chapeau melon et bottes de cuir

[sergebroom]

One of the things available on NetFlix is The Best of the Original Avengers and we just finished watching Vol.2. I'm basically skipping the Honor Blackman episodes because frankly they bored me. The problem wasn't Blackman, but the rather static mise en scène and plots. A story can be action-packed without resorting to lots of sound and fury and gesticulation, but we don't even get sound and fury and gesticulation, except for people who talk and talk and talk while being neither funny nor particularly witty.

Luckily, there was Diana Rigg's Emma Peel, in the first episode where she got to wear her famous cat suit. The episode, which had plenty of wit, involved a department store where things aren't right, and not just because a Secret Service man was killed. Would it surprise you to (SPOILER COMING UP!!!) that the plot is about someone who, disgusted with modern life, is building an atomic bomb in the store's basement?

The other two episodes... I'm about to be sacrilegious here... You know what? I like Linda Thorson's Tara King as much as and possibly more than Mrs.Peel. One story is about killer clowns getting their orders thru a Punch & Judy show, and John Cleese makes an appearance as the guardian of clown makeup designs drawn on eggshells. The other had Tara flying solo and looking into the possibility of an invisible man at a research center. Sometimes the episode feels like it was written by the Monty Python gang, with scenes where two Secret Service men are having trouble communicating with each other by radio because one of them happens to be called Roger.



One last thing.
Could Tara King be related to Jason King?
After all, the latter used to work for the British Secret Services.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I like Mother, I must confess.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, Mother... I had forgotten to mention he appears in the episode where Tara goes solo, sitting in a chair that's floating in the middle of a large swimming pool, with many phones stacked up on his chair's side table.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I remember that!