I was going to save this until Friday, but I'll go ahead and post it today so that no one else will worry that this thread is dying.
JERVISTETCH WINS BIG!
Out of character
1.) In order to do an IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE type story, this character was made to look like a mean boss – forcing her agency staff to work on Christmas Eve. But in almost every other episode, she never asked her agency staff to do much of anything. -
Maddie Hayes on Moonlighting -
JERVISTETCH2.) In a blink of an eye, this man suddenly found his first officer had a beard, his communications officer was wearing a provocative outfit and two other officers were trying to assassinate him.
Captain Kirk on STAR TREK:TOS (“Mirror, Mirror”) - JERVISTETCH3.) In the pilot if the show, this man told his wife they did not have five children, but later episodes showed they did!
Cliff Huxtable on THE COSBY SHOW In the pilot, when his frustrated wife asked, “Why do we have four children?” he replied, “Because you did not want to have five.” Later on, the producers wanted to have a college age daughter, so presto – child #5 appeared. -
MRSEHJ4.) This alien character once lamented that he wasn’t even there when his son Buck was born. But later episodes showed he had been an integral part of the birthing process for all of his children. -
Detective George Francisco on Alien Nation (He was not only there, he was the one that gave birth to him). -
JERVISTETCH5.) This Sergeant had two sisters – one named Babe who was very attractive and getting married, and another named Muriel, who was a plain Jane and still single. Trouble is, he referred to both of them as his “only sister.” -
Sgt. Carter on Gomer Pyle USMC (to be fair, the references were three years apart) -
JERVISTETCH6.) There was an episode of SEINFELD taking place at a wedding in India, an episode of CHINA BEACH where a nurse discovers she is pregnant, and an ER episode where Dr. Luka Kovac is involved in an automobile accident. All three of these episodes had an unusual thing in common. What was it?
The narrative of the episodes ran backward -
JERVISTETCH7.) This Doctor found his friend, the commander, suddenly wearing an eyepatch, his country England is a dictatorship and….oh, yes, the world is ending!
Doctor Who (the Tom Pertwee version) - "Inferno" An alternate universe story where drilling into the earth's core was causing the end of the world. He managed to return to his own universe and prevent the experiment there from having the same deadly result. -
JERVISTETCH8.) This animated character once got conked on the head with a jar of car polish and started acting like a refined man named Frederick. In another show, space aliens made duplicates of him that could only say one three word mantra that he often used. -
Fred Flintstone of The Flintstones His mantra was, of course, "Yabba Dabba Doo." -
JERVISTETCH9.) This character sold his soul to his best friend for $5. Fortunately, his sister bought it back for him. (Actually, this wasn’t really that much “out of character” for him.) -
Bart Simpson of The Simpsons -
MRSEHJ10.) Two submarine crew members on this show never had their first names revealed. One’s older brother, whose first name was Stan, appeared on one episode but only called him “Kid.” Yet a higher ranked officer not only had his first name revealed (Francis), but his middle name as well (Ethelbert). -
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Seamans Kowalaski and Patterson were never given first names; they would call each other Ski and Pat for short and their superiors just used their last names. We find out Kowalski had a brother named Stan and that Patterson's father was named Derrick, but their own first names were never given. Oddly enough, Chief Sharkey's full name of Francis Ethelbert Sharkey was revealed, but really only to embarrass him. (An old friend of his called him "Ethel Sharkey", prompting the revelation). -
JERVISTETCH11.) This girl started out as a simple-minded country girl, changed her looks a little once, and then turned into a sophisticated lady who even became a professional singer. Her next younger sister changed in looks, but not all that much. Her youngest sister stayed the same all the way through, although she did later get married and have a little girl.
Billie Jo Bradley on Petticoat Junction -
SMILEY12.) These two men met at an airport during an episode of THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN. One asked how the other’s flight was. “Terrible” the man said, “I kept seeing a creature on the end of the wing, but nobody believed me.” “The same thing happened to me!” declared the other. What were these two men making a clever reference to?
They were referencing the Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Guest William Shatner had played the character who saw the gremlin on the plane in the original series. Star John Lithgow had played the same character in the movie version. -
JERVISTETCH13.) This later change of character is so obscure and unknown, I don’t know if it’s even printed anywhere on the Internet. For me to reveal it you must tell me one of the actors involved. He was once a man who practically painted a target on his back each week, a detective who was old friends with a lady ME, a lawyer in a firm in Boston, an American detective working in England, a CIA director, and a character who died in the first episode of a new show, but was still part of the plot for the first half a season.
Mark Valley (Human Target, Body of Evidence, Boston Legal, Keen Eddie, Crisis and Fringe) -
JERVISTETCH - See the very last paragraph for the secret story.
14.) I'll never quite forgive this rural comedy for doing an episode where the lady plumber married the county agent and went off on their honeymoon, only to have the justice of the peace/general store owner realize his license to marry people had expired. The two never got to sleep together because she sent him on an errand while she changed clothes. When he came back, he accidentally knocked on the wrong hotel door and got beat up. Their friends promised they'd get married again later, but it was just forgotten about. Future attempts by the lady plumber to flirt with the county agent got met with blank stares. Even a reunion movie, set years later, found them both still single and alone. Too bad; I thought they made a cute couple.
The lovely Ralph Monroe and Hank Kimball on Green Acres. -
JERVISTETCH
JERVISTETCH - 11
MRSEHJ - 2
SMILEY - 1
A truly "out of character" story:Before all the other shows I mentioned, Mark Valley appeared in the soap DAYS OF OUR LIVES playing a man named Jack Devereaux. When he left the show, his last scenes were to air Friday. This had been done many times before with many characters. They would film the last scenes with both actors individually in case they wanted to do a little Friday recap on Monday. In the storyline, his character was in prison and his wife had just gotten a job as a guard there by using someone else’s name and ID. He was in the shower alone (after getting dirty volunteering to help in the prison garage) and the scene cut away to him having a little fantasy in his mind about returning home to his family. The scene then returned to the shower where his wife was sneaking in behind him. The camera panned down from Mark Valley’s head to his wife’s hand reaching over and touching his shoulder. But when he turned to face her, it was Steve Carlson - his replacement - whose face we saw. Someone had edited it wrong. Steve acted surprised to see her and then she shushed him and started kissing him. That was the last we saw of him until Monday, when Steve took over full time. Many actors in soaps have been replaced in the middle of a storyline, but Mark Valley was literally replaced
in the middle of a scene! To make it even more crazy, my wife was subscribing to two different soap opera magazines at the time and neither of them caught the mistake. One of them joked that he went into the shower as one man and came out as another, but that was referring to the casting change only; they didn’t notice the mid-scene switch. I have it on one of my scads of VCR tapes somewhere. If I can find it, maybe someday I’ll post it to YOUTUBE.