Chris: Oh boy, so, we’re actually doing this? It’s not like when we watched an episode of Krypton or Superboy or one of those other Super shows as a comparison/measuring stick for Lois and Clark? We’re actually going to watch all of Night Man, the 1997 syndicated superhero show staring Professional Stunt-Man turned Actor and People Magazine’s “Least Charismatic Man Alive” of 1998 Matt McColm as a hunky saxiphoner and kicker-of-men who gets struck by lightning and develops the ability to read people’s evil thoughts (presumably in a later episode someone checks his back for the switch that allows him to only hear their good thoughts) while simultaneously coming upon a kind of 33¢ Store Iron Man suit that gives him the power of flight maybe some other stuff that I can’t remember? That Night Man? The show so cheap that they reuse stock suiting up footage multiple times in the same episode and green screen matting so egregious that it seems like post-modern commentary on cheap green screen matting in grade Z syndicated UHF Saturday afternoon burn-off schlock? The show based on the hero from Malibu Comics, a publisher whose name sounds like what a lazy, burned-out writer would call a comics publisher in a show like Night Man?
All right then. Fine. Let’s go ahead and get it over with. Night Man episode 02 (or 03, depending on how pedantic you want to get about production schedules) “Whole Lotta Shakin…” opens with Night Man’s crusty dad the ex-cop hanging out with a pretty young Scientist Lady whose recently deceased husband was a police officer that Night Man’s dad trained. We learn this through dialogue that is in no way awkward or obviously expository, and it has no bearing on the plot save to explain why these two have any kind of relationship and attempt to allay any fears viewers may have that the old man is going to assault the Scientist Lady sexually. Night Man’s dad is about to leave when a bunch of ninja looking dudes with confusing accents bust in and fuck shit up real good. If you’re anything like me (and I am), you flashback to the vile Die Hard parody from the late in the first season of Lois & Clark and a chill runs down (or up, YMMV) your spine. But those fears are almost immediately put to rest when the Scientist Lady punches one of the ninjas square in the face, Night Man’s dad gets shot and the remaining ninjas hightail it outta there having successfully stolen some of her work. So the good news is, “Whole Lotta Shakin…” isn’t a Die Hard after all. The bad news it’s a Die Hard With a Vengeance, which has the virtue of being far less of a cliche, but still stinks.
Anywho, Night Man and his male companion Raleigh show up at the crime scene on account of Night Man’s dad getting plugged and are just in time to see a press conference wherein a reporter from a European network with a confusing accent asks some stupid question that allows us to recognize that he’s one of the ninja dudes and also hips him to Night Man who is immediately suspicious, not because he picks up any stray nasty thoughts or anything, he just doesn’t like the cut of ol boy’s jib. This, to me, does not seem like an adequate reason to start a vigilante surveillance operation. But it’s good enough for Night Man, which also apparently makes it good enough for Raleigh, who makes a smug comment about how the Eurotrash reporter with the queer accent is in for a world of hurt. I’m not a mathematician, but by my count this is only Night Man’s second adventure and as such maybe that kind of shitty, snarky attitude is a bit premature. Don’t get me wrong, his assumption that Night Man would save the day is right on the money, but the two of them only just met a week or so earlier and that kind of early, unearned confidence is frankly unbecoming. I’m glad you made a friend, Raleigh, and it’s great that you guys can do your crime-fighting together, but there’s no reason to be a dick.
You’ve gotta be a really old school homophobe if you find the sight of Little Richard on TV scary or threatening.
Ronnie: Yep, we’re doing this, and it’s going to get worse before we get Kim Coates hamming it up as Night Man’s archnemesis. (That’s in Season 2.) “Whole Lotta Shakin’” is in many ways a typical episode of Night Man, by which I mean it’s insane nonsense that bridges the gap between stupid 80s television and the superhero shows in days of yore. There’s just as much Fall Guy DNA in this as there is any superhero adventure program.
I would be remiss not to mention the opening narration that follows the opening title sequence. I don’t know why it’s added because I think the credits are pretty self-explanatory. The narrator intones “Johnny Domino was one of San Francisco’s hottest young jazz musicians. But fate, and a cosmic event, were about to change his life forever. What the doctors told him seemed impossible.”
“John, your brain has managed to acquire the capacity to pick up certain frequencies, like a radio.” “But doc, I’m only hearing bad stuff.” “Yes, exactly. You’re tuned to the frequency of evil.”
Raleigh then explains what the Night Man suit can accomplish: “A belt which allows him to overcome gravity. Fabrics which are virtually bulletproof. A stealth mode which makes him seem to disappear, a holographic display which makes him appear to be where he ain’t.” Viewers of the show will be inundated with this introduction so I thought I’d offer an encapsulation for the readers.
