Ironside Episode Reviews
Ironside Episode Reviews
ironsidetv.com
Ironside ran on NBC for eight seasons from September, 1967 to 1975, starring Raymond Burr as Robert T. Ironside, former chief of detectives of the San Francisco Police Department, who was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot. The show's 2-hour pilot was broadcast on March 28, 1967, almost 6 months before the show debuted, and according to a column from the Vancouver Sun on March 30/67, Universal City Studios wanted to know people's reaction to this pilot, not a normal procedure to get feedback regarding a TV show. Viewers were asked to mail their opinions on the idea of Raymond Burr playing a detective in a wheelchair, as well as what they thought of the actors playing the members of his team, directly to Universal.
I think the main reason Ironside lasted for eight seasons was because of Raymond Burr's popularity on Perry Mason, where he had played the lead role from 1957 to 1966. There is no doubt that Ironside raised public awareness of handicapped people with its star in a wheelchair. In fact, when Ironside goes to investigate crimes, I was constantly saying, "There is no way that buildings and houses in the late 1960s and early 70s can be well-equipped to deal with the needs of people like him." In many shows, there are steps where you would expect them to be, like at the entrance to people's homes, rather than ramps.
To assist him, Ironside has two cops: Sergeant Ed Brown (Don Galloway) and Officer Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson). He also has a young black guy named Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) helping him out, though the actor was not that young, born in 1943, between Galloway (1937) and Anderson (1945). Both Anderson and Mitchell may qualify as early representatives of women cops and black people on TV respectively.
In the pilot, it is established that Sanger previously threatened to kill Ironside, but the former chief of detectives figures if he offers Sanger a job, it will help to rehabilitate him. The relationship between Sanger and Ironside is peculiar. In the pilot, Sanger says "Yes, sir, boss" to Ironside, sort of like Eddie Rochester, Jack Benny's valet and tells him at one point, "You told me you don't want me to be ignorant." However, many of Sanger's responses to Ironside in later shows are equally sarcastic, bringing The Chief back to earth if he is getting a bit out of line.
Ironside has taken up residence
on a floor in the old San Francisco Hall Of Justice building, which housed the city's police headquarters. His living area is equipped with a ramp and other things which are "handicapped friendly." In the pilot and the first episode of the series, he is being pushed around by Sanger, but later he is also seen using a battery-powered wheelchair or propelling himself with a "manual" chair using his hands. In early episodes of the show, Sanger drives Ironside around town in a modified 1940 1½-ton Ford police patrol wagon which looks like a World War I military vehicle. It has been equipped with a V8 engine, an automatic lift in the back and other features like a mobile phone.
Ironside is a very crabby guy, and I would no doubt be crabby too if I had been paralyzed from the waist down by an assassin's bullet and ended up in a wheelchair. However, there is a video made in 1959 seen during the pilot which suggests that Ironside previously had a gruff persona and didn't take crap from anyone. He takes great pleasure ordering members of his team around, yelling at them that they are clueless if they can't figure out criminals' modus operandi and addressing them as "children." He prefaces questions with the word "QUERY" frequently and uses the word "flaming" which presumably replaces "fucking," sort of like "fracking" on Battlestar Galactica years later.
The show has a musical theme by Quincy Jones which includes a sound like a cat that has been thrown into an electrical substation. According to Wikipedia, this "was the first synthesizer-based television theme song," which is confusing, because the theme also uses "real" instruments. According to Jon Burlingame in his excellent book Prime Time, "a history of American television themes and scoring," this sound was produced by a Moog synthesizer, which Ironside was "the first series to use." The sound was supposed to "imitate a police siren." Jones' theme (minus the synthesizer sound) gets a lot of use in episodes.
