Two Hundred A Day - Episode 107: Just a Coupla Guys

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

After fielding the recordings on our answering machine, Nathan and Eppy take a trip to Jersey in S6E10 Just a Coupla Guys. This is a very Rockford-lite episode, centering instead on two hapless Jerseyites who want to make it in with the mob. A backdoor pilot for a never-produced show, this David Chase-written episode foreshadows a lot of what ended up in the Sopranos, but doesn't really give us what we come to the Rockford Files for. Interesting to talk about, though! We have another podcast: Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday) at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files (http://tinyurl.com/200files)! We appreciate all of our listeners, but offer a special thanks to our patrons (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday). In particular, this episode is supported by the following Gumshoe and Detective-level patrons: * Richard Hatem (https://twitter.com/richardhatem) * Bill Anderson (https://twitter.com/billand88) * Brian Perrera (https://twitter.com/thermoware) * Eric Antener (https://twitter.com/antener) * Jordan Bockelman (https://twitter.com/jordanbockelman) * Michael Zalisco * Joe Greathead * Mitch Hampton's Journey of an Aesthete Podcast (https://www.jouneyofanaesthetepodcast.com) * Dael Norwood wrote a book! Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo123378154.html) * Chuck from whatchareading.com (http://whatchareading.com) * Paul Townend, who recommends the Fruit Loops podcast (https://fruitloopspod.com) * Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app (https://rollforyour.party/) * Jay Adan's Miniature Painting (http://jayadan.com) * Pumpkin Jabba Peach Pug, Dave P, Dave Otterson, Kip Holley and Dale Church! Thanks to: * Fireside.fm (https://fireside.fm) for hosting us * Audio Hijack (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) for helping us record and capture clips from the show * Spoileralerts.org (http://spoileralerts.org) for the adding machine audio clip * Freesound.org (https://www.freesound.org/) for other audio clips

Mr. Rockford, this is Betty Jo Withers. I got four shirts of yours from the Bo Peep cleaners by mistake. I don't know why they gave me men's shirts, but they're going back. Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm Epidaeus Rapashaw. And before we get into our episode today, we have a big, big bright blinking light on our answering machine. Oh, no.

Yeah, we have one of these fancy ones where the light gets bigger the more messages we have. You know, that's a thing. So let's go ahead and see what's been accumulating in the last couple months since last time we did some listener feedback. months since last time we did some listener feedback. First, we have an update from our Rockford Library correspondent Jordan Not-Ritchie Brockleman

Bockelman. We gave him some homework in our episode 102, Beamer's Last Case, because there's a nice shot of Jim's bookshelves. Oh, yeah. So Jordan responds on Twitter.

While it is a great wide shot of that end of the trailer, nothing is in focus for me to see. However, I have noticed that the books that I have already discovered seem to move around to different spots in the trailer from episode to episode, including the prop books that originally appeared in the Columbo episode, Murder by the Book. Ah. Because we have the shared detective prop book library from the Universal Properties making their appearance. I'm trying to remember if Murder by the Book, that's the one where there's a detective author who is involved in the murder, I think.

Yes. Murder by the Book is the first episode, the first non-pilot Columbo. author who is involved in the murder, I think. Yes. Murder by the Book is the first episode, the first non-pilot Columbo. Right. Whereas the mystery writing team and one author murders the other one. The implication here is that that mystery writing team exists in the Rockford world. Yes. All right. Good. I like that. And so, yeah, I think Jordan might have mentioned this before, that at some point there is a book that's one of the,

I forget her name, but like that team writes the Something Something Mysteries and it's a woman's name. And so like one of those books appears on Jim's shelves at some point. That's great. I think as we've discussed way long ago on a listener question episode, the dream team of a Jim Rockford, Lieutenant Columbo crossover is implied by the existence of the, of these books.

It would have been so great. Next, we have some feedback on lions, tigers, monkeyskeys, and Dogs, our episode 103 from listener Eli. And Eli has sent a couple thoughts on various episodes via email. I thought this was the one that gives us the most to talk about. But thank you for all your thoughts, Eli. We appreciate getting them. Yeah. us the most to talk about but thank you for all your uh thoughts eli we appreciate getting them yeah i think we just had a probably i uh had a toss-off line about lauren bacall stayed star of screen and probably stage um he reminds reminds us that she was absolutely a stage star and that

she uh in fact won some tony's so i looked into it. She won two Tony Awards, Best Actress in a Musical, for Applause in 1970, which I've never heard of, which doesn't mean anything. I don't know tons about musicals. And Woman of the Year in 1981, which I have heard of. So at the time that this episode was made, she was a Tony Award winning actress. And then I was just looking at her awards page on Wikipedia. And so she has Tony's. She has various awards for various other things. But she never won an Oscar for something she was nominated for. She was nominated for a supporting actress role.

But she did get a Lifetime Achievement Award Oscar. So, yeah, we think you're great, but you've just been outbid every time you've been up award. The words are weird. They're just weird. Is the position of 200 a day, the same as the position of dig a thousand holes on awards? I mean, it could be, how do you, how do you phrase it? We, we neither pursue, pursue nor accept awards. I say that as somebody who won an award and built a career on it and then had the privilege to say, no, I'm done with those. I don't actually have a problem with other people pursuing or receiving awards. It's just that I, for my mental health, cannot. And so I will not. All right. In addition, getting to some of the plot stuff, why did Manette, a high quality mob guy, hire a bartender to kill someone? Didn't he have much better people for that job? I guess we're supposed to believe there was a favor for Gus. Was that ever explained? And who killed him? It couldn't be Gus. He's not competent for that. That's totally

unclear to me. So, boy, we're definitely in the range of I don't really remember all the details. Yeah, yeah. Right. So this is the one where Princess Irene wants to kill Kendall. That's like the big reveal. Lauren Bacall. And the method through which this happens is she puts pressure on Gus. Right.

So Gus is the fashion magazine guy. He slandered Irene. Irene is suing him but says she'll drop the suit if he kills Kendall. He chooses to do so by calling in a mob contact from the garment union or whatever because fashion magazine

garment union, right? That's Minette. I don't think there's any mention of why the bartender as we learn is the one who actually gets the job to do the hit. Right. Because he's the one wearing the robe who goes on the boat with the knife. Yeah. My read of that was just that the bartender thing was kind of his day job, but he was a mob guy like he was just an operator. Sure. OK, I think we might be able to answer that question in today's episode. Because there's certainly a chance that by the time it gets to Minette, there's already a game of telephone going on.

And it's not a mob affair. Yeah. So he might be like, I don't know, somebody looking to make their whatever the good mob term is for like make their wings or, you know, whatever. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, that was that was kind of my read was that it was a this guy got the job, not necessarily because of a particular skill set or whatever. Just like he's he's he's connected and he is probably disposable. So, yeah, willing and may not be connected to anyone right yeah and i think we have evidence of that it's not like he's a it's not that he's like a stone-cold killer like all the nervousness with the cigarettes and all

that stuff right yeah yeah so that's not explained in terms of giving us like minette gives him a call and says hey can you kill this woman right Right. But I guess that was my read. And then as for who killed Minette, I don't remember exactly. But the deal with that was that he drank some wine that was poisoned. Right. And it was the wine that Irene likes. It's like that one that one vineyard that she drinks. We got the line from Chapman that there was a component in it that

you could get from any i guess that doesn't matter too much but it was from like any silver like or any jewelry thing or any silversmith or something like that silver polish something yeah yeah so what we were given there was evidence that irene gave, you know, poisoned wine to cover her own tracks once things started breaking bad. Right. Yeah. Again, it's been a little while. So I don't remember what my, specifically what my impressions were at the time, but

I, that rings familiar to me. And then with a, I think a cogent critique here at the end of this email, I know Irene is nuts, but wouldn't she have had a lot of opportunities to bump off Kendall and make it look like an accident? No one investigates accidents in Europe. That's a new tourist tagline. And I think the answer there is just because that's the premise of the episode. I mean, Poirot used to investigate accidents. investigate accidents that's true yeah get the real crossover the poi road cinematic universe um yeah no that's good but yeah i don't you know i don't think there's any like screen time given to like why it has to be here now um except for and this is

just getting into the total how it turns into a total vibes yeah psychology study psychological thing right yeah it's like when they get back to california where they both came from yeah that's what brings this crisis to irene of yeah i can never be free as long as kendall is knows my secret or whatever yeah there's two possibilities there one is just being home breaks her psychologically and causes this to to result or uh being home there are more opportunities now for for kendall to someone to recognize them or you know like there's she's actually in more danger in a way yeah exactly so uh either one of those, I think. But yeah, she should have done it in Europe. And one more comment regarding lions, tigers, monkeys and dogs. At Carter Hall underscore on Twitter tweets at us about Leo Gordon played the heavy that Jim brought with him to the meeting with Manette,

who got immediately cold cocked and went to the hospital. And we hadn't seen him before, but he had been in an earlier episode, right? So there was a callback to how he got totally messed up in that one, too. He was in two previous episodes, one as this same character. The tweet here, Leo Gordon is excellent on both Maverick and Rockford files. IMO, his best Maverick is Shady Deal at Sunny Acres, which is a great episode and a con worthy of some of Rockford's best. Garner spends nearly the whole episode whittling on a porch,

saying he's working on it. Oh, I love Maverick. I want to see that episode now. I don't think I've ever seen it. I think it's referred to multiple times as like a Roy Huggins like plot that he not recycled, but like he did it in Maverick and then he pulls elements from it for Rockford. Like it's like a Roy Huggins like favorite con kind of thing. I have not seen it because I still have not seen Maverick cause I'm kind of, I don't know. I have this sense that I want to kind of keep myself. I want to, I want to keep myself innocent of Maverick until I'm done with Rockford files.

