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El Gallinero Gros
Mar 17, 2010

Detective No. 27 posted:

Here's a sort of practice that, I dunno if it's something that didn't age well, or just can't be done anymore. When old TV shows cast the same actor for different roles. I've been watching In The Heat Of the Night on Amazon. A show that's aged really well, actually. It's even got a 16:9 aspect ratio, for a show from 1989!

But yeah, they reuse actors sometimes. There was an episode one season where Walton Goggins played a high schooler who went blind and crashed a car after drinking tainted moonshine. I'm a few seasons later and Goggins is back, as a totally different character, some kind of reclusive redneck shooter. (I'm still watching the episode.) It's one of those things that people watching it when it was new wouldn't have known, especially with a then unknown actor. But it's decades later and it sticks out when you stream shows.

I'm not complaining about seeing Walton Goggins. He's great in everything.

Sometimes it surprises me when and how shows do this; S.Epatha Mekerson did this in Law and Order

quote:

She first appeared in the NBC police procedural drama Law & Order in Season 1: Episode 17, titled "Mushrooms", as the grief-stricken mother of an 11-month-old boy who is shot accidentally. Her performance impressed the producers enough to select Merkerson to replace Dann Florek as detective squad chief in the series' fourth season, making her one of the few actors to secure a recurring role after an initial single appearance on the show.

She stayed on the show for 17 consecutive seasons after that. Now that's using your shot wisely.


Columbo did this a few times, too: Shatner was the villain more than once, as different characters, as was Jack Cassidy, Patrick McGoohan, and George Hamilton.

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I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Ugly In The Morning posted:

There’s an actor that’s been at least three different rapists in Law and Order SVU.

Back when there were three Law and Order series, a few actors were the killer/rapist on each. Michael Emerson and Kevin Tighe were definitely on both SVU and Vincent D’Onofrio Unit.

El Gallinero Gros
Mar 17, 2010

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Back when there were three Law and Order series, a few actors were the killer/rapist on each. Michael Emerson and Kevin Tighe were definitely on both SVU and Vincent D’Onofrio Unit.

That's a typecasting that has to suck

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord

Ugly In The Morning posted:

I’m pretty sure that Angela Lansbury played the culprit in all the episodes of Murder She Wrote.
Wherever that lady went, people died.
It was the price she had to pay for making that deal with that eldritch horror that lurks off the shores of Cabot Cove to become a bestselling author.

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant

Koalas March posted:

Imagine if they were tho

Bruce-Tracy-Smith were an energetic live show but their melody work need improvement.

El Gallinero Gros posted:

Columbo did this a few times, too: Shatner was the villain more than once, as different characters, as was Jack Cassidy, Patrick McGoohan, and George Hamilton.
Dean Stockwell was a boat musician and later a layabout murder victim. Robert loving Culp was in the excellent 2nd episode and came back 2ish times.

El Gallinero Gros
Mar 17, 2010

FilthyImp posted:

Bruce-Tracy-Smith were an energetic live show but their melody work need improvement.

Dean Stockwell was a boat musician and later a layabout murder victim. Robert loving Culp was in the excellent 2nd episode and came back 2ish times.

Culp also has the distinction of being the only person to play both a killer and a victim

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

El Gallinero Gros posted:

Sometimes it surprises me when and how shows do this; S.Epatha Mekerson did this in Law and Order


She stayed on the show for 17 consecutive seasons after that. Now that's using your shot wisely.

Jerry Orbach did the same thing. He played a defense attorney before becoming Lenny Briscoe.

Lyrai
Jan 18, 2012

Ugly In The Morning posted:

I’m pretty sure that Angela Lansbury played the culprit in all the episodes of Murder She Wrote.
Wherever that lady went, people died.

Didn't someone run the numbers and come out with her city having a murder rate so high that dwarfed the #1 murder rate city by a factor of like, ten or twenty?

Koalas March
May 21, 2007



I'm looking forward to the CW's sexy gritty Murder She Wrote reboot Cabot Cove, in which a young writer uncovers various murders, nefarious schemes and cults, has sex with her professor, and visits a little town called Riverdale to see her friend Melanie.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
In the reboot is she still a mystery book writer or does she narrate a crime podcast?

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Lyrai posted:

Didn't someone run the numbers and come out with her city having a murder rate so high that dwarfed the #1 murder rate city by a factor of like, ten or twenty?

That happened with Inspector Morse and Oxford, although that's nothing compared to Midsomer County in Midsomer Murders.