Night Man, he flies like a moron
Onto the episode itself, which is a good encapsulation of the dumbshit adventure story the series is going to feed us for the next 21 weeks. 21? Jesus. “Whole Lotta Shakin’…”, the first but not last episode to be named after a song or song lyric, is broadly about goons using earthquakes to hold Bay City hostage. Wait, didn’t the intro call Johnny one of San Francisco’s hottest young jazz musicians? Well, yes. The thing about the show is it’s not good, and once you get on that page with the show a lot of it makes more sense. Their herald, their Surfer Silver if you will, is Little Richard portraying “Jubilee Jones”, which sounds like a racist character Will Eisner drew in the 50s. He goes on the television and tells the residents of Bay City when earthquakes are going to happen. The lead goon, some combination of South African, German and Die Hardese, at one point says to Johnny “I have a strong impression another earthquake is going to happen. That’s why I drink my martinis shaken, not stirred.” I share this because I thought you’d like to have a better grasp on what we’re dealing with. Alongside all this nonsense, a little girl needs a new kidney, and you bet your bottom dollar she’s gonna get it.
Chris: I’m glad you mentioned Little Richard’s involvement in this episode because I think it’s a great example of the kind of foundational incoherence Night Man and other syndicated straight-to-landfill filler like it rested on. This is, as we said, the second episode, which is to say it’s probably the first real episode they made of the show after the pilot was picked up. It’s their you had my curiosity, now you have my attention opportunity to demonstrate why Night Man would be a show worth returning to week after week. It’s almost as big a pitch as a pilot in that respect, and you want to put your best foot forward. The good people behind the scenes of Night Man decided that their “best foot” involved naming the episode after the beloved hit song “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” and stunt casting beloved rock and roll pioneer Little Richard in a supporting role.
Here’s what I mean when I say things like “foundationally incoherent.” Night Man is a television show that debuted in the fall of 1997, “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” is a rock and roll standard written in 1955, best known from its 1957 recording by incestuous pedophile Jerry Lee Lewis (or so wikipedia says). If you’re trying to entice viewers to embrace your hip, sexy, 90’s karate action comic book superhero show, what are you doing making the name a reference to a 40 year old song and making your big cameo a guy who A. was also a big deal 40 years ago and B. doesn’t really have anything to do with that song? It’s not that Little Richard never recorded “Whole Lotta Shakin”, but the internet informs me that it had been recorded by well over a hundred different artists by 1997, including (allegedly) Gary Busey. Look, obviously Little Richard is an historical figure of incalculable significance, and he did record “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” (though it doesn’t merit a reference on the song’s wiki page), but what the fuck does any of that have anything to do with Night Man?
Like all good crossovers, what starts as a clash based on a misunderstanding ends on a team-up.
Who is this supposed to be appealing to? What does the venn diagram of people excited by a Little Richard cameo and people interested in a syndicated superhero show based on a character nobody knows from a publisher so obscure that its fans regularly got their asses kicked by the editorial staff of Wizard Magazine (IYKYK) with acting best described as community theater understudy level? And how does the fact that the A plot turns out to be an elaborate Die Hard With a Vengeance riff where the villains are causing earthquakes as a way to drive people out of the city and divert law enforcement so they can loot unmanned banks fit into that equation? And none of this even touches the B plot around the little girl who needs a new kidney. Who do the makers of Night Man imagine are tuning in and what do they think those viewers want to see? Because this just feels like someone wrote a bunch of words on a bunch of ping-pong balls that were dumped into a rotating crate and then someone else picked a half dozen balls out at random and tried to fit them all into the same script.
Ronnie: I’d like to discuss the kidney transplant subplot because that’s something that’s in the episode. Not only is it disjointed from the rest of the show, the connective tissue being the seismologist whom the criminals rob has a daughter who needs a new kidney, it’s hilarious. Night Man figures out the head of the organ board is selling organs to the highest bidder, gaming the system, as evidenced by the fact that he’s got enough money to afford a fancy car. Before Night Man intervenes, it’s Frank who uses his lack of authority to pressure the guy into confessing. He bitches to Johnny and Raleigh and the latter hacks into DA COMPUTER and finds out Dr. Boone has been selling this shit. Rather than let Frank shake the guy down, Night Man laser visions up Booth’s car and also threatens to throw him down from up in the sky. It’s hilarious to see the shoddy explosion effects–think the stock fire in Aqua Teen Hunger Force–but also it made me think of an alternate better premise for the series. Think about it: a bitter ex-cop still wants the action of being on the force. His doofus jazz musician son lucks into a supersuit. Johnny becomes Frank’s instrument of revenge. Revenge against the criminal community, revenge against the cops who put him out to pasture, revenge against widespread anti-Greek attitudes. Johnny’s too zoned out from smack to quarrel with his father’s agenda. Then yada yada yada, son realizes dad is out of control, father fights son, it’s all very dramatic. Oh yeah, and that’s the end of the subplot which doesn’t connect to anything else. Dr. Boone is threatened with murder so he rescinds his rescinding of the little girl’s kidney. She gets the kidney, all is well. What the hell does this have to do with earthquakes? Beats me.
