Guerdon Trueblood, who wrote this, really had quite the resume. The grandson of General Billy Mitchell, the founding father of the U.S. Air Force, he was a dependable writer for TV as well as writing and directing The Candy Snatchers. You can also check out a few other TV movies he wrote like The Savage Bees, SST Death Flight, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo and even the theatrically released — and reviled — Jaws 3D.

Ants — also known as It Happened at Lakewood Manor and Panic at Lakewood Manor — was directed by Robert Scheerer, who also made Poor Devil, the “Primal Scream” episode of Kolchak and episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

Probably the main reason to watch this is Lynda Day George, who we all know and love from movies like Pieces, Day of the Animals, Beyond Evil and Mortuary. But you also get Myrna Loy, Suzanne Somers (just before Three’s Company), Bernie Casey and Brian Dennehy.

As for the Lakewood Manor, a real estate madman wants to turn it into a casino while its owner (Loy) wants to keep it as it is. As it is involves a pit of venomous ants that can’t be destroyed by pesticides and love to murder people. Imagine — millions of ants covering people, who can’t move or they’ll be killed, ants upon ants taking the life of the soon-to-be Chrissy Snow.

In the 70s, I spent most of my childhood worrying that I would be killed by a bug. Now, I’m more sure it’s going to be a heart attack any day now.

This movie is coming out from Kino Lorber in 2022. Yes! I love that those guys keep putting out physical releases of made for TV movies. Please support them.

I Dream of Jeannie was created and produced by Sidney Sheldon* and it seems like for a long time, he was the only person that believed in it. He originally wanted the first season to film in color — it was one of only two shows on NBC at the time not in color, but special photographic effects employed to achieve Jeannie’s magic weren’t technologically advanced enough to be in a full range of colors yet — but NBC did not want to pay it.

It was $400 an episode.

The network and Screen Gems didn’t think the show would make it to a second season. But Sheldon saw that ABC’s Bewitched was a success and bet on the show.

He was right. It was in the top 30 shows for almost every year that it was on before becoming a syndication powerhouse.

In the pilot episode, “The Lady in the Bottle”, astronaut USAF Captain Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) lands his one-man capsule Stardust One on a deserted island in the South Pacific. While wandering the beach, Tony notices a strange bottle** that moves by itself. When he rubs it, smoke and a genie (Barbara Eden) pop out.

Tony’s first wish is to be able to understand her, then for a helicopter to rescue him. Jeannie, who has been trapped in the bottle for 2,000 years, falls in love with him and follows Tony back home where she soon breaks up his engagement with his commanding general’s daughter, Melissa. It seems like this was a storyline being set up for the long game, but Sheldon realized that this romantic triangle didn’t have much rope.

Tony keeps Jeannie in her bottle until he realizes she needs a life of her own, which is mostly her using her genie powers to try and make his life better. He worries that if anyone finds out that she exists that he won’t get to be part of NASA, but his worries lead him to being investigated by psychiatrist U.S. Air Force Colonel Dr. Alfred Bellows (Hayden Rorke) with the only person — at first — that knows his secret being Major Roger Healey (Bill Daly).

Unlike many of the sitcoms of the era, I Dream of Jeannie had multipart story arcs (which were created to serve as backgrounds for national contests). For example, nobody knew when Jeannie’s birthday was and the guessing game led to a contest, with the answer being April 1. There was also a four-episode event where Jeannie was locked in a safe on the moon and fans had to guess the combination to save her and another where Tony was replaced and had to be found. But there are also several long storylines, like Jeannie’s evil sister also named Jeannie, Jeannie’s ever-changing origin story which includes Eden’s first husband Michael Ansara as the Blue Djinn, Jeannie taking over the crown of her home country Basenji and so many more.

Supposedly, Hagman was so hard to work with that the producers seriously considered replacing him with Darren McGavin. They even wrote out a story with Tony losing Jeannie and McGavin finding her, but it never ended up happening. In her 2011 book Jeannie Out of the Bottle, Eden wrote, “Larry himself has made no secret about the fact he was taking drugs and drinking too much through many of the I Dream of Jeannie years and that he has regrets about how that impacted him.”