I don't know why that probably doesn't make any sense, but yeah. Or maybe for a special episode, uh, we could do shady deal at sunny acres sometime. Oh, that might be fun. Yeah. That'd be fun. So we're going roughly in an order of our episodes here. Uh, we have a followup from listener Jim in Maine about our episode 104, Return to the 38th Parallel, which, if you'll remember, was his proposal to us to do. It's the one with Ned Beatty and the $3 million vase.

We spent some time talking about his state of mind at the end there on the train oh yes i'm sorry the train ending just came back yeah his follow-up says i was unclear about why ned baity threw a three million dollar vase off a moving train onto a stone embankment yeah he wants the money but it's a vase being thrown off a train onto rocks i don't see a wooden box with straw working i guess it's basically because the ba character is under stress, very greedy, and not too smart. That was and remains my take. Regards and thanks for the great podcast series. Well, thanks again, Jim.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, I think that's pretty much where we landed, right? Like, he didn't have a plan. It was more a reflex than a plan. I think he spent that entire episode just keeping inches ahead of his fate. He wasn't doing 4D chess. He was doing 1D chess. He was playing checkers.

He was playing sorry. I think, Jim, I think you got it. I think you've encapsulated our entire hour and a half episode with that. He's under stress, very greedy, and not too smart. Yeah. All right. We have a couple comments uh taking us way back oh we're going back to the mayor's committee from dearly falls our episode 36 which we uh released in june of 2018

wow so we have a correction uh on twitter at Torchy Blaine, who says, I'm the last Rockford fan in the USA to discover your pod, and I love it. Well, thank you very much. I'm sure there's someone else out there that will find it after you. There's always new Rockford fans born every minute. That's why this is such a lucrative business. Growth industry. Catching up on back episodes and came across a mistake that i have to correct

oh good in the mayor's committee from dearly falls the happy tourist guy uh newt i think that's probably right um he got real excited about seeing someone get into a limo and in our episode neither of us really remembered we called exactly the scene and one of us said like someone famous like jane fonda or someone so you said jane fonda but he actually said ginger rogers in the 1970s jane fonda was very much persona non grata because of her vietnam war protests no way a middle-aged midwestern white guy would be happy to see her you know thank you very much for uh listening and for letting us know about these uh ancient things that we have already forgotten that we said but i i thought this was um interesting to bring up because of the i think

that's a very cogent specific point yeah yeah about the you know the politics of the 70s um and that this show does care about that kind of stuff so yeah the characters i mean we often go into how real the characters feel and that's not by accident i think when they write a character even uh i mean this isn't even an incidental character he's he's one of the four or five villains of the piece there's four of them i'm sure they sit there and think who who would he see that that you know i mean i'm sure they think about that um and of course like if you're in it in that time you you have a better instinct than you and i do as we do a podcast five decades later four four and a half decades later yeah that's somewhere in there yeah yeah definitely so i think both a apt correction and also something that reflects the texture of the show.

Yeah. And then we're going to go even more way back for our next one. We have a recent website comment on Gear Jammers Part 1, which was our episode 8, fondly remembered from listener Gladys. I mean, that episode looms very large in my consciousness. It is one of the rough episodes that sticks with me over the years. So, yeah, it's a formative, a formative one for sure. Well, specifically, if anyone remembers, there's a lifeguard who is like super ripped, like in really good shape. Oh, yeah.

Running around. Fun fact. The ripped lifeguard is played by red brown he would go on to play captain america and do television movies from 1979 both are camp classics so a good shout b i specifically wanted to bring this one up because as someone who did not really know too much media of this era. I know Red Brown as a reference from my friend and editor for Worldwide Wrestling, Ian Williams. He designed and wrote a game called Action Movie World, where you play action movie stars in action movies. It's great.

And one of the playbooks that you have as your template for your star like if you want to play schwarzenegger or you want to play tom cruise or something like that one of them is called the yeller and that is to play red brown because he was also classically known for yelling all the time in all the like bad action movies that he was in so this is primarily a platform to shout out action movie world it's a great game. Yeah. Well, I will say also that Red Brown, Red Brown is my Captain America. I know that everyone likes Chris Evans, but like I grew up on the Red Brown Captain America, um, with that see-through shield and the motorcycle with the stealth mode. Yes. That's what Captain America should be about.

cycle with the stealth mode. Yes, that's what Captain America should be about. And I will also use this as an opportunity to remind you that our episodes on our website 200aday.fireside.fm have comments and you can leave comments on them there if you would prefer. Now we're going back to not Richie Brockleman, Jordan Bockelman who has some clarification for us on a confusing sequence in The Deuce. In the scene kind of towards the climax where Bonnie is in the bar with with Nils Watson's character, George. And they have the whole thing where he's, you know, not going to drink.

And he has this kind of moment of realization that he has a real problem and everything um and i think we were both uh or at least i was confused about her ordering a drink for him even though he wasn't drinking and being on the phone and complaining about it and then also as you clarified for me i just totally missed kind of the thing with pouring the booze on him after he's in the accident and everything. So clearly I was not paying 100% attention. So Jordan helps us out here. In the scene where Bonnie is in the bar with George, she speaks on the phone with her fellow goons about George not wanting the coffee but wanting more bourbon. I believe she's speaking more directly to a bartender and other patrons attempting to convince them that George is drunk when he leaves later to go meet with Jim at

Deckard's point. Setting up the frame. That makes sense. Yeah. There's another line later when she leaves the bar and we can all see the bartender visibly noticing her stating that he's had too much to drink, even though we know different. This is all somewhat confusing for the viewer.

And I would guess maybe some scenes or lines were cut from the episode. Yeah, I think that tracks, but I think that's a good point where maybe the focus, like literally, like, you know, maybe the camera focus of the scene where she's on the phone saying he doesn't want more coffee. Right. If that showed us the bartender intent or the crowd like listening or something. Maybe it did. I just don't remember.

But yeah, sometimes that's because I'm not paying enough attention. and I just don't remember. But yeah, sometimes that's because I'm not paying enough attention and sometimes it's because the craft of the scene isn't giving us all the information to put that together for ourselves. It can certainly go either way. But yeah, that does make that whole scene

make a little more sense. Jordan continues, as I dance back and forth between watching episodes of Rockford and episodes of Columbo, as one does, I'm sometimes finding myself enjoying Columbo more due to the amount of screen time he gets per episode compared to Jim. I think this particular story could have done with

five to ten more minutes of breathing room just to fill in some of the blanks for the viewer. Particularly apt for our future conversation. Yeah, yeah. For this particular episode we're going to do today. Yeah, what do you think about that? About just generally the idea that Jim sometimes just isn't in his own episodes enough? the person who's setting up the murder,

set up the murder, and then commit the murder, all but commit the murder. I think often the murder is just off screen or something like that, but we know who's guilty. And then the rest of it is Columbo up against this person. Columbo is front-loaded or back-loaded, rather.

The first section of a Columbo episode doesn't have Columbo, right? Yeah. And that's the formula. And then the rest does, for the most part. Yeah. And the rest is this battle with Columbo. So he's front and center with it, right?

Like, it's this game of wits with Columbo. And if he's not in every scene, he's in every other scene, you know, like, because that's what you're doing. Whereas, like, with Rockford, there's less of a formula. And to that extent, I think there's a lot of experimentation going on in Rockford. I'm not saying a lot more compared to Columbo, because I think Columbo does really clever experimenting with, and when I say Columbo, I mean the people who are making Columbo, with the format that they establish, right? But Rockford files, and we talk about there's beats that we're always looking for,

where he tries to reject the job, or we know that the job, it's a friend of his that he just has to help out. But there's not as much of a very solid formula for a Rockford Files episode. And in particular, we get these ones like the one we're going to do today, which just feel a little bit like somebody is using the Rockford Files to do something else. But yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm always all for more James Gardner. I can't imagine things wouldn't be improved.

