{"id":29546,"date":"2021-09-25T00:01:14","date_gmt":"2021-09-25T06:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=29546"},"modified":"2021-09-29T07:19:18","modified_gmt":"2021-09-29T13:19:18","slug":"telefilm-review-the-magician","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/telefilm-review-the-magician\/","title":{"rendered":"Telefilm Review: The Magician"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;OneJS=1&amp;Operation=GetAdHtml&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;source=ss&amp;ref=as_ss_li_til&amp;ad_type=product_link&amp;tracking_id=adamsblog03-20&amp;language=en_US&amp;marketplace=amazon&amp;region=US&amp;placement=B075392855&amp;asins=B075392855&amp;linkId=9e1840cbe0ba3746ad5c633d1f09d88f&amp;show_border=true&amp;link_opens_in_new_window=true\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>The Magician\u00a0<\/em>was a 1973 pilot film for a TV series starring Bill Bixby <em>(The Incredible Hulk, The Courtship of Eddie&#8217;s Father.) <\/em>Bixby plays a stage magician who solves mysteries. The pilot has a 70-minute runtime as opposed to most later pilots that opt for either a forty-five-minute regular pilot episode of a series or a TV Movie length. This was aired over NBC which was doing the &#8220;Mystery Wheel&#8221; format at the time with rotating 90-minute mystery movies being aired, so that&#8217;s the reason for the odd length.<\/p>\n<p>Tony Dorian*(Bixby) is sought out by a mother who&#8217;s daughter supposedly died in a plane wreck after a man who had been on the plane (and also was supposed to have died) has a spontaneous heart attack at Dorian&#8217;s performance. Dorian has to find out what happened to the woman&#8217;s daughter and thwart the very dangerous and powerful people who want to stop him.<\/p>\n<p>The 1970s was a golden age for the TV Detective. <em>The Magician\u00a0<\/em>has a lot of gimmicks that make it stand out from its contemporaries.. The wealthy playboy aspect of Dorian&#8217;s character is somewhat reminiscent of Banacek but Dorian&#8217;s different style plus the fact he cared not one whit for money makes that comparison strained. From this movie, the best comparison I could make is that Dorian is the Saint, if the Saint were a magician.<\/p>\n<p>Bixby&#8217;s performance is good. He was superb at playing characters with a kindly nature. At the same time, he manages to play the mystery and the ultimate coolness of his character in a way that&#8217;s relatable and pleasing to watch.<\/p>\n<p>With a name like <em>The<\/em><em>\u00a0Magician, <\/em>the series promises magic and spectacle and delivers. We get the same magic trick twice, but it&#8217;s an impressive and fun illusion to watch. 1970s was also a great era for chase scenes in detective shows and this featured one of the best-filmed and most-fun ones to watch (even if the logic of why the chase is done is a bit elusive.)<\/p>\n<p>The series also cast a solid actor to play the first guest villain in Hollywood veteran Barry Sullivan. Sullivan could still really bring a sense of menace to his character and he made a great foil for Bixby.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vP_4crJc6rg\">theme<\/a> tune is a solid fit for the era and a good listen, with some real complexities in the composition. It&#8217;s great to listen to, though I doubt it&#8217;s an earworm that sticks with you unless you grew up with it.<\/p>\n<p>The plot of the episode was a bit convoluted and had a couple holes such as the puzzling actions of the security team pursuing our hero in the final act.<\/p>\n<p>The movie&#8217;s biggest fault is it may try a little too hard. We learn our hero lives on a plane piloted by Jerry (Julian Christopher) and is also friends with a sophisticated but unconventional columnist named Max (Keene Curtis) who lives with his wife and computer genius wheelchair-bound son Dennis (Todd Crespy.)\u00a0 We also get quick exposition explaining that Tony&#8217;s life is a real-life version of the <em>Count of Monte Cristo.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Some of this may have benefitted by a feature-length pilot episode, but there&#8217;s too much going on for a series like this which is always going to focus mostly on Tony investigating the case on his own. When that&#8217;s going on, the film is a lot of fun to watch. At other times, it just feels like we have too many characters on-screen that we hardly know anything about.<\/p>\n<p>If you like Bill Bixby&#8217;s acting, or enjoy a 1970s detective series with a little bit more flash, this film is worth watching.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 3.5 out of 5<\/p>\n<p>The telefilm is included on the Complete Series disk for\u00a0<em>The Magician.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchaser.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Magician\u00a0was a 1973 pilot film for a TV series starring Bill Bixby (The Incredible Hulk, The Courtship of Eddie&#8217;s Father.) Bixby plays a stage magician who solves mysteries. The pilot has a 70-minute runtime as opposed to most later pilots that opt for either a forty-five-minute regular pilot episode of a series or a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[298,123,248],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd-review","category-golden-age-article","category-telefilm-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-7Gy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29546"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29590,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29546\/revisions\/29590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}