http://www.alternatehistory.net/discussion/showthread.php?p=9416810&posted=1#post9416810

Night Stalker TV series


TRX
07/23/2014

I was surprised when the series was cancelled. It was extremely popular among the people I knew, anyway.

Carl Kolchak was a bit of a nerd and in many ways naive. So it was interesting to find some old footage of Darren McGavin as Mike Hammer in the 1950s TV series. Looking at IMDB, it looks like more of McGavin's roles were Hammerish than Kolchakish, but I'll always associate Darren McGavin with Carl Kolchak.

There was a "reboot" Night Stalker TV show a while back, but it wasn't very good, and it died without much comment. Actually, it was a lot more similar to the X-Files than the Night Stalker, and that format had been pretty much run into the ground for a while.

McGavin also did some audiobook readings of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, but the only ones I found were very worn cassettes from the library, and the tapes had deteriorated to the point where they were just mumbling in wind. Print-through and loss of oxide; tape degrades just sitting there, and even faster when you play it. If they ever manage to recover and re-release those they'd be interesting to listen to.

unrelated: the library also managed to come up with some old cassettes of Elizabeth Montgomery reading Anne Rice's "Beauty" series. She was Samantha from "Bewitched", always shilling for charities in later episodes. Which is why it was definitely an alternate-universe moment to find those tapes of her reading (what was then) hardcore S&M pornography. They weren't quite as bad as the McGavin tapes, but we're at the point where almost anything released on cassette probably takes back to the turn of the millennium, and reaching the end of its useful life.