I can think of. There's a wonderful thing that happens between Jim and Stewart. They just work so beautifully together. Yeah. So there we go. I mean, so there are a lot of great scenes with Angel in it. But like some of my all time favorite are Angel and Jim.

Like, you know, i thought we were friends you know these like they're truly heart-wrenching and they're hard to to to do without well i mean without having this character angel would be an incredibly annoying character if stewart didn't do it right like there's some there's something magical happening with this character that makes makes him work there's some element of like endearingness yeah that is like not because it's not like a heart of gold situation like the character doesn't have that like but he's really good underneath every so often he kind of comes through in the clutch because his own skin's on the line usually um it's important for the audience to believe that jim and angel are friends right and i think and and all of the text is telling you that this is a bad idea for jim like all of it and still it works and i think part of

that is that these two just work so well together that the the the the two actors just bring something to it that you just 100 believe it and also can sympathize with jim you could be like i've got a friend who i you know um obviously obviously not not you uh so like the the the question who came up with angel it's a little um it's a little uh which came first the chicken or the egg right like yeah like would would this character have worked if you know stew margaret wasn't available right yeah if they had don rickles so interestingly and this is something that we definitively cannot answer right now but in the pilot rocky is played by someone else because um um noah noah berry yeah wasn't available like you know he was booked with some other gig right but he was cast as that just couldn't do

the pilot and then yeah you know was off to the races for the rest of the show. And so one of the big questions for me when we finally do the pilot is like, all right, how thrown am I going to be by someone else? Some other Rocky. That's not my Rocky. That's not my Rocky.

Well, we'll find out. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. So, uh, yeah. Thanks for the great questions,

Mary. Oh yeah. Thank you. All right. We move on to some questions from patrons. Friend of the show, Sam, comes at us with a big one. Yeah. Since I've started watching Columbo finally, good choice, can you talk a bit more generally about where the Rockford Files sits in its cultural lineage or context in regards to what inspired and drove its creation and evolution?

And what you see as some of its key points of influence for future works. Columbo and Maverick slot into that heritage for obvious reasons, but what about other detective, PI, con man fiction in various forms before and after? Even the trend of aging screen star does genre TV might be an interesting lens to point in both directions chronologically. Big, somewhat somewhat shapeless question but still interested in any discussion it might inspire all right thank you sam it is a big question uh we will now present our thesis yes uh yeah i mean like we've we've spoken quite a bit already about sort of the the maverick heritage but maverick in and of itself has like a nice uh stand out against the western um in that it's it's not a story of a gunman as we would expect from a western it's a uh

a gambler just an honest gambler uh all right so if we're looking backwards right like we're looking at influences into the rockford files i think about how um this the rockford files to me is a little genre blending in that like it definitely like there is the the western influence via maverick there's it's obviously got a noir thing going he is a private eye right like in he's a private eye where trouble seeks him out often uh and um there And there's that going on. But then in contrast to the private-eyedness, it does, and Sam mentions this, there's the con man aspect of it.

We often bring up the sting, or I'm blanking on the name of the book. The Big Con. The Big Con, yeah. But with the addition of Rocky and the addition of the book uh the big con the big con yeah um but you know with the with the addition of like rocky and the addition of beth and there's a very okay i was i was gonna say family drama but it's like it's it's not that yeah so it's so i think interestingly the sting is is contemporaneous right so the sting is a 1973 movie. Yeah. Um,

set in the thirties, but, uh, you know, it's, it's kind of almost in conversation with the Rockford files. Um, I guess it's immediately preceding it.

Right. Yeah. You know, I think these things move in waves of like looking back at a thing. Right. So like we have these seventies movies that are looking back at the thirties, you know, eighties movies looking back at the fift, you know, 80s movies looking back at the 50s and 60s, 2000s movies looking at the 80s.

