MeTv

[Natural Citizen]

I was flipping through my idiot box because I don't hardly know any of the channels and I found MeTv.

I'm watching Big Valley. Remember that show? Then it's Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Wanted Dead or Alive, followed by a Three Stooges marathon.

Pretty much all '60s stuff, the exception being the Stooges were '30s and '40s.

 

[Oddball]

Good stuff....There's also a digital over-air channel called Comet, that has a bunch of great retro programs as well.

 

[toobfreak]

I was flipping through my idiot box because I don't hardly know any of the channels and I found MeTv.
I'm watching Big Valley. Remember that show? Then it's Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Wanted Dead or Alive, followed by a Three Stooges marathon.
Pretty much all '60s stuff, the exception being the Stooges were '30s and '40s.

MeTV is one of the best. Think about it--- 10 years from now, 99% of the crap on TV today will be gone and long forgotten. For a show to still be in syndication 20-30 years later, much less 50-70 years, it must have been some damn good TV.

Saturdays is their best day, they air reruns of original 1930s Popeye cartoons, Wild Wild West, The Big Valley, The Three Stooges, Honeymooners, Dick Van Dyke Show, Batman, Star Trek, Lost In Space, Kolchak, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, they even rerun good and rare sci-fi horror classic B movies from long ago.

If you can't find something worth watching on Memorable Entertainment TV, you just don't like television.

Best of all, it is free.

 

[Oddball]

MeTV is one of the best. Think about it--- 10 years from now, 99% of the crap on TV today will be gone and long forgotten. For a show to still be in syndication 20-30 years later, much less 50-70 years, it must have been some damn good TV.

Saturdays is their best day, they air reruns of original 1930s Popeye cartoons, Wild Wild West, The Big Valley, The Three Stooges, Honeymooners, Dick Van Dyke Show, Batman, Star Trek, Lost In Space, Kolchak, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, they even rerun good and rare sci-fi horror classic B movies from long ago.

If you can't find something worth watching on Memorable Entertainment TV, you just don't like television.

Best of all, it is free.

Wouldn't it be fun if they started re-running MST3K?

 

[Auld Phart]

I was flipping through my idiot box because I don't hardly know any of the channels and I found MeTv.

I'm watching Big Valley. Remember that show? Then it's Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Wanted Dead or Alive, followed by a Three Stooges marathon.

Pretty much all '60s stuff, the exception being the Stooges were '30s and '40s.

I'm watching Big Valley. Remember that show?

binging it on streaming

 

[toobfreak]

Good stuff....There's also a digital over-air channel called Comet, that has a bunch of great retro programs as well.

Comet's claim to fame is they air mostly old Japanese Godzilla movies. Other good channels are Defy, Quest, and H&I. If you are into all things Star Trek, H&I is the channel for you.

 

[sparky]

I've been thinking new phone ditty.......



~S~

 

[Synthaholic]

I was flipping through my idiot box because I don't hardly know any of the channels and I found MeTv.

I'm watching Big Valley. Remember that show? Then it's Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Wanted Dead or Alive, followed by a Three Stooges marathon.

Pretty much all '60s stuff, the exception being the Stooges were '30s and '40s.

I've been binge-watching The Rifleman over the past few weeks. Such a great show. Johnny Crawford is still the best child actor.

 

[Oddball]

I can remember the days when all this great old re-run programming was on cable....Now cable and satellite are wastelands.

 

[toobfreak]

Wouldn't it be fun if they started re-running MST3K?

It's funny about MeTV. Back probably 10-15 years ago, I had DISH whose satellite receivers allowed you to patch in OTA TV and integrate it in with your satellite channels--- actually, a pretty nifty feature. I had a digital antenna and I quickly found MeTV and soon realized that they were showing better programming of stuff I liked better than the cable crap I was paying $100-$200 a month for! So I eventually cancelled the satellite and just kept the MeTV and other OTA stuff I get which adds up to as many as 70 channels.

Back to where it all began. I have not paid for TV programming in at least 8 years, no HBO, Cinemax, Showtime or anything, and I've never looked back. I have streaming now too, Pluto and several others, and I don't even watch that suff as with OTA, I can schedule to record stuff in advance then watch it when it suits me skipping over all the commercials.

 

[toobfreak]

I can remember the days when all this great old re-run programming was on cable....Now cable and satellite are wastelands.

