EDITOR’S NOTE: The Toughest Man In the World was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and September 14, 1988.

Mr. T’s first starring made-for-TV movie role has him playing, well, himself. Or Bruise Brubaker, a tough and scowling secret softy nightclub bouncer who is in charge of a neighborhood center. He’s a Vietnam vet, he has a mohawk to honor his roots, and he’s illiterate. And he’s gonna help kids, fool!

As he’s helping kids, he’s also trying to keep Billy (John P. Navin Jr.) from being part of the crime that rules the streets. He gets Tanker Weams (Tom Milanovich) to show up at the center but also screws up and promises everyone will be a winner in a fake charity giveaway, so he has no idea how to keep working people, kind of like Mr. T’s buddy Hulk Hogan and no, I won’t let death stop me from sharing stories of the Hulkster’s lies when they’re as funny as him being in Metallica or not getting the Foreman Grill deal because he missed one phone call.

Mr. T is a little like the Hulkster. Born Laurence Tureaud, he grew up in a family with twelve kids in Chicago, calling himself Mr. T so no one would call him boy. A city wrestling champion, he went to Prairie View A&M University on a scholarship but was kicked out in the first year. Then, he was in the army and tried out for the Green Bay Packers before inventing himself as he bounced at Dingbats Discotheque. He claimed that he was in more than 200 fights and that his chains were from the people he beat in fistfights. This turned into being a bodyguard for Steve McQueen, Michael Jackson, LeVar Burton, Diana Ross, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Leon Spinks — to Wiki name just a few — as well as whispered assassination and runaway tracking deals.

Then, ABC aired two of the World’s Toughest Bouncer contests, with Mr. T bloodying huge Tongan fighter Tutefano Tufi and defeating someone in the second in under a minute after saying, “I just feel sorry for the guy who I have to box. I just feel real sorry for him.” Sylvester Stallone saw this, cast him as Clubber Lang, and the rest was history.

After a role in Penitentiary 2, he was on The A-Team, had a cartoon, a cereal, was in D.C. Cab and even had a motivational video, Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool! Also: an action figure that told you to always respect your mother and a rap album, Mr. T’s Commandments. Also, he became a wrestler, backing up the Hulkster, and this is where it gets funny. Despite being in all those toughman fights, T was freaked out about the idea that his image would be destroyed by a wrestler going off script. Maybe the rumor that Bruiser Brody was getting paid big money to hurt him — this would have never happened, Brody knew that at some point in his career, he would work for McMahon — got to him. He kept no-showing almost until the day of the event.

An aside. A few weeks before Mania, Mr. T and Hogan were on the USA Network show Hot Properties. According to Remind Magazine, “After some encouragement from Mr. T, Hogan agreed to demonstrate a chokehold on host Richard Beltzer, but ended up applying too much pressure and rendering him temporarily unconscious. Belzer recovered quickly enough to send the show to a commercial break, but he officially filed a $5 million lawsuit against both guests in 1987. The case was settled quietly in 1990.”

They also hosted Saturday Night Live the night before the show, a last-moment replacement for Steve Landesberg.

Roddy Piper, Bob Orton and Paul Orndorff, Mr. T’s opponents at Mania, may not have liked this outsider and made him nervous, but they knew where their money was coming from. That’s why the stories — Hogan wrote that “security at Madison Square Garden resisted letting Mr. T’s entourage into the building the day of the show. He was distraught by the confrontation and declared that he would just leave. The Hulkster, however, took credit for finding the actor and talking him down, getting him to see through the planned main event attraction. Paul Roma claimed that he even no-showed a few years later, as Mr. T was to manage the Young Stallions — started.

OK, another aside. Wrestlers are notoriously full of shit. There’s no way a big payday guy like Mr T was going to be with enhancement talent like the Young Stallions. And Hogan’s book isn’t non-fiction.

Then again, comedian Chris Burns once said, “I can – again, inside baseball – tell you Piper was not a fan of Hulk Hogan, moreso, Mr. T. I mean, rest in peace, Roddy, I don’t think he’d have a problem with me telling this story. He legitimately was going to kill Mr. T. I’m not kidding around. He said, he thought, “You know what? If I just back suplex him and arch it a certain way, he lands on his neck, they can’t tell me that I did it on purpose.” Piper had that thought several times, and then was like, “I’m not gonna mess up WrestleMania like that.”