But I'm honestly trying to think of ones where, okay, I will say this, right? All of that, but just another Polish wedding might be perfect. And it has, until I saw this one, it had the least amount of Rockford in any Rockford Files episode. And I'm not saying that that's why it's almost perfect. It's clear that there's something else going on there

but yeah i i agree in like life is always more pleasant you have more james garland i would definitely agree with that yeah i think maybe if you looked at it on a minute per minute basis it's not necessarily that there's more colombo you'll watch an episode and it'll be 20 minutes of the murderer stuff before the Columbo shows up. And that's, you know, almost a third of the episode. But there is a sense that the show doesn't begin until you see Peter Falk, right? Like there is that feeling of like that's the real episode and the rest is kind of preamble. Well, with Rockford Files, obviously, depending on the episode, we're with Jim the entire time or we're cutting back and forth or whatever.

The beauty of the formula that they have for Columbo, I mean, there's many beauties to it, but one of the things, I mean, it's exactly that. You get the non-Columbo stuff in the beginning and then you get solid Columbo. And then, I mean, we were talking about this earlier, you cut, you end a Columbo episode like a beat before mean, we were talking about this earlier. You cut, like you, you end a

Columbo episode, like a beat before the audience wants it to end every time. Like every time the credits roll, you're like, Oh, that's right. Lately, Em and I have been watching a lot of the David Suchet Coirot, which is a lot of fun, but, um, that's an inverted Columbo. You're kind of going along and then you hit this point about either 15 or 30 minutes before the end of the episode, depending on if it's a short episode or a long episode where he gets everyone in a drawing room and just starts accusing everyone. There's just the thing about like when you get to that part, I'm like, can we just say who the murderer is? I'm done now. Like you've kind of seen the fun part and then you just want the resolution yeah yeah and and i understand that like for a lot of people that drawing room scene

is i mean like it's classically the poirot agatha christie thing like that's yeah it is the classic british murder mystery style yeah like when when people do uh parodies of murder mysteries that's the scene that they're parodying most of the time is the person going around accusing innocent people in turn until they get to the guilty person. I guess my last thought here is just that the potential issue of there not being enough Jim versus there needing to be a little more breathing room in an episode. I think those two things are independent. Like they can both be true or only one of them can be true like in just another polish wedding like that could have more breathing room without jim just to show us more gabby and gandhi that would be okay and in this

episode in particular in the deuce it is a bit weird because we do have so much just jim living his life. And yet there are these rough patches where we don't really understand what's going on with the fairly minimal plot. So, yeah, there is a mismatch there of like what we're seeing versus what we're getting. That I think is true. A couple more quick ones to round out our answering machine here. First, patron Robertsey has some thoughts for us on various episodes a general appreciation for irving the explainer episode 93 where as he

agrees the the joy is seeing jim be exactly wrong about what's going on um and he has a comment on our episode 86 the real Real Easy Red Dog. That's one where the reveal is that there was a baby smuggling ring, right? That this woman, she sold her baby to these unsavory characters. And now she wants... I'm trying to remember. I don't exactly remember the plot of Real Easy Red Dog. But the reveal of at least the motivation is that this woman wants her baby back.

Something like that. This is the one with the woman that's the private eye. Yeah. Yeah, okay. That keeps like playing Rockford. The one with the really good color palette. Yes, yes. See, that was exactly what I was thinking.

But Robert says, you talk about the baby adoption scandal and don't mention Raising Arizona with a quote. I myself brought $10,000 as a pup and that was 1954 dollars. So here's where I get to admit publicly and with some amount of shame that I've never seen Raising Arizona. And thus, I would not have thought to make a connection. Epi's eyes just bugged out of his head. No, no. I'm trying to make a connection. Epi's eyes just bugged out of his head. No, no. I'm trying to think if I actually have to make that same admission.

I don't know if I've seen it in totality. This might be homework for me. Because that's Coen Brothers. I know it's Nick Cage. Is it Coen Brothers? I can see our audience go down as we speak. I mean, to be clear, a couple of Nick Cage fans on this side. Yeah. Yeah yeah it's

the coen brothers okay so here's the thing the movie came out in 87 a lot not to not to like make excuses for myself but there are a lot of stuff a lot of stuff came out around that time that my friends just quoted all the time and then eventually you just forget that you weren't part of that group and didn't actually see the thing you know it becomes a a false memory kind of thing there are a lot of movies around that roughly around that time that i i have these sort of false memories of or as i've mentioned many times before i have a really bad memory and uh i did watch it and just have forgotten the majority of it. It's on us though. Oh yeah.

That's on us. That's on us. And finally, also from Robert in regards to where to watch the rock for files, he wants to make sure that we are aware and thus we will make sure that our listeners are aware of just watch.com, which is a service where you can put in a title of a TV or movie and find out where it is available for streaming or for purchase.

He says it's not perfect, especially at the first of a month when channels drop a show, but I found it very helpful in finding stuff I'm looking for. That's great. If you didn't know now, you know, and the Rockford files is currently streaming free on free V, which was formerly known as IMDbTV.

It has been rebranded as FreeV, but Rockford Files is still streaming there. It's apparently also on the Roku channel and on Tubi. Yeah. I assume with ads on all of those, and I know it's on the MeTV channel, and there's a couple linear channels that stream, you know, 70s shows and stuff. It's fun.

I'm looking at the list of the best price, the free on JustWatch.com. It's a great interface, actually. I just went to it and I was expecting a lot worse, you you know, web pages these days. But I look at it, they got the Roku channel and the 2B and 3B, all of which you mentioned. Both Roku and 3B have a little note on it that it's in HD, you know, for your high definition Rockford files, which I'm sure. Well, I don't know. You've got the Blu-ray. You can tell me.

Is it better in high definition? As far as I can tell, the main difference between the Blu-rays and the DVDs is that the Blu-rays are louder. Oh, okay. Like the audio is just louder, maybe a little crisper. The image quality on anything that I don't have a particularly nice TV. So like it looks the same on my TV. Maybe if you had a fancier TV, the upscaling would look nice or something. But these, like most Columbos, I think are just transfers of TV tapes from the 70s. So they're like they're going to be the same no matter what, which I consider part of the charm.

Yeah, I agree. And also the format format the square format uh i don't know about you but it makes my job of taking notes while i'm watching it much easier i do that now on my laptop and uh because it's the square tv format if it were the wider format that things tend to come into these days it would take up too much of of the screen for my notes to also fit on the screen or it would have to be like such a small thing that i miss important details like the color palette that said thank you so much for just watch i am bookmarking this now this is going to save so many hours of just digging through all the different apps on my phone to find anything

all right well that's everything on our answering machine. Thanks again for all of the comments, and if you sent us something and we didn't mention it here, thank you for your comment. This was long enough as it is, so we did have to make a couple choices. And we'll do it again once we have

some more thoughts that come in from listeners. And you can submit those comments, or let us know what you think via Twitter at 200pod, comments on episodes at our website, 200aday.fireside.fm, email 200adaypodcast at gmail.com, all spelled out, or becoming a patron over at patreon.com slash 200aday, and we will see and respond to your comments over there as well. Thanks again. All right.

Now with that half of our show out of the way. Get to the other half. Time for our main show here. The main event. The main event. What episode are we talking about this time? We are talking about Just a Couple of Guys. The couple of is all one word. Just a couple of guys. just a couple of guys uh that's the couple of is all one word just a

couple of guys just a couple of guys i gotta do the thing we are on yeah oh sorry i was doing that off screen season six this is the penultimate episode of season six which i did not know when i chose it okay so the the decision process here such as as it is, our previous episode was, I think, episode four of season one. And we had talked a little bit during that episode about it was still kind of finding its Rockfordishness. And I thought, oh, what a wonderful contrast would be to go to the final season where they've refined their Rockford-ishness. And so I just kind of glanced at what the different episodes were that we hadn't done in the season. And I saw one where he comes out to the East Coast. And I was like, yeah, let's see Rockford on the East Coast.

As you'll soon discover, we barely see Rockford on the East Coast. Yeah. All right. We'll get into that in a East Coast. Uh-huh. Yeah. All right. We'll get into that in a few minutes. Yeah. Yes. This is indeed the second to last episode of The Rockford Files, season six, episode 10.

This one is directed by Ivan Dixon, who we've seen four times before, most recently. The Real Easy Red Dog, our episode 86. Oh, yeah. for uh most recently the real easy red dog our episode 86 we uh have a couple more of his to do before we would do the full the full dixon um but we've talked about him a couple times he he was an actor as well as a director he was on hogan's heroes he did broadway and he was a very important figure in uh black representation in hollywood and performing arts stuff at some point probably deserving of a more deep dive but uh that is who's behind the camera here and then the writer and i think this is key to this episode is david chase yes more about that uh later so this episode

so our preamble here is that this is a weird episode with very little Jim in it. So we will take a slightly different approach to talking about the episode. I think it's a more interesting meta discussion than going through kind of the beat by beat. Yeah, I agree. I want to start off because we just talked about Ivan Dixon and David Chase, both of which have been involved in some of my favorite episodes of the Rockford Files. I'm just going to put that out there up front before we go into this. Yeah. So I think we will get to that discussion, as is tradition, after we talk about the preview

montage, which is a bit misleading. Yeah. All right. So I am full of vim and vigor. I come out of the opening montage completely charged, right? We've got some good stuff, good jokes in the cut. The, you know, Jerseyites are the friendliest people. Some of the friendliest people in the world.

