Following the Rumpled TV Detective in the Brown Trenchcoat Down The Web Rabbit Hole

Here I go again. That darn crazy internet. One link catches sparkles my curiosity. I’ll just click and peek. I swear I won’t get distracted and start looking things up in weird archive. Just one more click…

Two hours later I emerge from the rabbit hole smiling. And later I go back to where I left my mark to go deeper.

While I read all the time the proclamations that the web is a burning pile of trash or how en-poopified it all is, I wonder to myself, “Do they never leave the crowded LinkedIn malls or the Webmart superstore?” Indeed, I can make and do call out crap on the web, but on the other hand, at least once a day, if not more, I find myself amazed at what I click stumbled into, out on the quiet fringes, the side streets, the lesser traveled parts of the web, the untrodden sites that are the handiworks of information passionate individuals, sites not plastered with ad click bait.

The web you miss (if you knew it)? It’s still out there. Hence my unexpected tracking down of old Columbo.

Prologue

As usual, it starts with one thing I might have easily scrolled past.

The mention of Columbo piques the nuerons shaped by my formative screen years of watching TV. A lot of TV. And I do recall in the early 1970s watching the Detective everyone underestimated, his rotation was in the NBC Mystery Movie series that I believe were on Wednesday Nights. I saw Columbo episodes (as you will see below), but I recall liking a bit more McMillan & Wife . But absolutely my favorite was McCloud with Dennis Weaver playing the cowboy detective from New Mexico showing up those New York City crooks and cops. Maybe it was my long TV mystique of the cowboy figure.

Yet like McCloud, Columbo was fun to watch as the smartest guy on the crime scene that everyone dismissed as a bumbling clod. It was the brown coat and the messy hair?

I’m off to the races digging the simple design and VHS style box cover layout of Columboxd

And info in the footer indicates “Website look and feel lovingly borrowed from Letterboxd.” Woah, How have I never seen Letterboxd – “Social Film Discovery”? What a great site for getting film info, adding reviews, building your own collection of seen films. That’s a path I gotta come back to.

Likewise, I note in the footer, that the data for Colomboxd is obtained by apis from The Movie Database TMDB not to be confused with your grandpa’s iMDB.

The Movie Database (TMDB) is a community built movie and TV database. Every piece of data has been added by our amazing community dating back to 2008. TMDB’s strong international focus and breadth of data is largely unmatched and something we’re incredibly proud of. Put simply, we live and breathe community and that’s precisely what makes us different.

But now we go deeper into the web hole of Columboxd.

Act 1: DVD The Bad Guy

I scan the covers and while maybe some sound familiar, I cant recall the year of one episode that still stands out because it had Dick Van Dyke (I acronymed him DVD) who always plays the nice guy, in this episode he was the sleaze who killed his wife! He was baaaaaad and thought he was much smarter than old Columbo.

I reached for the web search, and again, for all te bemoaning of how bad Google is, in just the few seconds of doing a search on Columbo episode with Dick Van Dyke I see the title is “Negative Reaction”. Of course, “negative”! DVD’s character was a well known photographer.

I leave the search results hanging open in browser tab number 68 and return to Columboxd. Hmm, no search. But there is a toggle to “Show All Episodes” and it’s just a job for commanf-F to find the Negative Reaction episode.

Gotta like the tag line, “A Picture is worth a thousand alibis”. The info there is brief, what likely comes from TMB and Columbox site has reviews/ratings added on the site.

That’s nifty, but I wanted to learn more as I remember almost nothing from the plot of the episode. The real joy came when I went back to my search results that got me the episode name from a site named “The Columbophile Blog”

Episode review: Columbo Negative Reaction

What’s to love here is the in depth content and human presence of more or less a super fan. And although the author describes themselves as an (groan) “influencer” I can sense they have done much with a deep interest in one niche of pop culture. And the reviews are deep! Plus, corporate sites don’t say things like:

When I’m not watching the show, or adding pics to the Columbophile Instagram page, or adding to this blog, or reading Columbo books, or expanding my collection of Columbo memorabilia, or updating the Columbophile Facebook page, or walking my basset hound, I live a quiet life with my family in Australia.

https://columbophile.com/about/

It’s wild to think of this Ozzie bloke walking his dog around thinking about a new post on Columbo. They have this full episode available for watching.