The dazzling special effects of 1997
Odds & Ends
-Also playing at the House of Soul: Marc Bonilla and the Dragonchoir
-Monday: “Great news little girl, turns out we can get you that new kidney you need tomorrow!” Tuesday: “Ah, shit. Never mind. Sorry about that, turns out that kidney is going to someone else.” Night Man walked so One Tree Hill could fly.
-”Hey, aren’t you…” Night Man to Jubilee Jones, suggesting that there are a surplus of 60+ year old black men with pencil mustaches, gigantic bouffant wigs and bright spangly dress shirts out walking around Bay City at any given moment.
-The seismologist pins down the criminals’ accents to either Scottish or Irish, or maybe also South African. And they only spoke German. Tower of Babel filmmaking strikes again!
-”I heard them downloading something from my computer” – you can HEAR a download? I guess…
-Bay City has a female mayor. Good for them!
1X04 “I LEFT MY HEART”
Chris: Remember the time they did that Night Man that looked like it was gonna be a Die Hard riff but then it turned out to be a Die Hard With A Vengeance riff? Well I guess they’ve run out of ideas since then because it’s back to that well with “I Left My Heart”, but this time, instead of defaulting to the cliched Die Hard With a Vengeance riff, the makers of Night Man decided instead to pattern the episode after the earlier, less financially successful film in the series, Die Hard (released in 1988, Die Hard grossed an estimated 140 million dollars, as opposed to 95’s Die Hard With A Vengeance which grossed 366 million. It’s interesting to note that Die Hard was actually the lowest grossing and therefore worst entry into the entire series). This time, instead of playing a citywide game of cat-and-mouse with the villains, our hero is trapped with them inside a skyscraper during a fancy party.
We open with a little girl gazing lovely at Johnny (Night Man’s civilian alter ego) as he plays a sexy sax solo I think maybe just for her. Her chaperone appears to take her away but before she can the little girl says something about how when she’s old enough she’s gonna go to his club and see him again, when he asks her how old she is she says she’s thirteen (I would have guessed eleven but whatever) and both of the adults laugh because there’s an obvious sexual connotation to what she’s saying that’s extremely inappropriate and making them uncomfortable. Well, it made me uncomfortable. It’s worth mentioning that this episode aired in September of 1997, three months after the beloved sequel-that-no-one-involved-regretted-making-and-movie-I-saw-opening-night Speed 2: Cruise Control which also had a subplot about a little blonde girl developing an unhealthy sexual fixation on a boring block of wood. Though in that case, the block was played by Jason Patric, an actual actor who is given nothing to work with yet still managed to convey a mixture of wary caution and parental concern whenever she’s around (I’d describe the tenor of his performance as “Let’s get you to safety, don’t touch me“.
The bowtie makes Raleigh look like a member of Nation of Islam. That’d be a good twist: Night Man has to work with a follower of Farrakhan. Very hip, very 90s.
Now, does this plot similarity combined with the fact that Speed 2 is itself a Die Hard riff that’s the sequel to another Die Hard riff mean that this episode is actually more of an homage to that critical and commercial smash slash movie where Willem Dafoe uses leeches to fight his cancer? Yes, it probably does. But that only matters to losers, academics and quizzo enthusiasts (redundant?). It’s also important to know that, as clever and influential as Speed 2 was, there was never a scene where Jason Patric or Sandy Bullock used a hologram of themselves playing saxophone to lure a thug into leaping over the side of a building in the same fashion as Wile E Coyote might run full speed into a wall that he himself just painted the image of a tunnel onto moments earlier. Advantage Night Man.
Ronnie: The episode begins, as it usually does, with aerial shots of the city set to the smoothest of jazz. That’s because Johnny provides saxomophone for a fancy party. Said party is to inaugurate a fancy plastic surgeon office recently infused with cash. Mr. Cruz, in the employ of a dying drug lord, suggests to the doctor that they “inaugurate this facility in a truly meaningful way” by operating on someone. Tonight. While the doctor is in fancy clothes. The doctor blows him off but takes the proposal more seriously once Cruz threatens his wife and daughter and shows off a pallet of explosives. Cue Die Hard ripoff in which a jazz musician is all that stands in the way of terrorists’ macabre plan.
