A few years ago on a panel at Comic-Con, I mentioned that I was a fan of the 1978-1981 TV detective show Vega$ starring Robert Urich. A fellow in the audience who reads this blog had an extra set of the entire series on DVD (this set) and he was nice enough to send it to me. I've been watching one or two episodes per night for long enough to get through, so far, the first season.
Have to say I don't enjoy it as much now and I did then but I enjoy it enough to keep watching. A small part of the problem may be watching so many of them back-to-back, night after night. You begin to notice a certain sameness from episode to episode. For instance, Dan Tanna — the private detective played by Mr. Urich — takes on very few cases that would pay him his oft-quoted, rarely-paid price of $200 a day plus expenses.
They're mostly cases involving friends or friends of friends or people who can't pay…as if the producers told the writers, "We want him to be personally involved in every case." Tanna seems like a great guy but if you're his friend, you're destined to be beaten up every so often, shot at and/or framed for murder.
Then again, seeing shows in rapid succession has made me impressed with how good Urich was in the part. And I'm impressed with how elaborate some of the episodes are in terms of set-ups and crowd scenes and shooting all over Vegas. It's hard to believe they could have filmed some of those in five days.
Las Vegas of 1978-1981 is one of the big stars of the show. Tanna rarely drives his red 1957 Thunderbird convertible to any hotel that still stands. The T-Bird is also a star. I used to own one of those cars and I still love 'em. There are big chase scenes involving it where I'm thinking, "Oh, I don't care if Dan Tanna gets killed. Just don't wreck that great car."
(I assume they had a couple of 'em. I actually saw the main T-Bird he drives in person some years before the show went on. It was owned by Dian Parkinson, one of the prize models on The Price is Right long ago, when she was married to the guy who later produced Vega$. It was in the valet line at a party and she was ahead of me. I never saw such a beautiful woman get out of such a beautiful automobile.)
I also like that the show has just about every familiar face from that era of television either in a starring guest spot or a cameo. The first season alone, we had Cesar Romero, Robert Reed, Sid Caesar, Molly Picon, Barbara McNair, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin, Bill Dana, Nehemiah Persoff, Richard Bakalyan, Cameron Mitchell, Kim Basinger, Red Buttons, John Marley, Henry Jones, Isabel Sanford, Shelley Berman, Pernell Roberts and everyone else who ever sailed for the same producers on The Love Boat. Norman Alden and Andrew Duggan had major guest roles as two different people in different episodes in the first season. Muhammad Ali, Dean Martin and everyone else who set foot in Vegas did cameos.
One person I hadn't seen in the first season was this comedian I keep talking about on this site, Dave Barry. To remind you: Dave Barry was a stand-up comedian who appeared often on The Ed Sullivan Show and in clubs and hotel rooms across the country. He also had a decent career doing voices for cartoons, including a lot of vintage Disney and Warner Brothers shorts. I had the pleasure of meeting him twice before he passed away.
Vega$ filmed all over that city but was most often based at the Desert Inn and in the show, you saw a lot of the big marquee signs out front of every hotel but especially the Desert Inn. In the show's opening titles, and often in the episodes themselves, you see that WAYNE NEWTON was headlining there and in smaller letters below his name, it says DAVE BARRY. His name was on the show a lot that way.
So I figured Dave Barry would show up in an episode but he didn't. I looked him up in IMDB to see which one he'd be in…and while the credits there for the series seemed pretty complete, there was no listing for Dave Barry ever appearing on Vega$. Wayne was on the show twice — once playing a character, once playing Wayne Newton — but no Dave Barry. It seemed kinda unfair to me.
Now, since I've been writing here about Dave Barry, I've been in e-mail correspondence with two members of his family. Last night, I was watching an episode of Vega$ while I was answering some e-mail and I was about to write to his grandson when I heard a familiar voice from the screen. I looked up and there was an actor playing a bit part as a casino security guard…
The voice gave him away. It was Dave Barry without his toupee and with what may or may not have been a fake mustache. He was not listed in the show's credits and he was not listed in IMDB, though I think his grandson is adding him in for this. But that was Dave Barry…in a scene that was probably filmed at the Desert Inn during the day when he was opening for Wayne that night. It's only about a minute and a half but you can see it in this video, about four minutes in. They even found him a bald stunt double or maybe a hairy one with a bald cap.
I'm very proud that I recognized him. That's the guy who did Humphrey Bogart in all those Bugs Bunny cartoons and was briefly Elmer Fudd and a lot of other folks. I'm now into the second season of Vega$. I'll let you know if anyone else interesting shows up. I'm sure many familiar faces will.