"Route 66" Sleep on Four Pillows (TV Episode 1961) Poster

(TV Series)

(1961)

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2/24/61 "Sleep on Four Pillows"
schappe113 April 2015
Warning: Spoilers
This one is a pretty weak entry. The boys are in LA. Buz is a door- to-door salesman while Tod is taking a computer course at UCLA. (Yes they had computers then- the size of a room. Apparently it didn't go too well because Tod does not become a computer programmer.) Patty McCormack makes a second appearance in the series, (she was in the opener, back in Garth). He's she's all dolled up to look older than she was, (she was born 8/21/45 so she's probably 15 here). She claims that mob killers are after her and asks for Buz's help in eluding them. At the same time she leaves clues suggesting she's been kidnapped. It turns out she is the daughter of rich parents she feels have never paid enough attention to her due to their careers. Buz and Tod fight off a pair of comical detectives they think are the mob hit men. It's an attempt at a charming comedy that just comes off as being silly.

There is a rare bit of continuity there. The family thanks the boys for caring for their daughter by letting them use their mansion while they take a trip to South America. We see them having a pool party with a bevy of beauties and they are still there at the beginning of the following episode. I'm sure they stopped doing this sort of thing because they couldn't be sure that the episodes would be shown in the same order in reruns and syndication.
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Stumbles Along
dougdoepke14 March 2016
Rather lame episode. It's like the producers got 16-year old Patty Mc Cormack (The Bad Seed {1956}), then weren't sure what to do with her. The script is erratic at best, more like it's been cobbled together. Jan (McCormack) enlists the guys to help her escape mafia hit-men she says are after her because of her dad. Seems some goof-ball detective agency is also after her. Meanwhile, the boys fumble around hiding her in their all-male lodgings. This latter suggests farcical elements amid the rather confusing narrative, while the detectives appear to be lampooning TV's spate of detective shows. Anyway, McCormack does her best while knocking about Hollywood and the UCLA campus, along with Tod and Buzz. In my little book, it's an unfortunate misfire, one of the few times when a series screenplay couldn't find a footing.
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Kooky Patty
lor_19 October 2023
Stirling Silliphant demonstrates his comedy writing chops in this oddly-titled episode, satirizing several topical subjects. Surprisingly, the show hasn't dated after 60+ years.

It's styled as a showcase for child star Patty McCormack, self-consciously paralleling her inevitable transition from young toward adult roles. She's a goofy runaway who attaches herself to Maharis and Milner like a leech, and they prove to be soft touches for her kooky antics.

Among Silliphant's targets for spoofing are: the new-fangled digital computers, with Milner enrolled in a course at UCLA learning computer programming; TV detective shows, with Larry Gates quite amusing as head of the large Baer agency, with his reliance on scientific "follow the paper trail" methods mocked cleverly, in what is a prescient forerunner of the creation decades later of the surveillance state (with the help of the modern version of those original Univac type computers); and even his own dialogue style, as McCormack stretches Silliphant's fondness for spitting out non sequiturs and oddball allusions becomes comical this time.

Maharis is comically stuck as a bumbling door to door salesman pitching women's cosmetics, with statuesque B-actress Francine York striking in a small role as a horny would-be customer.

With the boys begrudgingly taking her in to stay with them in a males-only boarding house, Patty is fun cross-dressing for most of the show, pretending to be a man, dressed like one of the Blues Brothers. SS's script explicitly alludes to the boys in danger of being arrested for child molesting (Patty was 15 when this was shot) since the cops and Gates are looking for her as a potential kidnap victim, while he never wrote about possible assumptions out there about the boys having a homoerotic affair during their endless journey together.
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