{"id":941,"date":"2007-04-19T12:29:24","date_gmt":"2007-04-19T12:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=941"},"modified":"2007-04-19T12:29:24","modified_gmt":"2007-04-19T12:29:24","slug":"tales_of_gold_monkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/04\/19\/tales_of_gold_monkey\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales of Gold Monkey"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Tales of the Gold Monkey<\/i>, which I mentioned in the <a title=\"Voyagers! on DVD!\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/2007\/04\/voyagers_on_dvd\/\">previous entry<\/a>, was another one-season-wonder of a television show that gouged a huge divot in my impressionable young brain. Curiously, it ran in the same 1982-83 television season as <i>Voyagers!<\/i> (back <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/2004\/03\/the_demise_of_the_traditional.html\">when network series still had discreet and contiguous seasons<\/a> instead of only occasionally airing new episodes in between re-runs); there must&#8217;ve been something in the air that year that caused TV shows to lodge themselves so firmly in my memory. Hell, I still remember the actual <i>time slots<\/i> of the shows I loved: <i>Voyagers!<\/i> was on Sunday nights and <i>Gold Monkey<\/i> was Wednesdays. Yes, I did spend far too much time thinking about what was on the tube&#8230;<br \/>\nBe that as it may, <i>Gold Monkey<\/i> was a nifty show, a good old-fashioned pulp adventure set in the South Pacific of the 1930s. I think it failed largely because people compared it unfavorably to <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/i>; both were set in the &#8217;30s and featured an all-American leather-jacketed hero and dastardly Nazis, so <i>of course<\/i> one had to be a rip-off of the other. But I didn&#8217;t care about the similarities when I was a kid, and I&#8217;ve since decided that <i>Gold Monkey<\/i> was actually far more similar to the Bogart-Bacall classic <i>To Have and Have Not<\/i> than any of the Indiana Jones movies. Even in the &#8217;80s, however, nobody bothered to watch the classics, so the rip-off accusation stuck, and by the start of the &#8217;83-&#8217;84 season, <i>Gold Monkey<\/i> was only a memory. At least until somebody finally gets those DVDs into production!<\/p>\n<p>While we wait for that boxed set of shiny silver discs, here&#8217;s the opening title sequence, featuring an appropriately jaunty theme song by uber-composer <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mike_Post\">Mike Post<\/a>. I miss opening title sequences&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"425\" height=\"350\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/YdFN6agkNnQ\" \/><embed width=\"425\" height=\"350\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/YdFN6agkNnQ\" wmode=\"transparent\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tales of the Gold Monkey, which I mentioned in the previous entry, was another one-season-wonder of a television show that gouged a huge divot in my impressionable young brain. Curiously, it ran in the same 1982-83 television season as Voyagers! (back when network series still had discreet and contiguous seasons instead of only occasionally airing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-glass-teat","category-tv-title-sequences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}