It’s always a full moon on Night Man… for some reason.
“This OR isn’t equipped for transplant surgery.” “We’ll see.” I love that response; it reminds me of Frank on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia saying “he’ll adapt” when it’s pointed out Charlie doesn’t know how to read. “I Left My Heart” adds a personal wrinkle to the Die Hard ripoff setup, replacing the Bonnie Bedelia aspect (because jazz musicians can’t be tied down, man), by which I mean the terrorists want to transplant Johnny’s heart into Jose Escobar’s body. What does it say that the jazz musician’s heart is the healthiest at the entire party? Dude has a hologram he employs when he’s nodded off from heroin usage and can’t perform at the House of Soul. Henry Darrow plays Escobar and it’s a sweet gig because he’s in bed nearly the entire time.
Most preposterously, when the narco terrorists can’t find Johnny, they pick up the second best heart match: Frank Dominus, Johnny’s dad. Look, no offense, but if Earl Hollimon is the second most compatible heart then you’ve got a party full of people with congenital heart defects or something. He’s a 60 year old man! I like when Night Man is sweating a guy for information (holding up in the air and threatening to drop him, a classic Night Man technique), the guy mentions Johnny’s dad and Night Man goes “they got Frank?”, as though he is on first name terms with the guy. In fact, everyone in this show’s calling him Frank, never “Mr. Dominus” or “Dominus” or “hey, old man”. It’s almost as if Night Man anticipated my college drinking game and introduced as many uses of the name “Frank” as possible. Fortunately before my liver fails due to phantom pains, Night Man dispatches the suitcase bomb with some of the worst CGI the late 90s has to offer and saves his father–er, Frank, from danger. He also scares Escobar so bad he has a heart attack and dies (“El Diablo!” sez Escobar when he looks at Night Man’s visage, which, fair). All in a day’s work.
Do you see? Do you see the shit we have to deal with?
Chris: It would not be an understatement to say that I am astonished at the ineptness of the effects work on this show. And not just the effects work, the entire production feels sub-community theater. Am I crazy or are a bunch of closeups on Night Man out of focus? It’s the craziest thing. There would be these super tight, dutch angled closeups right on Night Man’s puss, chin to forehead, and as God is my witness, his face is out of focus. There isn’t even any kind of background either! It’s just black back there! Like someone hung a big sheet of construction paper right behind his head! How do you shoot literally the only object in front of the camera out of focus? Who does that? I’m honestly a little concerned here because the thing about Lois & Clark was it was professionaly bad. It had shaky acting, the writing was (at best) uneven, and the effects were eighth assed, but by God it was on a network. Shitting on Lois & Clark was (as the kids say) punching up. Taking shots at Night Man feels like ripping apart the drawings my 8 year old cousin did in sharpie of aliens attacking a city on the Amazon box the birthday gift his mom gave me came in. And, to be clear, those drawings were much more convincing than any of the effects in “I Left My Heart.” If you ever read this Henry, don’t ever think I’d disparage your work.
He sued the Night Man production for bedsores incurred while filming “I Left My Heart”; the production settled out of court.
Ronnie: It reminds me of a workprint. These special effects belong in a workprint, not a finished product. Remember when someone leaked X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘s workprint and it was a lot of unfinished effects and Hugh Jackman falling onto gym mats? It’s like that. I wonder if you also notice the amount of slow motion around when Night Man does anything; boy, that’s an obnoxious choice that never gets better with time. We’re watching these from DVDs (I gave Chris the set as a gift one year) and I think it’d be hilarious to see Night Man upscaled to 4K, or even regular blu-ray. You could see everything and it’s hideous!
Odds & Ends
-On Tubi this episode is rated TV-14. I cannot fathom why.
-”This is a dangerous city, doctor. Rape, torture, murder. Those are just the socially acceptable deviations.” Since when are rape, torture and murder “socially acceptable”? What’s worse than those? Cutting off the mattress tag?
-Johnny ducks out of the party briefly to provide sax at his dad’s birthday party at The Blarney Stone. I guess there are no Greek pubs in Bay City.
-Johnny keeps his suit in his spare saxophone case.
-Night Man causes an elevator to fall 40 floors, proving once again that Night Man Loves Killing People.
-Another Night Man kill: a guy falls off a roof trying to tackle the Johnny Domino jazz hologram. What an ignominious end, right folks?