Then you cut to Jim, like they stole my car, you know, that kind of thing. Lots of gunshots. There's a whole thing with a coffin being i didn't realize it until we started watching the episode but the coffin is being carried into a kitchen there's like a good gym threat in there too like keep that up and i'm gonna find your off switch so i'm like yeah this is this is this episode's gonna have it all we know there's organized crime going in yeah organized crime. And ending with the great joke of diving out of the way of machine gun fire and then a welcome to New Jersey.

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day. Thank you. Thanks so much. So yeah, I, I, I was ready for, and I, I, I don't use this term lightly a rock. All right. So starting this episode, I had skimmed through some of the IMDb reviews because they are extremely mixed. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So I was primed for What We Get, which is an episode that doesn't really have much Jim in it

and is more about the titular couple of guys who are kind of a couple of wannabe mobsters from newark so i already had that expectation of like oh i'm not going to see a lot of jim we're going to watch these two guys and this is a generative palette right for stuff that would later turn into the sopranos similar to the anthony boy episodes the the the man who saw the alligator and um the other one there's like some formative tissue of david chase writing characterization and content that is clearly what he's interested in with this like east coast jersey mob stuff um but kind of with a twist right and that stuff all turns into the sopranos and etc etc so i guess i had my expectations set more correctly i suppose because if i had gone into it like you said ready for a romp uh full of rock traditionists i i too would

have been disappointed i don't want to be too mean on this episode uh like this is the thing we i said uh before we started the podcast but is you know there has to be your least favorite rockford episode right like like and one of the episodes that might still be better than any other show or whatever but there has to be like a least favorite rockford and currently this might sit in that position for me i'm not going to uh i'm gonna i'm gonna try my best not to be like and this is what they did wrong this is what they did i just look at what what they did right because i think you're right i went in with certain expectations and that's why it happened uh if i had known the expectations, I probably would have not spent most of my notes

going, where's Rockford? And to be clear and fair, you had the expectations that I think any viewer turning on their TV to watch the Rockford Files would have had. They are what the opening montage was promising, right? Like, I feel that i'm not wrong there yeah so how do we do this yeah so i think we'll kind of we'll we'll go through we'll hit we'll hit some high points and see if there's any uh opportunity for discussion um we do get actually kind of reminiscent of lions tigers monkeys and dogs a kind of fun opening scene that gives us some title cards and like you know some good placement so we get these establishing shots of this very east coasty like alley we see we're in an italian restaurant then we get a title that comes up that says

somewhere in newark yes we know we are not in la umA. and we have the kind of delightful juxtaposition of our suit wearing guys bringing a coffin in through this kitchen where nobody seems surprised. Doesn't faze anyone. Yeah. And they haul it into, you know, essentially a freezer, I guess. It's a classic restaurant kitchen where everyone's still busy doing whatever their job is and they can't. It doesn't matter what's going on around them it's just general chaos we cut to two guys perhaps a couple of guys uh in a convertible with one of one of the nice little i don't know just one of the fun little

things that i like in this kind of show where uh we have our sax playing in the score and then it turns into a diegetic music that's a Mr. Lombard, but he doesn't want to see them. With the line, it's a couple of guys who are ready to help him with this problem. And we get the title, Just a Couple of Guys, over them. The Just a Couple of Guys gag is leaned on heavily. It is. They do have a dynamic which is nice uh yeah so i guess let's talk about them because we're going to be spending most of our episode with this pair yeah that's eugene and mickey eugene is the one kind of the more fast-talking slick one yeah it's got a little

more a little more angel vibe yeah yeah yeah and yeah and mickey has more of a rockford vibe um he's a little more pessimistic but he also is quick on his feet and responds well to challenges taking opportunities and yeah and they're you know they're two guys from newark a couple of guys who want to get in with the mob that is their deal they're small time operators that's even giving them a little extra consideration like they want to be operators like they're not even operating yet one of the good early uh rockfordish gags with these guys is that they have a load of presumably stolen hair dryers that they are trying to talk about how they're going to be able to because this gore vidal guy

or no no sorry not vidal sassoon guy they just say gore vidal oh they do the joke is that we in the 70s would know they mean vidal sassoon right yes yeah yeah i hear i made the same mistake but anyways yeah the like you have uh mickey who is kind of like i don't know like maybe we should think this through and eugene is like i need to make sure there's positive energy at all times like and so he's constantly like reframing reality in a way that makes it sound like they're they're smart and doing the right thing no matter what it is and uh and it's clear that they aren't uh or it's not that they aren't smart they're just not they're not set up right they're not knowledgeable they don't have the experience yet they're they're still they're wannabes yeah one of these couple of guys couple

of guys um yeah i think not only does eugenio's reframe like reframe reality he also readjusts expectations constantly yeah maybe we can make this much money you know what let's make this much money that's a lower amount or whatever like there's you know let's set our sights lower so that we can get a win there's definitely a part where he's like oh yeah no he really Well, how much did we get? Well, it's not that. It's not how much money. Yeah.

Yeah. So Eugene and Mickey are who we're going to be spending most of this episode with. But before we get back to them, we do cut to seeing Jim landing in New Jersey. Yeah. Newark International Airport. An airport I know well. Yeah. Honestly, it's fine. Yeah, fine. I've been through worse airports. I've been through better airports. And there's a fun, I don't know, gag, I guess, where we start off with him walking with and talking to a guy in a

big leather trench coat who's talking about how great New Jersey is. And he's lived there his whole life. And he had to go to California to get mugged by a guy wearing rubber sandals it's good and i'm i'm sitting here being like okay jim is talking to like his contact or whoever brought him out here or whatever and they pass the car rental counter and he's just like nice flying with you the guy just leaves i again, to highlight some of the best part of this episode, I think every moment that Jim is on screen is just pure gold. I think that we just get such good Rockford comedy and the other Rockford bits. You feel each beat coming and you know what's coming and it's still a delight to see it.

So he's renting a car he's leaving the lot his turn signal doesn't work so being a considerate driver he rolls down his window and and puts his arm out to point to indicate that he's turning yeah to do his signal and that is when a a youthful goon just grabs his watch off of his extended arm and takes off uh jim jumps out of the car to chase him uh he can't quite get to him and he gets away over a fence and then as he's going back to his rental car someone jumps in it and as jim goes hey wait that's my car just takes off in the rental and so now jim has lost and we had a very specific shot of him putting his luggage in the back of the car right so now jim has lost his watch his rental car and his luggage within minutes of arriving in new

jersey it's amazing just as amazing as him giving you know giving a statement or whatever to the the cops at the rental counter with the lady there who was so nice to him earlier just being like i don't know it's a little suspicious you mean this guy rents a car and then five minutes later it's stolen just being like what kind of con is this guy running and uh he's gonna have to go down to the precinct to fill out a report all right back to our couple of guys where they go into their base of operations which is a sub shop run by eugene's uncle beth who is a special guest appearance by Simon Oakland. Oh yes. Oh,

he's been in a lot of episodes. He's Vernon St. Cloud. Yes. Yes. He's Vernon St. Cloud. Yeah.

Oh, is this a ramp on him? Yes. You know what? You're right. So I recognize them, but I didn't realize i recognized them from the rockford files because that's what happens to us this is interesting because he is he has a kind of a really well-established character there's not one of those episodes that he doesn't

feature very prominently in so yeah it just feels like a cameo here because uh you know at the rockford files we're no stranger to actors playing different characters. But usually it goes the other way, right? this is he's got this prominent reoccurring character uh burn saint cloud a a fellow shamus uh and then turns around and it's just the sub shop over right yeah because we saw him in sticks and stones may break your bones but waterberry will bury you the house on willis avenue and nice guys finished dead yeah three solid episodes also three that feature another guest star. Oh, really? Yeah, because the first one has Cleveland Little is the other detective. The House on Willis Avenue

is a Richie Brockleman episode. And Nice Guys Finish Dead is a Lance White episode played by Tom Selleck. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, really. So this is a different character, Uncle Bep, or as he's credited, Bepi Canigliaro. And he is primarily here to deliver this tirade about submarine sandwiches.

It's lunchtime. What am I, a magician? I can make a hundred submarines all by myself? I'm a cadaver and the prosciutto jumps on the roll and the little red peppers make a conga line and walk right onto the paper plates. I'll be out to help you in a minute. I got to do some things first. Come on.

