Blue (Bill Cosby) works as a skycap for an airport and also scrounges for junk he can sell. His wife Serena (Gloria Foster) is a maid and going to school to be a nurse. They’re both working so they can leave the projects and have a better life for their son Vandy (Dennis Hines), who resents the fact that he can’t have fun like his other friends and spend money. Well, when he gets sickle cell anemia, everyone realizes that time may mean as much as dollars.

Directed by Gilbert Cates — the producer of the Academy Awards fourteen times between 1990 and 2008 and was credited with recruiting Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman, Steve Martin, Chris Rock and Jon Stewart to serve as hosts — this was written by Cosby and Allan Sloane.

Cosby and Foster would reunite years later for Leonard Part 6. But that’s another story.

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Based on characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner, this was directed by Walter Grauman and written by Sam Roffe, who created Have Gun, Will Travel. The producers — Paisano Productions — had tried to launch a Doug Selby series for six years, while its series Perry Mason was popular. This is the only effort that came of all that hard work.

In the small town of Madison City, Doug Shelby (Jim Hutton) and Sheriff Brandon (Robert J. Wilke) have recently won the election pledging to keep the filth of neighboring Los Angeles out of their city. There’s also Chief Larkin (Ed Asner), who loves L.A. and a murder. That’s right — a body has been found in the pool at Jane Antrim’s (Jessica Walter) home. She that place with her disabled father-in-law Frank (Leslie Neilsen), a man who was put in a wheelchair by an accident. that also killed Jane’s husband Brian, who was also Frank’s son. For some reason, the insurance won’t pay up. And now that body isn’t drowned but has been shot twice, with two different bullets, in one entrance wound.

This is very Perry Mason, which makes sense, as Erle Stanley Gardner also created that character. Where his TV show was memorable, this movie, unfortunately, isn’t.

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Based on Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male, this BBC TV movie was directed by Clive Donner, adapted by Frederic Raphael and in addition to Peter O’Toole, it also stars Alastair Sim in his last film role.

In early 1939, before the start of World War II, Sir Robert Hunter (O’Toole) takes aim at Adolf Hitler with a hunting rifle. He hesitates to shoot, which ends with him being attacked by an SS guard. He’s tortured and claims that this was just an intellectual exercise to see if he could kill the leader. He’s a well-known British citizen, so to cover up the torture, they throw him off a cliff.

He survives and escapes to England, where a Nazi sympathizer named Major Quive-Smith (John Standing) recaptures him and demands that he writes a false confession that the British government demanded that he was given orders to kill the German leader. But he’s not giving up without a fight.

In 2007, Peter O’Toole named the film as his favorite among those that he had made. One of the reasons he was in it was because his wife Sian Phillips loved the novel.

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Also known as The Letter of the Law and Big Stick, this is a movie about Buford Pusser, except instead of Joe Don Baker, Bo Sevenson, The Rock or Kevin Sorbo, it has Brian Dennehy in the lead. Keep in mind this came out five years after the first movie and a year after Walking Tall: Final Chapter.

Buford Hayse Pusser was the sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, from 1964 to 1970, and constable of Adamsville from 1970 to 1972. During his time on the force, he survived seven stabbings and eight shootings as the result of his war on moonshining, prostitution and gambling on the Mississippi and Tennessee state line.

Already a local hero, Pusser’s war on the State Line Mob went national when his wife Pauline was killed on August 12, 1967. There was an ambush intended for him, brought on by common-law husband of a woman who tried to kill Pusser and who he shot and killed in self defense,

Pusser died on August 21, 1974, of injuries sustained in a one-car automobile accident four miles west of Adamsville on the same day that he met with Bing Crosby Productions in Memphis to talk about playing himself in the sequel to Walking Tall. It was claimed he was drunk driving but no autopsy was ever conducted.

As his legend grew — even when he was alive — singer Eddie Bond wrote and recorded several songs honoring Pusser, beginning with “Buford Pusser” in 1968 and then released Eddie Bond Sings The Legend Of Buford Pusser five years later. Pusser even recorded on Stax subsidiary Respect and even today, bands like The Mountain Goats and The Drive-By Truckers sing about him. And in 1973, when the first movie was made, he became a hero to many.

There’s a good cast here, with Forrest Tucker as Carl Pusser (he also played the same role in Final Chapter: Walking Tall), Brian Kerwin as Til Johnson, Ken Howard as Danny Boy Mitchell and Sheree North as Carrie Todd. It was directed by Lou Antonio and written by Samuel A. Peeples. If you don’t know the story from the other movies, here it is again. I like Dennehy, but I’m partial to Joe Don Baker. Then again, this led to the seven episode TV series. I can remember seeing all the commercials for these movies and I thought it was kind of sad that people kept glorifying someone who was dead, but I was a kid and what did I know.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Ralph Senensky (Death Cruise) and written by John McGreevey (The Death of Richie), this remake moves Heidi from Switzerland to New York City. It’s also a musical.

