Above you see embedded the entire pilot episode of the 1967 version of Jack Webb's Dragnet series. In the episode titled "The LSD Story", Sergeant Joe Friday (Webb) and his partner Bill Gannon (Henry Morgan) are introduced to the wild world of LSD when, out on a call, they meet Benjie "Blue Boy" Carver, a young man with his head buried in the ground looking at the center of the earth. You know the something is up with Benjie, because his face is painted blue on one side and yellow on the other. If you haven't seen the episode, you really should, if only to catch the vibe of this 1967 television series as it tries to wrap its head around the youth culture of the 1960s. Also, Dragnet was so perfectly minimal, it can't help but remind me of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy comic strip from the fifties and sixties. Ernie Bushmiller kicks so ass.
But the reason for this posting is because my old apartment building appears in this episode of Dragnet! It's almost like I'm in the episode! In the 13th minute of "The LSD Story," Joe and Bill pull into a parking lot, and right there in the background is my old place on Dracena in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles!
I lived there for about ten years, and while I knew it was a cool old building from the 1920s (my apartment even had a genuine zinc lined icebox), I had no idea it was in the legendary Blue Boy Dragnet episode! The episode that, when it first aired in 1967, had everybody at St. Joseph's Elementary School talking about the freaky things we had seen on television the night before!
2 comments:
a curse on hulu for not streaming to the UK
have you seen the quincy and the punks episode?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpYd7bOn52M
it's a cracker
"Saw a blind man the other day/Took his pencils and ran away!" Now that's poetry!
Post a Comment