When there were two TV movies in the 80s, Hagman didn’t return. In I Dream of Jeannie… Fifteen Years Later his role was played by Wayne Rogers and as he’s on a space mission in I Still Dream of Jeannie, he’s simply written out and Hagman’s Dallas co-star Ken Kercheval took over as Jeannie’s master. There was also a cartoon called Jeannie that aired from 1973 to 1975 that had Julie McWhirter (who in addition to being the voice in so many cartoons is also the wife of Rick Dees) play Jeannie, “Curly” Joe Besser as Babu a genie in training and Mark Hamill as Corey Anders, a high school student.

Eden has also gone on the record as saying that she never connected with another actor in the same way as she did with Hagman. They’d reunite for the 1971 TV movie A Howling in the Woods.

Why did the show end? It was still near the top thirty after all. Well, Eden believes that there were enough episodes for syndication already and the ratings had gone down after Jeannie and Nelson got married in season 5. No one except for the network wanted that and it eliminated the romantic tension of the show.

I grew up watching this show multiple times a day, often paired with its one-time rival Bewitched. Just going back through these — the original 8 episodes with Paul Frees narration instead of the theme song are a revelation — has made the end of the year doldrums so much better.

You can get all 139 episodes on the Mill Creek  I Dream of Jeannie The Complete Series blu ray set. You’ll get hours and hours of fun for a really great price at Deep Discount.

*Sheldon was inspired by the movie The Brass Bottle, which has Tony Randall’s character get a genie played by Burl Ives. Randall’s girlfriend was played by Eden.

**The bottle is actually a special Christmas 1964 Jim Beam liquor decanter containing “Beam’s Choice” bourbon whiskey. How weird is that?

Also known as Beyond This Place There Be Dragons and wow, what a high minded title for a TV movie — this movie is all about Fred MacMurray as a yacht sailing daddy who falls for a gold digger who actually loves him, including a long speech about the first time they made love and how he finally knew what it was like to be a man and you know, all the negative reviews of this movie can go jump in a Bermuda Triangle because this movie is all about old man loss and yearning, including a professor whose wife disappeared and he was afraid to go into the door into another dimension to find her.

There’s also a great speech about being a dreamer, as well as Donna Mills showing up and a young Dana Plato, which also makes me wistful and sad. This was her first acting job.

Sure, it’s languidly paced, but we all live inside now and maybe we need time to reflect on a place that used to take trophy wives from would-be sea captains and men of industry.

Director William A. Graham started in TV back in 1958, so he probably made something you’ve seen, like Birds of Prey, Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, The Last Ninja, Calendar Girl Murders, Elvis and the Colonel: The Untold Story (he also directed Change of Habit, Elvis’ last fictional movie), The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer and Death of A Cheerleader.

This movie was produced by Playboy Productions, which brought 76 productions to large and small screens, including And Now for Something Completely Different, the Oliver Reed version of Fanny Hill, Saint Jack, Young Lady Chatterley II (I have so much to say about that one), the mind-destroying Playboy’s Roller Disco & Pajama Party, A Summer Without Boys and so much more.

This YouTube link is amazing, because not only does it have the movie, but it’s a CBS Late Night Movie complete with commericals for Shirley Jones steaming hot dogs and The Manitou!

This movie knows my weaknesses and exploits them.

TV movies. Summer camp romps. Movies with stars of network television.

Marvin Schector (Cheers star John Ratzenberger) has opened up a new summer camp, a place where his daughter Ava (Jennifer Aniston) has a job for the summer and meets cut with a tough kid named Roger played by Brian Robbins from Head of the Class. His wife is played by Dorothy Lyman, Naomi from Mama’s Family and man, this article is going to turn into me geeking out over what shows each of these people come from.

Well, let’s see:

Chad Allen is from My Two Dads.

Candace Cameron Bure is from Full House and I once had a job ghostwriting her tweets about tuna, so I have that going for me.

Josh Saviano (Marilyn Manson) and Danica McKellar are from The Wonder Years.

Jaleel White is Urkel.

And Sherman Helmsley is from Amen and The Jeffersons.

