A few years ago, when one of the channels I was then receiving on my teevee began rerunning old Man From U.N.C.L.E.s, I watched a few and experienced a mild but undeniable shock. I'd seen those shows when they first aired and they hadn't been as cheap and shoddy-looking then as they were now. Back when Napoleon Solo first hit NBC, his environment had the expanse and grandeur of the best James Bond flicks. These reruns had obviously been refilmed since to lower their production values — or at least, that's how it felt to me. They were still entertaining in their way — I was never a huge fan of the thing — but I remembered them as being more lavish and with fewer scenes that now look to me as having been shot in someone's tool shed with a security-cam.
There may be a couple of reasons for this change besides sheer, overrating nostalgia. One is that I now watch TV on a larger, sharper screen than I had then. Another is that having toiled some years in the TV business, I'm a little more conscious of what's costly to do on-screen and what isn't.
Lately, my TiVo keeps snaring old episodes of Hawaii Five-O, which is a show I intermittently enjoyed as a youth. I watched it avidly for a time, then got bored with the endless repetition I summarized in this article. As I watch them now, I'm struck by something I hadn't fully realized before, which is how truly awful most of the acting is…and I don't mean "awful" in the way that any TV show filmed in 4-5 days is likely to contain some line readings that would set Lee Strasberg to rotating inside his crypt. I mean that apart from the occasional guest appearance by a William Devane or someone in that category — and leaving aside James MacArthur, who was always good — that show employed some astoundingly poor actors.
In fact, I'd wager a high percentage of them weren't even actors in the sense of ever making a living at it elsewhere. Filming in Hawaii, the producers probably ran through all the good thespians in town quickly and rather than pay to fly someone in from Hollywood for a bit part, they started tapping local amateurs. What I really had not noticed when I first watched these shows — which means either they did a good job of it or I wasn't too perceptive then — is how many incidental actors are looped, and not by themselves. There was an episode on the other day which called for three or four young, beautiful women of Hawaiian extraction to loll about in bikinis. Each had a few lines of dialogue and each was overdubbed by, I suspect, the same professional voiceover actress. Obviously, with a short production schedule and a limited talent pool from which to draw, the producers couldn't find decent actresses with both the proper physiology and thespian skills. They probably didn't even try; just said, "Cast 'em for their looks and we'll loop 'em later."
An amazing number of the bit parts, I now realize, were dubbed…and some of those that weren't probably should have been. But it also was done with large roles. A few weeks ago, I caught one episode — it was one of the ones where Hume Cronyn played his recurring character — where some handsome gent of Asian ethnicity played a boss who controlled the rackets on Oahu. The actor had a hefty amount of dialogue and every word of it was supplied by voice legend Paul Frees, probably at some little studio here in Los Angeles.
At times, I wish Paul had dubbed Jack Lord and given him that fey Inspector Fenwick voice from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons. I understand why someone thought Mr. Lord was a star as he does have that insistent, intense air about him — but, boy, is he a dreadful actor. Pat Paulsen had more range of character and emotion…and maybe still has. I just watched one that guest-starred William Shatner and between him and Lord, it's a wonder there was any undevoured scenery left in Hawaii when filming was done. And yet, the odd thing is it worked. Like a trained horse, Jack Lord could do just what they needed him to do when they needed it. I can't think of any performers currently anchoring a TV series who are that limited…but then I also can't think of a current TV show that has it down to a formula in quite the way Hawaii Five-O had it, either. Maybe there's a connection.
What I'm curious about — and maybe there's someone still around who knows the answer to this — is to what extent the dubbing of inadequate actors was part of the standard production schedule. Some episodes, there are several looped parts. Some episodes, there seem to be none…and that's when you get those real terrible two-line performances that I'm sure would have been dubbed if they were going to the trouble of bringing professionals in to replace anyone's dialogue that week. It's almost like in mid-filming, they had to decide, "Are we going to spring for loopers this episode?" And finally someone's performance would be so unacceptable that they'd have to spring for a dubbing session, call in people like Paul Frees. June Foray recalls that she did a couple of them…so if you're watching and you see some native girls who sound like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, your ears aren't deceiving you.
And I really hope that the guy in charge of hiring the voice dubbers was named Dan Something. I'm imagining that they're in the middle of an episode and some untrained actor gives a performance that evokes the "Springtime for Hitler" look in everyone else on the set, and Dan runs up to the director. "Do you think we need to hire Paul Frees again?" he asks the director. And the director turns to him and says, "Book him, Danno."