-”You missed your calling as a Marx Brother.” “I like the Marx Brothers.” “My point is they’re all dead.” – Amazing dialogue from a time before ChatGPT
Night Man Nights: “Whole Lotta Shakin…”/”I Left My Heart”
1X03 “WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN…”
Chris: Oh boy, so, we’re actually doing this? It’s not like when we watched an episode of Krypton or Superboy or one of those other Super shows as a comparison/measuring stick for Lois and Clark? We’re actually going to watch all of Night Man, the 1997 syndicated superhero show staring Professional Stunt-Man turned Actor and People Magazine’s “Least Charismatic Man Alive” of 1998 Matt McColm as a hunky saxiphoner and kicker-of-men who gets struck by lightning and develops the ability to read people’s evil thoughts (presumably in a later episode someone checks his back for the switch that allows him to only hear their good thoughts) while simultaneously coming upon a kind of 33¢ Store Iron Man suit that gives him the power of flight maybe some other stuff that I can’t remember? That Night Man? The show so cheap that they reuse stock suiting up footage multiple times in the same episode and green screen matting so egregious that it seems like post-modern commentary on cheap green screen matting in grade Z syndicated UHF Saturday afternoon burn-off schlock? The show based on the hero from Malibu Comics, a publisher whose name sounds like what a lazy, burned-out writer would call a comics publisher in a show like Night Man?
All right then. Fine. Let’s go ahead and get it over with. Night Man episode 02 (or 03, depending on how pedantic you want to get about production schedules) “Whole Lotta Shakin…” opens with Night Man’s crusty dad the ex-cop hanging out with a pretty young Scientist Lady whose recently deceased husband was a police officer that Night Man’s dad trained. We learn this through dialogue that is in no way awkward or obviously expository, and it has no bearing on the plot save to explain why these two have any kind of relationship and attempt to allay any fears viewers may have that the old man is going to assault the Scientist Lady sexually. Night Man’s dad is about to leave when a bunch of ninja looking dudes with confusing accents bust in and fuck shit up real good. If you’re anything like me (and I am), you flashback to the vile Die Hard parody from the late in the first season of Lois & Clark and a chill runs down (or up, YMMV) your spine. But those fears are almost immediately put to rest when the Scientist Lady punches one of the ninjas square in the face, Night Man’s dad gets shot and the remaining ninjas hightail it outta there having successfully stolen some of her work. So the good news is, “Whole Lotta Shakin…” isn’t a Die Hard after all. The bad news it’s a Die Hard With a Vengeance, which has the virtue of being far less of a cliche, but still stinks.
Anywho, Night Man and his male companion Raleigh show up at the crime scene on account of Night Man’s dad getting plugged and are just in time to see a press conference wherein a reporter from a European network with a confusing accent asks some stupid question that allows us to recognize that he’s one of the ninja dudes and also hips him to Night Man who is immediately suspicious, not because he picks up any stray nasty thoughts or anything, he just doesn’t like the cut of ol boy’s jib. This, to me, does not seem like an adequate reason to start a vigilante surveillance operation. But it’s good enough for Night Man, which also apparently makes it good enough for Raleigh, who makes a smug comment about how the Eurotrash reporter with the queer accent is in for a world of hurt. I’m not a mathematician, but by my count this is only Night Man’s second adventure and as such maybe that kind of shitty, snarky attitude is a bit premature. Don’t get me wrong, his assumption that Night Man would save the day is right on the money, but the two of them only just met a week or so earlier and that kind of early, unearned confidence is frankly unbecoming. I’m glad you made a friend, Raleigh, and it’s great that you guys can do your crime-fighting together, but there’s no reason to be a dick.
You’ve gotta be a really old school homophobe if you find the sight of Little Richard on TV scary or threatening.
Ronnie: Yep, we’re doing this, and it’s going to get worse before we get Kim Coates hamming it up as Night Man’s archnemesis. (That’s in Season 2.) “Whole Lotta Shakin’” is in many ways a typical episode of Night Man, by which I mean it’s insane nonsense that bridges the gap between stupid 80s television and the superhero shows in days of yore. There’s just as much Fall Guy DNA in this as there is any superhero adventure program.
I would be remiss not to mention the opening narration that follows the opening title sequence. I don’t know why it’s added because I think the credits are pretty self-explanatory. The narrator intones “Johnny Domino was one of San Francisco’s hottest young jazz musicians. But fate, and a cosmic event, were about to change his life forever. What the doctors told him seemed impossible.”
“John, your brain has managed to acquire the capacity to pick up certain frequencies, like a radio.”
“But doc, I’m only hearing bad stuff.”
“Yes, exactly. You’re tuned to the frequency of evil.”
Raleigh then explains what the Night Man suit can accomplish: “A belt which allows him to overcome gravity. Fabrics which are virtually bulletproof. A stealth mode which makes him seem to disappear, a holographic display which makes him appear to be where he ain’t.” Viewers of the show will be inundated with this introduction so I thought I’d offer an encapsulation for the readers.
