Sunday, January 11, 2015

What Might've Been: My Mother The Car (1965)

Fantasy sitcoms were the rage in the 60's. 1965 saw the debuts of not only I Dream of Jeannie, which lasted 5 seasons, but also My Mother The Car, also for NBC, which has been ranked as one of the worst sitcoms of all time.

Lawyer Dave Crabtree (Jerry Van Dyke) buys and restores an antique Porter, then discovers that the car talks. Specifically, his late mother, Gladys (Ann Sothern), has been reincarnated as the car. Now, that does stretch things, doesn't it? Sure, it does. Gladys will only talk to her son, not any of his family, but Dave ends up spending much of the season seeing to it that the vehicle doesn't fall into the hands of a fanatical collector, Captain Manzini (Avery Schreiber).

Series creators Allan Burns & Chris Hayward had also worked on The Munsters, Get Smart, and Rocky & His Friends. Smart was also part of the freshman class of '65. Seems Mother ended up with a creative dunce cap by comparison. Hayward would later write and produce episodes of Barney Miller. Burns also found later success elsewhere.

Right now, we have the open & close for the pilot.



Never saw the show. No rating.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

Chris Moore reviewed this one on his TV Trash site. He made some relevant points which match my own.

The first issue for this show's failure was the premise. I had asked my mom about this show as it was always referred to as the worst TV show of all time and I wondered why. She told me it failed because no one wanted to believe their loved ones' would be reincarnated into a soulless inanimate object. IRL, reincarnation (reinCARnation!) doesn't work like that, if you subscribe to those beliefs. While Christians believe in life after death, reincarnation is generally not part of the afterlife package.

The second was in the way it was aping Mr. Ed, in which the car would only speak with her son, and no one else.

IMO, another problem was why such a car would have been on a car lot to begin with. As Moore himself said in his review, to have such a vehicle on the lot for sale in 1965 is the equivalent to walking on a modern day car lot and finding a '73 Pinto for sale!

Not gonna happen!

Moore saw a few eps of it (I didn't) and mentioned that the writing of the show wasn't bad per se, just par for the course for it's era. Nothing remarkable, but not as bad as say, those sitcoms on Nick & Disney Channel.

To think, Van Dyke rejected Gilligan's Island for this!

hobbyfan said...

And it would be the first of a series of failures for Jerry Van Dyke before he finally landed a hit series, albeit in a supporting role (Coach).

Methinks they took the whole idea of a sitcom rooted in fantasy a ways too far.