By way of Lee Goldberg’s blog, I have just found out that the complete 1980’s TV series, The Master, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. (Well, at least, per Amazon. I’ll believe the Blu-ray exists when I see it.)
This is slightly less obscure than other TV shows I’ve discussed (for reasons I’ll get into shortly), but for those who have never encountered The Master: Lee Van Cleef is “John Peter McAllister”, a “white ninja”. (He “stayed behind” in Japan after WWII and supposedly learned the ninja arts.) McAllister returns to the US to search for his daughter and teams up with “Max Keller” (Timothy Van Patten), a drifter with a van. Together they wander the country looking for the daughter and meddling in other people’s affairs helping others with their problems. Meanwhile McAllister is pursued by “Okasa” (Sho Kosugi), a former student who has a grudge against him for leaving the ninja clan or some other stupid horsepucky.
I never saw an actual episode of the show, so my judgement is perhaps unfair. But: it wasn’t good. Think a post-BJ and the Bear series or a variant on The A-Team, but featuring two people with no charisma.
How do I know? Well, the series was recut into “movies” (basically two episodes each) and released on video. (It is unclear to me how they got seven movies out of thirteen episodes, if they did two per movie. But I digress.) Later on, as I’m sure many of you know, Mystery Science Theater 3000 did the first two “movies” (episodes 322 and 324) which is how I saw them.
And now you know…the rest of the story.
The Master on Wikipedia.
Take us out, bots.