Night Man, he flies like a moron
Onto the episode itself, which is a good encapsulation of the dumbshit adventure story the series is going to feed us for the next 21 weeks. 21? Jesus. “Whole Lotta Shakin’…”, the first but not last episode to be named after a song or song lyric, is broadly about goons using earthquakes to hold Bay City hostage. Wait, didn’t the intro call Johnny one of San Francisco’s hottest young jazz musicians? Well, yes. The thing about the show is it’s not good, and once you get on that page with the show a lot of it makes more sense. Their herald, their Surfer Silver if you will, is Little Richard portraying “Jubilee Jones”, which sounds like a racist character Will Eisner drew in the 50s. He goes on the television and tells the residents of Bay City when earthquakes are going to happen. The lead goon, some combination of South African, German and Die Hardese, at one point says to Johnny “I have a strong impression another earthquake is going to happen. That’s why I drink my martinis shaken, not stirred.” I share this because I thought you’d like to have a better grasp on what we’re dealing with. Alongside all this nonsense, a little girl needs a new kidney, and you bet your bottom dollar she’s gonna get it.
Chris: I’m glad you mentioned Little Richard’s involvement in this episode because I think it’s a great example of the kind of foundational incoherence Night Man and other syndicated straight-to-landfill filler like it rested on. This is, as we said, the second episode, which is to say it’s probably the first real episode they made of the show after the pilot was picked up. It’s their you had my curiosity, now you have my attention opportunity to demonstrate why Night Man would be a show worth returning to week after week. It’s almost as big a pitch as a pilot in that respect, and you want to put your best foot forward. The good people behind the scenes of Night Man decided that their “best foot” involved naming the episode after the beloved hit song “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” and stunt casting beloved rock and roll pioneer Little Richard in a supporting role.
Here’s what I mean when I say things like “foundationally incoherent.” Night Man is a television show that debuted in the fall of 1997, “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” is a rock and roll standard written in 1955, best known from its 1957 recording by incestuous pedophile Jerry Lee Lewis (or so wikipedia says). If you’re trying to entice viewers to embrace your hip, sexy, 90’s karate action comic book superhero show, what are you doing making the name a reference to a 40 year old song and making your big cameo a guy who A. was also a big deal 40 years ago and B. doesn’t really have anything to do with that song? It’s not that Little Richard never recorded “Whole Lotta Shakin”, but the internet informs me that it had been recorded by well over a hundred different artists by 1997, including (allegedly) Gary Busey. Look, obviously Little Richard is an historical figure of incalculable significance, and he did record “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” (though it doesn’t merit a reference on the song’s wiki page), but what the fuck does any of that have anything to do with Night Man?
Like all good crossovers, what starts as a clash based on a misunderstanding ends on a team-up.
Who is this supposed to be appealing to? What does the venn diagram of people excited by a Little Richard cameo and people interested in a syndicated superhero show based on a character nobody knows from a publisher so obscure that its fans regularly got their asses kicked by the editorial staff of Wizard Magazine (IYKYK) with acting best described as community theater understudy level? And how does the fact that the A plot turns out to be an elaborate Die Hard With a Vengeance riff where the villains are causing earthquakes as a way to drive people out of the city and divert law enforcement so they can loot unmanned banks fit into that equation? And none of this even touches the B plot around the little girl who needs a new kidney. Who do the makers of Night Man imagine are tuning in and what do they think those viewers want to see? Because this just feels like someone wrote a bunch of words on a bunch of ping-pong balls that were dumped into a rotating crate and then someone else picked a half dozen balls out at random and tried to fit them all into the same script.
Ronnie: I’d like to discuss the kidney transplant subplot because that’s something that’s in the episode. Not only is it disjointed from the rest of the show, the connective tissue being the seismologist whom the criminals rob has a daughter who needs a new kidney, it’s hilarious. Night Man figures out the head of the organ board is selling organs to the highest bidder, gaming the system, as evidenced by the fact that he’s got enough money to afford a fancy car. Before Night Man intervenes, it’s Frank who uses his lack of authority to pressure the guy into confessing. He bitches to Johnny and Raleigh and the latter hacks into DA COMPUTER and finds out Dr. Boone has been selling this shit. Rather than let Frank shake the guy down, Night Man laser visions up Booth’s car and also threatens to throw him down from up in the sky. It’s hilarious to see the shoddy explosion effects–think the stock fire in Aqua Teen Hunger Force–but also it made me think of an alternate better premise for the series. Think about it: a bitter ex-cop still wants the action of being on the force. His doofus jazz musician son lucks into a supersuit. Johnny becomes Frank’s instrument of revenge. Revenge against the criminal community, revenge against the cops who put him out to pasture, revenge against widespread anti-Greek attitudes. Johnny’s too zoned out from smack to quarrel with his father’s agenda. Then yada yada yada, son realizes dad is out of control, father fights son, it’s all very dramatic. Oh yeah, and that’s the end of the subplot which doesn’t connect to anything else. Dr. Boone is threatened with murder so he rescinds his rescinding of the little girl’s kidney. She gets the kidney, all is well. What the hell does this have to do with earthquakes? Beats me.