Roddy Piper, also a wrestler, was probably full of shit a lot of times.

Anyways, back to Mr. T in a TV movie.

He falls for Leslie (Lynne Moody), beats gangsters and ends up knocking everyone out, including running through a wall like he’s on Takeshi’s Castle. It’s as stupid as you want it to be, and I wanted it to be really stupid.

This was directed by Dick Lowry. Yes, the same man who made Smokey and the Bandit 3. It was written by Vincent Bono, Dick Guttman and, of all people, Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster. How did that happen?

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Stepford Children was on the CBS Late Movie on June 29, 1988.

The second of three TV movie sequels — there was also Revenge of the Stepford Wives, directed by Robert Fuest, and The Stepford Husbands — The Stepford Children is based on the Ira Levin novel The Stepford Wives and the films that came after.

Laura and Steven Harding (Barbara Eden and Don Murray) have brought their kids, David (Randall Batinkoff) and Mary (Tammy Lauren), to Stepford, Connecticut, the same place where Steven’s first wife died. Laura just wants to become a lawyer, but Steven joins the Men’s Association, which is still turning wives into robots. It’s also turning the kids into homework-obsessed drones.

David and neighbor girl Lois (Debbie Barker) start hanging out, as they both love motorcycles. Laura becomes friends with Lois’ mom, Sandy (Sharon Spelman). And she soon learns that while she lets her kids be who they want to be, her husband seems obsessed with making them perfect.

During a school dance, everyone starts to dance to big band standards and when David and Mary switch it up to some rock and roll, they do more than lose control. They freak out and the cops have to come, as the Stepford Children have not been programmed for 80s music. All the men of Stepford chase Lois, causing a motorcycle crash and then David sees them removing her arms at the hospital. The next day, she shows up brand new and dumps him.

A movie that somehow has “replacement Ginger” Judith Baldwin, James Coco, Dick Butkis and Hedwig and the Angry Inch star John Cameron Mitchell all in it? Yes, and it ends in the most astounding of ways, as the entire town must die for the humans to live.

Directed by Alan J. Levi and written by William Bleich, this is way more entertaining than you’d expect. Usually, I say fuck those kids, but this time I rooted for them.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Topper was on the CBS Late Movie on February 16, 1983 and January 5, 1984.

Seven-year-old Sam was not upset when things were remade. He loved watching Topper on WPGH’s Sunday Morning Movie, and he was pleased that it was back. Old Sam is the grumpy one.

Old Sam would also like you to know that Andrews Stevens and Kate Jackson are the cutest of couples and are sad that they divorced.

This was the third time a Topper series was attempted — yes, another failed pilot — as there was a 78-episode show starring Anne Jeffreys and Robert Sterling from 1953 to 1956, and another failed pilot in 1973 with Stefanie Powers and John Fink. There was also a 1992 pilot with Tim Curry as Cosmo, Courtney Cox as Marion and Ben Cross as George.

Marion  (Jackson) and George (Stevens) swerve to avoid a bunny and end up as ghosts, stuck on Earth until they earn their way into Heaven. One of those ways they try to help others is to improve the marriage between Cosmo Topper (Jack Warden) and his wife Clara (Rue McClanahan), as well as keep him from being screwed by his unscrupulous business partner Fred Korbell (James Karen).

Charles E. Dubin directed this, along with more than 110 other TV productions. It was written by the husband-and-wife duo of Michael Scheff and Mary Ann Kasica, with George Kirgo. It was based on the original novel by Thorne Smith.

Did you ever want to see Topper in a disco? This is your movie.

You can watch this on The Cave of Forgotten Films or on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cover Girls was on the CBS Late Movie on March 2 and August 1, 1983, March 21, 1984, December 30, 1986 and June 1, 1987.

Two models, Linda Allen (Cornelia Sharpe) and Monique Lawrence (Jayne Kennedy), are really spies, sent on a mission by James Andrews (Don Galloway) to track down both an embezzler, Bradner (Vince Edwards), and a criminal named Michael (George Lazenby).

This is a failed pilot made in the wake of the success of Charlie’s Angels. You get Don Johnson as an undercover agent posing as a rock star, Ellen Travolta as a photographer and an appearance by Ray Dennis Steckler’s wife Carolyn Brandt!

Directed by TV vet Jerry London and written by Mark Rodgers, this is enjoyable silliness that I wish had become a series, but I say that about every failed pilot.

