bonanza

Veteran character actor Jeremy Slate - you might not know the name but you definitely know the face - died of complications from throat surgery last week in Los Angeles.

Slate was known for his movie roles in Girls! Girls! Girls!, Lawnmower Man, and Hell's Angels '69, but he was even more known for the massive amount of work he did on the small screen, starting in the late '50s. Slate was a regular on the 1960 series The Aquanauts, and had guest roles on many shows, including Route 66, Perry Mason, Dr. Kildare, Naked City, Have Gun, Will Travel, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Mr. Lucky, The Untouchables, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Bewitched, Combat, Tarzan, Bonanza, Ironside, Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Wonder Woman, The Wonderful World of Disney, and many others. Most recently he guest-starred on an episode of My Name Is Earl.

I remember him most from his two soap roles: he played Chuck Wilson, Asa's assistant, on One Life To Live for many years, and had a short-lived role as songwriter Locke Walls on Guiding Light in the mid-80s (he was involved with Alexandra Spaulding and her son Nick, if I'm not mistaken).

Filmmaker and iconoclast Robert Altman died Monday evening in Los Angeles at the age of 81. While his legacy is firmly rooted in the cinematic realm with films like Nashville, MASH and The Player to his credit, television wouldn't be the same with him.

Altman's career actually started in television in the early 1950s. He directed dozens of television episodes for shows like Combat! and Bonanza, as well as the short-lived, but critically-acclaimed 1997 series Gun, which followed the history of a single gun as it passed through different owners and scenarios. The mini-series Tanner '88 is still the guidepost for political satire in film and television. His film MASH, of course, became a revolutionary television series of the same name.

When I learned about the Seinfeld tidbit that they tried to add nonsense lyrics to the theme but failed, I started thinking about theme songs over the years that stick in your head despite the fact that they're presented without lyrics. There are more shows than you think that fit into that category, and they're not all one-hour dramas (where most lyric-less theme songs can be found). Adam put up a list of them in December. But there are particular ones that have adhered themselves to my cerebral cortex to the point where I probably hum them in my sleep:

(Click on the name of the show to hear a sound clip from each theme)

iWatchNow, a new Web-based video-on-demand service, launched recently. Normally I don't get too excited about these things because I don't enjoy watching shows on my computer and I don't own a Video iPod. However, the company is offering some cool classic shows, including Dragnet, Bonanza, Jack Benny, and others. What I found personally appealing was the offering of classic cartoons like Popeye and Felix the Cat. Of course, most of these shows you can catch on cable anyway, but then you wouldn't be paying $0.99 to watch them, would you? See what I mean? Because I sure don't?