RIP George Romero and Martin Landau
Lost them both today...a great character actor and pretty much the creator of the zombie/living dead genre. Shame.
sharewow I had not heard about either one!
shareWow you learn something new everyday!
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MovieChat Forums > General Discussion > RIP George Romero and Martin Landau
RIP
share50 years after Night of the Living Dead and Zombies are still prevalent in Hollywood. I think George Romero deserves
most of the credit for this.
Martin Landau was indeed a great character actor. Many good and memorable performances.
At least 99% of the credit
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<< Martin Landau was a great character actor. Many good and memorable performances. >>
Yeah. He was indeed wonderful in The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981)
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lol. I totally forgot about him in this. Wasn't he another millionaire or something like that ?
And wasn't Barbara Bain in this? His co-star in Space 1999 ?
I have to look this up.
When I was young, I used to love Landau's character of Rollin Hand aka The Man of a Million Faces in the original Mission Impossible television series.
shareStill loved it on reruns
shareI think those episodes were the best when he was with that show. I liked his then wife, Barbara Bain. She played Cinnamon Carter. She was great!
shareOne of the best shows on television back then. When that fuse was lit and that irresistibly catchy theme song kicked in, I was psyched for an upcoming hour-long thrill ride !
shareYou got that right! I could hardly wait for the next episode. When they released the series on DVD (2007?) I was thrilled and purchased them as each season was released. I definitely binged watched!
For those of ya'll who remember TV programming back then, we only had three channels, but we had something to watch 7 nights a week! And it was good programming if we were lucky enough to have a good antenna (which we had to go outside and turn the mast), flat wire and gator clips. Before the clips we stripped the wire and wrapped the leads around the screws. If not an outdoor antenna...good old rabbit ears which we put aluminum foil on, had to keep turning, and fiddling with the telescoping antennas. Wow! I just recalled the time I visited someone's house who had a rotary antenna controlled from a box sitting on top of the TV! Will wonders never cease!
Nowadays we have a gazillion channels and have to search for something good to watch!
Good times until the President addressed the nation and preempted the shows on all tree channels.
shareI had forgot about that; but you did remind me of the presidential conventions being on night after night with my favorite programs preempted! I was in my last three weeks of being preggers when Pres. Kennedy was shot. I was miserable, shut up in the house with no car (we only had one which my husband drove to work) no AC and living in Florida. I was glued to the tv like everyone else, but after three days, hour after hour, night after night, I was ready to scream! Three channels of continuous coverage for days and days.
shareYou just reminded me of the conventions! That's when we'd shut off the tv and dance to records or play board games. lol!
"I was in my last three weeks of being preggers when Pres. Kennedy was shot. I was miserable, shut up in the house with no car (we only had one which my husband drove to work) no AC and living in Florida."
That had to be horrible. I'd have been ready to scream too!
I recall all of that very well. I was 7 at the time, and while I felt bad about it, I found things to do on and off while the tv droned on and on in the background. It was compelling to watch it though. I was always drawn back to the strangeness of it.
i think everyone was glued to the tv that horrible long weekend. TV was strange those three days. No commercials. Just news coverage. That was unheard of at that time.
We were all stunned to sit there and watch Oswald get shot! I mean, it was bad enough that the president had been killed. We were shocked to see the guy accused of killing him gunned down on live television! We all sort of looked at each other as if to say, Did we just see that?
Times have certainly changed. I don't know if it's for the better. I do think that weekend was the beginning of that change though.
"You just reminded me of the conventions! That's when we'd shut off the tv and dance to records or play board games. lol!"
I think I did play Solitaire...over and over and over! I didn't know anyone in order to play board games due to my husband being in road construction. We moved frequently so I was new to the neighborhood. Frankly in the bad mood I was in, maybe it was best no one was around me!
We had 4 with PBS in the 70's. On a clear summer night we might a fuzzy picture from a station over 100
miles away. We did eventually get one of those new fangled rotary gadgets. The reason was I was went up
on the roof when I was a kid to turn the antenna and fell off the roof. Ice is slippery by the way.
My mom basically forced my dad to get one.
I also remember my dog changing the channel by wagging his tail in front of the TV.
It didn't take much with those TV's.