Right. Like, yeah, that's that's a thing. I guess another kind of just grounding point for the Rockford Files is that it was self self-consciously or specifically created to be a detective show that's not like all the other detective shows yeah in the same way that maverick is a western that's not like all the other westerns um and that's the stuff i don't know i feel like in a lot of genres we've talked about this i think on on a lot of plus expenses episodes but in many genres the stuff that sticks out in the arc of time is the stuff that was not, if the genre is just like a, there's this big river of,

of TV detective and police shows. Right. And if you're just like straight down the middle, I don't know, Hill street blues, maybe I'm like, you know, like if you're just kind of like a,

this is what we are show. And then you have stuff kind of moving against the current, right. Rockford files is breaking the other way. In the scope of time, as that, I don't know, I'm mixing my, I'm losing my metaphor here. But the stuff that sticks out is either stuff that's like exactly in the middle or the stuff that's cutting back the other way.

All the stuff between those kind of fades away, falls away and gets memory hold. And then like the stuff that sticks out becomes sort of the um right that is now the institution of the genre that later work is now going to respond to right yeah yeah that's where i was trying to go with that um yeah looking forward it's fun like one of my favorite things since we've started this is because of what we called the the podcast but the 200 a day or some variation thereof yeah shows up everywhere in detective stories past the rockford files it's got to be a nod every time yeah i mean like even i mean you know like the 20 a day star

trek yes episode right like yeah uh and i'm just things files the whatever files like yes there's there's tv episodes named the whatever files yeah and that's going to be the more like investigating kind of thing or maybe it's a send-up of a kind of detective thing or whatever but yeah um that's uh that's certainly uh a touch point for later work. Yeah. It would be interesting to me. And like, obviously, this is not research that I've done yet. Sorry, Sam, I've not done my homework.

Yeah, I feel like an adequate answer to this question will require way more off the top of my head TV knowledge than I actually have. Right. But I mean, like, to think of it as like, OK, so let's say we're going to do this homework. Like, where do we go next? Like, I would want to find out if, for instance, sent me a tweet from John Rogers, the leverage guy that was about the Rockford files or you know um but like that's me painting into one particular show it just keeps showing up over and over again and uh well i think there's like you could do a lineage project right where it's like okay where i would probably start is um go to it would be with magnum pi um because we already have the character, not the character, we have the actor crossover. Obviously, Eddie Brockleman. Is it Brockleman?

Not Jordan Bockelman from Twitter. Richie Brockleman from the show. Yes. Yeah, the Richie Brockleman show. But Magnum P.I., where there's text about how Tom Selleck had Jim Rockford as a role model for a character. Clearly, he does his own thing, but that show is coming out directly, essentially, out of the Rockford files, among other influences. And then, where do you go for Magnum PI? Now we're in the 90s, and I don't know what happened to television.

Oh, the other one I was going to say is Remington Steele. Yeah. Which, again, I haven't really watched, but the premise of it is a very Rockford-y premise. It's a con. It's a con, yeah, where it's like a fake detective that you know is created so that this so the woman can actually do her detecting um so like there's the branching paths from there where what did those shows then inspire that one could investigate to actually answer this question yes and uh i like the j turn uh being just a thing now. That's what people call it.

Yeah, yeah. So in terms of the broader cultural influence, yeah. The things that people who don't know the show wouldn't even know are references. That just are references. Yeah. 200-something a day or something a day. Something 100 a day plus expenses. The J-turn.

The X-files. x files yeah yeah yeah um to like bring mary back into the discussion for a moment here uh that wonderful thing she said about uh how it was uh melancholic outlook tempered with an abiding sense of honorable behavior so that actually that last bit there is the thing that I would be most interesting in seeing is if Rockford's sense of morality, which is kind of like a bedrock of the show itself, right? Like without it, the show doesn't, I don't think work. I mean, there's a lot of elements

without which the show doesn't quite, wouldn't quite work mean there's a lot of elements without which the show doesn't quite wouldn't quite work but um that i would be really interesting to see if that has had some sort of influence on fiction because some of these other things that are i don't want to say that they're superficial but they're easier to see they're easier to to uh but like if somebody said oh yeah i uh this character that i'm doing here, I wanted to capture the Jim Rockford sense of, Jim Rockford honor. It combined with his well-honed sense of self-preservation. In a weird way, the first place that I go to actually is bringing star trek back into it is oh obviously is a captain picard yeah as a character there's a different obviously it's a different character with a different portfolio right of like what he is there to do for the show

