I've never seen that show, and we don't get that channel on our local Directv. But it is available as DVD sets on Amazon. Maybe later on.

 

Episode 17 had no real car action except more use of the Toronado. But we did have some interesting scenery.

At one point, Mannix is tailing a lady who is riding in a cab. We have a view of the cab from the passenger seat side inside the Toro. It's an interesting street scene because of all the signage. Note on the right side is Brucks Oldsmobile and Cort Fox Ford. Both dealerships are no longer in business. Behind the Oldsmobile sign is the Chrysler Pentastar logo, so there's clearly a Chrysler dealer next in line, but it's too far away to make out the name, and this is the only view of it we get in the episode.

Note also that, because of the camera being inside the car, we get to see the lines of the Toro's hood as you would see them from the front seat, and we can see the passenger-side windshield wiper tucked into its parking space at the base of the windshield. I doubt Mannix has ever had to use the wipers as he never even has to put the top up!




I did a little internet searching and was able to find a few tidbits about Brucks Oldsmobile. It opened in 1952 and closed in 1980. I was able to find an advertisement by the dealership in the May 20, 1954 edition of the Los Angeles Times, and it is below. Note that the street address is provided.





Given that we have the address as 4575 Hollywood Blvd, we can find a google street view of that area today, and that's below, to the best of my ability to find the spot. Note that the Mannix screenshot is taken when the dealership is a bit in the distance, so while its address is 4575, the address where the shot was taken is a few house numbers prior to that. The google street view below is at 4550 Hollywood Blvd. There is really nothing that matches between the two views, which are about 50 years apart. The scenery in the distance appears to match well enough, especially if you look to the right in the street view and see the mountain ridge line. It matches pretty well with the ridge line you see in the Mannix shot just below and to the right of the "Oldsmobile' in "Brucks Oldsmobile." I think that the reason that the mountains appear closer in the Mannix shot is because of the type of lens used on the TV camera versus what's used on google streetview cameras, which are very wide-angle.

One thing I did notice is that there is a curb cut in the google view on the right side, and there looks to be possibly a curb cut in the Mannix screen shot right behind the Ford that's parked on the right side behind the white station wagon. We can barely see it because the next car behind blocks most of it, and you have to strain a bit to get it to be a curb cut, but I'm throwing it out there as a thought.





Finally, I couldn't help but notice on the very same Los Angeles Times page as appeared the Brucks Oldsmobile ad was a larger ad for Goodyear Tires. I had to take a shot of that one, too. Nothing like $18 for a tire!

 

This is nice stuff, I like reading it.

 

I'd venture to say that the first building on the left in the Mannix picture, is the same building as the red one at the end of the Uhaul lot in the Google picture. So those two pictures were taken almost exactly at the same place. Interesting.

 

I think you're right! Good eye.

I cropped and enlarged slightly the Mannix photo. In the original view, it looks like a building with a peaked roof on the side facing the street. But when you zoom in on it, this isn't necessarily true. Rather, the building appears to have a 45 degree angled front entrance, and that's what you see in the red building in the google street view. Because the google photo is from street view, we can go back to that address and zoom in on the building.

The building certainly looks like it's had a few facelifts over the years, but it does appear to be the same building.

 

Episode 18 was the conclusion of the series' first two-part story. A couple of cars did appear, but no Toronado at all this time.

First up is the closest view yet of the '65 Pontiac GTO we've seen glimpses of in previous episodes. Looks very nice, and I like how you can see the California black plate. What would one of these in decent condition sell for at a Mecum auction these days? $25,000? $30,000?

By the way, who can identify the two actors? The man is character actor Dana Elcar. He appeared on both film and televsion at that time, but I remember him best as the guy who played the FBI agent "Hickey" Polk in the movie The Sting. He's the one who "shot" the Paul Newman character (Henry Gondorff) at the end of the movie.

