Talk:Danger Man
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This article is part of WikiProject British TV shows, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to British TV shows on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project British TV shows, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. |
Please consider joining the project! HowardBerry 19:19, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
Is that song on the DVD?
- I believe there's a soundtrack CD which features both "HighWire" and "Secret Agent Man" together with other musical themes from the series. - Lee M 23:41, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)
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[edit] All Four Seasons on US DVD? Don't Think So...
All four seasons of the series are now available on DVD in North America, using the original Danger Man credits and theme music, rather than the Secret Agent version.
I just bought the complete series boxset from A&E, and it's only the complete hour-long set... not the previous halfhour series.
... and upon edit, I will correct myself. The A&E "Secret Agent aka Danger Man" boxset only includes th 47 eps of "Secret Agent", what they're calling the hourlong series. Apparently claiming that to be its US release name.
There is a separate 39 episode set of the first season, which they call Danger Man.
Guh. Frickin' A&E.
- Yeah, I don't know why they didn't release the 1960 series as a "Set 0" or something like that, but at least they did release it because it's brilliant. (It was not released until nearly a year after the Megabox which is why these episodes aren't included. Incidentally, it is correct to refer to the hour-long episodes by the name Secret Agent because that was their broadcast title on CBS and that is how they've been syndicated over here since the 1960s so they needed to use the American title over top of the UK original. However the first season aired as Danger Man in the US (although according to one reference book I read awhile back, the half-hour episodes were at one point syndicated in America as Secret Agent as well.) However you have brought to my attention the potential for some confusion on the DVD issue so I'll reword it. Thanks. 23skidoo 04:45, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Guess you bought the wrong set. The A&E set I have has all episodes. Shop around next time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.79.88.255 (talk) 20:41, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
- Please be a bit more civil and make note that the above comments are nearly 3 years old. About 2 years ago A&E did in fact release a megabox incorporating the 1960-61 episodes. But that was long after the above discussion was conducted. 23skidoo (talk) 18:28, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Danger Man titles/opening sequence in the US
Not true that these were never seen in the US prior to the DVDs. Channel 48 in San Jose, California ran both the US and UK versions in the early 80's as part of an amazing Saturday afternoon package of 60's and 70's reruns they called "Those Fascinating Men." Package included the Lawford "Thin Man" series, the Michael Rennie "The Third Man," "Burke's Law," "The Persuaders" and on and on. Ahh, the good old days of independent TV.
- Please feel free to add that to the main article. It's an interesting fact to note. 23skidoo 03:41, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Deleted paragraph
The following paragraph has been deleted because it is unsourced and appears to be completely speculative (and also, what role did Smart's sister play?). The fact a relation of Smart appeared in The Prisoner has nothing to do with the relationship between the two men. If a citation is available, please add it and the paragraph can go back in:
On the other hand,one of the first characters to be seen in 'The Prisoner' is in fact, Ralph Smart's actress sister, Patsy Smart, suggesting relations between the two men were perfectly cordial. Patrick McGoohan evidently considered he was playing two different characters in John Drake and Number Six, but admitted that he used the plaform of a 'secret agent' as a way to introduce his new series to the watching public. That Number Six had been a secret agent is evident from the whole ethos of 'The Prisoner'. The allegory of the fight his secret agent had, to maintain his individuality, to the battle that every man can share in their own everyday life, was equally clear. 23skidoo 14:06, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
- This was been added back in, and has now been deleted again. In fact, I've done a major cull of original research and fancruft so that this article reads more like an encyclopedic article and less like a debate or a fan magazine. --Rodhullandemu (talk - contribs) 14:57, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Deleted content re: program format
My edit (which was done as an IP as I was logged out without realizing) was removed as being unsourced. In fact, as stated in the edit, the program is the source, and the material I added is as verifable as the rest of the material in the paragraph. Its removal renders the paragraph a factual error as it describes only the 30-minute version of the series as broadcast in 1960-61 and does not reflect the series as broadcast from 1964-66. 23skidoo (talk) 00:58, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Episode counts by running time
