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#814: Riding With Death
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This epic slice of the Seventies is actually two episodess of a failed
and monumentally stupid TV series welded together. It (they) star(s)
the vacuous, meaty Ben Murphy, an alleged Harvard Law grad, now a
super-agent for a super secret agency that works out of a parking
garage in Sherman Oaks. On a super secret mission, radiation turned
Ben invisible rather than killing him and ending the series before it
started, dammit.
In the first episode of the -ahem- movie, addle-pated Ben plays a
trucker, a station far beyond his intellect, and along with Heywood
Floyd from 2001: a Space Odyssey spearheads a badly planned transport
of a super-secret fuel additive from-
Aw, who the hell am I kidding? Why even bother? The plot is stupid
and pointless, The dialogue pat and smarmy, the actors stagy in
that Mid-seventies Universal Television "who-gives-a-good-crap"
sort of way, Heywood Floyd is embarrassingly bad. And to cap it
off, Riding With Death showcases the slimy ministrations of the
insipid, badly dressed and apparently talentless cracker Jim Stafford.
And I'm just talking about the good stuff.
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Prologue:
Mike shows off his talents as a teppanyaki chef, chopping everything
in sight; he slices off one of Crows claws, cooks it lightly and serves
it to him. Yum.
Segment One:
Mike and the 'Bots get an urgent call from the nice camping
planet: Bobo, Pearl and Brain Guy are under attack by renegade
warlike robots! Bobo has Gas, Brain Guy is dressed like a nurse,
and Mike ultimately blows up yet another planet, by gum.
Segment Two:
Servo, looking not unlike Anthony Geary*, plugs in
his Arp and struts his stuff in a musical tribute to the Seventies.
But poor dumb Servo has got it wrong, he wrote about the decade
of 70 A.D. (or C.E., if you must), not the Nineteen Seventies!
Hilarity ensues. Crow rounds out the cast.
Segment Three:
Servo, inspired by all the trucking in the movie, has somehow
procured a skinny-legged but paunchy trucker body, complete with
flannel shirt, little cowboy boots and belt buckle. Mike points
out that he has no butt. Servo takes exception; he likes his
butt and talks to it.
Segment Four:
Crow appears in just the cutest little outfit, and declares himself
Turkey Volume Guessing Man! The premise hinges on one or two
colloquial uses of the word "turkey" in a pejorative context,
and quickly collapses when Mike demonstrates his own uncanny
ability to guess an area's volume in increments of turkeys.
Segment Five:
On the S.O.L., Mike and the 'Bots try to recreate a canned method
of injecting a actor who wasn't in a film into the film. It fails.
In the Widowmaker, Pearl forced Bobo and Brain Guy to honor her with
so many medals and ribbons for bravery she topples, sending them
careening off into the beyond somewhere.
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While we were shooting this episode, a crew from Gold Coast
Productions was at our studio, shooting a behind-the-scenes special.
Bill Corbett was dressed in his Observer makeup as a nurse, all
day long. As a result, many viewers might come away with the
impression that Bill is a cross-dressing albino. This is very,
very true.
During the production of the behind-the-scenes special, the producers
made the mistake of giving us home video cameras to document our
true selves at work. I think you will see us as we are, a bunch
of bizarre, hammy, blathering fools who somehow have barely enough
wits about us to cobble together a puppet show in a reasonable
amount of time.
As for the movie Riding with Death, I could go on for hours
on how annoyingly inept this thing was. Looking over the
encyclopedia of prime time TV, it becomes apparent that casting
Ben Murphy was the kiss of death for a series, and yet he managed
to work for years without anyone becoming suspect. And Jim
Stafford, I'm told, was once named one of the ten best dressed
men in America, giving additional weight to my argument that the
1970's was the most shameful era in fashion perhaps in the history
of Civilization, with the possible exception of the Elizabethan
Era when Men wore panty hose and puffy shorts in public.
- Kevin Murphy
*Anthony Geary played Luke on
General Hospital, a
character who rose to become America's favorite sexual predator.
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