The lady is Beverly Garland, another busy and well-known actress at the time. I remember her best as playing the character Beverly Harper who married the Fred MacMurray character (Steve Douglas) on My Three Sons and became Beverly Harper Douglas and the stepmother of the three sons. She also brought the little girl "Dodie" into the family. "Dodie" (actress Dawn Lyn) is now 56 years old.

Garland had an interesting side business later in life. She was born Beverly Fessenden and married a guy named Garland in 1951. She divorced him in 1953 but kept his name for the rest of her career, even after she remarried in 1960. That second husband (a guy named Fillmore Crank---would you have taken his last name?) bought a Howard Johnson's hotel and remodeled it and renamed it Beverly Garland's Holiday Inn. Later that name was shortened to just "The Garland." It's still in business today, is managed by her son, and it ain't cheap. But then, what is in LA?

In this episode of Mannix, both of these characters are bad guys. Elcar ends up dead, and Garland is arrested.





The other nice vehicle we see is this gorgeous '68 Plymouth Barracuda convertible on which you can also see the California black plate. It's got rally wheels, too. If the GTO would sell for a lot today, what would this sell for? Anywhere from $20k to $50k?

I took a couple of shots of it at different points in the show. This is the first car that I have spotted in the show that is a '68 model year car. This episode aired in January 1968, so it's expected that '68 model year cars would eventually start appearing in the episodes.

You can barely make her out, but the lady driving the Plymouth is actress Antoinette Bower, who should also be familiar to anyone who watched '60s television. She was the actress who played the character "Sylvia" in the Star Trek original series episode "Catspaw." She is still with us and will turn 87 on September 30.

More trivia. The person who wrote the episode "Catspaw" is the same person, Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel "Psycho," the book on which Alfred Hitchcock based the famous movie of the same name.

In this episode, Bower's character is suspect at first but turns out to be a good guy, and Mannix almost has a fling with her at the end, just like he does with pretty much any living female under the age of 100.

 

Nothing like quoting yourself.

There's one of these for sale right now at the Hemmings Auction site. The auction is ending shortly as I write this, and the current bid is $30,000 with the reserve not met.

https://www.hemmings.com/auction/196...ign=2019-09-17

 

Episode 19 featured only one car worth taking a picture of, but it is a model we haven't seen so far in the show, a 1968 Chrysler New Yorker. Actor Howard Da Silva, who was the head bad guy in this episode and ended up getting shot dead by Mannix at the end, is driving it.

We did get a glimpse of the Toronado with the top up, something we haven't yet seen in the show, but it was just a closer-in, side view, and you couldn't really see the car, so I didn't take a photo.

 

Episode 21 featured some unusual automotive scenes.


First off, we have Mannix driving the Toronado on, gasp, a rutted dirt road getting mud on the tires and everything. My heavens! How could he do such a thing to the car? Maybe he knew that, after this episode, there were to be only three more in the first season, and he'd be getting a new car for the second season, so he didn't care if he trashed it.

In the end though, and even though he kicked up a lot of dirt when he drove away from that area later in the episode, the Toro came through unscathed without a hint of dirt.





A little later, Mannix is followed by a guy driving a car that it would be very difficult to be inconspicuous in, even in 1968. It looks to be a 1950-ish Pontiac. Even then it stood out as an old car, and it was belching smoke, too.





This scene had me cracking up. Here's an excellent example of something that someone in the show's continuity department should have caught. Here we have the action a few seconds after the above scene. Mannix notices the car behind him, and we see what Mannix sees through his driver's side rearview mirror. We do get a good view of the front of the old car chasing him, but there's one big problem. As we've clearly seen in every photo of the Toronado that shows them, the outside mirrors on each side are ROUND. Yet in this scene, the mirror is rectangular. Hmmmmmmmmm.

I also like the two cars parked at the curb in the distance on either side of the Pontiac. On the left looks like a '59 Buick, and on the right looks like the back end of a '58, '59, or '60 Thunderbird.