Would it be proper to put the number of episodes produced at 30 & 60 minutes each (39 & 47, respectively) in the infobox alongside those two running times? As is, there is only the overall episode count given. (Source: Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Harry and Wally's Favorite TV Shows, Prentice Hall Press, 1989, p. 452) Ted Watson (talk) 19:19, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
- As long as the number is correct, I don't see a problem, although technically speaking they weren't 30 and 60, but more like 25 and 50 without commercials. My preference, though, would be to divide them either by seasons or by year rather than counting how many episodes of each length. 23skidoo (talk) 23:29, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
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- You are quite right about the actual running times, and an encyclopedia should be technically accurate. However, since the running times also reflect what are actually two separate programmes I'm not too certain that this is not a good ground for episode count listings. Yes, I know that they share the same:
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- 1. title (Danger Man, at least in the UK)
- 2. creator/producer (Ralph Smart, albeit executive producer on the 50-minute version)
- 3. star (Patrick McGoohan)
- 4. lead character name (John Drake)
- 5. genre (international espionage)
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- Despite all this, in the first version, Drake is an American working for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (even though he was sent on assignments in Africa, Latin America, the Far East, and in what is to my knowledge the only episode where NATO was specified internally, northern India/the Himalayas), in the second a British national working for British intelligence. Two different characters, really, and therefore two separate TV shows. Furthermore, I've never found a list of how many episodes a TV series produced in each of its seasons—and nothing else—particularly helpful or informative. So I was really interested in only whether there was some more-or-less arbitrary rule prohibiting episode counts on the running-time lines in an infobox. Ted Watson (talk) 19:55, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
- I agree there's nothing saying it can't be done, so I have no objections if it is done. However I have to disagree with you regarding the opinion (shared by some, but not all -- see for example Dave Rogers book on Danger Man and The Prisoner) that the two series were separate series. They were one show - that's been said by no less than McGoohan himself. The fact the series changed formats is nothing new. To give a recent example, had Veronica Mars been renewed for another season, the plan was for it to jump ahead something like 5 years and basically begin anew as a series about Mars being an FBI agent or something like that. It wouldn't have been a new series, just a reformatting of the old. Similarly, there are those who feel that every era of Doctor Who constitutes a completely separate series, and it does not. The problem with Danger Man is that -- like virtually all the series made on UK and US TV in the 1960s -- there was very little by way of continuity, so you wouldn't have Drake in a 1966 episode referencing something happening in a 1961 episode like you would today. However -- and I need to find the source but I remember reading it -- one thing to also think about was at one point the half-hour episodes were apparently syndicated as Secret Agent episodes, complete with the Johnny Rivers theme. I have no idea how that would have worked -- they must have edited episodes together or something. But if this is true and the source I got it from (a TV shows encyclopedia but I've forgotten the name) is accurate, then that's a pretty strong indicator that it was considered the same series. Also the 60-minute series was never consistent on what nationality Drake was; in one episode he declared that he was Irish (and not in the context of an alias). 23skidoo (talk) 20:19, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
- I noticed the statement about Drake saying once that he was Irish in the article—good point specifying that the context did not allow for it being part of a cover identity, though I had assumed as much—along with a cite request. In any event, he was British, and the NATO Drake was definitely an American (the evidence is conclusive, if subtle), and that means McGoohan played two different characters. None of your examples is analogous enough to be relevant (I've never heard of anybody claiming this about Doctor Who, it's indefensible if said in the same sense that we're debating it for Danger Man, and anyone who had said it that way would have been put down by everyone familiar enough with the show to be qualified to venture an opinion). As far as your statement about the half-hours being syndicated as Danger Man, a half-hour Tarzan TV series of the early 1990s had its three seasons of episodes spliced together into one-hour installments and combined into a rerun package with a Tarzan series of the mid-1990s produced at that length in the first place. Like Danger Man, a few years passed between the two runs, and there were some producers in common. However, it would be nothing short of insane to call them the same programme. The two had completely different casts, tones and even time frames (the one in the hour-long format matched the pre-World War I setting of Edgar Rice Burroughs' earliest novels along with his educational level and British title for the apeman, while the other wasn't back-dated at all and the leading man spoke like Johnny Weissmuller and his successors in the old Hollywood B-film series version). So ITV or some