They are trying to force everyone onto streaming now as the next great money-maker for them, and with streaming, you need to subscribe to at least 3-5 services to get a lot of diverse programming, and I refuse to be exploited, so just as how they took 'The Orville' off Fox and put it on Hulu or some such streaming service, I refuse to subscribe to pay streaming, it is just killing television. Put it back on TV or I just won't watch it. If just more people had the resolve to do this, they'd improve their viewing selections while lowering their costs, but consumers just are not a very intelligent lot.

 

[Synthaholic]

I refuse to subscribe to pay streaming

Basically, you just want free stuff.

 

[toobfreak]

I've been binge-watching The Rifleman over the past few weeks. Such a great show. Johnny Crawford is still the best child actor.

Rifleman was very good, as was Branded, Wagon Train and early Gunsmoke. Another really good TV show that gets overlooked was Seahunt with Lloyd Bridges.

 

[toobfreak]

Basically, you just want free stuff.

No, nothing is free. All those long 6 minute commercial breaks you sit through now full of insulting commercials selling you shyster legal services or medical products and drugs 6-7 times an hour (used to be just 4 commercial breaks at 2 minutes each) pay for the TV. Ever check out what TV ads cost? They are millions of dollars for a 30 second spot! The advertising is supposed to pay for the TV (they used to call them sponsors) and we as viewers pay for it by our willingness to spend our time sitting through the crap to see the show.

And they collect demographics on TV viewership in order to base the ad prices as reaching xyz millions of households.

My TV is a RECEIVER. It receives a TV broadcast. TV only became a "pay for" service when they came out with cable so that people in very bad TV reception areas could get a clear signal too. Then they got the idea to exploit it with more and more channels of specialized programming from private sources until they had the public rooked into paying for the crap no matter where they were even in high reception areas.

And look, it worked! They have you programmed to think you SHOULD be paying for the crap (and it is 95% all crap) and that I should feel guilty getting it free as TV was meant to be.

 

[odanny]

I've been binge-watching The Rifleman over the past few weeks. Such a great show. Johnny Crawford is still the best child actor.

Have you ever watched Branded?

 

[Synthaholic]

Rifleman was very good, as was Branded, Wagon Train and early Gunsmoke. Another really good TV show that gets overlooked was Seahunt with Lloyd Bridges.

The thing about 'The Rifleman' is the abundance of future stars who were unknowns on this show.

The Roku Channel (free) has all five seasons of The Rifleman, and it's absolutely amazing how many stars were on it. From a young, straight-eyed Jack Elam (he's in 5 over the years, and the eye starts misaligning as the seasons go on) to Adam West. Dennis Hopper is in two S1 episodes, Ida Lupino directs an episode (S3 E26 'Assault') Richard Anderson is great in 4 or 5 , Claude Akins (3) (who I didn't know was half Indian), Warren Oates (5), Agnes Morehead (Endora, on 'Bewitched'), Lee Van Cleef (4) - Oates and Van Cleef are both is S2 E31 'The Prodigal' - Robert Culp is in two of them, the first as a very unconvincing teenager in S2 E19 'Hero'. He seems older than Chuck Connors in his manner. The second appearance is fantastic, as a bounty hunter S4 E20 "Man From Salinas". He also wrote 'Waste' part 1 and 2, which began S5, starring Vito Scotti as a Mexican bandit with the worst teeth you've ever seen. Speaking of Mexican bandits, Martin Landau plays a great one in S4 E1 "The Vaqueros". William Schallert is in a couple, Cesare Danova, Vic Morrow, Buddy Hackett (2), Sammy Davis, Jr. (the highest rated episode on IMDB)(2), Michael Ansara (Barbara Eden's husband, and famously, Klingon commander Kang), Kevin McCarthy from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' plays a very good Mark Twain (opposite a pool shark Jack Elam), Robert Vaughn, Michael Landon and Dan Blocker, pre-Bonanza, a very young Richard Keil ('Jaws' from James Bond), James Coburn (2), Lon Chaney, Jr. I'm sure I'm missing some big ones. Richard Donnor directed a handful, as did B-movie noir director Joseph H. Lewis (51), Arthur Hiller, and Sam Peckinpah. Paul Mazursky wrote some episodes.

When you watch a bunch of them, you notice the same supporting actors in multiple episodes:

John Milford - 11
John Anderson (great!) - 11
Chris Alcaide - 10
Peter Whitney - 9 - different in each one
Dabbs Greer - 8
Mel Carter - 8
Richard Devon - 7 episodes, and he's great in each. My favorite guest star.
Royal Dano - 5, including as a neighbor who thinks he's Lincoln. Dano played Lincoln a lot, and Disney used his voice for the Hall of Presidents. Another stand-out is 'The Sheridan Story' S1 E16, as a war-wounded Confederate soldier holed up at the McCain ranch.
John Dehner - 4, and he's always fantastic, too.

