Q&A Hollywood
Q:Wasn’t Judy Garland a little old to be playing a teenager in “Meet Me in St. Louis”?
A: It all depends on your standard, but you’re in good company for wondering: Judy Garland thought the same thing.
She was 21 when she was approached for the part of Esther Smith, one of the four Smith daughters in the 1944 classic “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Esther is said to be 17 in the film.
That four-year gap really isn’t a lot — much worse casting crimes have been committed — but more importantly, Garland had already begun playing adult roles and was eager to continue. (She began her screen career at age seven and was ready to leave her child-star status behind.)
As Hollywood lore has it, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was unable to sell her on the role, but the film’s director, Vincente Minnelli, had better luck. Indeed, Minnelli and Garland got on so well that they began an affair shortly afterward.
Q: I’ve been rewatching “Scrubs” online and a lot of the music is different. Why is that?
A: The “Scrubs” soundtrack featured on the streaming services is different for the same reason that “WKRP In Cincinnati” was completely unavailable for decades after it aired — and so, the situation could be worse.
The show’s rights owners had to swap out many of the songs used on “Scrubs” before making it available online because they didn’t have the songs’ streaming rights. Basically, the producers of “Scrubs” committed the sin of not predicting the streaming revolution.
“Scrubs” debuted in 2001, back when Netflix was still just sending DVDs through the mail (it wouldn’t launch its streaming service until 2007). That is to say that when the show’s producers were negotiating the rights to the cuttingedge pop songs they wanted to feature (one of the reasons fans and critics loved “Scrubs” so much), streaming wasn’t even a thing yet, so they didn’t know to negotiate the rights for it.
Q: Wasn’t there an ‘80s Robin Hood TV show with Jason Connery as Robin? What was it called?
A: You’d think that would be a simple question, but nothing about the history of this show is simple.
The show in question was a co-production between the U.K.’s ITV and Showtime in the U.S. (but it was later rerun over here on PBS as well). In the U.K. it was called “Robin of Sherwood,” but it was retitled “Robin Hood” for the North American release (just in case we North American dumb-dumbs got him confused with that other guy named Robin who lived in Sherwood).
If you’re looking for it today, you can find DVD releases under the “Sherwood” title.
Since it was a show with two names, why not two completely separate Robin Hoods? The first two seasons of the show featured Michael Praed (who later did runs on soaps “Dynasty” and “Emmerdale”) as Robin of Loxley, a low-born woodsman who was handy with a bow. But Praed quit the show to try his luck on Broadway. Rather than simply recast the character, they opted to kill him dramatically and then have the Merry Men led by a new Robin, the disgraced nobleman Robert of Huntingdon.
That may sound like a crazy workaround dreamed up by a desperate writers room, but it is actually a reflection of the two separate Robin Hood legends.
The second Robin was played by Jason Connery, son of the late, great Sean Connery (who took his own shot at the legend years earlier in 1976’s “Robin and Marian”).
Connery only got one “season” on the show before it was canceled, but that one season contained as many episodes as the first two combined, so both versions of the character got equal screen time.