distributor having done something similar with the two DM runs proves nothing. If they did it. In the early years of the Fox network here in the States, because they were on a relatively small number of stations and most of them were UHF outlets whose transmissions didn't carry very far, they also had a cable/satellite channel called Fox Net. As the over-air network itself wasn't on for very much of the day, the channel had a great deal of material to fill out the schedule. Nightly at 1 AM Eastern time, they ran Secret Agent. After a few weeks, the schedule changed to indicate Danger Man at 1:00 and 1:30. After a few more weeks, Secret Agent again. They went back and forth several times before dropping them entirely. This might be what you heard about, even though there doesn't appear to have been any alterations to the NATO version. As for McGoohan supposedly saying they were one show, I can put a surprisingly large number of blatantly inaccurate statements into his mouth—note a recent edit of mine in The Prisoner article, where a Canadian TV interview of 1977 has him saying he did "54" episodes of Danger Man, when there is no way to get that number legitimately, no matter how you break them down (I put a "sic" and an explanation there), and mind you the videotape survives and a transcript apparently released, so there's no question he actually said this B.S., and if he didn't remember for sure off the top of his head, he shouldn't have given an exact number—so even that, if you can prove he said it, doesn't have much credibility. The facts are that the NATO Drake was American and the M9 one was British (whether Irish, English, Scot [the actor's surname always sounded Scottish to me, and I'm of Irish ancestry], Welsh or even mixed blood, he was British)—and we're not talking about mere citizenship here—and that means they were two different characters and we're dealing with two separate programmes. Ted Watson (talk) 22:07, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
- I agree there's nothing saying it can't be done, so I have no objections if it is done. However I have to disagree with you regarding the opinion (shared by some, but not all -- see for example Dave Rogers book on Danger Man and The Prisoner) that the two series were separate series. They were one show - that's been said by no less than McGoohan himself. The fact the series changed formats is nothing new. To give a recent example, had Veronica Mars been renewed for another season, the plan was for it to jump ahead something like 5 years and basically begin anew as a series about Mars being an FBI agent or something like that. It wouldn't have been a new series, just a reformatting of the old. Similarly, there are those who feel that every era of Doctor Who constitutes a completely separate series, and it does not. The problem with Danger Man is that -- like virtually all the series made on UK and US TV in the 1960s -- there was very little by way of continuity, so you wouldn't have Drake in a 1966 episode referencing something happening in a 1961 episode like you would today. However -- and I need to find the source but I remember reading it -- one thing to also think about was at one point the half-hour episodes were apparently syndicated as Secret Agent episodes, complete with the Johnny Rivers theme. I have no idea how that would have worked -- they must have edited episodes together or something. But if this is true and the source I got it from (a TV shows encyclopedia but I've forgotten the name) is accurate, then that's a pretty strong indicator that it was considered the same series. Also the 60-minute series was never consistent on what nationality Drake was; in one episode he declared that he was Irish (and not in the context of an alias). 23skidoo (talk) 20:19, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
- You are quite right about the actual running times, and an encyclopedia should be technically accurate. However, since the running times also reflect what are actually two separate programmes I'm not too certain that this is not a good ground for episode count listings. Yes, I know that they share the same:
[edit] Danger Mouse?
Is DangerMouse a parody/homage of Danger Man? If so, is this fact worthy of a mention in this article? Applejuicefool (talk) 19:08, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
- While it's probable that the title is a play on the Danger Man title, as far as I know it's just a general Bond parody. Beyond the title there don't seem to be any elements suggestive of Danger Man, and for it to be a parody there needs to be similarities of some sort. 23skidoo (talk) 19:50, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
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- They're both about British secret agents... Applejuicefool (talk) 18:26, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Peter Yates?
Why does this page have a 'Peter Yates' navbox at the bottom? That name doesn't appear anywhere else in the article. --Masamage ♫ 03:54, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
- Good question. I'll remove it. 23skidoo (talk) 12:08, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
- Actually I've decided to put it back. Upon further investigation, Yates directed six episodes of the series and went on to direct a number of noted movies including Bullitt. What needs to be added is a reference to this in the article. If he'd only been a guest star, or only directed a single episode, I might have taken it off, but his involvement was a bit more substantial. 23skidoo (talk) 12:12, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
