When I first started blogging 20 years ago, it was almost entirely a coincidence that I did so concurrent with the then-10th anniversary of UPN's
Legend starring Richard Dean Anderson. As I made plans to restart the blog, I decided that one way to celebrate was by doing a review of each episode of
Legend, to be released on the 30th anniversary of that episode's premiere. Thus, today, I'm celebrating the first episode of the series, entitled "Birth of a Legend," which first aired on April 18th, 1995. The episode was written by Michael Piller & Bill Dial and directed by Charles Correll.
Before I begin, I'd like to share this link, wherein I review the series as a whole, which I did 15 years ago, on the occasion of Legend's then-15th anniversary (wow!). The reviews I'll be doing on this occasion will focus on specifics relating to each episode. If you'd like to see the episodes, yourself, they are available via Amazon Prime Video. A DVD is also available.
We're introduced to Nicodemus Legend, the Paladin of the Prairies, a dime novel hero, and almost immediately thereafter we met the writer, a man named Ernest Pratt. Despite the series title, this is Pratt's story, but as we quickly learn, Pratt's life is inextricably tied to his creation, often to his own chagrin. While doing a public appearance as "Legend" to help sell his books (not to mention other merchandise hawked by his publisher), Pratt is approached by a lawyer hired by farmers in Sheridan, Colorado, roughly a thousand miles away, to defend "Legend" against criminal charges against him. Having never been to Colorado, Pratt is understandably confused, but the problem is inescapable, and so Pratt travels to Sheridan to try to clear things up.
Once there, and confronted by scores of people who claim to have seen him in person, Pratt eventually learns that the crimes (stemming from physically changing the course of the Platte River to aid the farmers, at the expense of a wealthy landowner, one Vera Slaughter) were in fact committed by a Hungarian scientist, Janos Christoff Bartok, who was sympathetic to his neighbors' suffering, but who had hoped to avoid scrutiny by arranging for the fictional hero to receive credit for the deed.
Bartok agrees to go with Pratt and tell the truth to the authorities, but before they can do so, Pratt finds himself cornered by a reporter who is writing a sympathetic account of the event, and Pratt ends up taking credit for helping the farmers. This escalates the situation with Slaughter (who we eventually learn is trying to force the farmers off of their land so that she can take ownership of it and profit from a railroad that she hopes to be built in the area), and Pratt soon witnesses an attack upon the farmers who had shared their meager resources to hire his legal defense. Also, a gunman is hired to eliminate "Legend" from the equation.
Pratt realizes that he can't simply walk away from the farmers' plight, and he and Bartok team up. They create a costume which allows Pratt to more fully take on the persona of Nicodemus Legend. Armed with this persona, coupled with Bartok's inventions (including the lightning-emitting "electrofulminator" and a land rover called the "
quadrovelocipede," among others), Pratt confronts the gunman. As Legend, Pratt is able to avoid a showdown by suggesting that the gunman might earn more money by writing stories of his previous contracts rather than fulfilling the one to kill Legend.
After staging a public appearance as Nicodemus Legend, thereby pressuring Slaughter to drop the legal charges against him, Pratt and Bartok do some investigating, and they learn about Slaughter's plans. After they give this information to a friendly reporter, Slaughter loses political support needed for her railroad plans. In desperation, she and her son arrange for a band of mercenaries to drive the farmers off of their land (she hopes that she might yet salvage the situation, but can only do so if she owns the land before Colorado officially becomes a state), but even this effort is thwarted as our heroes (assisted by the gunman previously hired to kill "Legend") arrive to defend the farmers and rout the mercenaries.
With Pratt finally able to return home, Bartok surprises Pratt with a suggestion that Pratt might remain in Sheridan, whereby the two of them, combining imagination and invention, would create the real Legend. While Pratt initially tries to decline, he changes his mind when he learns that his publisher will drop him if he does not agree.
The adventure continues....
A few behind the scenes notes:
- This series is set in 1876, and this episode in particular makes several references to the US Centennial and Colorado’s upcoming statehood, which began on August 1st, 1876.
- Sheridan, Colorado is an actual city within Arapahoe County, as suggested by this episode. Today it is considered a suburb of Denver. The South Platt does indeed flow through this region. Back in the year 2000, I had the privilege of an email exchange with Legend co-creator Bill Dial, but he told me that neither he nor co-creator Michale Piller were even aware that Sheridan was real (they were informed of Sheridan's reality by a Legend staffer well after production had started)*, so this detail is either a nice coincidence, or the location-accuracy was thrown in during production.
- The character of Bartok is a thinly-veiled take on the real-life Nikola Tesla, and some of Bartok's backstory includes a similar adversarial relationship with Thomas Edison.
- Despite several efforts over the past 30 years, I have never seen an official source for the spelling of Bartok's middle name. My own instinct was to use the spelling of "Kristóf" on the basis of this being a variation with known Hungarian origins, but I'm using "Christoff" (a frequently-attested variant in unofficial sources, but for which I'm unable to find a Hungarian antecedent) based on the writings of J. Randolph Cox, editor (at the time) of Dime Novel Round-Up, who uses "Christoff" consistently. Cox not only had access to publicity materials (at least some of which I've seen copied elsewhere on the web), but also consulted with Barb Mackintosh, the Production Executive for Legend, who presumably would have corrected Cox if "Christoff" was incorrect.#
- The "Legend Wings" were designed by a company called "Stunt Wings," that does this kind of thing for the entertainment industry. To this day, if you go to their website and click on the "Gallery," you can find an image of the Legend Wings proudly displayed (2nd image from the left on the 2nd row, as of the time I'm typing).
- Promotional materials for the series mention actor Bob Balaban in the role of Harry Parver, a representative of publisher E. C. Allen (who really existed), suggesting that Parver would also be a series regular. While we do meet Balaban as Parver at the beginning of the episode, he only makes one further appearance in the series after this episode. I do not know if plans changed, or if the publicity simply over-baked Balaban's role.
I hope you'll come back next week, when I have a look at the next episode, "Mr. Pratt Comes to Sheridan."
*Source: E-mail from Bill Dial to Mark Wright (this is before I got married and hyphenated my name), dated May 8, 2000.
#For more information on Cox's process in writing articles on Legend, see his 10th anniversary retrospective in Dime Novel Round-Up, Vol. 74, No. 2, dated April 2005. That said, I did discover that Starlog, in an interview with John De Lancie printed in the December 1995 issue, went with "Kristoff."
No comments:
Post a Comment