"Hennessey" and a Columbo

Jackie Cooper spent his childhood as a child star -- and a cute one most famously in The Champ.

Jackie Cooper spent a lot of his final decades as an actor playing newspaper boss Perry White in the four Chris Reeve Superman movies.

He was also a TV director of some prolificacy -- MASH, stuff like that.

I do believe that he was the only director of either TV or movies who was willing to take the stand in one of the trials against director John Landis for the fatal accident on the Twlight Zone set in 1982. Gutsy or traitorous(a bunch of more famous directors APPEARED in John Landis films in cameos, to support him.)

Also a quick cruise to IMDb demonstrates that Jackie Cooper had quite the career, both active and reserve in the US Navy, and learned how to fly jets. That's accomplishment!

I come here to praise a couple of his other accomplishments:

"Hennessey" -- a CBS military sitcom of 1959 through 1962. I literally stumbled onto some clips from this old show on YouTube and as some of the commenters noted: that series had a HELL of a great theme song. Its a jaunty fun theme that lifts you right up, mixing a bit of Anchors Away and Yankee Doodle Dandy into a more "50's/60's jazz hip" "hornpipe for tuba and piccolo." Eh - you have to hear it to "get it."

Looking at the actual acting and comedy clips, "Hennesey" is a bit too "old school" and has the usual problem of the time -- good, charismatic actors given not terribly good or funny lines. But Cooper is sharp, Abby Dalton is very pretty and efficient, Roscoe Karns is 40's Old School Sardonic(as Cooper's peacetime commander) and other players are funny. Big name guests like Bobby Darin and Sammy Davis Jr. dropped by, along with Charles Bronson.

To go with the great theme music, Henessey has a nice "technical effect" in its weekly opening scene: The name Hennesay appears on the screen as being "stamped" military style onto the screen -- the stamp is pulled away and only the title remains. We are being put in that "nostaligic military framework" of the early 60's which had a lot of FANS -- veterans, their spouses and their families who wanted to re-live the best of their military lives, not the pain.

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About 10 years after Hennessey ended its run, and around the same time that he was making a new living as a TV director -- Jackie Cooper made a rare "in front of the camera" appearance to play one of those plum "Columbo guest killer parts."

Noteable: Cooper is playing a politician -- so charming, so smiling ...so murderous. Columbo had taken on doctors and lawyers and scientists but here was...a potential Senator?

Noteable: Just as Cooper got the delectable Abby Dalton as his love interest on Hennessey, as this killer Senator on Columbo, Cooper was charismatic enough to have BOTH a sexy young mistress(Tish Sterling) and a still-sexy enough older wife(Joanne Linville). It is this "scandal" which drives his murder (a crime of love? Rather than killing one of the women, he kills his male campaign manager for trying to break things up.) And how Columbo catches the politico is one of the great "gotchas" of the series. (The production of a Columbo episode about a villainous politican in the heat of Watergate couldn't have been a coincidence.)

So, now Jackie Cooper has a post. Try the "Hennessey" theme song. It'll pick you right up!