I was at Costco yesterday and I bought a barbecued chicken, a package of raw New York Steaks, a case of canned cat food, some notions for the bathroom, a package of batteries, a package of light bulbs, some supplies my Cleaning Lady demanded (someday, she'll figure out that she works for me) and a box containing enough Cheerios to last me three years or until my June visit to Costco, whichever occurs first.
Oh, yeah — and I bought a huge package of paper towels. When you depart Costco, there's an employee at the exit who checks the items in your cart against the items on your receipt…and it doesn't matter how many you have or how they're piled on top of each other in the cart. This employee can miraculously and instantly and with obvious x-ray vision, determine that the purchases in your cart precisely match the items on your receipt. I believe they're also not allowed to let you out unless you've purchased a huge package of either paper towels or toilet paper. Most people get one of each just to make certain they're permitted to leave the building.
And I also bought the complete collection of Yancy Derringer episodes on DVD. This may come as a surprise. Those of you who memorize every word of this blog like you're supposed to do, will recall that in this post almost two years ago, I wrote about my fondness for that old TV series, I gave you this Amazon link to order the complete set and I told you I'd advance-ordered it.
Which I had…but there was a problem with something else I ordered at the same time and that whole order got canceled. I somehow never got around to reordering the DVD which turns out to have been fortuitous. Back then, it was $31.44 and as you can see in the above pic, I got the same exact DVD yesterday at Costco for seventeen dollars. There were 34 episodes of the series so that's fifty cents a Yancy. (If you'd like to use that Amazon link now, the price as I type this is $18.71. Or you could go to Costco and get toilet paper and a barbecued chicken while you're at it.)
As we've discussed here before, a lot of shows I enjoyed in my youth have not aged well. Neither have I but leave that aside. I still think every episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was later rewritten and refilmed to make it silly and chintzy-looking. They were not like that when I first saw them. I now can't believe I watched more than three episodes of My Favorite Martian without getting tired of their one plot. (Uncle Martin has accidentally been transformed into a _____ and Tim has to find him before he _____.) Today, if you were determined to get me to watch multiple episodes of Land of the Giants, you'd have to strap me into that chair that they put Malcolm McDowell in in A Clockwork Orange.
But some shows hold up. I've been watching Adam 12 lately on MeTV and before that, they ran the entirety of F Troop and I'd forgotten what a good show that was. And of course, shows like Sgt. Bilko and The Dick Van Dyke Show and Car 54, Where Are You? only seem to get better with each passing fall schedule. I caught some Yancy Derringers on MeTV and other cable channels and I enjoyed them enough to commit to all of them. Jock Mahoney was awfully good in the title role.
I can't believe that in that earlier post, I neglected to tell you of my own encounter with Mr. Mahoney. It was at one of the first San Diego Cons back at the El Cortez Hotel. These were the cons that we now call Comic-Con International.
Today, they're full of movie and TV stars but at this one, which must have been around 1975, Jock Mahoney was one of the biggest TV and movie stars on the premises. Kirk Alyn, who had played Superman in some movie serials, was usually at the cons and you could sometimes spot David Carradine walking around…but that was about it. Mahoney, who had once played Tarzan in a couple of very poor Tarzan movies, was hanging out with Russ Manning, who was drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip. I was then writing and editing Tarzan comic books — though not for long — so you figure that when Russ introduced me to Mr. Mahoney, we'd all talk about Tarzan.
But we didn't. We talked about Yancy Derringer…which pleased Mahoney a lot because he thought very few people at the con knew who he was and that none of them remembered the elegant Mr. Derringer. Somewhere in what I jokingly call my files, I have a photo of Jock, Russ and me and if I ever find it, I'll post it here, assuming I don't look too stupid in it.
I wish I could remember everything we talked about. I know I kidded him about always stealing Pahoo's lines. (Pahoo was Yancy's Indian sidekick and he never spoke.) I know we talked about how he had been a stunt man and was now involved in some program/school that was training new stunt people. And I know we talked about his stepdaughter, Sally Field. But mostly, we talked about what I'd liked about Yancy Derringer, which was how classy and non-prone to violence his character was. At a time on TV when everyone was shooting at everyone else, it was a welcome relief.
He seemed to be in fine shape but later, someone told me he was still recovering from a stroke a few years earlier. He died in 1989. If you buy the DVDs or just catch some episodes somewhere, you'll see why he was one of my favorite TV leading men.