but that idea of there's of there's this like essential commitment to an essential commitment to a morality or an essential commitment to an ethical system that isn't a here are all the rules and I never break my own rules, but is more of a here are my principles. And I will look at a situation through and in contrast to my principles. The principles themselves. I mean, they might evolve they don't really i mean neither of these characters i think of all like i think those are bedrock to the character they're not yeah they're not character arc elements yeah um but uh yeah and it doesn't mean they act the same way because they're different principles but the fact that they are there and they are humanistic is something that bridges that that makes like it makes total sense to me in

the fiction why captain picard would be so obsessed with noir detectives right because that like you know a a honor honorable men in dishonorable circumstances is like something that kind of connects for me it's it's been bugging me this this whole conversation. I just recently rewatched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which came out after The Rockford Files, based on a book that probably was written before The Rockford Files. I'm not entirely sure. But the reason why it came out to me is that he took the job for $200. Oh. So I was like, somewhere very recently this happened. So I was like, somewhere very recently this happened.

And yeah, I would not be surprised that that wasn't in some way in dialogue with the Rockford Files. But the question I have for the Picard thing is, like you said, it's not a surprise that he has this. Nathan and I are fans of a podcast about the holodeck episodes of the Star Trek. And we know that Picard likes to play this noir detective so the question is that noir detective charges twenty dollars a day which i i would bet you uh ten of his day's wages that was a reference to the Rockford Piles. I wonder if there is an influence there.

I mean, a stated influence by someone. One could probably look up some exhaustive Star Trek website somewhere to find that out. Which maybe we'll leave it to those other podcasters to do sometime. When the conventions start rolling again. And when I feel comfortable going to them again, which may not be the case ever, and you have actors and people that have created television shows sitting there waiting to sign things, I think I will just bring my phone and just ask each and every one of them how they were influenced by the Rockford Files to find out. I'm not trying to make light of Sam's question, which is a great, obviously inspired a lot of good discussion here. But I actually genuinely am now curious to find out who can draw a lineage to the Rockfordford files um either directly or indirectly well maybe we'll we'll leave that for further investigation as we do have some more questions to get to okay

but no i think that's yeah it's as as sam says big big question but um hey you know what i don't know why this just occurred to me now but like we should punt this to our audience. Like if you know of influences, like absolutely email us. 200adaypodcast at gmail.com. Yeah. Or hit us up on Twitter. And yeah, we'd love to hear about it. Start making one of those conspiracy maps with the thread and the. Yeah, that'd be good.

Put it on the inside of the closet door. So you don't know until you go into the closet and the... Yeah, that'd be good. Put it on the inside of the closet door so you don't know until you go into the closet and then... Okay. All right. Here's a question. We'll go from the general to the specific with our next question from a patron, Paul,

who asks, Hi. That's not the question. Hi, Paul. I've loved some of the recent apps. Thank you. And it's been great to listen to how much you find in each episode uh my question is to ask about your takes on the music of course the incredible theme tune but also the incidental music which does so

much with the basic theme in youtube there are season-based compilations of music that i sometimes work along to uh good to know but i wondered what you might want to bring to a discussion about that from your various worlds. It's really a pleasure to keep tuning in to hear you. Thanks, Paul. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. I gave up making notes about music in my notes because... Because we keep going, huh, there's some good music here. Right, exactly. So I'm not the most musically literate person. I could very poorly recite almost every Sabbath song to you. That's a thing I can do. But in the beginning when we were doing this put that in context because the timing of the music is so important and when we talk about what happened in the show it it's not it's you know it's it's beat for beat but it's not beat for beat you know you know what i'm saying yeah sometimes

i mean you would know this if you listen to the show um i do sometimes put in some of the music like when we're specifically talking about it to if i listen to the show i would know this if you listen to the show um i do sometimes put in some of the music like when we're specifically talking about it to if i listen to the show i would know yeah okay no no but i i which i only say to to say that sometimes you have to hear the transition or you have to hear the music with the dialogue or hear how the dialogue drops out or whatever to like yeah get why we're like oh this moment was so good um yeah and so that is hard for us to convey when we're just talking about it i 100 agree on the music i will definitely check out those youtube uh compilations there there have been moments i mean mean, like more recently, not Requiem for the Funny Box, the other one that we just did.