Wikipedia also says "In addition to the opening theme music, Quincy Jones composed the entire score for the first eight episodes. Oliver Nelson took over those duties up to the end of the winter to spring 1972 episodes." This is totally wrong. According to the show's end credits, Jones composed the score for the pilot and 12 of the first season shows: 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12-17. Oliver Nelson did four episodes: 1, 3, 7, 11. Benny Carter did the sixth. The credits for shows 18 to 28 say that Jones did the theme, indicating that stock music was used. (This becomes confusing at IMDb, because the entire score of these stock shows is credited to Jones.) Marty Paich did shows from the fifth season on.
For a series which ran for 8 seasons, Ironside's release on DVD has been disappointing. According to the show's Wikipedia page, Shout Factory put out seasons 1 to 4 in North America from 2007 to 2010, with a re-release of seasons 3 and 4 in 2017. These sets do not seem to have been remastered. Seasons 5 to 8 and the complete series was released in Australia by ViaVision Entertainment from 2007 to 2011, and it was also released in France, though that is with French dubbed dialogue and no subtitles. According to one WWW page I read, the Shout Factory DVDs are based on PAL releases in Europe. There are big discrepancies in the times of episodes in the first season and I think that some of the first season shows (and maybe others) were edited because of music rights issues. The foreign DVDs can be obtained in North America from sites like amazon.com and eBay.
Ironside for the 21st century was rebooted on NBC in 2013 and was a huge flop. Only four episodes were aired, though nine were made. The remaining five were later streamed on iTunes. There was a big stink made because the actor playing the lead role was not a paraplegic, though the explanation for this was there were flashbacks to the past, prior to him becoming disabled.
Mr. Mike speaks:
I started this site in 2017, and reviewed a few episodes, which are now indicated with an asterisk (*). (Some of these were revised for these current web pages.)
As of 2024, I continued doing reviews, of season one in particular. I finished that season, but I'm not encouraged to do more reviews of this series because I found problems with most shows, even though one fan of the show told me that "[it] gets better as it goes along." We're not talking about "bad" in the sense of "so bad it's good." There are serious issues with plots, characters, and general script logic. I was under the impression that Ironside was a "quality show," but I was wrong, at least based on many first season episodes. I also reviewed the late 1980s reboot of Mission: Impossible where many of its episodes were mediocre, though at least that series was only two seasons long, whereas Ironside had eight in total, only four of which are easily available on DVD in North America.
At one point, I got so fed up with season one of Ironside that I randomly chose another show from the third season to do. Big mistake, this was a continuation of an episode from season one which was already bad and this conclusion of the story was even worse.
I think a lot of the Ironside shows were overwritten, in other words, they went beyond an hour in length, and had to be edited to fit in the hour. Jerome Coopersmith, who wrote many episodes of Hawaii Five-O, said words to the effect that he was told to keep his scripts to around 60 pages, which would represent the equivalent of a 60 minute show. There are a lot of references in Ironside to characters identified just as "him," "her," and so forth, and it's hard to believe that the writing was so poor that no one bothered to correct things like this.
A further explanation for the problems with Ironside's North American release may be found in a 2023 posting on the Home Theater Forum. It says "I'm starting to go through this release again for the first time in years and I've noticed a lot more than I did before that these episodes are very much altered from their original presentation. Uncut episodes have been PAL sourced and are in the wrong music cue and run at a hair under 50 minutes, whereas episodes that have the music in the proper speed (you can notice not just with the theme but with the Universal tag) have been edited by several minutes and run out at a smidgen under 48 minutes. Also, at some point along the way during the syndication run the decision was made to put the title/theme music first when its clear that the original presentation was a pre-credits teaser and then the theme since the way the episodes unfold we get a short scene after the theme and then coming back we get episode title, main guest stars, writer, director, etc."