Longrunning British detective / cop shows are great if you want to see actors turn up in multiple roles. Not uncommon for someone to have played 2 or 3 different roles on The Bill or Midsomer, and even in Poirot you can see <suspect #3> in 1989 play <police superintendent> a few decades later.

Shut up Meg
Jan 8, 2019

You're safe here.

Lyrai posted:

Didn't someone run the numbers and come out with her city having a murder rate so high that dwarfed the #1 murder rate city by a factor of like, ten or twenty?

Doctor Spaceman posted:

That happened with Inspector Morse and Oxford, although that's nothing compared to Midsomer County in Midsomer Murders.


That's one of those things that is a massive elephant in the room that the characters studiously ignore: you create this world where the characters continuously live there and yet no-one ever comments that the death rate is higher than an active warzone

"Morning, Mrs Brown! How are you today?"
"Another dead body in the park. It gave my dog a right shock, I can tell you."
"Oh I know, I found two by the bins this morning"
"It's a disgrace, the council should clear them up"
"Well, I did phone them, but they said there was quite a backlog of clearance due to the dustmen all having been killed last month and they are still waiting for replacements"
"It's not good enough, I shall write to the local paper"

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Radio Times posted:

If Midsomer is presumed to have a population comparable to Oxforsdhire, then its average of 2.6 murders an episode, with roughly eight episodes a year, making 21 deaths a year, gives an annual murder rate of 32 per million. That’s three times the rate that Thames Valley Constabulary reports for Oxfordshire (well, the Cotswolds wouldn’t be such a tourist attraction if Oxfordshire was home to so many cases of dismemberment, poisoning and garotting).

In contrast, Radio Times found in 2007 that the average number of murder cases featured in Inspector Morse and Lewis across the years (just under four per year) matched almost precisely the murder rate of Oxford (three murders from April to December 2005, and “fewer than three” from January to March 2006).

However, More or Less points out that while Midsomer may have an unusually high murder rate for a bucolic English county — actually closer to that of countries such as Chile and Latvia — it is nowhere near as dangerous as somewhere like Honduras, which, with a murder rate of 910 per million, is the most dangerous place on earth.

Or is it? Another fictional idyll that has an unusually high murder rate is the small fishing village of Cabot Cove in Maine, the home of amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. Across its run it featured 274 killings, with around five cases a year taking place on Jessica’s doorstep.

As Cabot Cove reportedly has a population of 3,500 that gives it a staggering annual murder rate of 1,490 per million — over 50 per cent more than Honduras. According to The New York Times, across Murder, She Wrote’s run, two per cent of the residents of Cabot Cove were killed – though the majority of victims were visitors. Not the place to stop for clam chowder.

Leave
Feb 7, 2012

Taking the term "Koopaling" to a whole new level since 2016.
The lady that played Casey Novak in SVU played s rapist in an episode of the prior season where she started as the DA. It was a little odd, watching an early episode, because I came in partway through the episode and was trying to figure out how she became the prosecutor.

GoutPatrol
Oct 17, 2009

*Stupid Babby*

Shut up Meg posted:

That's one of those things that is a massive elephant in the room that the characters studiously ignore: you create this world where the characters continuously live there and yet no-one ever comments that the death rate is higher than an active warzone

"Morning, Mrs Brown! How are you today?"
"Another dead body in the park. It gave my dog a right shock, I can tell you."
"Oh I know, I found two by the bins this morning"
"It's a disgrace, the council should clear them up"
"Well, I did phone them, but they said there was quite a backlog of clearance due to the dustmen all having been killed last month and they are still waiting for replacements"
"It's not good enough, I shall write to the local paper"

Buffy did a very good job of that in the Prom episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN-9GeMDRWY

Detective No. 27
Jun 7, 2006

The rate of rape in SVU's New York is probably significantly less than real life. :smith:

RC and Moon Pie
May 5, 2011

Allan Melvin was in eight Andy Griffith Show episodes, almost always as a bad guy. He also appeared in eight Dick Van Dyke Show episodes as different characters and three more role and episodes in Make Room for Daddy.

FreudianSlippers
Apr 12, 2010

Shooting and Fucking
are the same thing!

Shut up Meg posted:

he just outright refuses to do any dialogue he doesn't like.


Sometimes this sort of things works out.

When Cristopher Lee was in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966, d.p. Micheal Reed) he thought the dialogue he was given was so bad that he refused to say. As a result Dracula doesn't speak at all in the film, unless you count hissing. This actually works out very well because it makes Dracula seem much more like an animalistic monster than if he spoke.

the_steve
Nov 9, 2005

We're always hiring!