Oh, our latest episode. Caledonia, It's Worth a Fortune. Yes. It did some amazing things with the theme song and the banjo when the chase sequences started. You don't often hear from me saying they did something amazing with the banjo, but they did something amazing with the banjo. And I agree. The way the incidental music weaves the theme in and out from time to time. We've always kind of commented on when there's a very interesting directorial choice.

very interesting directorial choice and oftentimes the ones that have the most striking directorial choices also have like these i'm going to say weird but i don't mean it in a derogatory way like just these different from the normal episode they stand out yeah and like how the music is a part of those scenes yeah for sure yeah so uh agree with all of that. I have a couple, again, logistical notes from paraphrasing out of a section devoted to this in Ed Robertson's book, which is that so the all the theme music right is Mike Post and Pete Carpenter. I don't know anything about about them other than the way that this is phrased here is that yeah mike post is kind of the guy you talk to and then he works with p carpenter to do the actual work that's interesting like they are collaborators but like right p carpenter just doesn't talk to anyone right i guess i don't know yeah not to cast aspersions i'm just saying this is all phrased um mostly from post's point of view but um he's brought in by Cannell to do the music.

So again, creatively, you know. It's a Steve Cannell joint. They were really the groundbreakers of doing rock music, like doing TV music based in rock and roll or other popular music genres as opposed to classical right tv scores and i you know movie scores work from the tradition of silent movies and generally were you know composed for orchestras right and then um in this section there's a quote from post talking about uh henry mancini who if you've been watching Columbo, you may recognize as the Columbo theme guy who innovated the repetition score, which I think this is just what I'm used to because I don't really watch a lot of TV before the Rockford Files or Columbo. Other than the Prisoner prisoner which has its own yeah rock stone thing kind of thing going on with its own music so this is this is a period where

like the tv music was transitioning early 70s right uh so mike post credits steven cannell with kind of like giving them the direction to get them to what they got to. We talked about the kind of guy Rockford was, how he was more interested in collecting his $200 a day plus expenses than in catching bad guys, and that he was kind of quirky, how because he'd been to the joint, he had a kiss-my-ass attitude towards the police, despite his friendship with Becker, how he was friends with Angel, even though he knew Angel would steal him blind if he could, and how he also had a rhineness and sweetness about him,

which you could see in his relationship with Rocky. We tried to write music that has humor. We wanted to create music that was tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, with your fist on your hip. As if you're saying, hey, kiss my ass. I could imagine. Okay, so recently i watched a youtube compilation of 30 some shows that were introduced during like the fall or mid-season lineup across all three usa channels the uh abc nbc and cbs for one year like it was this one year where they introduced like 30-some shows,

and it was in the early 80s. I don't remember the exact year, whatever. If you go online and look it up, it's very intriguing to see because they just play the opening credits for each one of the shows, and it's kind of fun to guess what the show's meant to be or whatever. But that's a lot of television, right? What makes me think of is just like how you could phone that in when it comes to for theme music.

They could be like, hey, we just need something in this mood and you just play something in that mood and you let it go. But they go through the trouble to like know the characters and decide that this is the music that will reflect the characters. I mean, I'm not saying that this is unheard of or it doesn't happen all the time or whatever. I don't know. I haven't been involved in it. I mean, half of those shows that you're talking about

were probably scored by Post and Carpenter. Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's very true, actually. But it's very... That's interesting to me. Well, I just love how distilled, I mean, so that was, I was reading a quote from Jim and like,

I just love how distilled that is of like, here are all of Jim's character elements. Right. And here are the other characters that reflect those character elements. I guess that makes sense coming from Cannell. Like here's the distillation. Um, yeah,

specifically, uh, everyone mentions the harmonica and i think that's where we get to the good that's like that's the rockford instrument right there's not always harmonica but when there is harmonica you're like oh yeah this is this is the good stuff yeah it it's that moment where you're like, oh, it's going to happen. Whatever it is. Something that I think is really interesting is that the music is most, at least to my sensibility, is real bluesy more than anything else. Like, you know, it's using rock instruments, but like the actual how it actually sounds to me is pretty bluesy. Like the actual how it actually sounds to me is pretty bluesy, which is an interesting choice for a show that's set in Malibu. Right.