What am I, a magician? It's so good. Big ups to Simon Oakland. He's a great character actor. He was all over Kolchak and he was in Toma, which was one of the generative shows for this. Plus, you know, as his IMDb bio says, one of the movie's most memorable tough guys. Yeah. But yeah, this is also their base of operations

for a couple of guys. We get the gag about the Gore Vidal blow dryers. Yeah, the stolen hair dryers. Yeah. I'm assuming stolen. I don't know. We can only assume. We do see that they paid three C's for them.

So yeah, they better be able to turn those around because 300 bucks worth of hair dryers seems like a lot. So here we establish that they they're just trying to get their foot in the door. There's someone who's been throwing dead animals on this guy Lombard's lawn and they think they can help. This seems like the level of thing that they can deal with. think can help this seems like the level of thing that they can deal with there was like a um a rundown of open job tickets they have right like they they kind of went through like a list of uh things in the neighborhood oh is it just the one thing i was it was like a protection racket thing yeah it's like someone's knocking over newsstands and they said they can deal with it and now they have to figure out who's doing it so they can try and deal with it you get this impression that they don't don't know what it is that they want to

be right like they're they're like we want to be mobsters we want to be connected or whatever but they aren't entirely sure like to what end like yeah what is this what's going on um which is fun and understandable and i do like the the whole bit about like they're throwing dead cats and chickens and just I'm just consulting the Bible about it. Like, so we get a little bit of the insight into because Lombard is presumably a connected man that they think if they suck up to him, they'll be able to get involved yeah that's all established here we're like this guy lombard he's a born-again christian so he's not part of the outfit anymore but eugene thinks that maybe that's just a cover or whatever but that's the like he's praying about it not doing anything about it like because that's his his thing now um they they have one lead which is this kid saw a car near there and has a license plate number for them um and he says i want my money and they give him a pure rayon number 55 jersey i was looking at because this kid is upset about that and like obviously he wanted money uh but i think that might have been

a packers jersey and i uh which would have been weird in New Jersey. What year is this? 79. I was just trying to figure out if there was like a thing about like maybe if it were Jets. It could have been Jets at the time, but it's green and gold, right? Like I don't know enough about football. We might have to rely upon. If someone who knows about late 70s football knows that this is a reference to something in particular please let us know it seemed like a reference yeah like it gave him

a rival team's jersey or something but because it looks like an adult's football jersey yeah it certainly wouldn't fit him so that's a good enough joke yeah uh we go back to jim uh on the phone with his client at the precinct he He's been there for four hours. And here he refers to her as Miss Lombard. So we're like, ah, we see where this is going to come together. Yes, this is the Jim connection. He tries to chase down an officer to find out when he's going to be able to go. And he just gets totally no-sold.

And we are left with the sense that he's going to be at that precinct for a while. our couple of guys are staking out lombards when they see a kid on a bike roll up and throw a dead chicken over the gate so what do you know their theory that it's just some kids messing with them seems to be panning out uh they chase him down and knock him off his bike and we get a good line from this kid who's like i think 12 my dad finds out about this you creeps will be worse off than those chickens. Our next couple of scenes are kind of establishing all the rest of our players. Yeah. Lombard, who is played by Gilbert Green.

He's appeared in a couple other Rockford Files episodes. I don't think this is a wrap on him. He has one we haven't done. But he was the elder Sylvan in requiem for a funny box who uh can't handle having a gay son that guy right is he is he always mobbed up in these i feel like he probably is we have one more appearance i mean he's he's great and he clearly has much more of a role in this uh in this episode um than in that one though i remember at the time being like wow they really pack a lot of acting into this uh yeah to this conversation he has a

lot of he has a lot of like gravitas yeah but in like a mobby way i think he's well cast for this particular thing because of uh the the line that this character walks, which is the former mob. There's something sinister at first. And then he just, every turn he's, he's, he's just trying to be closer to God. Yeah. He's trying to escape his past and do more good works.

Like that's his deal. There's a line where, so, you know, they brought the kid in and then the household is all there. So it's Miss Lombard, whose name is Renee. She's a attractive young woman she's in gym clothes and we get a little bit of a eyes between like the guys and her which actually pays off later a little bit she asks the butler about

rockford who called to say he'll be quite late uh the computer turned up some unpaid traffic violations in california our guys tell her about the kid and then mr lombard shows up they tell him what you know what happened uh he's trying to he's asking the kid what's his name what you know why is he doing this tells him to go sit on it which is very rude yes his this is where he turns from like the menace to yeah the like the turn that we weren't expecting, which is, you know what you did, and that's between you and your god. Yes. He quotes some scripture and then hands out born-again pamphlets to everyone, including giving everyone tickets to his evangelical television show, like their Sunday broadcast. And he gives the kid a magazine called sports and the scriptures.

Yes. And like, there's also ticket tickets to the sandals, a Christian rock band. Like he gives more to the kid as to the couple of guys, but he is handing brochures out and all of that. I really dig that. Like the whole like, Oh, well now, now you're going to get a bunch of free stuff.

But it's all clearly meant to turn this kid's life around and stop this crime wave of throwing dead animals into yards. Eugene and Miggy, they appreciate it, but they're thinking more of getting like a favor. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Something, something like maybe if someone's knocking over some convenience stands,

you, you know, or you can tell us whoever's doing it, you know, like whatever. Yeah. Oh,

I see. You two want to hustle. Yeah. Yeah. You want to deal your way up. All right. i understand ambition but so does the lord i don't will power anymore he wields his power over me he's a true believer yeah and then to get us the rest of our of our players we have uh our kid

getting yelled at by his dad i think this may be and i'm saying this is someone who has still similar to maverick still have not watched the sopranos because i kind of feel like i want to be done with robert files first i don't know yeah okay yeah but i know so many of the memes um and i feel like this scene is probably a er sopranos scene. So this kid's dad is, um, the other important mobster, Tony Martine.

Yeah. So Martine has some beef with Lombard. And so his kid has been harassing Lombard by throwing dead animals over his gate because he's been overhearing what his dad's been saying. Yeah. Uh, so it's not a direct thing. Incredible. You hear that? dead animals over his gate because he's been overhearing what his dad's been saying yeah uh so it's not a direct thing incredible you hear that incredible you did it for me is that what you're saying where where does he learn these things honey if you would just stop yelling at him buoys grope around for male role models and what their fathers think of them is especially

important to them and so they try in their own way to be rough and tough he is 12 it is an age of transition transition he's going to transition his way right into military school if he keeps this up from now on i want to see that child psychologist two times a week not just on wednesdays he can miss his drum lessons there's this like like this psycho dynamic that's kind of spelled out for us and and he is to his credit open to that being the case right like he's not like just shutting everyone down uh which feels very sopranos as well but then after that he calms down and he tells his kid very calmly and forthrightly that you know you've put me in a very difficult position but like i'll take care of it you you know shouldn't do this kind of thing blah blah blah but like in a very loving way yeah like he's not lecturing anymore

he's kind of like okay i don't know got my high emotion out and now let me try and connect with you about like please don't do this anymore kid goes to bed and then he makes a phone call this thing has drawn on long enough he wants to hit on lombard tonight just enough to get his attention oh and find out about these two guys and gives the names of the guys who those are these like i'll you know did those guys like hate you slap you around or whatever and the guy's like yeah they which they did not do like they you know no beat me up and all the stuff like they just knocked him off his bike anyway so he's ordering a hit on lombard and he wants to find out about our couple

of guys. We have some more gym. Uh, he finally arrives in a taxi or he's so late because in addition to all the other stuff, his hotel reservation got let go cause he was late for that. So he's been looking for somewhere to stay and he can't find anything. Um,

and we get kind of the, the questions establishing all this with renee who's standing outside talking to him and it's a good physical business with him paying the cabbie and then the cabbie just like looking at him and waiting for an additional tip i guess there's some really good lines in this too like the when she sees him she's like mr rockford and he's like what's left of him and then we get to that bit where about the car i'm just gonna look at this like my dad would whoever stole it needs it a lot more than i do which is like a beautiful rocky line 100 not what rocky would think if his truck got stolen right right if jim's car got stolen truck got stolen. Right, right. If Jim's car got stolen. If something got stolen from Jim. Yeah.

And it's undercut almost immediately by a machine gun attack. What is referred to as a machine gun attack in the text. Yeah, this car just screeches up, sprays the front of the house with the machine gun. Jim grabs Renee and dives to the ground, but they're not being shot at, right? Yeah, yeah. It screeches away

uh there's this great shot of a head falling off of a statue and then after the car leaves there's a shot of them on the ground and we see renee see the head of the statue which is staring at her on the other side of jim and like flinches it's there's a lot of good visual stuff in this uh yeah in this bit and we get jim's uh rye line of welcome to new jersey yes all right let's take a little pause in the action here so that we can all sit back and catch our breaths and epi and i can let you know where you can find us elsewhere on the internet because as it turns out we do do other things than talk about the Rockford files from time to time. Epi, where can our fine listeners find you and your work? You can find my work at www.worldswithoutmaster.com. That's world plural, master singular, or at dig1000 holes.com with the thousand being numeral one zero zero zero.

