Three Dollar Bill
Was watching the Kojak marathon this weekend on the Decades Channel, when good old Theo referenced two gays as "a couple of three dollar bills".
Very non-PC.
So what if it's non-PC by today's standards. It's authentic for the era. I don't find the comment offensive at all, and I'm openly bi. I find it humorous.
We need to stop applying today's PC policing to shows and cultural artifacts of the past. The implication is that we're supposed to feel guilty or wrong enjoying something with dialogue like that. And I don't feel guilty about enjoying that at all. Enough of the liberal shaming.
LoL,,,I actually posted that observation sarcastically as I thought it would fuel the opposite reaction also. Where obsessed liberalists will want to condemn Kojak for his hateful slander.
I agree with you, and in addition to your comments would like to add we should never negatively critique someone from the older generation who happens to make a questionable comment for the same reasoning - that's the standard and the norm for how they were raised and brought up into adulthood. So cut them some slack.
And actually people still talk that way, and use that phrase. It's not so much a generational thing as it's a cultural thing. Some cultures just cannot accept expressions of homosexuality or bisexuality without thinking it's out of the norm and labeling it as such.
The way Telly delivered the line was actually quite funny. I hope it never gets edited out.
Yes, it was hilarious to hear the way he said it. Great characterization by Savalas.
shareCheck out "Requiem for a Cop" from the first season. Whatever McNeil said around the 30 minute mark must have warranted a very obvious overdub on the DVD. The line is something like "just because his kid is homosexual", but homosexual was plastered on top of something. Can't imagine that particular character saying anything worse than "queer", but it doesn't seem like that would be worth masking over. Wish you could see his mouth. I need to watch for it on TV to see if it's the same.
Take Care
If it's not the "q" word then it would have to be the three letter word that starts with "f" and ends with "g." What else could it be? But I don't see McNeil speaking in such a derogatory way.
shareNeither do I. That's what was odd about it. ;)
I thought he might have said "f", but that seems harsh, even for 70's TV. I know it was all over movies from back then. He also doesn't seem to say "his kid is *a*...", but they could very well have pasted it over that too. It looks sort of like the camera jumps over to Kojak prematurely, while the McNeil dialog is still running, so maybe they didn't want anybody to see his lips.
Take Care
In S01E03, after a Mafia type is almost knocked off by two black guys, McNeil asks Kojak "Who else is going to recruit a schvartze for a hit?", suggesting that only a rival black gang would have done this. The Yiddish expression schvartze is unusual for McNeil, who I seriously doubt is Jewish. This term usually means "a black person" but also has connotations of the N-word which IMDB is wimpy about.
The N-word is actually heard in S04E15 (its only use on the show, I think). Kojak visits this fatherless black family he knew years before where the oldest son's first two names are Theo Kojak because he is the kid's "godfather." When the kid refers to Kojak as a "honky," Kojak calls him "Sambo." Later, when the kid tells his mother in her restaurant she is a "dumb n-i-you-know-what" like his father, Kojak belts him in the mouth.
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Interesting comments, mister-mike. I haven't seen seasons 4 or 5 yet. I will look for that episode. I totally missed the Yiddish expression McNeil uses in season 1 about blacks.
But again, this dialogue is a sign of the times during which the show was made. It may not be pleasing to today's politically correct ear, but it's authentic for the era.
In the scene in S01E06, Requiem for a Cop, where Kojak refers to "three dollar bills," there is more un-PC stuff (not that I want to make a federal case out of this). Kojak asks Sandro, the highly dandified guy who found the body of the murdered squealer Sammy, one of the two gay guys (the other being Jack, the son of the killed cop) "Was he a friend, a relative?" (Sandro already told Geeno he was a relative.) Sandro replies, "La mariposa? [The butterfly?] He may be your friend. I don't know, man. He's maricon [a bad word for "homosexual"] [Then, as if Kojak doesn't understand what he is saying] Fagola!"
I don't understand why Kojak suddenly sees some connection between Sammy and Jack. Sammy is a bartender at La Culebra [The Viper or Snake], an after-hours bar. Is he suggesting that Jack and Sammy are "pals." (Like is this the only gay bar in town?) When Kojak goes later to talk to Jack (who does hang out in La Culebra, even though the decor in the background is different than when Kojak was there earlier talking to Sammy), Jack says the $10,000 that got his father killed was extorted from a "respectable businessman, a wealthy man, a closet queen." Kojak says this is baloney, that Jack got the money from selling info to crooks that he gleaned from his father's duty schedule. This seems far-fetched to me, but Sammy had to get the intel that he gave to the cops from somewhere, and it was obviously changed around because everytime Jack's father and Geeno went to raid a place where a theft was taking place, the robbers were somewhere else. So is the suggestion that Jack gave Sammy the wrong info because they were lovers? (I think some material from this episode got left on the cutting room floor, other than the word that McNeil said which was seemingly replaced by "homosexual" earlier.)
By the way, in the previous episode, S01E05, A Girl in the River, to meet the conditions for a lineup, Kojak gets Chiccaloni and Stavros to put on curly wigs. After Chiccaloni puts on his, Stavros, who is standing at the door of Kojak's office, says "Excuse me" in a swishy way and leaves. When the two men go out of the office, the other men laugh themselves silly at how ridiculous they look. No idea why Kojak had two wigs in his desk!
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http://www.kojak.tv -- working on it!
Mister Mike- I remember both of those scenes, the McNeil one in particular, as I've only heard that term used in a derogatory way. I seem to recall him using Yiddish lingo at least a couple times, but sort of jokingly. Don't know what that's all about.
Here's Kojak reading a Playgirl type magazine at a date's apartment:
http://tinyurl.com/hmkegec
Just watched a cop on Police Story refer to a mentally handicapped guy they gave a ride to as a "retard". The cop was actually one of the good guys in the episode. Unless I'm forgetting, I don't think I'd heard that term before on TV.
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