FreudianSlippers posted:

Sometimes this sort of things works out.

When Cristopher Lee was in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966, d.p. Micheal Reed) he thought the dialogue he was given was so bad that he refused to say. As a result Dracula doesn't speak at all in the film, unless you count hissing. This actually works out very well because it makes Dracula seem much more like an animalistic monster than if he spoke.

To be fair, it also helps that it was Cristopher Lee.

fartknocker
Oct 28, 2012


Damn it, this always happens. I think I'm gonna score, and then I never score. It's not fair.



Wedge Regret

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Jerry Orbach did the same thing. He played a defense attorney before becoming Lenny Briscoe.

Jeremy Sisto played a defense attorney in the last episode of season 17, and then was introduced as Detective Lupo in the first episode of season 18.

L&O, particularly the original series, is notable for reusing a ton of actors at least once, sometimes twice (Maybe even more) a season in different roles. As some else mentioned, when these episodes originally aired months apart, and sometimes with the actors being in different make up or having more or less screen time (Big difference from being the suspect who is in the entire episode, vs a witness with one line prior to the :doink: & opening credits), it’s harder to spot. But, watching it in syndication where you’ll see an entire season in a week, you start spotting all sorts of faces popping up a lot.

fartknocker has a new favorite as of 05:18 on Sep 15, 2019

Angry Salami
Jul 27, 2013

Don't trust the skull.
There's one actress who appeared in two episodes of Star Trek as a crewmember. They weren't written as the same character, but someone realized part-way through filming the second episode "Hey, we cast this woman before, we should make it the same character!", but they apparently forgot to re-shoot a line where Kirk refers to her by a different name.

FishFood
Apr 1, 2012

Now with brine shrimp!
The original Law & Order was also known to be steady work for New York actors. The joke was that every working actor in the city had played a corpse at least once. Practically everyone on that show worked on or off-Broadway, it was the gig everyone had when they weren't on stage. The sheer number of people that appear at least once on that show is immense. I miss :doink: so much.

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


I always enjoy the casual way dock workers or whoever the detectives are talking to will just go about their daily routine like it's no big deal that someone was brutally murdered there just yesterday. New York was truly a different place in the late 80s.

Don Gato
Apr 28, 2013

Actually a bipedal cat.
Grimey Drawer

exquisite tea posted:

I always enjoy the casual way dock workers or whoever the detectives are talking to will just go about their daily routine like it's no big deal that someone was brutally murdered there just yesterday. New York was truly a different place in the late 80s.

My mom lived in New York at around that time and her stories basically made it sound like that was the mindset you got into, since a dead body probably wasn't even in the top 10 weirdest things you'd seen that day.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Big Mad Drongo posted:

Yeah, I think I need to get more specific about what I meant. Final Fantasy has robots and factories alongside magic, but earlier games weren't shy about straight up throwing your fantasy characters into a space opera. The overarching plot of Might & Magic is about aliens colonizing worlds (and two of the later games end with you getting ray guns then invading an alien hive colony/a derelict space ship, respectively), Ultima featured an outer space dogfight with the big bad in one of the earlier games and the later Wizardries are about chasing an evil space man and feature two galactic empires as neutral factions.

poo poo was bonkers, and I kind of miss that absolute silliness.

The other famous example is (World of) Warcraft, where the Orcs and Draenei come from another planet and while the Orcs get to Azeroth through a magic portal the Draenei arrive by spaceship.

Regarding the re-use of actors: this still happens all the time. Just recently the penultimate episode of Elementary featured an actress who was in the pilot as a different character. Nothing's ever going to beat Babylon 5, though. In order to reduce make-up expenses while simultaneously having to create the illusion of a space station with 250,000 inhabitants, they developed a rep company for the aliens so they could recycle head moulds. One actor, Mark Hendrickson, had eight different parts across the 22 episodes of B5's first season and probably at least as many uncredited appearances. It was Mary Jo Slater's best idea since nepotism.

LITERALLY A BIRD
Sep 27, 2008

I knew you were trouble
when you flew in

Big Mad Drongo posted:

the later Wizardries are about chasing an evil space man and feature two galactic empires as neutral factions.

poo poo was bonkers, and I kind of miss that absolute silliness.