The dazzling special effects of 1997
Odds & Ends
-Also playing at the House of Soul: Marc Bonilla and the Dragonchoir
-Monday: “Great news little girl, turns out we can get you that new kidney you need tomorrow!” Tuesday: “Ah, shit. Never mind. Sorry about that, turns out that kidney is going to someone else.” Night Man walked so One Tree Hill could fly.
-”Hey, aren’t you…” Night Man to Jubilee Jones, suggesting that there are a surplus of 60+ year old black men with pencil mustaches, gigantic bouffant wigs and bright spangly dress shirts out walking around Bay City at any given moment.
-The seismologist pins down the criminals’ accents to either Scottish or Irish, or maybe also South African. And they only spoke German. Tower of Babel filmmaking strikes again!
-”I heard them downloading something from my computer” – you can HEAR a download? I guess…
-Bay City has a female mayor. Good for them!
1X04 “I LEFT MY HEART”
Chris: Remember the time they did that Night Man that looked like it was gonna be a Die Hard riff but then it turned out to be a Die Hard With A Vengeance riff? Well I guess they’ve run out of ideas since then because it’s back to that well with “I Left My Heart”, but this time, instead of defaulting to the cliched Die Hard With a Vengeance riff, the makers of Night Man decided instead to pattern the episode after the earlier, less financially successful film in the series, Die Hard (released in 1988, Die Hard grossed an estimated 140 million dollars, as opposed to 95’s Die Hard With A Vengeance which grossed 366 million. It’s interesting to note that Die Hard was actually the lowest grossing and therefore worst entry into the entire series). This time, instead of playing a citywide game of cat-and-mouse with the villains, our hero is trapped with them inside a skyscraper during a fancy party.
We open with a little girl gazing lovely at Johnny (Night Man’s civilian alter ego) as he plays a sexy sax solo I think maybe just for her. Her chaperone appears to take her away but before she can the little girl says something about how when she’s old enough she’s gonna go to his club and see him again, when he asks her how old she is she says she’s thirteen (I would have guessed eleven but whatever) and both of the adults laugh because there’s an obvious sexual connotation to what she’s saying that’s extremely inappropriate and making them uncomfortable. Well, it made me uncomfortable. It’s worth mentioning that this episode aired in September of 1997, three months after the beloved sequel-that-no-one-involved-regretted-making-and-movie-I-saw-opening-night Speed 2: Cruise Control which also had a subplot about a little blonde girl developing an unhealthy sexual fixation on a boring block of wood. Though in that case, the block was played by Jason Patric, an actual actor who is given nothing to work with yet still managed to convey a mixture of wary caution and parental concern whenever she’s around (I’d describe the tenor of his performance as “Let’s get you to safety, don’t touch me“.
The bowtie makes Raleigh look like a member of Nation of Islam. That’d be a good twist: Night Man has to work with a follower of Farrakhan. Very hip, very 90s.
Now, does this plot similarity combined with the fact that Speed 2 is itself a Die Hard riff that’s the sequel to another Die Hard riff mean that this episode is actually more of an homage to that critical and commercial smash slash movie where Willem Dafoe uses leeches to fight his cancer? Yes, it probably does. But that only matters to losers, academics and quizzo enthusiasts (redundant?). It’s also important to know that, as clever and influential as Speed 2 was, there was never a scene where Jason Patric or Sandy Bullock used a hologram of themselves playing saxophone to lure a thug into leaping over the side of a building in the same fashion as Wile E Coyote might run full speed into a wall that he himself just painted the image of a tunnel onto moments earlier. Advantage Night Man.
Ronnie: The episode begins, as it usually does, with aerial shots of the city set to the smoothest of jazz. That’s because Johnny provides saxomophone for a fancy party. Said party is to inaugurate a fancy plastic surgeon office recently infused with cash. Mr. Cruz, in the employ of a dying drug lord, suggests to the doctor that they “inaugurate this facility in a truly meaningful way” by operating on someone. Tonight. While the doctor is in fancy clothes. The doctor blows him off but takes the proposal more seriously once Cruz threatens his wife and daughter and shows off a pallet of explosives. Cue Die Hard ripoff in which a jazz musician is all that stands in the way of terrorists’ macabre plan.