You are correct; but UHF came later. Our first set did not have the UHF tuner. When we did purchase a TV with UHF, I thought we had moved up in the world! We now had 2 gator clips!
"Under the All-Channel Receiver Act, FCC regulations by 1965 required all new TV sets sold in the U.S. to have built-in UHF tuners that could receive channels 14–83."
Too funny about your dog changing the channel! Your first wireless remote control!😁
How did we manage to see that 19" black & white screen in a box from across the room? My poor Mom was Dad's official remote control. Up & down from the sofa was her lot in life when they watched tv. Me? I had the good sense to leave the house and not return until he went to bed! Then it was "Perry Mason" for me.
lol. Never thought of my dogs tail as a remote.
I was so happy when we got our first console TV. That way the black and white went into my room.
I was also lucky, my dad worked 2nd and 3rd shifts a lot so we weren't at his mercy.
He also wasn't a big TV guy. As long as got to see his news and ball games he was content.
My dad "owned" the tv. It's a good thing my mom loved all sports as well as he did. I think back...one, uno, one tv in the house. How many do I have now? The four bedrooms each have one, one each for the living room, the kitchen and the master bath for a total of seven! For two people! Seven tv's for two people! And to top it off we're both sitting here with our Ipad Air 2's on our laps! Oh, the shame of it! Come to think of it, back then one bathroom for seven people. I have 2 1/2 for two people! Ain't life grand?
shareAnd to think if you called somebody and they didn't answer you actually had to wait.
And to think with 300 channels, access to almost everything and all the little gadgets we have
now people say they are still bored.
BTW, We rode bikes without helmets and survived.
We left in the morning to go wherever to play, showed up back at home for lunch, left again and returned for dinner. No mobile phones so the parents didn't know where in the heck you were. We walked to school and walked home for lunch. I pulled my brother's red wagon all over to collect soda bottles to turn in for the greatest penny candy or for a comic book. I had stacks and stacks which would be worth a fortune now.
The feats I could do on a swing set! The ones at school we stood on the seats and manage to swing straight out without falling off. We didn't have the "safety crazies" trying to safeguard everything. We survived. Sure I got hurt many times, but I survived. We were daring, but had enough sense to stay out of the way of a swing in use! The jungle gym...we didn't just swing from the bars...we walked on them!
Remember the little blue peddle car for boys? I was too tall and lanky to sit inside and use the peddles. I pushed it to an area in back of the elementary school I attended, There was a very steep paved walkway in back. Did I ever have the fun sitting my rump on the seat with my legs on top of the hood area! And away I would go with absolutely no way to stop! I just steered the darn thing hoping it would stop before running into the street or miscalculating and running into a tree or turning over! It was one of those many Whee! moments.
Sorry, folks about getting off subject. Maybe we should start a thread "Remember when.....?
Hi MM ! Miss you over her on MC.
But who names their kid Cinnamon? C'mon !
I am losing my heroes each and every day :(
shareI just watched the ABC evening news a little while ago. Some of Martin Landau's roles were listed. They also mentioned that he had been offered and turned down the role of Mr. Spock on Star Trek.
That was news to me!
Landau was terrific playing Bella Lugosi in the Tim Burton movie, "Ed Wood." It's hard to play such a well-known personality convincingly. He also had an uncredited cameo in another Burton flick, "Sleepy Hollow." He played the Headless Horseman's first victim.
I don't like zombie movies at all, but Romero made a quirky little film I like a lot, "Knight Riders." It doesn't have an AI Pontiac Firebird. Set in the 20th century, it's about a troupe that tour the country on motorcycles, wearing medieval knight armor and staging medieval fairs--where they full-on joust each other on bikeback! Each has a name from Aurtherian lore (the bad guy in black armor chose Morgan, because he thought it sounded evil and pirate-y, not realizing that Morgan le Fey was a woman). It stars a very young Ed Harris!
One of my favorites is his small role in North By Northwest.
I also have a favorite (one of many) episode of The Twilight Zone. It's called The Jeopardy Room. Landau is outstanding in that!
I liked him in the Woody Allen movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. He was the central serious character. Also had Jerry Orbach and Angel Huston.
shareWe miss you. ::heart::
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