Here's one more unusual Toronado view. Mannix is driving with a passenger, and the camera is right behind and above them. We get a good view of part of the car's dashboard. We can see the radio, ignition switch, some of the A/C vents, and more. But what do we also see? A HUMONGOUS inside rearview mirror. Look at the size of that thing. It stretches three-quarters the width of the car. I guess when you're almost always being followed by bad guys, you want to have as good a view of the world behind you as possible.

If that mirror was present in any other view of the Toronado so far, I never noticed it. I wonder if its presence had something to do with the way the scene was filmed with the camera apparently mounted on the car right behind them.





Finally, we have one of my favorite screen shots of the entire series so far. Not the Toronado, in this case, but the yellow car on the left. If I'm not mistaken, that's a 1967 Delta 88. What's more fun, it's the same color MY '67 Delta 88 was before I had it painted red.

It's a pretty neat street scene overall, with all the cars, buildings, palm trees, and the two neat cars in the foreground. I'm semi-tempted to print it out, frame it, and hang it somewhere.




Here's a shot of my '67 taken the day I bought it back in 2009. I do think it matches pretty closely the yellow car above.

 

In that picture of the square side mirror, all the cars seen in that view are early to late-1950s. Mannix must have been driving down Yesteryear Street!

Randy C.

 

Very true. Overall, one sees quite a few significantly old cars in this show. By that I mean cars 10 to 20 years old or more. It's probably due to this being southern California, where cars don't rust away.

 

The large mirror is one of those segmented ones that let you see everything. I forget the name of the mirror, but it has five segments.

 

After a couple of weeks of travel and such kept me from the Mannix TV, I was back at it over the weekend.

Episode 22 had no cars worth talking about.

Episode 23 had only one decent shot of a car, a '67 Plymouth Belvedere wagon, and that's below. The episode also featured lots of Mannix driving around in his Toronado, including several nice over-the-shoulder shots where we could see part of the dashboard in front of him. This is the second-last episode of season 1, so, presumably, there's only one more episode with any chance of seeing the Toro, and only one more episode with Joseph Campanella as co-star.

Campanella's character, as Lou Wickersham, chief of "Intertect," the high-tech detective agency (always using a big, mainframe computer that Mannix always ridicules) that Mannix works for (when he isn't quitting in a huff, which he seems to do every other week when he and Wickersham don't see eye-to-eye on something), has been a good foil for Mannix's occasional excessiveness. But he's always there to back Mannix up in the end. It will be interesting to see how they set up the second season's new premise, that of Mannix on his own as a private detective with secretary and girl Friday Peggy Fair (Gail Fisher) at his side.

 

The final episode of the first season did not feature any car scenes worth photographing. It was time to say good bye to the Toronado, too.

In the first episode of the second season, we did see Mannix driving what looked like a mid-size Chrysler product, but it was at night and too dark to get a good view of it, let alone a good picture. In one scene we did see a close up view of the top from behind, and whatever it was, it was a convertible with no back window. If I recall, on some convertibles with clear plastic windows back in those days, the windows could be removed by unzipping a zipper than ran all the way around the window.

This episode did feature a couple of nice car shots early on. The two cars were parked one in front of the other by the side of the road.

The blue wagon is, I think, a '68 Dodge Coronet. Correct me if I'm wrong.




The yellow car in front is a '65 Pontiac, a Grand Prix I believe. Only the Bonneville and Grand Prix had fender skirts that year, and, while you can't read it in the photo, I'm pretty sure that script behind the front wheel opening says "Grand Prix."

What massively beautiful cars those were (and are).




Here's a view of a '65 Grand Prix from the '65 Pontiac brochure, and the "Grand Prix" script is visible behind the front wheel.

 

The Catalina model could also come with fender skirts. I'm generally not a fan of fender skirts but that particular year the fender skirt looked great on the Bonneville/Grand Prix/Catalina series. It completed the line that runs along side the body nicely. That is my favorite year of those series of models. The Bonneville is a boat!

Randy C.