Here, slightly but unavoidably delayed, is the clip from Mr. Terrific, the "other" sitcom about a nerdy superhero. The same night Captain Nice debuted on NBC, Mr. Terrific first flew onto CBS, a half hour earlier. Actually, as you'll see, this is two clips. The first is the Mr. Terrific opening with a nice bit of narration by the ubiquitous (in the sixties) Paul Frees. Then the second part gives us a few minutes from one episode that pretty much captures what was wrong with the series. It wasn't that funny.
I know little of Stephen Strimpell, who had the title role. He apparently was more of a stage than screen actor and he was at one point quite prominent in New York theater as both a performer and teacher. He also was one of those people — there sometimes seem to be a lot of them — who go to law school, pass the bar…and then go do something else. One wonders if at any time when they had him dangling from wires in a baggy superhero suit, he paused to think, "Well, I guess this is one way to uphold the law." Ten bucks says that the casting calls for this show said they were looking for a "Woody Allen type" and Strimpell was as close as they could come.
The rest of the cast included Dick Gautier, a fine gentleman who tells me he reads this weblog. You probably know he played Hymie the Robot on Get Smart and Elvis Conrad Birdie in the original stage version of Bye Bye Birdie and Robin Hood on When Things Were Rotten and hundreds of other roles. Did you know he's also a cartoonist? Check out his website and see some examples. And also in the cast, you have John McGiver, who was on every sixties sitcom at one time or another to play a frustrated authority figure, and who starred in a fun but forgotten sitcom I liked called Many Happy Returns. Playing his aide was Paul Smith, who may have set some sort of record for doing bit parts on TV shows without anyone ever knowing his name.
I recall getting bored with Mr. Terrific after an episode or two but I watched Captain Nice up until its also-quick demise. Someone did an article soon after in TV Guide saying that the two shows had cancelled each other out; that the lesson television should learn is not to do two shows at the same time with the same premise because neither would succeed. Of course, only a few years earlier, we got The Munsters and The Addams Family in the same season and they both did okay. I don't think either of the superhero sitcoms was that wonderful and in neither case did you have particularly endearing characters. William Daniels, who played Cap'n Nice, is still one of the great actors out there but he's cold and — as his John Adams was described in 1776 — "obnoxious and disliked."
Here's Mr. Terrific in its fleeting glory…