I like complex URLs. You can also find me on Twitter at Epidia, E-P-I-D-I-A-H. Where can we find you, Nathan? The hub for all of my stuff from games to zines to podcasts is NDP design.com. I recently started a new podcast called Appendix NDP, which is a solo show where I talk about various topics in games and publishing. So I will plug

that for listeners of podcasts. You can also find me on Twitter at ndpaoletta, P-A-O-L-E-T-T-A. And on Instagram at the same handle, though I probably will only have pictures of my dog. So, you know, that may be a plus. Now we return to the adventures of Jimbo Rockfish on 200 A Day. And then we go inside. There's cops and stuff because obviously there was some kind of incident. We just had this great shot of Lombard crossing the entryway, giving Jim just the most incredible stink eye and then just leaving.

And here we find out that Renee, Jim had helped her out with something at UCLA when she was there. There was like a previous thing. So that's why she called him, but she didn't tell him that her dad used to be in the mob. He knows that she, she knows he wouldn't have taken the job if he had known that. Yeah.

But he, you know, since he's there, he's like, it wasn't an attempt on his life. He's basically turning down the job. Right. Yeah. That's standard procedure. My advice to you is, you know, keep keep talking to your father. Use your relationship with him to you know find out who this might be because he probably does know and like that's your greatest asset right like

i'm not going to be able to get more out of him than you will yeah and so jim is not taking the case go back to our guys so these next couple scenes are basically they hear on the radio about the incident remember because you know they were like they got this license plate from this kid but then they chased down the kid on the bike but now they're like well maybe that license plate was something someone casing the joint so now they're like oh if we can run the plate and find out who that is we can deal ourselves back in because lombard you know sloughed them off it's like okay you know come come to my revival meeting uh see you never um so there's a good joke in the cut where they're like all we need

to do is run this license plate and then to this woman just going no yeah i like this scene too because this is kind of this is the most rockfordy scene that doesn't have rockford in it they have a friend who works in the mayor's office and who they know is this like secretary, Kathleen. In my notes, this is when I start going, is this a backdoor pilot? And part of that is the lack of Rockford so far. I mean, we've talked a lot about Rockford scenes in it because those are the ones we're enjoying,

but it's mainly been these two. And at this point, as I'm watching it, I'm like, what is going on here? And I think the other bit is just the introduction of this character feels like setting up a resource or character that these two will use in future episodes setting up a setting up a dennis almost yeah exactly and uh that's when i was like wait a minute here here. Something's up. So there's, you know, there's a bunch of business about like Eugene trying to like flirt with her. And she's like, I'm not interested. And he's like, why don't you like me?

Which is creep behavior. But she says like, you're insincere. I'm like, okay. Yeah. Appreciate that. Mickey takes over and this is extremely smooth. I really like this. He's like.

You are friends with a couple of guys on the security staff, right? I mean, you even dated a couple of them. I don't think they'd mind if you use their names and call the cops they would mind if they found out nah like the guy you told me about he wouldn't mind who george bzak ron allen who cut to mickey making the phone call and using the name that he got from Kathleen to ask, you know, hey, the mayor's office, I'm blah, blah, blah from the mayor's security. I need you to run a plane. That's extremely good. It's a good con. Yeah. They go back to talk to Lombard again and they find out that this car was registered to a guy who lives in Philly. Maybe he's a shooter for the South Side Out outfit. Lombard appreciates the info,

but he doesn't know what he's supposed to do with it. He's finished with all that. He doesn't want to know about it. Lombard's thing is that if the Lord decides that it's his time, there's nothing he can do that's going to change that plan. With a little bit of like, I think he says, I've done a lot of things. It's a little bit of like,

Yeah, I deserve this. Yeah, I might deserve this. It's not up to me up to me right yeah so our guys are trying to figure out you know they still want to deal themselves in somehow and they think they feel like they're on to something lombard may not be interested but someone who cares about him might be and mickey knows a guy who's related to martine then the martine family they're the mob guys maybe they can get martin's appreciation their premise their flawed premise is that yeah because lombard used to be in the outfit the current boss would want him protected right yeah this is all occurring while they're like walking around the house and they come across renee who's packing up her car he she's being dispatched to um

to stockbridge which is like a school, like a school, I guess. Probably. There's schools everywhere in this town. But she's like, wouldn't be in college. She's whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah. She's being, you know, sent away for her own protection, essentially.

Oh, it's where the Norman Rockwell Museum is is which i highly recommend to anyone who's in the area um and she has a line where it's like maybe she'll manufacture a crisis to get him to leave to come to her and that's how she'll help yeah should have thought of that before spending 800 on a detective good for rockford i mean he lost a lot coming out this way, but it sounds like he got paid. And there's another great joke in the cut. Where's this gumshoe anyway? Cut to Jim getting punched directly across the face. He's in a bathroom

being held by multiple guys and getting just beat up by another one. They brawl into a stall. There's a guy standing kind of by the sink just like watching in horror. And then there's this guy who just gets up out of the neighboring stall and puts on his

cowboy hat and just slowly walks away. And someone yells like, hold him down, it's my turn. Our imagination gets to run wild about what put Jim into this situation. But there's a lot going on. There's a read of this episode in which it's basically saying that Rockford doesn't have what it takes to survive on the East Coast.

Or the East Coast has a certain type of antibody that is highly attuned to Rockford and his style of whatever. But there's just something here that's just saying Jersey is hostile to Jim Rockford and his style of whatever. But there's just something here that's just saying Jersey is hostile to Jim Rockford. We have no context now, and I don't think we ever get context for why any of this went down. I think Rockford has gotten more fights in bathrooms than I've ever had in my life. I like that thesis that

there's some quality to jim that just yeah it attracts the worst kind of attention in in jersey we go back to our guys who are trying to play off their info to tony martin uh he's picking them up under a bridge in a stretch limo they start off and by they i mean eugene starts off with this very stilted like i don't know parody of the godfather-esque kind of language mr martin we are happy that we can be a help to you and a certain friend in this matter and that a tragedy can be diverted also we would consider it an honor if you will be our guest for dinner while we talk this matter. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Danny's Chop House. I don't know, 22?

Hey, let's hear it. Stop talking. Just tell me what you want. Why are we here? Yeah. So they give him their piece of paper with the plate number and the name. It's Albert Constantine, whoever's been, you know, staking out the Lombard house. And he asked, what do they want?

And they say that they want to be remembered, plain and simple. So again, yeah, they don't really have a goal, right? Like they have a method without a madness. Yeah. They're investing in process, but they don't have anything they actually want to get out of it. Mickey says he recognizes Mr. Martine's face. He reminds me of someone. It's a bit of a gag to get us into Martine saying,

Oh, maybe a kid, maybe 12 years old. Someone you pulled off a bike, slapped him around a little bit. Mr. Martine, let me start off by saying we didn't know.

And that's some spunky kid you got there. And then Martine just kicks him in the kneecap. I think just, yeah, or something. let me start off by saying we didn't know and that's some spunky kid you got there and then martine just kicks him in the kneecap i think just yeah or something it was very funny so they're sitting facing each other in the back of this limo so it just like kicks out straight in front and i paused my video to take some notes and the this the frame i paused on was eugene's face like right after he was kicked so he has the like the pain on his face he's reacting his reaction shot which was very funny that it was just sitting there for a minute martine's been sitting next to this other guy who's been quiet this whole time i have someone

i want you to meet this is albert constantine i think constantine pulls out out his gun and says, and this is Albert Constantine Jr. This is a good scene. It's good. There's menace from the get-go when they get in this car that they can't see. And that makes it even more palpable, right? Like you can feel it. You're just sitting there watching and going, oh, come on, guys. Because at this point, like I don't really like these guys, but I don't want to see them murdered they're kind of they're kind of just hapless right but again i think this is where i was

like oh this is kind of a rockfordy kind of moment where mickey yeah again the one quicker on the on the draw just whips a bottle of some kind of booze out of the little there's like like some an ice bucket or something i guess he just whips it out and hits uh constantine's hand with it uh which keeps him from shooting them immediately and they they jump out the side doors of the limo constantine jumps out and chases them and takes a couple shots but they manage to get away running around they're in like a they're by some like train tracks under a bridge it's very east coasty um i could i could smell that location uh based yeah yeah you know taking the commuter rail down to providence and stuff like that like i know what that kind of area smells like but they get away they go back to lombards uh who is distraught because they kidnapped renee they i guess grabbed her right off the highway.