You can watch this at The Cave of Forgotten Films or on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: See China and Die was on the CBS Late Movie on March 4, 1984 and June 6, 1985.

Larry Cohen can really do no wrong.

Even with a TV movie budget, he turned this pilot for the TV show Momma the Detective into something great.

Momma Sykes (Esther Rolle) is the momma — you see, right? — of a cop, Sgt. Alvin Sykers (Kene Holliday) and she can’t help but get mixed up in his cases. She reads detective novels all the time and soon finds herself in one, as one of her employers — she’s a maid — was killed soon after coming back to China. Seeing as how she always figures out the killer in her books, she thinks she can do the same now.

She makes her way through the building, getting fired when she pries too much and then getting hired right next door, because finding a cleaning lady as good as her is hard in New York City.

I loved Ames Prescott (Paul Dooley), a cowboy singer in New York who was also a juggler, a magician and anything that would get him on the stage. There’s also a villain of sorts in former NYPD chief Edwin Forbes (Andrew Duggan), who threatens Alvin’s job.

Also: Laurence Luckinbill shows up and he was Sybok, so you should be pretty excited about that. And Estelle Evans and Rosanna Carter also show up as maids; they’re the real-life sisters of Rolle.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Fantastic Seven was on the CBS Late Movie on January 5 and September 9, 1983 and May 16, 1984.

Directed by John Peyser (The Centerfold Girls) and written by David Shaw, this starts with actress Rebecca Wayne (Elke Sommer) being kidnapped by Boudreau (Patrick Macnee) and taken to Finland, where she’ll be killed in 72 hours if the ransom isn’t paid. The studio won’t pay it; her last two films were failures. That means stuntman Hill Singleton (Christopher Connelly, so many Italian movies) must recruit, well, six more people, like his friend Horatio (Brian Brodsky), swimmers Elena Sweet (Morgan Brittany) and Dinah Latimore (Juanin Clay), explosives lover Skip Hartman (Christopher Lloyd), weaponer Wally Ditweiler (Bob Seagren) and bartender and (because he’s Asian) martial arts expert Kenny Uto (Soon-Tek Oh). Of course, they’re successful, even if this pilot wasn’t picked up for a series. I mean, I still watched it on the CBS Late Movie and wrote so many episodes for it. Ah, if only — I mean, a weekly show about stuntmen solving crimes? I mean, that would never work. Oh, The Fall Guy?

This has stunts by a Swamp Thing (Dick Durock) and two Michael Meyers (Dick Warlock and George Wilbur), as well as “Judo” Gene LaBelle.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Plutonium Incident was on the CBS Late Movie on January 21, 1983.

If you see the German poster for this, you may think it’s an Italian post-apocalyptic movie. No, it’s not. It’s very much we have Silkwood and The China Syndrome at home.

Directed by Richard Michaels (who directed a movie I’m obsessed with finding, Death Is Not the End) and written by Thomas B. Allen and Darlene Young, this has Judith Longden (Janet Margolin) working at a plant in Oregon where she finds some shocking safety problems, but also finds time to hook up with Art Reeves (Bo Hopkins). Good for her. Anyways, she and Harry Skirvan (Joseph Campanella) try to inform the world about all of these issues, which leads to The Crazies suit-wearing maniacs busting into her house, tons of harassment and — spoiler — her death by the end of the movie.

Powers Boothe is Dick Hawkins, the boss, and man, more movies with evil Powers Boothe. I say that as a yinzer who watched him hold my hockey team hostage.

You can watch this at the Cave of Forgotten Films.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Visions of Death was on the CBS Late Movie on September 15, 1976 and October 27, 1977.

Telly Savalas plays Lt. Phil Keegan, a cop before Kojak, and he’s dealing with the visions of Prof. Mark Lowell (Monte Markham), who can see the future. He tells the police that someone is about to plant a bomb, which makes him the prime suspect.

Directed by Lee H. Katjin (Death Ray 2000) and written by Paul Playdon, one wonders if a young Steve King watched this and thought, “Hey, that idea of a psychic being able to touch people and see their future seems pretty neat.” Except that Mark is a professor and Johnny in The Dead Zone was a teacher and…yeah.

They also brought in a real-life psychic — cold reader, more like it — James Van Pragh.  Barb Anderson, Eve Whitfield from Ironside, is also in this.

You can watch this on YouTube.