The DARK SAVANT! I was too young to have played the earlier Wizardies but god drat did I love 8. The manual had a bit about how the Dark Savant is threatening the universe and, the manual writer supposed, he went by that name to differentiate himself from any Green or Neon Purple Savants running around. Also after you recruited the bard character if you typed Backstreet Boys into his dialogue prompt box he would throw mad shade. Fun, funny, all around excellent game.

rodbeard
Jul 21, 2005

Jim Gaffigan has been in 4 episodes of Law and Order as different people. You would think they wouldn't recycle an actor that was already famous prior to guest starring. Also the woman that wrote Waitress was on an episode of Law and Order and later her real life murder was used for a ripped from the headlines episode.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

Angry Salami posted:

There's one actress who appeared in two episodes of Star Trek as a crewmember. They weren't written as the same character, but someone realized part-way through filming the second episode "Hey, we cast this woman before, we should make it the same character!", but they apparently forgot to re-shoot a line where Kirk refers to her by a different name.

Wouldn't Kirk not remembering a new lady's name be totally in character since he porked half the galaxy?

AceOfFlames
Oct 9, 2012

Angry Salami posted:

There's one actress who appeared in two episodes of Star Trek as a crewmember. They weren't written as the same character, but someone realized part-way through filming the second episode "Hey, we cast this woman before, we should make it the same character!", but they apparently forgot to re-shoot a line where Kirk refers to her by a different name.

Don't recall an actress but that definitely happened to a male crewmember: the guy who played Lt. Riley in "The Naked Now" (he's the guy who starts singing on the intercom) was later cast as another crewmember in "The Conscience of the King" with the casting people seemingly having completely forgotten that he was in the show before. Once they realized this, they decided to make it Riley again, meaning he's one of the few rando crewmembers to have an actual backstory (since in the latter ep, it's revealed his parents were executed by a tyrannical governor who is currently posing as an actor about the Enterprise)

Funnily enough, I recall reading somewhere that this happened on The Wire of all places. There was some article in which claimed they didn't notice that the kid who killed Omar had already appeared on the show in season 3 until it was pointed out to them.

AceOfFlames has a new favorite as of 12:29 on Sep 15, 2019

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




FilthyImp posted:

And unlike Cage, who will genuinely give a performance, seems that Bruce just checks out if it's a cashgrab.

Cage gives a performance but it is more often than not completely bafflingly bad. Like, Cage can suddenly walk into the movie set and declare that his character is now a mullet haired southerner who eats gummy worms out of cocktail glasses and never blinks.

Henchman of Santa
Aug 21, 2010

AceOfFlames posted:

Funnily enough, I recall reading somewhere that this happened on The Wire of all places. There was some article in which claimed they didn't notice that the kid who killed Omar had already appeared on the show in season 3 until it was pointed out to them.

Isn’t he killed by Kenard? That was a recurring role.

AceOfFlames
Oct 9, 2012

Henchman of Santa posted:

Isn’t he killed by Kenard? That was a recurring role.

Yes but he showed up way back in Season 3 in some scene where he and a bunch of kids are pretending to be Omar. It essentially turned to retroactive foreshadowing.

fartknocker
Oct 28, 2012


Damn it, this always happens. I think I'm gonna score, and then I never score. It's not fair.



Wedge Regret

rodbeard posted:

Jim Gaffigan has been in 4 episodes of Law and Order as different people. You would think they wouldn't recycle an actor that was already famous prior to guest starring. Also the woman that wrote Waitress was on an episode of Law and Order and later her real life murder was used for a ripped from the headlines episode.

To be fair, I think only one of those he played a prominent role, and that was in the last season I think. His first two or three appearances were blink and you’d miss them, one scene things well before he was famous.

Like, Chadwick Boseman was in one episode as a drug dealer or something in like 2003, and I didn’t make the “Oh poo poo, that’s the guy from Black Panther!” connection until We TV had a commercial highlighting a bunch of people who became famous much later. Both Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney appeared in episodes a few years apart (The latter when he was still like a teenager), and I think at one point Anna Gunn and the guy who played Gale from Breaking Bad where either in the same episode or back to back ones.

Henchman of Santa
Aug 21, 2010

AceOfFlames posted:

Yes but he showed up way back in Season 3 in some scene where he and a bunch of kids are pretending to be Omar. It essentially turned to retroactive foreshadowing.

Interesting. The other funny thing about that is that despite playing this aggressive kid, the actor was a sweet little boy who was nearly traumatized by pretending to shoot Michael K. Williams.

Sir Lemming
Jan 27, 2009

It's a piece of JUNK!

Angry Salami posted:

There's one actress who appeared in two episodes of Star Trek as a crewmember. They weren't written as the same character, but someone realized part-way through filming the second episode "Hey, we cast this woman before, we should make it the same character!", but they apparently forgot to re-shoot a line where Kirk refers to her by a different name.

