Product Description
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"There ya' go…" Rustle up some action and adventure as
drama McCloud rides on to DVD for the first time ever! Emmy
winner Dennis Weaver stars as the brave Deputy Marshal Sam
McCloud, the toughest cowboy to ever take on the mean streets of
New York - as well as the by-the-book detectives on the NYPD.
Despite the demands of his strict supervisor, Chief Peter B.
Clifford (J.D. Cannon), McCloud finds himself in an endless
showdown with some of the meanest criminals east of the
Mississippi. This amazing DVD set from the popular NBC Mystery
Movie Series features all 11 thrilling episodes of McCloud
Seasons 1 & 2 - including the series' pilot! - as well as a
gripping bonus episode of the popular McMillan & Wife. Saddle up
with entertaining guest stars including Milton Berle, Pat Morita,
Stefanie Powers and more in the series that proved that sometimes
all you need to solve a crime is a little good ol' country
know-how.
Bonus Content:
Disc 3:
* Bonus Episode: McMillan & Wife "Murder by the Barrel"
.com
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A viewer's favorite from the get-go, McCloud applied
country-to-city humor to the popular -series formula that
exploded on TV networks in the early 1970s. Although it would
eventually become part of the three-way line-up on the "NBC
Mystery Movie" schedule (where it rotated with McMillan & Wife (
/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/14288891/${0} ) and Columbo (
/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/13745141/${0} ), the series pilot
premiered (on September 16, 1970) as part of NBC's "Four-in-One"
cycle of TV miniseries (Rod Serling's Night Gallery was also in
that foursome), and its popularity quickly earned a regular
network timeslot, first on Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m. and later as
the "Mystery Movie" threesome settled into a well-rated
Sunday-night slot. To be sure, McCloud owed almost all of its
success to the perfect casting of Dennis Weaver as Deputy Marshal
Sam McCloud, of Taos, New Mexico, a good ol' boy crimefighter who
spends the two-hour pilot ("Portrait of a Dead Girl") tracking a
key witness who's escaped from his custody. This takes him to New
York City, where the show's premise (involving McCloud's
temporary assignment with Manhattan's 27th precinct, to "learn
the methods of a large metropolitan force") placed him at
constant odds with his immediate superior, Chief Clifford (J.D.
Cannon) as he partnered up with Sgt. Joe Broadhurst (Terry
Carter, later on the original Battlestar Galactica) and pursued
an on-and-off romance with Chris lin (Diana Muldaur), a
journalist who finds McCloud endlessly intriguing (not to mention
newsworthy).
These characters are now far more appealing than the hoary plots
that frequently found McCloud applying Southwest sleuthing to Big
Apple crimes. Like McCloud himself, many of these 11 episodes are
lanky and loose-jointed, and not quite as involving as nostalgic
reverie might suggest. The first-season episodes are also the
"condensed" versions, resulting from the subsequent combination
(after their original broadcasts) of two original one-hour
episodes into one 90-minute segment, hence the credits for two
directors and two-layered plotlines in episodes like "Manhattan
Manhunt," starring Richard Dawson as a Cockney-accented theater
producer threatened by a would-be killer. (The second-season
episodes are fully intact as originally shown.) And while the
cost-cutting expediency of '70s TV production is painfully
evident in cheesy process s, blunt ADR , and
oft-repeated stock footage, the tongue-in-cheek charm of McCloud
remains fully intact, as Weaver adopts his signature line ("There
ya go!") and commands his role with a gentleman's demeanor and a
wry, fish-out-of-water perspective on big-city work in
episodes costarring a who's-who of '70s guest stars including
Barry Sullivan, Nina Foch, Milton Berle, Stephanie Powers, Susan
Strasberg, Bo Svenson, Sebastian Cabot, Susan Saint James (just
prior to McMillan & Wife) and many more. The of McCloud
navigating Manhattan's concrete canyons on a galloping horse was
iconic in the playful spirit of the series: It makes no sense
whatsoever, but with Weaver in the role, you bought it
immediately and happily went along for the ride, which explains
why McCloud aired for five enjoyable seasons until 1977. --Jeff
Shannon