POP CULTURE Q&A

July 31, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

POP CULTURE Q&A

By Rich Heldenfels

McClatchy Newspapers

22A. Bridgette Andersen, who played Savannah, worked at times following this movie, including in the TV comedy “Gun Shy.” But she died in 1997, reportedly of an accidental overdose; she was 21. The two bumblers in the movie were played by Mark Miller (who also wrote the “Savannah Smiles” script) and Donovan Scott. Other cast members included Peter Graves, Pat Morita and Michael Parks. The film has been released on DVD. Miller, by the way, is the father of actress Penelope Ann Miller.

222A. The 1986 parody of prime-time soap operas has not, as far as I can tell, been released as an authorized video on VHS or DVD.

22A. While the show was a hit in your house, it was not so in most other places. According to the TV Series Finale website, the show premiered in June 2010 to low ratings and then watched them drop steadily until Fox finally ended the show.

22A. The series about a family in the ’60s (and about American Bandstand around that time) ran for three seasons. Only the first has been released on DVD, and Jonathan Prince, the driving force behind the series, told me recently that music-rights issues have delayed additional releases. But the good news, he said is that “it seems we will, indeed, begin the work on putting out a boxed set of all three seasons, as well as the “epilogue,” which we shot at the end of production.” The epilogue follows up on the characters a couple of years after the last regular episode.

22A. Busey, nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the rock ’n’ roll legend, did all his singing for the movie, as did Don Stroud and Charles Martin Smith, playing fictionalized versions of members of the real-life Crickets.

22A. I have not found any significant post-Monk credits for either Bitty Schram, who played Sharona, or Traylor Howard, who played Natalie, on the series. But Tony Shalhoub, who played Monk, has been busy enough. He was in the HBO film “Too Big to Fail” and was one of the voices in the animated “Cars 2.” According to the Internet Movie Database, he also has more movies in the works.

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