Today a post on Scott Edelman’s Facebook page got me thinking about short-lived TV shows I loved as a kid, a train of thought that led eventually to a bizarre discovery of a series of attempted murders.
In 1967 two nearly identical shows appeared on different networks on the same weeknight in the same hour: Mr. Terrific and Captain Nice. They were futile attempts to cash in on the short-lived Batman craze—the type of show that could only appeal to a six-year-old fan of Batman and Underdog. That’d be me.
Right: a newspaper ad celebrating the premiere of Mr. Terrific.
One six-year-old can’t keep two network series on the air, no matter how frantically he watches them—especially when he’s frequently forced against his will to play T-ball on Monday nights. (My lifelong hate affair with organized sports was born around this time.) These ridiculous live-action cartoons were soon shuffled off to oblivion.
And, candidly, I’ve often had trouble keeping them straight in my mind. For a long time I thought Wally Cox starred in Mr. Terrific, and the internet had to invent IMDb to cure me of that delusion. (Wally Cox, of course, voiced the main character of Underdog, from which both Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific stole their premise: an ordinary schmoe gains short-term access to superpowers.)
Tonight, as I was wondering which of these series was which again, I checked in with Mr. Wikipedia and found that the female lead on Captain Nice was played by a somewhat-familiar face: Ann Prentiss, a once-promising comic actress who played supporting roles on a bunch of stuff I watched as a kid. Only I never recognized her, because I always mistook her for her more famous sister, Paula Prentiss, who delivered such memorable performances in the groundbreaking sitcom He & She, in What’s New Pussycat? and in The Stepford Wives. (Every now and then my wife and I look at each other and say, “I—thought—we—were friends…”)
This is the story of Ann Prentiss’ life, I guess: being mistaken for and overlooked for her more famous sister. It’s the kind of thing that could drive you crazy. Maybe that’s what actually happened.
The startling conclusion to Ann Prentiss’ Wikipedia article is that she died in prison. In the late 90s she apparently committed a felonious assault on her father, and while in jail she tried to have a contract put on her father, her sister’s husband, and her sister’s son. She was convicted and sentenced to 19 years–effectively, a life sentence, given her age at the time.
I’m not especially prone to celebrity gossip—I don’t think so, anyway—but I can’t help feeling that this is a story that needs telling by someone who knows the facts. I expected to find a bunch of books about it, but I could only find some dumb posts online by bozos who’d read Prentiss’ Wikipedia entry.
“Hell, I could do that,” I muttered, and did, as you see.