Heidi is played by Katy Kurtzman and her friend Elizabeth Wyler is played by Sherrie Wills. It’s the same story you expect, as Elizabeth is fascinated by the rural life of Heidi and her grandfather (Burl Ives).

While you see a lot of snow in this, it was shot in the summer in Los Angeles, so the acting is pretty decent. After all, it was in the 80s while fake snow was falling on the ground. Also: the grandfather is assumed dead for nearly a year and no one calls the police or tries to help Heidi. Instead, they bring her to live with the rich people and treat her like a pet, then solve the grandfather’s blindness by paying for surgery because money solves everything.

Maybe I’ve never seen Heidi before or something.

Denise Miller (Sally Field) has come home after a year of living with hippies. Her younger sister Susie (Lane Bradbury) is about to do the same thing. As for Denise, her boyfriend Flack (David Carradine) is driving across the country to save her from her family. And her parents Ed (Jackie Cooper) and Claire (Eleanor Parker) wonder where they went wrong.

Directed by Joseph Sargent (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Jaws: The Revenge) and written by Bruce Feldman, this reunites Field and Parker, as they played sisters in Home for the Holidays. If you think it’s odd that she’s her mother in this, well, Bradbury is her younger sister but is really eight years older than her.

This also has a Linda Ronstadt soundtrack, if that makes you want to watch.

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Directed by George Schaefer and written by James Costigan, this has a pretty fun cast. There’s Richard Chamberlain as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blythe Danner as Zelda Fitzgerald, Susan Sarandon (a year before The Great Waldo Pepper and The Rocky Horror Picture Show) as Ailie Calhoun, David Huffman (who died way too young as he was stabbed by a criminal while outside the Old Globe Theater in San Francisco) as Andy McKennam, Ernest Thompson (the writer of On Golden Pond) as Earl Shoen, Richard Hatch (Battlestar Galactica) as Bill Knowles and Planet of the Apes TV show cast member James Naughton as Captain John Haines. And Brooke Adams!

This is the story of how Fitzgerlad met his wife. I worked with Blythe Danner a bunch on health care commercials and I always got her after she’d been through twelve other agencies, so she was exhausted and would turn a :30 second commercial into a :90. I purposefully watched the time she hosted SNL and told her. After nearly years of us barely interacting, she sparkled and said, “Was I any good?” It wasn’t a great episode, the kind of one that aired in 1982 when the show was finding its way back. It was the kind of SNL where the music guest — Rickie Lee Jones — did three songs instead of two. But I told her, “Your monologue was perfect.”

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Katherine is based on Diana Oughton of the Weather Underground, a radical who died in 1970 when a bomb she was building accidentally exploded and Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by and then joined the Symbionese Liberation Army the same year this movie aired on ABC.

Director and writer Jeremy Kagan also made Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8, The Journey of Natty Gann and Big Man on Campus. He also directed Roswell: The UFO Conspiracy, a TV movie about the people that were near the crash.

Katherine is filled with actors who weren’t stars yet. Sissy Spacek was a year away from Carrie, Henry Winkler was not yet the Fonz and Julie Kavner was years from being Marge Simpson (although she was on Rhoda).

Katherine (Spacek) falls in love with Bob Kline (Winkler) and runs from the upper class life her parents Emily (Jane Wyatt) and Thornton (Art Carney) live in and becomes part of the Weathermen wing of Students for a Democratic Society. So much of the story is told by Katherine facing the camera and talking directly to the camera. It’s pretty interesting how that makes you feel for her as this movie never makes her seem misguided which is a pretty brave idea for a TV movie in 1975 much less something made these days.

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This movie had its theatrical debut in the United Kingdom in 1970 and was released on television in the United States in 1971 where it won John Williams an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition.

Jane Eyre (Susannah York) is the kind of classic heroine you read about in high school whose best friend had a cough and was forced to sleep in the rain and died the next day and you wonder, “Why are they making us read this book?” Well, she’s also in love with her boss Edward Rochester (George C. Scott), who is much older than her and he’s the father of Adele, the girl she’s raising. But oh the foggy secrets of Thornfield Hall.

Based on the Charlotte Bronte book, this was directed by Delbert Mann, who had directed Marty, She Waits and David Copperfield. The script was from Jack Pulman, who had worked with Mann on the aforementioned David Copperfield and also wrote Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die and The Executioner.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.