They tell him, you know, it's Tony Martine. And he's like, I know he called me half an hour ago. So I think everything with Lombard is good. Like his, like we were saying,

just his delivery and everything is very engaging. What do they want? What they always want. They want their way. He's been resisting their pressure for 12 years, but he can't resist anymore now that they have his daughter. So he's going to go meet a very important man and he's going to put the pressure on him and on and on and on. And then there's a beat and they say like, well, do you need someone to drive you? We'll take you. We cut to, all right, so I think I just got this. We cut to this garage where he's going to have this meeting and the camera starts on the front of his car, which has a big yellow sign that says,

I found it. And then it pans up. Yes, I'm just looking that up. As I'm looking at my notes here, I'm like, oh, that's like, that must be an evangelical thing, right? Like I found God or I found him, right? A marketing campaign put on by the Campus Crusade for Christ. Oh, okay. So it was an actual thing. Here we go.

For you millennials who weren't around in the 1970s, Christianity had a popular campaign in America. Christians bought bumper stickers that said, I found it. That's it. I found it. It caught a lot of attention. Everyone wanted to know what was found. That was on purpose.

Put the bumper sticker on your car and wait for people to ask what you found. At that point, you share the gospel. I found Jesus. So yes, our instincts were correct. I got this from the Mission to Mission website, WordPress website. But I assumed it was a thing that someone of the time would have recognized immediately. And I assumed it had to have been somehow related to Lombard's conversion to, oh, as we find out, it's a conversion from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity. There's actually a New York Times obituary for William R. Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ. In the 1970s, he plastered I found it signs across American cities for months. The it was faith in Jesus. So there we go. Look at us learning things.

Yeah, that's what this is all about. So yes, as you say, we discover he converted from Catholicism because his meeting here is with a cardinal. Yes. This scene, even in comparison to some other scenes in this episode, has some very bold, as you know, George exposition. This kind of exposition gets under my skin because the first thing you do is you explicitly state that the character, all the characters present know the exposition and then you state the exposition. So you're not only telling things to characters who don't need it told to them for the sake of the audience, but you're also telling the audience that these characters don't need to hear it. Yeah. But it's still fun to be like, who's this secret meeting with? Yeah. And it turns out it's still fun to be like who's this secret meeting with yeah and it turns out it's

it's a cardinal in the catholic church that's fun like there's but yeah yeah i agree it's a little that that particular line is like as your good friend who sat beside you on the interfaith council for six years yeah in comparison to this to its own episode because like earlier with like jim and renee she doesn't say as you know you helped me when i was at ucla she's just like well you helped me when i was at ucla like in response to him exactly having some other question like right it's just it's exposition for us giving us background on how they know each other natural thing for them to say but it's part of the natural conversation yeah yeah so there's a compare and contrast even in this episode, but okay.

So the issue here, what, what the, it is in this episode. Uh, if you remember that coffin, I did not, I know neither did I actually.

So this was, the pacing here is still very good. Yeah. In that coffin is the body of Vincent Martine, cousin to Tony Martine. Vincent Martine cannot be buried in a catholic cemetery on consecrated ground yeah not only was he a sinner in life admitted to crimes he uh committed suicide right so that's the issue tony wants his cousin to be buried with the church

yeah and the church refuses to allow it so all this stuff is to put pressure on lombard to talk to his his friend the cardinal to make get them to make an exception and now renee is in danger like come on can you do me this one thing with this caveat of like i've resisted for years asking you for favors for the mob right yeah like that's kind of the subtext the cardinal says that they can't give into terrorism um and it's just not going to happen. Lombard says what he's supposed to do. Put your faith in him. He watches out for children.

The implication there being that Rockford is him. No. I found it. Okay. So credit where credit's due. This kernel around which this episode is built is good. The idea that there's this mobster that can't be buried in consecrated ground and his brother is, or some family member. His cousin, yeah.

is upset about that and is going to put pressure on a born-again former mobster to put pressure on the Catholic Church to get it to work. I love that. That feels very Rockford. Rather than like a mob war over any other reason, it's not petty. In fact, by definition, it's not petty because it's over an immortal soul right but it's not about money or power yeah it's about family right which is like the other big one that part i dig we then go to jim reappearing at lombard's all beat up with a bandage on his forehead a big shiner and we see later his his whole wrist and hand is in like a cast or like a

brace yeah he's talking to the butler uh he didn't know where else to have the police drop him off because they took everything his airline ticket his traveler's checks there's a gag about how he doesn't have the right kind of traveler's check so he can't just get them replaced i'm pretty sure this is a joke on american express commercials at the time because they talk is it national express national express i think they call yeah and he's like most people carry national experts i don't know it just feels like a thing yeah it is a good gag that jim doesn't have the right kind of money yeah um so he's like i came back to ask miss lombard for you know to maybe advance me so i can get my plane ticket back.

He says, well, she can't help you. She's in serious trouble. So now we go to Jim and Lombard talking. Our couple of guys are there, too. So we have the whole little unit here. There's some tough guy talk about he thinks they're bozos. They think he's useless. They mentioned that they ran Vincent's body around a different funeral homes until it like exceeded the legal limit for how long you could have a body in a mortuary.

So it must be on ice somewhere. There's a good moment. Let's hit the streets. We'll talk to our contacts. See if maybe Martine has like a meat company or something. And Jim's like, where are you going? You know what? No, that's a great idea.

You guys go do that. There's a nice gag where it says you're going to need someplace to keep it. And the two of them are like, yeah, like a beer cooler. Or maybe something bigger like a freezer. He literally tells them to hit the bricks, which is funny. Yeah. And me and Lumber lumber we'll stay at the phone like you go do the quote work and we'll you know stay at the phone because they're waiting for martin to call back uh and again he tells lombard it's not really his turf as we know uh but he advises him to talk to the fbi uh and in the meanwhile stall as long as

possible so they can like yeah yeah, figure something out. We then go to Jim answering the phone with Eugene giving them a call. They found a restaurant that Martine's godson owns, Bally's Clam House. There was a very obvious ADR. Like, I guess they had to rerecord the name of it or something. It's only closed for renovations. They saw Constantine going in the back. They only heard one other voice they're gonna they're gonna hit hit the restaurant take vinnie's body and you know exchange it for renee right that's the plan oh these guys jim's

trying to talk them down i think there's a line where he says uh mickey went to get his dolly which i think pays off great lombard heard the conversation on the other phone and jim says well we're gonna have to go there see if we can stop those guys before they get into too much trouble and you have to call the police now there's no other choice yeah uh we then get a big climactic action scene where our couple of guys they managed to get the drop on one of the guys who's at the back of the restaurant constant Constantine hears a noise. They impersonate the guy's voice. He goes to see what happens.

They get the drop on him, too. Sure enough, there's a coffin in the freezer. And they haul it out and then put it on the dolly, which I was like, oh, that was so smart. Like they have a little furniture dolly. My notes at this point, I'm like, wait a minute, they're pulling this off. And then... They never checked the front of the restaurant where Rene is there tied up. And there's Martine himself and a couple other guys with guns. They hear a noise, a big guy and Martine surprised them in the back.

He says that he's going to he's going to take them out to the meadows where he will personally blow them away. So he's not kidding around anymore. His other goon had gone to check on Constantine. He comes back to say like, hey, those guys are down. And that distracts Martine enough for Mickey to throw a fish at him, which knocks the gun out of his hand. They try to run for it. They're cut off. And then we have a big brawl where they're it's actually it's pretty well choreographed i think where they're like running under the table good kitchen

fray yeah grabbing legs throwing bowls of ice at each other clams are flying there's a big pot of linguine that goes over someone's head it's it's good stuff during the the the fray, Martin kind of dips out the front once he sees police sirens reflecting off the back windows. The cops arrive. Jim and Lombard, they're in a car. They see Martin running. They follow him in the car. He takes a couple of shots at him and then they run him down. Yes.

Not at high speed. He's alive, but he does get hit by a car they sideswipe him yeah they sideswipe them the uh the cops arrive they take over to lombard his daughter's in the restaurant they run off to get renee and uh justice is presumably served we then go to our final scene here where we do have just jim in the back of the convertible with our couple of guys in the front. They say that at least Jim got paid. All they got was out of jail, which honestly seems fine to me. And something else, because Renee invited Mickey to a dance prom in Stockbridge, and then they'll go to the Springsteen concert in Boston, which is a good East Coast joke,

I think. Yeah. But Eugene faced with this like, wait a second, like, you're getting a date out of this? Starts going on about how expensive it is to buy a girl like her presents. Nah, Mick, I saw right away how it is with a snobby chick like this Renee Lombard. Take presents. You want to buy her something for her birthday, right? Start talking at $200.