Right. It's not surf rocky. It's not. Yeah. And it's not like showbiz-y, like Hollywood or something like that. And I think I've never thought about it before until right now. but I think that's a testament to how well suited it is. Is it's like, yeah,

Jim Rockford's kind of a bluesy character, right? Yeah. Um, there was a, uh, Portlandia had had a skit at one point about, um,

the way all of the music for television at this one point in time in which this skit came out was just the steel guitar uh you know like blues not blues metal but blues rock kind of thing or whatever which is not the the kind of thing that you're talking about there but it makes me think of like how horrible the rock for files theme would be if it was from that time wouldn't it just i like there's so much about this show that's iconic but the music is definitely a standout thing and um yeah yeah what is there to say it's real good i will i will endeavor in future episodes to make notes of when the music does a thing that i'm like

hey wait a minute what the music did here was interesting uh to to mention in the actual podcast though for paul just for you paul yeah the last thing i would say about this and this actually leads into our our final question a little bit is that and i think we talk about it in the movie episodes but how they update the theme yeah for the 90s movies and how it's kind of like it's not bad but it's very 90s yeah in a way that like this theme doesn't necessarily i mean i guess it feels i guess it feels 70s in the way that like here's a long piece of tv theme because tv shows don't do that anymore right yeah um but yeah i guess the even so the night so like the 90s thus far, we haven't done the later ones yet. But they, you know, they keep the actual, you know, motif and some of the instrumentation. But like there's some synths, there's some like more rock guitar.

And somehow it hasn't aged as well as the original stuff, like much of the 90s yes yeah in fact it actually has kind of a more of an 80s than a 90s feel especially those are those first two. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe later on they'll get a little more Jesus Jonesy.

And then, uh, I don't know. I haven't watched all the movies yet. Uh, uh, and then maybe they'll switch to grunge. They finally get to grunge.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that was the extent of my musical knowledge. Jesus Jones grunge. That, that was the nineties. Those were the,

there was the dividing line between the two the very last one is a uh new metal version yes if only um all right so this does get into our final question here where uh our patron brian uh at thermoware on twitter asks i've seen all the tv episodes but have never seen any of the movies. What's the premise for what has gone on in the time between the 1970s shows and the 1990s films? So I was thinking about this one. And I don't remember if there's any like, I don't think there's meant to be a gap, right? I think as far as in jim's life he just keeps plotting along right as the private eye it's not like he goes off and does something else right yeah and and so when we

come back to him his his uh trailer is a little bigger it's a little more uh revamped or whatever but not like it's sort of like somebody just spent the last 20 years saving up to buy an extension onto his trailer. Like that's the extent of it. And he's a little older. He's a little more beat up. But all of the characters are still there. There is definitely some complications between Jim and Beth. Right.

And we know IRL that those are due to contractual things. But Beth, we haven't – wait, have we done an episode with Beth has returned to the 90s? Yeah, I think the last movie we did perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, so kind of there's a couple things that are mentioned in the movies. Like there's no like here's an info dump of all the things that have happened yeah since 1980 right because yeah or 1979 um the first movie is kind of a because it's the return of the rockford files right so like it has the whole series of natural disasters oh right and that's kind of what we track jim through the first part of the movie we kind of see him like hanging on

through right these all these things going on all this unrest and everything in the early 90s the title of it is i still love la right like that's the so it's just sort of uh a tribute to the area despite all of the hardship that is hit right so in that interim it is established in that movie that he married and then divorced this woman who is now the subject of this episode. And we kind of get the, you know, we get that sense of like he tried to settle down, but really he's kind of a hard guy to live with. Yeah. And then in the one where Beth comes back, which I think might be the third movie. I guess I could look it up.

