More of Hogan season two...
- I mentioned in an earlier entry that the black and white pilot was reshot as a color episode. We've reached that point now, in the episode "Information Please". Some of the details are different, but it's the same basic plot.
- Hogan and LeBeau make another trip to Paris, this time with a Monet painting stolen by the Nazis, in "Art for Hogan's Sake". We're back in Mission: Impossible territory. Schultz even gets into the act as a fake general. How does Hogan explain having a white trenchcoat as a POW? Oh right--this is a fantasy.
- How do you trick a German Field Marshall in a POW camp into thinking he's in England? The Mighty Hogan Art Players of course--along with a shot down allied plane. It's all in "The General Swap."
- More Mission: Impossible stuff--the boys rob a bank in order to pay off an informer in "The Great Brinksmeyer Robbery". There's a great scene with Hogan acting as a paramour to the girl next door to the bank (Joyce Jameson).
- The boys put on a show to add some real ammunition in Nazi war games in "Praise the Fuhrer and Pass the Ammunition". This was a common formula on 60's sitcoms--come up with an excuse for the stars to perform. Of course, Clary and Dawson were both nightclub performers before the war.
- Ruta Lee plays a scientist who challenges Hogan's authority in the obviously named "Hogan and the Lady Doctor". She had guest television roles going back to 1953--and she's still working in soaps.
Cast info:
Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter) was born in 1907 in Vienna, in what was then known as Austria-Hungary, now part of Austria. Yet another Hogan cast member with a Jewish ancestry, he was already a successful actor in Germany by when he was arrested in 1933 by the SS. Upon release, he left for Paris and spent 5 years there in the theater. At the start of WWII, he was put in an internment camp, then his application for emigration to the US was accepted in 1940. He was able to find work in the theater, but after Pearl Harbor, he joined the US Army and was transferred to England, where he spent the rest of the war. He then returned to the US and back to theater, becoming a founding member of American Actors Equity. Hollywood then beckoned, and he spent the next four decades there, with roles in over 60 films and television shows, generally as an "accent actor" who could cover many dialects. He was in the first Cinemascope film The Robe, as well as Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three. If you've watched Rocky and Bullwinkle, you've heard his voice as "Fearless Leader". He also played several roles on Steve Allen's 1970's PBS series Meeting of Minds. He returned to Austria in 1994 and made several films there, as well as returning to the theater. He passed away in 2005.
Remember, you can play along! The DVD box set is available on Amazon.