I've been enjoying a few tropes in 1970s TV shows
I've been watching some TV shows from the 1970s recently. I've noticed a few tropes that I find pretty amusing.
One of tropes is how often someone "slips a mickey" to someone else in the show. By this, I mean that someone is given a drink that has a drug in it that causes the character to pass out. There is always a certain way this is portrayed by the director. The screen gets out of focus and then the camera tilts in strange directions.
In the first 3 episodes of The Rockford Files, this scene happens twice. Once it is done by Rockford himself (well, his client does it for him), and the next time it is done to him by one of the other characters.
A variation of this is getting hit on the back of the head with something, usually a handgun. This always reliably knocks out the person without long term injury.
Another trope is the scene of a character driving up to a location, getting out, and walking into a building. In a modern show, this would maybe be done in a few seconds just as an establishing shot. But in 1970s television, this shot could last a few minutes. It's very obvious that they are trying to fill some time. These scenes are very noticeable in shows like Columbo when they went to a 90 minute format.
A variation of the "person walking" trope is when we only see the legs and shoes of the person who is walking. This is so that the audience doesn't know the identity of the person walking yet. It usually turns out to be a bad guy and there will be a crime done by the end of the scene. Sometimes we continue looking at the feet while the crime is in progress, and sometimes we zoom out to see who is doing it.
The bad guy is kidnapping a woman or holding her hostage. By loosely holding onto one of her arms, he has rendered her completely helpless as he drags her towards certain doom.
Also the hilarious thing where someone gets captured and tied to a chair. It's always like two coils of rope looped lazily around their upper arms.
Well, imagine if the woman struggled too hard. Her uterus could fall out and then what's the point of even being alive???
Yeah, looking back on the shows from my childhood, it's kind of interesting how stylized and theatrical most of them were. Viewers were expected to interpret some coils of rope as representing total immobilization. A couple of swings in the general direction of someone's head meant that they had been beaten to a pulp. Some bright red liquid was a serious if not fatal wound. In some ways it seems like a more sophisticated way of telling a story, where everything didn't have to be laid out in precise detail.
One of the old shows I’ve been watching is The Bionic Woman (Jamie Sommers). This is a spinoff of The Six Million Dollar man, which is about a cyborg named Steve Austin who has superpowers from his “bionic” parts. He’s like robocop but more human.
The Bionic Woman has a little less action than The Six Million Dollar man. She uses her super strength to do heroic things, but also uses them to do housework really fast. I don’t think there are any scenes of Steve Austin doing dishes but there are multiple scenes like that with Jamie Sommers.
Besides the housework thing, it’s very noticeable how the men treat Jamie. They call her honey or sweetheart a lot, and they frequently touch her and kiss her. It seems very weird to a modern audience.
But the show is overall pretty good and does quite a bit with its low budget. The main character is very endearing and always shows empathy and good ethics.
I haven't revisited most shows from the 70s. I remember absolutely loving the Kung Fu with David Carradine which I believe is modeled on the Lone Ranger.
Since you are interested in how women were shown fighting, you might want to also look at Charlie's Angels and Wonder Woman. There are also scenes where Cat Woman fights in the live action Batman series.
I have vague memories of Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Laverne and Shirley, Threes Company and the reruns of I Love Lucy as shows where women played a prominent role.
MASH is a show I watched and loved from beginning to end. The final episode was a national phenomenon with more than a hundred million people tuning in. That episode was also an amazing, surprising piece of television. I will never forget many MASH episodes and characters. How women were treated in MASH evolved over time. Major Margaret Houlihan's character arc took her from sex object to hard hitting serious character.
The knockout trope was still very popular way past the 70s. It's probably still happening. And they always pass out for the right amount of time. No need to be worried about them waking up early or being seriously hurt, because that's not in the script.
Another one is that pointing guns at people is like a remote control. Even if it's perfectly obvious that the gun will not be fired, the person at gun point is completely under the power of the person who holds it.
In a lot of cases it's been replaced with choking the person out, which feels a little more plausible.
When you get choked out in real life, you wake up in about 2-10 seconds after they stop squeezing your arteries.
Yeah, it's either that or death/serious brain damage, and the line between the two is pretty thin.
There's really no good way of rendering someone unconscious for over a few seconds without the careful application of very specialized drugs intravenously. If there were, the entire field of anesthesiology would be much simpler. Just smack someone in the back of the head with a snub nosed .38 special before surgery!
Archer used to play with this a lot with characters complaining that they had to book an appointment with a neurologist after getting knocked out.
Archer also suffered from tinnitus from constantly having guns fired right next to his ears.
And of course from Archer,
Which I love. Much better than the trope of accidental discharge when dropped,which... no.
My wife and I are rewatching Lost, and you see this trope almost every episode. And they never tie it to the healing powers of the island like they do with other types of wounds/ailments (e.g. Sayid's GSW, Jack's appendectomy, Locke's paralysis, etc.).
I remember an episode from The Partridge Family when Reuben got in trouble with some local government agency because it had switched to computers and it had gone haywire, leading to all kinds of chaos and grief. But the way computers failed in the 70s were always the same. HAL from 2001. They had our flaws but magnified. The popular imagination couldn’t conceive of them as what they were, which were just glorified adding machines. Garbage in, garbage out, etc.
There was a ton of anxiety about the digital revolution in the 70s that had evaporated by the 80s with the advent of personal computers and a better understanding of how machines actually cause trouble.
HAL is actually a decent depiction of "garbage in, garbage out" in the book (which I recommend reading immediately before or after seeing the film. It's short but clarifies many things). The short version is thay the government, in an abundance of secrecy, ordered HAL to conceal the mission objective from Dave and Frank but this was counter to his primary programming of accuracy and openness. This caused a fault (Hofstadter-Moebius Loop) akin to mental illness and HAL tried to resolve the fault by eliminating the source: no Frank and Dave means to secrecy.
Have you seen Cobra Kai? It's got tons of tropes and it's wonderful.
Literally every problem is solved with karate.
This is one of my guilty-pleasure tropes from the original Star Trek series. Spock had his Vulcan nerve pinch, which at least made an attempt at a plausible explanation, but aside from that Kirk will regularly knock goons out with a single karate chop to the shoulder, which I find hilarious every time.
I remember hearing somewhere that losing consciousness due to a physical impact usually means a traumatic brain injury (or at the very least a serious concussion), so whenever my wife and I are watching an old episode of TOS and a guy gets knocked out by a Kirk-chop I yell out "BRAIN DAMAGE!" My wife usually rolls her eyes and mumbles something like "you got that all right." Not sure what she means by that...
I’ve always enjoyed the double-fisted “axe handle” punch. Once in the baddie’s belly to make him bend over, then another one on the back of his head to seal the deal. K.O.!!!!!
What I loved about that was that only Vulcans could do it. Not even the ship's doctor could figure out how it worked.
I think that some of the tropes we have seen die out is because they were allowed to be simplified by lack of general knowledge about them. That hit on the back of the head to knock someone out move, for instance; once the internet became widespread and people started communicating on it freely, people started to learn that such things cause traumatic injuries.
And beyond that, in the past few years people have become a whole lot more anal about which plot contrivances they will accept. Some of them are understandable - "why don't they just call someone on their cell phone?" - but for some of them, people should probably just relax. I mean, a good portion of TV and movies are made just to have an excuse to have sexy people roleplaying. You're generally not watching an atomic reconstruction of real historical events, and if you were it would be painfully boring.