I was gonna bring up Star Trek as largely being an exception to this rule, because you can convincingly reuse an actor with different alien makeup -- but there are a few occasions like the one you mentioned. I think you're referring to some random redshirt (redskirt?) but there was also Diana Muldaur, who played a one-off crew member in one episode of TOS and then a very human-like alien in another -- and then became a regular in TNG, but only for one season.

Oh, also, Mark Lenard played both the first Romulan we ever see and Spock's dad, which is weird because it's basically the same makeup.

Sir Lemming has a new favorite as of 15:16 on Sep 15, 2019

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Krispy Wafer posted:

Wouldn't Kirk not remembering a new lady's name be totally in character since he porked half the galaxy?

This article is very long but it makes a good case that Kirk in the TV show isn't really the character that people think he is, especially in terms of being a womaniser.

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011
My favorite secret celebrity appearance is when Vince Vaughn appeared on Sex and the City. Now, this wasn’t unusual: lots of celebrities appeared on Sex and the City playing fictionalized versions of themselves. It was exactly the problem though.

Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker’s character) goes to a party in Hollywood and hits it off with Vince, who identifies himself as a big-money actor. He’s wining and dining her, living in the lap of luxury, makes sense that this is what dating Vince Vaughn would be like.

The climax of the episode is Carrie and Vince sleeping in his mansion - and being woken up by Carrie Fisher, who’s the real owner. It turns out that Vince’s character is actually her personal assistant and he’s been abusing his position to impress women. It’s supposed to be funny, it’s supposed to be foreshadowed - but between the time of the episode being shot and when I watched it Vince became an actual star, so the whole thing made no sense!

Ambitious Spider
Feb 13, 2012



Lipstick Apathy

Arivia posted:

My favorite secret celebrity appearance is when Vince Vaughn appeared on Sex and the City. Now, this wasn’t unusual: lots of celebrities appeared on Sex and the City playing fictionalized versions of themselves. It was exactly the problem though.

Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker’s character) goes to a party in Hollywood and hits it off with Vince, who identifies himself as a big-money actor. He’s wining and dining her, living in the lap of luxury, makes sense that this is what dating Vince Vaughn would be like.

The climax of the episode is Carrie and Vince sleeping in his mansion - and being woken up by Carrie Fisher, who’s the real owner. It turns out that Vince’s character is actually her personal assistant and he’s been abusing his position to impress women. It’s supposed to be funny, it’s supposed to be foreshadowed - but between the time of the episode being shot and when I watched it Vince became an actual star, so the whole thing made no sense!

never seen it before, but it's still kind of funny if vince vaughn moonlights as carrie fisher's assistant.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

AceOfFlames posted:

Don't recall an actress but that definitely happened to a male crewmember: the guy who played Lt. Riley in "The Naked Now" (he's the guy who starts singing on the intercom) was later cast as another crewmember in "The Conscience of the King" with the casting people seemingly having completely forgotten that he was in the show before. Once they realized this, they decided to make it Riley again, meaning he's one of the few rando crewmembers to have an actual backstory (since in the latter ep, it's revealed his parents were executed by a tyrannical governor who is currently posing as an actor about the Enterprise)

Funnily enough, I recall reading somewhere that this happened on The Wire of all places. There was some article in which claimed they didn't notice that the kid who killed Omar had already appeared on the show in season 3 until it was pointed out to them.

The Wire has an interesting bit of weird casting. . There’s a homicide detective in real-life Baltimore (now retired) named Jay Landsman. He actually was the basis for John Munch on Homicide and later every TV show ever made. The wire has a character named after Jay Landsman but by and large not based off the man... who appeared later in the show playing Lt Mello. Munch also makes an appearance in an episode.
So the wire has a role named after a guy, a cameo based on that same guy, and another character played by that actual guy.

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Henchman of Santa
Aug 21, 2010

Ugly In The Morning posted:

The Wire has an interesting bit of weird casting. . There’s a homicide detective in real-life Baltimore (now retired) named Jay Landsman. He actually was the basis for John Munch on Homicide and later every TV show ever made. The wire has a character named after Jay Landsman but by and large not based off the man... who appeared later in the show playing Lt Mello. Munch also makes an appearance in an episode.
So the wire has a role named after a guy, a cameo based on that same guy, and another character played by that actual guy.

Also the real guy has the thickest Baltimore accent in recorded history

And while a number of characters are based on real gangsters, the only guy with an actual criminal record plays the deacon.

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