I can see why Breckin Meyer is in this and why Mr. Dewey from Saved by the Bell (Patrick Thomas O’Brien) and Playboy February 1988 Playmate of the Month Kari Kennell and Melanie Shatner — who is in Bloodstone: Subspecies II and III — were in this, but G. Gordon Liddy?

Director Roger Duchowny also made episodes of That Girl, The Brady Bunch and The Love Boat, which probably helped in the filming of this movie. It was written by Bennett Tramer (Kidco, Without Warning, many Saved by the Bell episodes and yes, the inspiration behind the name Ben Tramer in Halloween) and Rich Melcombe, the creator of the Grudge Match syndicated series.

I mean, if you want a great summer camp comedy, there’s always Meatballs. If you want to spend some time with your favorite TV characters, there’s Camp Cucamonga.

Jeff and Barbara Hamilton (Bill Bixby and Paula Prentiss) lose their maid and decide that if they’re both so busy, they should just get another wife because it’s 1972. And yet in the midst of porno chic, their new wife Susan Silver (Valerie Perrine) is only shown to be fleetingly romantic with Jeff and not interested at all in the benefits of a true triad relationship. But hey — it was on TV in 1972, so why am I wondering these things? Too many Joe D’Amato movies, that’s why.

Throw in appearances by Myrna Loy, Robert Goulet, Nanette Fabray, Larry Storch and Penny Marshall and yes, you have a TV movie.

Somehow, this is my second Jerry Paris-directed movie in two days, so that means I’ll have to seek out his movies What’s a Nice Girl Like You…?, Evil Roy Slade and How Sweet It Is!, which somehow has both Terry-Thomas and Paul Lynde in the same movie.

Seriously, why didn’t Barbara and Susan just run off and leave Jeff — who is a real cad for the entire movie — all on his own?

Based on the book Pandora’s Clock by John J. Nance, this movie draws on the author’s experiences as a Braniff Airlines pilot by telling the story of a deadly virus on a Boeing 747-200. The governments of the world have left the passengers — including Ambassador Lee Lancaster (Robert Guillaume) — to die, but Captain James Holland (Richard Dean Anderson) and his crew are struggling to save them all.

Nance shows up as a high-ranking Air Force official, plus there’s Daphne Zuniga, Jane Leeves, Robert Loggia and Stephen Root on hand.

One could argue my smarts in watching a movie about quarantines and pandemics and viruses while the Omnicron variant is in the news. There are so many disease of the week movies that now are not as much fun to watch as they once were.

You can watch this on YouTube if you feel like dealing with some dread.

The adult side of Archie isn’t new — despite what series like Riverdale would have us think — as this movie has the comic book hero coming back home fifteen years after graduation. In England, where they’d have no context for the comic, it was called Weekend Reunion.

Dick Lowry also directed several of the Kenny Rogers Gambler movies and The Jayne Mansfield Story so you know the quality that you’re getting into here.

Archie (Christopher Rich) is now a lawyer about to marry his fiancee, while Veronica (Karen Kopins) has been married four times, Betty (Lauren Holly) has become a school teacher, Jughead (Sam Whipple) is a psychiatrist that fears women and Reggie (Gary Kroeger) is still a jerk.

While this pilot for a series wasn’t picked up, Archie Comics published an adaptation of that had Stan Goldberg and Mike Esposito art in the flashbacks to look like the classic comics and Gene Colan drawing the modern versions of the characters. It also has a cover by John Byrne, who didn’t often draw comedy characters like Archie and his friends.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Gene Levitt wrote and directed The Phantom of Hollywood as well as creating Fantasy Island. Here, he’s making a kinda sorta pre-Argento giallo in which Paul Dennison (Stewart Granger) tries to kill his wife Nancy (Lois Nettleton) but ends up giving her amenesia instead.

The problem? The amnesia she gets could go away at any time and then she’ll remember that he was cheating on her, that she was going to cut off his cash and that he set her up to die. But until then, he’s going to try and ride this out.

This isn’t a classic of the small screen. That said, it has some nice locations and moves along quickly. It’s innocuous and sometimes, you just need some old made for TV movies to get you through the day.