You notice her feet? Those toes don't come from American shoes. It all comes from Italy, Mick. Italy. Remember them guys who used to paint chapel ceilings? They now make shoes. And they don't work cheap. And I think we get a legitimate laugh,

like a good James james garner like laugh in the back seat because that is a very funny line they say hey maybe they can get jim stuff back they know some people they can track it down maybe he'll get a parcel post on his doorstep anything can happen and then yeah anything can happen that's how guys like us operate then we have a freeze frame on our couple of guys laughing as Jim has a sudden wince of pain and he's grimacing in the backseat. Really, really showcasing the different fates of all of our players here. And that is just a couple of guys. Okay, I'm going to admit something here.

I think I've come around on the episode in our retelling of it. I think I'm less harsh on it than I was when we first started. I don't know why. I think we may have mentioned this in passing, but two other things, I think, for context. One is this is the second time that we'd be seeing these characters. We mentioned that, but I guess in the first episode they're in, they're much more goonish.

They beat up Rocky, and there's a couple other things where they're very much like people we don't like so right this is a bit of a rehab on these characters and also it was a backdoor pilot for a show a spinoff with these two guys eugene and mickey having adventures i guess mob adventures is this making it no did it ever happen no i don't think so okay but i guess the show would have been called the jersey bounce i just realized that the actor playing mickey's actual name is eugene yeah i know it's unclear from this so this is the write-up in um 30 years of the rockford files it's unclear here who was shopping it like if it was chase or or someone else anyway because it's it just says um yeah just a couple of guys was designed as a pilot for the jersey bounce possible rockford

spinoff series starring greg antinachi antinachi and eugene davis eugene and um mickey the idea was not well received. The show suffered a split personality, noted Daily Variety, taking on the Rockford charm when Garner was on screen, lapsing into amateurish tedium when spinoff possibilities were being mined. Okay, so yeah, down here there's a quote where it says, yeah, so David Chase was shopping the episode as a pilot. Most of the rest of the quote is about Anthony Boy.

Another quote, Time has been kind to just a couple of guys, at least in the sense that in some respects, the episode provided the foundation for a far more successful venture. According to author Andrew Clark, who interviewed David Chase as part of retrospective on Rockford published in the May, 2004 issue of Toro magazine, the origins of the Sopranos are partly rooted in this episode.

Yeah, it makes sense. Uh, I mean, as in, I see that. So yeah. Um,

I don't know what else there is to say. So I guess. Yeah. Going back to, I think a comment much earlier, all that meta stuff about the place of this episode in the longer arc of David Chase and how it sits in relation to other episodes of the Rockford Files is all a little more interesting than just watching it as an

episode of TV. Slightly as a gag, we're like, we're going to pay a lot more attention to the Rockford scenes and just kind of skim the other scenes, right? I don't know how much that came through. But other than talking about the dialogue the dialogue's pretty good with exceptions as noted a lot of the visual stuff is good it's well shot it's there's a lot of visual gags in various spots as well stuff like that that we didn't really talk about but these two characters yeah so a lot of the imdb reviews and even the book review like the the write-up in the, refers to them as kind of like amateurish or uninteresting. And I guess I found them more, they're more like,

they're outlines of characters to me. They're not really realized. There's definitely an expectations thing going on here because as I'm watching it, it's dawning on me that they're going to be the episode. And the thing that's happened is that I keep thinking, why are we still watching these guys when... When James Garner's right there. Right. Yeah, exactly.

The whole section in the beginning where we see them and their different machinations, like when they're hiding in the bush watching for the kid and whatnot. different machinations in the, like, when they're hiding in the bush, watching for the kid and whatnot. And it's all before we figure out what the connection is to why Rockford is coming to Newark. You just kind of get to this point where you're like, why is this happening? Right, right. Why are we seeing this in particular? Yeah. And what that ends up doing is it ends up coloring my, the impression that these characters make on me. Like, you know, I end up going, I don't want to see these guys. I mean, if the show had more Rockford in it and the characters took a slightly more backseat to it,

they actually might be kind of fun characters. I think you're right. They're not quite as realized as... I mean, it's not the Gabby and Gamby thing, right? But also, they're also lacking the star power that Gabby and Gamby have. I think that's the other thing where even the other incidental characters, so like Lombard, he's great. That actor's great.

He has great presence. He has a lot of, even if it's a little hammy, he just has some of that charisma that is just fun to watch fun to watch him talk right um yeah martine tony martine yeah because we see him have a non-threatening scene first i mean his lighter scenes he's just kind of like the threatening mob boss and it's like whatever but at least we got to see him be interesting earlier and he also has that kind of air of menace kind of similar to our urban horticulturalist that we love so much. Yes. Those kinds of characters.

So even in context to like the other characters that we don't see very much who make more of an impression on me. Like the main characters are kind of like, eh. Their dynamic is fun. I get the impression that Eugene is supposed to be annoying. In the same way that likeugene is supposed to be annoying in the same way that like angel is supposed to be annoying uh but he's not he's not angel so i'm gonna say that okay so that's a it's a tough character to do that right right the whole point to your character is to suck up the energy in the scene and be slightly annoying and angel can like a sir marlin does a wonderful job with that uh and i'm not i don't want to like

diss uh i missed i forget the actor's name now uh greg antinacci yeah i don't want to i don't want to just greg antinacci uh it's just like the character wasn't there like i i was like why are you listening to your like looking at mickey going why are you listening to your friend here like what why are you going along with what he's saying he's clearly wrong um yeah i don't know i think the fact that so much of the episode hinges on these two and they're not entirely baked yeah and like i don't know if it's a casting thing because like again because this is taking two characters we've seen before. I wonder if that's like the concept, right? Like, Hey, we saw these two characters in this episode. I want to do something else with them.

And since they're already cast, because I feel like, cause in that episode as I mean, we'll find out, but I assume they have a much, you know, much more subservient role to the story. So maybe putting them front and center, expose them a little bit as actors. I feel like that a little bit. Yeah. This is leading to our, um, our cliffhanger, our, our, our two-parter, our accidental two-parter. We decided before the show, we mentioned this, that we want to go and watch the other episode, uh, with these characters in it. Oh, the Jersey Bats. Oh yeah. Yeah. All right right from the season before i do not remember it uh we haven't done it yeah i i again only vaguely remember it but yeah we have not done it yet

uh so i think we're gonna do this one next time because maybe it'll answer some of our questions yeah i think it's gonna give us a little bit more insight into into uh what's happening it's it's also interesting thinking about this in the context of like you said that we're looking forward to these two being even less likable might be more interesting if they're less likable yeah yeah but it's going to be interesting because this is this would not be the first time on our podcast that the rock profiles has reformed a character because that's the gandy thing right like the first episode of gandy turns out to be it's a good episode but it turns out to be pretty rough when you realize that gandy's character is going to become a lovable addition to the right intermittent

cast or whatever i'm intrigued and i guess yeah the only other meta thing is that this was this was the last episode filmed and then they put it second to last for airing right there's some context there just around like and i don't i didn't really do any deep dive into this but this is when james garner is in increasing physical pain he's having more and more trouble yeah he's also in this legal situation with universal about the accounting and everything about the show so this is you know the last one shot before he's like i cannot do the show anymore we're shutting you know like doctor's orders i cannot physically continue performing like yeah we're cutting the the season short there's a read there of like we did an episode episode that had very little James Garner so that he didn't have to be on set or whatever. Right. Right. That is, you know, maybe a bit of a making lemonade out of lemons. Like, what do we do with an episode where we don't have Jim? Oh, we have these characters and I want to do another mob story or whatever. Like there's a there's a bit of an element of like kind of doing what you can with what you have, I think.

That's part of the stew going into this particular episode. But yeah, kind of zooming out, I would say it's not really that fun of an episode of the Rockford Files because you keep on wanting to see Jim and you don't get him very much. It's an okay episode of TV. Yeah, it's got some fun bits got some some fun bits has that those signature little fun quirks of like yeah the heart of the of the drama being the not being

able to bury this body and a lot of the clips and stuff like that like that's all good stuff again it's better than a lot of other television i would want right like i would choose watch this over some other episodes of tv but uh i think generally agreeing with the critique of it's not a great rockford files because we just don't have much rockford in it that is not untrue no no but um i mean one of the things about episodic television uh is that you can very quickly recover from a, uh, a dip in your, in your episodes. I mean,

obviously this one's near the very end of this, the whole thing. But, um, one thing I really enjoy about episodic television is that you can have bad episodes and it doesn't matter. It's okay. It just,

it just doesn't matter. We call this the Star Trek effect. Yes. You can have a good show that has a lot of bad episodes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we'll look forward to seeing, you know, if and how our opinions change after seeing the earlier version of these characters. Yeah.

We can see Eugene and Mickey at it again for the first time. Mm hmm. Yeah. So an interesting episode to talk about. Not really recommend to watch unless you're a huge sopranos completionist and want to see some of that proto dna i mean that's definitely interesting and worth watching that part yeah all right well that all said um i think it's time for us to uh to get back on the plane back to our our homesteads but as we've gone on at length about

we will be back next time with another episode of The Rockford Files. This one might have more Jim in it.