 

[toobfreak]

Basically, you just want free stuff.

And to add to the subject: no, I was actually a very happy satellite viewer up until a few years back when the satellite company got so greedy that when their rental equipment they supplied (I paid a monthly rental fee for them to supply and install the working system I needed to receive their programming) broke one day and they refused to come out and even look at the problem unless I paid them $100! Even if it was just a loose connection that took 5 minutes to fix.

Then they tried to charge me for the programming still despite the fact that I wasn't getting it because their gear broke!

Then when I cancelled the service, they refused to even come pick the crap up and tried to get me to uninstall it all, box it up and ship it to them.

Then when I refused to do that, they tried to bill me for the non-functioning gear.

So I stopped subscribing altogether. Corporate greed literally drove me from subscribing to a service where they retained all rights and I had none.

 

[Synthaholic]

The thing about 'The Rifleman' is the abundance of future stars who were unknowns on this show.

The Roku Channel (free) has all five seasons of The Rifleman, and it's absolutely amazing how many stars were on it. From a young, straight-eyed Jack Elam (he's in 5 over the years, and the eye starts misaligning as the seasons go on) to Adam West. Dennis Hopper is in two S1 episodes, Ida Lupino directs an episode (S3 E26 'Assault') Richard Anderson is great in 4 or 5 , Claude Akins (3) (who I didn't know was half Indian), Warren Oates (5), Agnes Morehead (Endora, on 'Bewitched'), Lee Van Cleef (4) - Oates and Van Cleef are both is S2 E31 'The Prodigal' - Robert Culp is in two of them, the first as a very unconvincing teenager in S2 E19 'Hero'. He seems older than Chuck Connors in his manner. The second appearance is fantastic, as a bounty hunter S4 E20 "Man From Salinas". He also wrote 'Waste' part 1 and 2, which began S5, starring Vito Scotti as a Mexican bandit with the worst teeth you've ever seen. Speaking of Mexican bandits, Martin Landau plays a great one in S4 E1 "The Vaqueros". William Schallert is in a couple, Cesare Danova, Vic Morrow, Buddy Hackett (2), Sammy Davis, Jr. (the highest rated episode on IMDB)(2), Michael Ansara (Barbara Eden's husband, and famously, Klingon commander Kang), Kevin McCarthy from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' plays a very good Mark Twain (opposite a pool shark Jack Elam), Robert Vaughn, Michael Landon and Dan Blocker, pre-Bonanza, a very young Richard Keil ('Jaws' from James Bond), James Coburn (2), Lon Chaney, Jr. I'm sure I'm missing some big ones. Richard Donnor directed a handful, as did B-movie noir director Joseph H. Lewis (51), Arthur Hiller, and Sam Peckinpah. Paul Mazursky wrote some episodes.

When you watch a bunch of them, you notice the same supporting actors in multiple episodes:

John Milford - 11
John Anderson (great!) - 11
Chris Alcaide - 10
Peter Whitney - 9 - different in each one
Dabbs Greer - 8
Mel Carter - 8
Richard Devon - 7 episodes, and he's great in each. My favorite guest star.
Royal Dano - 5, including as a neighbor who thinks he's Lincoln. Dano played Lincoln a lot, and Disney used his voice for the Hall of Presidents. Another stand-out is 'The Sheridan Story' S1 E16, as a war-wounded Confederate soldier holed up at the McCain ranch.
John Dehner - 4, and he's always fantastic, too.

A few of these supporting actors who we've all seen a hundred times in Westerns:

John Milford

Chris Alcaide

Richard Devon

Royal Dano

John Dehner

 

[toobfreak]

The thing about 'The Rifleman' is the abundance of future stars who were unknowns on this show.

All those old shows were full of great upcoming current and future talent. Hollywood was rife with talent back in those days compared to a bunch of spoiled brat silver spoon do-nothings today. I follow the production crews as well and you will see all kinds of big names behind the making of those shows.

The Roku Channel (free) has all five seasons of The Rifleman

I have the Roku Channel but have never checked it out. I'll have to take a look at it some day.

John Anderson (great!) - 11
Royal Dano - 5,

Dano was a great character actor but I especially liked Anderson. Excellent dramatic actor who even did two Kung Fu's and one Star Trek Next Generations.

 

[Synthaholic]

John Anderson. I'm convinced that he was incapable of a bad performance.