Episodes of Ironside in the first four seasons -- at least as available on the Shout Factory DVDs -- are shorter than typical hour-long TV shows of the era (1967-1975). You can see the first four seasons' times on this page. Episodes of Raymond Burr's Perry Mason on the show's 50th anniversary set range from 52:05 to 52:37 in length (1960 and 1961 shows), from 50:38 to 50:57 (1962 and 1963), and from 50:20 to 51:58 (1964 to 1966). Mannix, a show which also ran from 1967 to 1975, same as Ironside, ranged from 50:30 to 50:32 (season 1 shows), 50:30 to 51:09 ( season 2), 51:06 to 51:10 (season 3) and 50:22 to 51:11 (season 4). And the timings for most Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980) episodes were also around 50-51 minutes in its early seasons. Ironside on the Shout Factory DVDs rarely gets above 49 minutes in its first four seasons, even getting as low as 47:49. A couple of Ironside episodes like the last-mentioned may have been where there were issues with music which was cut out of the show.
As far as the source of some of the shows being from PAL originals in Europe, I got hold of a few selected episodes from the current (2024) French-dubbed set and their times were virtually the same as the ones released by Shout Factory. In searching for links about the show, I also kept reading about a series of bootleg tapes from a Canadian broadcast source and the Columbia House VHS tapes which were supposedly near or even above 50 minutes in length. Some of the Columbia House tapes are sold on Ebay and a close-up of the tape labels suggests that the typical time for one of these episodes is 50 minutes.
Overall, my experience with Ironside soured me so much on reviewing classic TV shows, that I don't know if I am going to continue doing this. And this situation wasn't helped by my selecting a random episode from Mannix for a change of venue -- and it also turned out to be a particularly bad episode.
In any case, if you want to agree or disagree, please send some e-mail to me.
Other Ironside links to check out:
THE MAIN STUFF:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironside_(1967_TV_series)
Show's Wikipedia page
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061266/
Show's IMDb page
http://ironside.tv/
This site has been around since at least 2017, but I don't think it has changed much. There are a few forum postings dating from 2010 and 2011.
https://lemondedesavengers.fr/hors-serie/annees-1960/l-homme-de-fer-1967-1975/l-homme-de-fer-saison-1#17
A site in French which covers not just Ironside, but many TV shows. To read in English, use a browser like Google Chrome, where if you right click on a French page, there is a prompt to translate it.
https://www.itsabouttv.com/2022/06/over-transom-ironside.html
A very good overview of the series.
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/classic-tv-show-you-should-be-into-couldnt-get-into.375222/page-8#post-5097972
Another overview of the show ("Should I give it another chance?")
https://www.beachwoodreporter.com/?s=ironside
Several episodes reviewed, if there is a "Read more" link for a specific review, click on it.
Ralph Senensky (who is 101 years old as of 2024) has his own WWW site where he talks about episodes of TV shows which he directed, including two season one Ironside shows:
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/ironside-1967
Is Ironside suitable for families?
REVIEWS OF DVDS:
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/htf-review-ironside-season-one.254603/
A review of the Shout Factory DVD season one from 2007.
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/entertainment/television/2007/05/25/ironside-first-season-memorable-viewing/61775807007/
Another review of the first season DVD set
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/htf-dvd-review-ironside-season-two.262640/
Review of season 2 Shout Factory release
http://hkfilmnews.blogspot.com/2007/12/ironside-season-2-dvd-review-by-profle.html
Another review of the season 2 DVD set
https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/42299
Review of season three Shout Factory DVD set (not very favorable).
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/ironside-seasons-5-8-on-via-vision.375495/
Discussion about seasons 5-8 released in Australia
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=22387
Monster of Comus Towers review
MISCELLANEOUS:
https://www.city-data.com/forum/tv/1886150-any-other-ironside-fans.html
Postings from 2013 from people who remember the show.
https://www.fanfiction.ws/tv/Ironside/
Four pages of Ironside-based fan fiction stories.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/Ironside1967
Various "categories" you might expect to see on Ironside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8BHWvyofX8
Benny Hill as Ironside (pretty rude)
https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/summer-media-roundup-part-1/
https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/tag/ironside/