It’s always a full moon on Night Man… for some reason.
“This OR isn’t equipped for transplant surgery.” “We’ll see.” I love that response; it reminds me of Frank on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia saying “he’ll adapt” when it’s pointed out Charlie doesn’t know how to read. “I Left My Heart” adds a personal wrinkle to the Die Hard ripoff setup, replacing the Bonnie Bedelia aspect (because jazz musicians can’t be tied down, man), by which I mean the terrorists want to transplant Johnny’s heart into Jose Escobar’s body. What does it say that the jazz musician’s heart is the healthiest at the entire party? Dude has a hologram he employs when he’s nodded off from heroin usage and can’t perform at the House of Soul. Henry Darrow plays Escobar and it’s a sweet gig because he’s in bed nearly the entire time.
Most preposterously, when the narco terrorists can’t find Johnny, they pick up the second best heart match: Frank Dominus, Johnny’s dad. Look, no offense, but if Earl Hollimon is the second most compatible heart then you’ve got a party full of people with congenital heart defects or something. He’s a 60 year old man! I like when Night Man is sweating a guy for information (holding up in the air and threatening to drop him, a classic Night Man technique), the guy mentions Johnny’s dad and Night Man goes “they got Frank?”, as though he is on first name terms with the guy. In fact, everyone in this show’s calling him Frank, never “Mr. Dominus” or “Dominus” or “hey, old man”. It’s almost as if Night Man anticipated my college drinking game and introduced as many uses of the name “Frank” as possible. Fortunately before my liver fails due to phantom pains, Night Man dispatches the suitcase bomb with some of the worst CGI the late 90s has to offer and saves his father–er, Frank, from danger. He also scares Escobar so bad he has a heart attack and dies (“El Diablo!” sez Escobar when he looks at Night Man’s visage, which, fair). All in a day’s work.
Do you see? Do you see the shit we have to deal with?
Chris: It would not be an understatement to say that I am astonished at the ineptness of the effects work on this show. And not just the effects work, the entire production feels sub-community theater. Am I crazy or are a bunch of closeups on Night Man out of focus? It’s the craziest thing. There would be these super tight, dutch angled closeups right on Night Man’s puss, chin to forehead, and as God is my witness, his face is out of focus. There isn’t even any kind of background either! It’s just black back there! Like someone hung a big sheet of construction paper right behind his head! How do you shoot literally the only object in front of the camera out of focus? Who does that? I’m honestly a little concerned here because the thing about Lois & Clark was it was professionaly bad. It had shaky acting, the writing was (at best) uneven, and the effects were eighth assed, but by God it was on a network. Shitting on Lois & Clark was (as the kids say) punching up. Taking shots at Night Man feels like ripping apart the drawings my 8 year old cousin did in sharpie of aliens attacking a city on the Amazon box the birthday gift his mom gave me came in. And, to be clear, those drawings were much more convincing than any of the effects in “I Left My Heart.” If you ever read this Henry, don’t ever think I’d disparage your work.
He sued the Night Man production for bedsores incurred while filming “I Left My Heart”; the production settled out of court.
Ronnie: It reminds me of a workprint. These special effects belong in a workprint, not a finished product. Remember when someone leaked X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘s workprint and it was a lot of unfinished effects and Hugh Jackman falling onto gym mats? It’s like that. I wonder if you also notice the amount of slow motion around when Night Man does anything; boy, that’s an obnoxious choice that never gets better with time. We’re watching these from DVDs (I gave Chris the set as a gift one year) and I think it’d be hilarious to see Night Man upscaled to 4K, or even regular blu-ray. You could see everything and it’s hideous!
Odds & Ends
-On Tubi this episode is rated TV-14. I cannot fathom why.
-”This is a dangerous city, doctor. Rape, torture, murder. Those are just the socially acceptable deviations.” Since when are rape, torture and murder “socially acceptable”? What’s worse than those? Cutting off the mattress tag?
-Johnny ducks out of the party briefly to provide sax at his dad’s birthday party at The Blarney Stone. I guess there are no Greek pubs in Bay City.
-Johnny keeps his suit in his spare saxophone case.
-Night Man causes an elevator to fall 40 floors, proving once again that Night Man Loves Killing People.
-Another Night Man kill: a guy falls off a roof trying to tackle the Johnny Domino jazz hologram. What an ignominious end, right folks?
-”You missed your calling as a Marx Brother.” “I like the Marx Brothers.” “My point is they’re all dead.” – Amazing dialogue from a time before ChatGPT
Ronnie Gardocki