But yeah, Gretchen Corbett comes back. Beth comes back. And it's established that she got married, left her law practice, and wrote a book. And Jim is kind of salty about her success, which is part of the text you know part of part of that that movie uh and like dennis you know got a promotion finally yes he's a he's a lieutenant um chapman's a commander or not deal deal with the commander uh angels angel angel age is like a fine cheese yeah and i think we in our episodes about the movies i think we talk about how like of all of them i mean they all really do seem like they just never miss a beat in terms of

the character interactions everyone acts exactly how you would expect a older version of the person to act which is a testament to all of them as actors and everything um so noah barry passes away yeah uh but he's not before the movie the first movie comes out i think he's he's the character of rocky exists in in he doesn't he's not on screen but he's in the background of the first one like i think they mentioned that he's fishing or something like that they go to the graveyard they go to the grave i thought that was later a later one was that in the second one yeah in the first one there's a moment where they look at where jim like looks at a picture of rocky yeah and they do like an in memoriam thing i think at the end yeah maybe i'm getting my wires crossed about which movie is which um so he he was in it you know he couldn't be in the movie he was he was ill so he wasn't in the

first movie but they do right because he has a phone conversation with rocky and he has the picture on his desk and that's in the first yeah um and i was filmed before he died oh we've seen the fourth one we've done the first four because uh and this is the other bit um is that the fourth movie is kind of centered around uh becker's you know dennis's son dennis's son yeah who jim is the uh the godfather for um yeah so we have we have four of those left to do two of which are directed by steward margolin right and i cannot wait for that yeah so i don't remember exactly the sequence, but yes, he couldn't be in the movies. Of course, he, Noah Berry was, the actor passed away before the first movie premiered, but he was in it in spirit. They had the conversation in the picture.

And then he's established as having passed away sometime in between then and the next couple of movies. I forget exactly which one yeah anyways so obviously we have um perfect recall right yeah so i guess which is all to say that like yeah they don't sweat like building canon between them it's more like they establish some things for fans like people who watch the original show who want to see them pick up where they left off. Yeah. And they basically can kind of slot in any character with a little bit of like background that could have happened any time in the last 15 years. And a lot of that feels much like the original TV series where you would occasionally get characters that Jim had history with and we're just like, oh yeah, he had history with them.

That's all we need to know. jim had history with and we're just like oh yeah he had history with them that's all we need to know there's uh if you're avoiding the movie or have been avoiding the movie so like the first four at least have no scrappy do there's no there's no like uh there's no here's my nephew yeah who's now going to help us out i uh i was just thinking about like what uh uh a rockford files scrappy do would be like. And I'm like, they would do it right. They would just do it right. They did it right with Richard.

I mean, wouldn't it be Richie? Yeah, Richie. He's Scrappy-Doo. They already did it. It is perfect. It's a great set-up of Scrappy-Doo, which probably occurred a decade before Scrappy-Doo did. So, yeah. So I guess, yeah, there's, you get all of the establishment of things you need to know in order to make the relationships make sense

in the same way that the 70s episodes give you everything you need to know to make the relationships make sense. Yeah. They're just sometimes placed in time a little differently because of the era that they're in. Yeah.

That brings us to the end of our questions. Thank you, everyone, for sending us all that good stuff. Delectable questions, things to dig into. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking forward to more. To getting back to the show. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

We'll see how how things go we have a bit of a time juggling well yeah we have a little bit of juggling to do with our schedules in the near future and then i think we'll be able to uh finish out the year pretty strong hopefully yeah and get to more more episodes of the rockford files perhaps more of the movies yeah uh as we've been as we were just talking about them, as we've been threatening to do, I feel like, for like a year. Yeah. To do the next movie. But just looking at that list,

thank you, Brian, for pointing us at that list, because that has definitely now put that in the forefront for me. I'm like, yeah, I want to hit that next one. Yeah, thanks again. We appreciate you listening. I think it continues to surprise and delight me that people listen to the show and like it.

So thank you all for that. It's really, as always, a bright spot for us as all of the wild times that we live in continue to be wild. With that, I suppose we will sign off, perhaps, to some good harmonica music, if I can pull a representative sample for the end of the show. But rest assured that we will be back next time with another episode

or perhaps movie of the Rockford Files. Bwam bwam bwam bwam bwam. Bwam bwam bwam bwam bwam. Bwam bwam bwam bwam. Bwam bwam bwam bwam. Yay!