Dial File: Movie bomb blasts open TV pride

Thursday, Aug. 27, 1998 | 9:56 a.m.

SKIP the flick. See the show.

For those who haven't yet inflicted "The Avengers" on themselves -- and judging by early box-office receipts, it's most of you -- that's the advice from this corner.

And strangely satisfying advice it is.

Movie and TV critics concur on its stinkeroo status. But only the film fraternity fails to find the gravy in this turkey that flattens the pop and fizz of the old "Avengers" like a glass of club soda doused with milk.

A clunky new movie outclassed by a sassy old series? Among all the small screen-turned-big screen projects, that kind of flameout provides perverse pleasure for TV critics (a perverse profession, I'll grant you).

Curiosity compelled me toward the movie misfire based on the stylish '60s spy series, with cine-sophisticates Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman stepping in for tele-types Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg as dapper do-gooders John Steed and Emma Peel.

The stench of this stink bomb could curl Steed's bowler. It isn't hard to fathom why Macnee -- or rather, his Elizabethan pipes -- turned in a cameo as an invisible character while Rigg went him one better, making herself completely invisible to the filmmakers, lock, stock and layrnx.

On the big screen, "The Avengers" became "The Avoiders." It was never screened for critics, debuted at No. 3 on the box office charts (a huge letdown for a flick originally tagged a can't-miss summer blockbuster) and has since sunk -- make that dissolved -- like a lump of sugar in Steed's tea.

So did the Warner Bros. dreams of an "Avengers" franchise, a la Bond, "Batman" and "Star Trek."

But, oddly enough, I'm anxious to see the series again -- a cause-and-effect usually reserved for hit movies based on series. Must be that sense of underdog pride -- the kind you'll find in curmudgeonly-but-huggable TV critics who grudgingly love the medium even as they thrash, trash and bash it (who, me?) -- when hotshot moviemakers come up short of TV standards.

We are an insecure bunch.

And yet, given the lopsided respect afforded movies over television in this bigger-is-better country -- right down to the size of the screen and the room we watch it in -- there's a defiant sense of triumph about a movie that can't rise to its TV inspiration.

Let's categorize the components in this equation:

In the interest of apple-to-apple comparisons, one of the closest to the aim of "The Avengers" -- play it straight, stay loyal to the source, but give it that big-screen sheen -- is "The Fugitive." Although necessarily condensing the more pensive, nuanced adventures of the series' Dr. Richard Kimble into a tight, tense two-hour movie, the film nailed the same sense of outrageous injustice and viewer empathy that kept a country riveted to Kimble's quest for the one-armed man.

On the rotten apple side was "Sgt. Bilko," which utterly failed to match the memorable TV series, a la "The Avengers." But since expectations and anticipation were nonexistent -- unlike "The Avengers" -- it renders the movie moot: the old "if a tree falls in the forest" conundrum.

Then the oranges overwhelm the apples:

Tube-to-film flops like "The Beverly Hillbillies," "McHale's Navy," "Dennis the Menace" and "Car 54, Where Are You?" were enjoyable trifles as TV series that, if transformed into razor-sharp film comedies, would have been almost, well, inappropriate. The same applies to "Lost in Space," a series so silly in its salad days that there's no way for a big-screen salute to out-kitsch it (although the movie came close), leaving TV's secondary status intact. Then there's "The Saint": a minor league series with Roger Moore, remade as a minor league movie with Val Kilmer. Call it a wash.

At a different level were the twin "Brady Bunch" flicks, which rewrote the rules. By refusing to treat its TV inspiration seriously or respectfully -- as if you could actually do either and still pass a mental competency test -- they scored as savage satire but voided any straight comparisons to the series.

Same principle, different criteria applies to the cinematic double dip of "The Addams Family" the filmmakers of which stridently distanced themselves from the TV series, framing themselves as the more pure-of-heart interpreters of cartoonist Charles Addams' macabre concoction. The result was a darker, more deranged humor than the series' lighthearted creepiness. (However, in a concession to angry "Addams" addicts, the filmmakers added a snippet of Vic Mizzy's lovably loopy TV theme music -- so there.)

On the same wavelength: "Mission: Impossible," which was successfully grafted onto the silver screen in name only. Tom Cruise & Co. hedged their bets by largely gutting the original source material and refitting it for a cynical '90s audience: Tom-Tom's central character, Ethan Hunt, was created especially for the film, and Mr. Phelps -- played by Peter Graves as the avuncular, decent-to-the-core leader of TV's "Impossible Missions Force" -- was turned into a double-dealing, five-star fink by Jon Voight in the movie. It worked as a film. It wasn't TV's "Mission: Impossible."

Which beams us over to "Star Trek," about to launch its ninth film flight and the only example -- nine times over -- of the movies' total capitulation to a TV series. Can you imagine anyone but the original TV actors playing Kirk, Picard and their intergalactic gallivanters? Anyone but the late Gene Roddenberry and his disciples behind their Enterprising adventures? Movies didn't re-imagine "Star Trek." They regurgitated it.

That leaves "The Avengers" -- a dry, flabby movie outclassed by a wry, witty TV series in a spectacular crash-and-burn. A clear-cut TV triumph for all to see. It almost makes me proud to be a television critic. Even perversely.

CROON A TUNE: "Where else but 'St. Elsewhere'?" Who else but ANDREW HATCHER? With those words, that reader became the first to ID the instrumental theme that kicked off the new Croon-a-Tune phone line.

Other readers pegged it as "Hill Street Blues" (which sounded more like "Daaaa-da-da, Daaaa-da-da") and "L.A. Law" (which went something like "Daaa-Daaa-da-da-Daaa), as opposed to "St. Elsewhere" (which actually goes "Da-Da-Da-daaaa-da, Da-Da-Da-daaaaa-da")

Hope that clears it up for you.

Congrats to these other "St. Elsewhere"-hip readers: Susan Bobby, Obert Brinley, Kathy Coffin, Rich Collins, Joe Lacy and John Paine.

Thanks to everyone who called -- and you're all invited to call again for this week's theme: Just dial up Dial File, after 12 noon on Thursday, at 702-259-4012 (it will pick up after four rings); after you hear the TV theme, leave your guess, the spelling of your name and a daytime phone number.

Pick up the phone and ... Let your fingers do the walking, let Croon-a-tune do the squawking, let your tele-smarts do the talking.

And don't even think of balking.

THOU SHALL NOT DROP TROU: Brian Benben -- you may remember him and his undraped derriere when his character of Martin Tupper copulated his way to cable stardom on HBO's "Dream On" -- is the star of a new CBS sitcom in the fall.

He's aware of the subtle differences between network and pay cable standards.

"The pants can only come halfway off now," he told TV critics. "But I find that for me, that's enough."

No offense, Brian, but that's actually more than enough.

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