Archive for July 2003
Dead Air: Tales of the Gold Monkey
July 3, 2003, 11:02 pmEntertainment Geekly - July 03, 2003
Some shows are an attempt at something different — not necessarily new (so few things are), but at least something not seen in awhile, with a bit of a twist to help it stand out. Other shows are so obviously capitalizing on other, usually contemporary, works that if you listen to the theme song hard enough, you could swear you can hear the executives in the background yelling, “Money! Wheee!” Tales of the Gold Monkey is (I’ve always suspected) one of these shows. That makes it a bit cheap, but that doesn’t mean it’s an altogether terrible show.
In 1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark hit theaters and we were amazed. Just over a year later, Tales of the Gold Monkey hit TVs and we were… well, we just were. It was a fun show and we certainly were looking for more of that high adventure we saw in Raiders, but something didn’t click. Maybe we didn’t need a lot more high adventure, just a smidge thanks. Maybe it had a suck timeslot. Maybe in the end it could never measure up to what we were hoping for (which was high enough that even the second Indiana Jones movie didn’t make the cut). For whatever the reason, the show hit its twenty-first episode — a decent season length — and sank from view.
The premise was simple enough; Jake Cutter, seaplane pilot and dimple-chinned man of action, along with his cycloptic dog, Jack, spent every week, well, in action. Episodes more often than not involved lost treasure (the first episode involved the search for the statue of the Gold Monkey — I’ll be damned if I can remember why the hell anybody wanted it), experimental weapons involving the Japanese or Germans (the show was set in 1938, which means the Earth was covered in Nazis looking for experimental weapons, lost arks, and gold monkeys), kidnappings or attempted kidnappings, and helping old friends of Jakes from the days when he flew as a Flying Tiger. This, I will sidestep to explain, is one of the cooler aspects of the show — I knew little about the Flying Tigers at that time, but the show got the better of my curiosity and sent me into the books. I did say that some shows do attempt something rarely seen and a twist and I guess this counts — but the whole Indy-esque aspect doesn’t count well in favour of the show.
Maybe I’m just being cynical and maybe the producers weren’t trying to cash in and if that’s the case then I applaude them for A) sensing the public wanted to see some high adventure and B) give them my condolences for coming out on the heels of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which it was inevitable it would be compared to. Look, I’m doing it right now.
Beyond the Flying Tigers and the half-blind dog, the show was pretty standard fair, only Nazis got punched more than you’d find anywhere else on the TV dial. Also of particular note is that Roddy McDowall was Louie, owner of the Monkey Bar (hyuk hyuk), the favourite hang-out of everyone on the show. There was the irrascable mechanic buddy, an American spy who was a hottie (The Charming’s Caitlin O’Heaney) and German spy who was, well, German. Toss in a second babe in the form of a princess, ruler of a nearby island (shrug) and her Japanese bodyguard (shrug… shrug) and there you are — a recipe for fistfights.
It was a fun show while it was on. It didn’t make many careers. Stephen Collins (the man under the hat playing Jake Cutter) went on to 7th Heaven and Roddy McDowall went on to Fright Night, Gobots, and years later, just plain Heaven. But for a brief period of time it did fill the void between Raiders and Temple of Doom and for that it has my undying (slightly grudging) respect.
—castewar | no comments
(posted in the Dead Air category)
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