Friday, November 30, 2018

Dragnet, "The Christmas Story"


For everyone thinking "the holidays are here early; Thanksgiving has already passed and it's still November," remember--tomorrow is December 1st and the first official week of the holidays is over already. It's later than you think!

For the first post-Thanksgiving weekend of the holidays, I offer an episode of the original black-and-white run of the legendary TV series Dragnet--an unusual series to have a Christmas episode, but this is a fine example of one. Detectives Joe Friday and Frank Smith investigate the disappearance of a baby Jesus statute from a Catholic church's Nativity display. The work of a heartless thief, a vandal--or someone else?

For anyone familiar with Stan Freberg's Dragnet parody "Christmas Dragnet," it's amusing to hear how closely Freberg imitated the show's characters right down to their speech patterns. Freberg was spot on!

This episode was recreated almost word for word for the series' color revival in the late 60s and can be seen on Hulu (which I just subscribed to this week for the first time--thank you Cyber Monday deal!).

Enjoy! Have a great weekend!


2 comments:

Bob Johns said...

This is a very good episode if I remember correctly its a tad on the sad side?

Phillyradiogeek said...

I don't know about sad, but it does mention the poor status of the citizens of the parish.