Tales of the Gold Monkey, which I mentioned in the previous entry, was another one-season-wonder of a television show that gouged a huge divot in my impressionable young brain. Curiously, it ran in the same 1982-83 television season as Voyagers! (back when network series still had discreet and contiguous seasons instead of only occasionally airing new episodes in between re-runs); there must’ve been something in the air that year that caused TV shows to lodge themselves so firmly in my memory. Hell, I still remember the actual time slots of the shows I loved: Voyagers! was on Sunday nights and Gold Monkey was Wednesdays. Yes, I did spend far too much time thinking about what was on the tube…
Be that as it may, Gold Monkey was a nifty show, a good old-fashioned pulp adventure set in the South Pacific of the 1930s. I think it failed largely because people compared it unfavorably to Raiders of the Lost Ark; both were set in the ’30s and featured an all-American leather-jacketed hero and dastardly Nazis, so of course one had to be a rip-off of the other. But I didn’t care about the similarities when I was a kid, and I’ve since decided that Gold Monkey was actually far more similar to the Bogart-Bacall classic To Have and Have Not than any of the Indiana Jones movies. Even in the ’80s, however, nobody bothered to watch the classics, so the rip-off accusation stuck, and by the start of the ’83-’84 season, Gold Monkey was only a memory. At least until somebody finally gets those DVDs into production!

While we wait for that boxed set of shiny silver discs, here’s the opening title sequence, featuring an appropriately jaunty theme song by uber-composer Mike Post. I miss opening title sequences…