Folks, this is blogging.

Act 2: Subliminally Yours in the Seventh Grade

After dutifully pinboarding these sites I later remembered another influential episode of Columbo. I was less interested in the crime than the plot featuring this concept of subliminal suggestion. I recall the perpetrator had spliced a frame of something into a film that forced a victim to leave the theater (?) where something bad happened.

The episode ended up creating an idea for a research paper I had for a school assignment, and I went down some rabbit hole learning how it was supposedly used in print advertising, like liquor ads having figures rendered in ice cubes that looked like naked women (?) and other ones used to sell food.

Yes, this is a pretty weird topic for a seventh grader. When I told Cori this morning she laughed wondering about how my social studies teacher talked in the faculty lunch room about her student’s topic. I also have no idea how I researched, I would guess it was maybe at the school library of what was then Sudbrook Middle School or more likely at the Randallstown Branch of the Baltimore County Public Library.

Any how, a web search on the google, somehow worked again like magic, finding the name of the episode was “Double Exposure” — “The perfect murder is all in the editing– A marketing research executive uses subliminal cuts in a film presentation to create an alibi for murder.”

It’s a doozy with Robert Culp as the killer that, surpise! Columbo nails. Again the Columbophile blog digs in deep

Episode review: Columbo Double Exposure

How can they could have said TV was so bad when it influenced me to research an obscure and debatable psychological concept? And that I still remember it?

The rabbit hole winds around even more.

Act 3: The Technology Crystal Ball

My memory of Columbo episodes had tapped out. I was preparing for this post, so I did some searching for open licensed images to represent the iconic Pater Falk cooked character. My search curiousity piqued when Is the preview for this image in flickr– hey I recognize that robot getting a Columbo handshake.

Robby the Robot is a legend! But what is Columbo doing hanging out with him in a room full of what look like computer tapes?

Again, hardly any time needed to mind the title of this 1974 look into the future episode- Mind over Mayhem— ‘When genius turns criminal — A brilliant scientist commits murder to cover up his son’s plagiarism.” It spies far back then the rise of AI!

Again leave it to the guru Columbophile to dissect and critique the episode:

Episode review: Columbo Mind Over Mayhem

You have a mad computer genius computing war scenerio (hello War Games) and the boy computer wonder kid who at age 8 has built already seven robots- plus he is named “Steven Spelberg” after another boy genius making his early films.

But where is Columbo? He’s hangin’ with young Steve again as the wunderkind is trying to crack the case by entering evidence into his lab’s supercomputer. Sadly, the only feedback the machine has to offer is: Does not compute.

Don’t despair, bruh, Stevie Boy tells Columbo. He’ll program MM7 to continue running evidence through the computer. After all, he can do almost everything a man can do if programmed correctly. And that gives Columbo a flash of inspiration, or, as he memorably puts it: “Something just computed.”

Deep link to the Columbophile blog review of Mind Over Mayhem

Epilogue

Who would have thunk so many threads could come from a single link to a web site catalog of episodes of a 1970s tv show? That’s the web Is signed up for.

Track the links that make you curious.
Follow ’em down the web rabbit hole.
And, uh, just one more thing…

me editing the text on the Columboxd site

And looking at that catalog, filled with stars, and they had so much wisdom/creativity in ther Episode names, almost artistic ones like Columbo Goes to College (the edu episode), Swan Song (starring Johnny Cash), How to Dial a Murder? (bad dogs!), A Stitch in Crime (Leonard Nimoy as a killed surgeon)… it just goes on and on.

I think I have some backlog Columbo to catch up to.

And thinking back now, I am notching Columbo to the top of my faves of the Mystery Movie Series, sorry McCloud.

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Featured Image: Of questionable reuse, shrug. I like it. I remixed the Columboxd web site using my technique of Browser Inspector as the New Mozilla Goggles to edit the front text and hide the signin box. This is remix!