Showing posts with label The Second Hundred Years. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Second Hundred Years. Show all posts

11 November 2017

Nerd Humor**

As TC noted in the comments, the US show mentioned in the previous post was The Second Hundred Years, starring Monte Markham as a Civil War veteran who took off for the Alaskan Gold Rush and was buried in ice & snow in 1900, remaining in hibernation until being revived in 1967.


In the UK, a year earlier Adam Adamant Lives! debuted, starring Gerald Harper as a Victorian Gentleman buried in a collapsed house in 1902, remaining in hibernation until being revived in 1966. Adam Adamant stayed on the air for two years, so the shows overlapped in 1967.


As similar as the shows sound above, they were vastly different from each other.  Luke Carpenter, Monte Markham's character in The Second Hundred Years settles into a quiet life, hiding who he is as he lives with his great-grandson in a typical sitcom view of the generation gap, filtered through Luke's outdated, but not necessarily outmoded, perceptions.
Gerald Harper's Adam Adamant, as one might guess from the logo above, was a bit more wild - groovy, even. The 1960s was merely a new adventure for Adam, and he quickly hooked up with a mod girl for balance and took to solving crimes and odd mysteries. Some say the only reason Adam didn't last much longer is that another, somewhat similarly toned pair took to the airwaves about the same time - The Avengers. Monty Berman & Dennis Spooner had more money for their program, and a spiffier shine on it.
Mind you, it wasn't that the producer of Adam Adamant Lives! didn't have sufficient genre cred - it was Verity Lambert, the original producer of Doctor Who. What else did this woman do? We should probably know.

Amazingly, The Second Hundred Years may be the only television show from the time period that did not get a comic book. (Okay, i'm sure there were others, but it doesn't seem like it when looking at all that was there.)
Adam Adamant Lives! may not have received an ongoing comic, but our hero did get a strip in TV Comics starting in #788 - 2 page chapters for 13 issues, and then another 35 single page episodes. In 1968, he received his own annual-


The book contained seven stories, three of which were in comic format, and another four text stories sporting illustrations such as this one:


I enjoyed The Second Hundred Years when it was run at 4 or 5 am by the local station where i lived at the time. I typically worked until dawn with the television as company while waiting for the computer to render the latest animation frames or effects layers. (It was so nice to bill for machine hours while watching old shows and reading comic books)
But, that said, it kind of sucked by comparison to Adam Adamant Lives!

And, there are those who say that he yet lives...  *


screen caps from respective programs, images from Adam Adamant Annual (1968)


 ===

*(yeah - that's actually Carson Napier. I know.) 

**(Here's an example of how my mind works. The title of the previous post was the Nerd Humor referred to in the this post's subject line: Quantum Broadcast Entanglement? 
You see, classic quantum entanglement experiments use two twinned pairs of particles - AB & BC.
The Second Hundred Years was on ABC.  Adam Adamant Lives was on BBC. ABC + BBC = ABBC, reflecting the entanglement reference linking the similarity of concepts. Nerd Humor.
They all make sense, just rarely get explained)