A Little Bit of Luck, A Little Bit of Grief (6.20)

Rate, review & discuss the episodes from the sixth season

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How Would You Rate This Episode?

10 (Perfect!)
0
No votes
9.5 (One of the Best)
0
No votes
9.0 (Excellent)
3
4%
8.5 (Very Good)
7
10%
8.0 (Pretty Good)
10
14%
7.5 (Decent)
23
32%
7.0 (Average at Best)
15
21%
6.5 (Not So Good)
6
8%
6.0 (Pretty Bad)
5
7%
5.0 (Just Awful)
2
3%
 
Total votes: 71

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J.J. Walters
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#11 Post by J.J. Walters »

golfmobile wrote:I wonder also if Claudia Cron was pregnant when this was filmed. She looks rather thick around the middle, and usually the female guest stars were, well, rather picked for their looks.
I wondered that, too. She does have three sons. She dropped out of acting in the early '90s and became a really good artist (oil paintings and graphite drawings)!

http://www.claudiacron.com/index.html
golfmobile wrote:I wonder how many times they had to film the shot of the briefcase (with the money) landing in the back of that produce truck WITHOUT bouncing out?? :lol:
Pineapple trucks are apparently out to get Rick. He loses his money to a pineapple truck in this episode, and in "No Need to Know" he says he once had a dog on the islands that was run over by a pineapple truck! :shock:

Doc mentioned somewhere about Icepick "licking his lips like a lizard". Well, it's on full display in this episode during the poker game! 7 or 8 times he does it.

Image

Lastly, you ever see somebody who looks EXACTLY like somebody you used to know? Like, so much so that it's creepy? MacKenzie's secretary, Ms. Debra Lee Worthy, looks EXACTLY like my 10th grade english teacher!

Image

Doppelganger's, they're out there!
Higgins: It's not a scratch! It's a bloody gouge!

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Tom_Magnum
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#12 Post by Tom_Magnum »

This episode was interesting, but better than others in Season 6.

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Rutledal
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#13 Post by Rutledal »

I don't no if you guys list reused filiming loacations or not, but if you do I would like to metion that the look-out where Rick goes to deliver the money is the same look-out where Magnum has his first meeting with Admiral Hawks in "Blood and Honor".

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Rutledal
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#14 Post by Rutledal »

Also noticed a contradiction; in this episode Rick claims that his favorite song is "As Time Goes By", but in "I Witness" he says his favorite song is Morris Albert's "Feelings".

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Jay-Firestorm
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#15 Post by Jay-Firestorm »

I’m back from my small holiday (that’s “vacation” in American talk :lol:) and did last week’s batch of reviews on my laptop, so here we go.
This episode… don’t like it that much to be honest.

[Rating=6.0]

As T.C. and Magnum try to prevent the demolition of T.C.’s youth club-house by a slimy land developer, Rick becomes a millionaire after winning the mainland lottery – but gets mixed up with some card shark con artists. Not a very likable episode…

-----

This review contains spoilers.

This episode, to me, has ‘filler’ written all over it, to meet the season’s required episode count. It just feels like it was thrown together late in the season, and has little to really like about it, in my opinion.

The strangest thing for me about this episode is the appearance of Bruce Forsyth, well known to Brits (such as me) as an entertainer with a career stretching back to the 1950s. We’d already seen several familiar British faces in the England-set ‘Deja Vu’ at the start of the season, but seeing Forsyth here feels really odd.

I don’t really care for the plot of this one much at all. It is very slow in places, and for the most part not very interesting. In fact, for most of the episode, it felt like an episode from the far inferior fifth season.

I think the main thrust of the plot was intended to be that Rick was too busy wrapped up in his new found wealth to help his friends Magnum and T.C. out, but it just comes off as an unfocused mish-mash. I find the idea to not be very well realised, and for the whole it just doesn’t work.

And beyond that, I just didn’t find Rick becoming a millionaire very convincing at all. So much more could have been done with it, even on a limited budget.

The best bit about this shaky episode is the Casablanca-style final scene, with Rick saying goodbye to Jeannie, but sadly it is not as good as it might have been, as the rest of the episode building up to it has been rather sub par.

All-in-all, not a particularly good episode at all. ‘This Island Isn’t Big Enough…’ probably gets my vote for weakest episode of the season, but even so, ‘A Little Bit of Luck…’ is pretty poor.

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Other notes, bloopers and misc.:

* The correct formatting of this episode title, as seen on-screen, is ‘A Little Bit of Luck… A Little Bit of Grief’.

* As mentioned on this episode’s main page, the words ‘Ice Pick’ appear on-screen for the first time. But worth noting is that they appear as two separate words, not ‘Icepick’ as they sometimes appear on other occasions.

* T.C. wears his purple Lakers cap once again. I guess he did wear this often and I’d totally forgotten about it!

* As already mentioned on the episode’s main page, Bruce Forsyth is one of the U.K.’s biggest entertainers, with TV career stretching back to the 1950s. He’s been a compare, game show host, chat show host, sometime actor (as I suppose he is in this episode), and at the age of 81 is still going – today (Saturday 12th September 2009) he begins the new series of the BBC’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, the original U.K. version of ‘Dancing with the Stars’, and which the whole country except me seems to be going mad over!
JAY FIRESTORM

Facebook: Jay Gathergood / Twitter: Jay_Firestorm NEW BLOG: http://thea-teamcaptured.blogspot.com/

My A-Team site - http://thea-team.org aiming to be the most detailed A-Team site on the Net - if I ever get around to updating it!!

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#16 Post by Tuan Vu »

This episode started off good, with T.C. and Magnum getting thrown in jail and Rick winning a million dollars. It was really funny how the one woman won $10,000 and was disappointed like it was nothing.

But then, somehow things just slowed down. And I didn't quite understand the part about Blair Boyer being Dennis Mackenzie and what that had to do with anything and why Rick went into his office in the first place. Was he going to ask him for money? And we never get to see the end of the fight where the money is thrown out the window.

The best part of the episode was when the men drive away with Jeannie and the look on Rick's face when he realized he had been betrayed.

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nha trang
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#17 Post by nha trang »

I rated this episode "decent." I somewhat regret that they insist on always making Rick such a schmuck. It really doesn't play well to make him come off as that pathetic to where we feel sorry for him...

Just finished season 6, minus the two episodes on one disc that were scrambled due to a big fat gouge in the disc (I suppose I should have expected it buying it used off of Amazon).

Season 6 had it's moments but to me kind of just followed season 5 which was somewhat weak. I am looking forward to season 7 and actually looking forward to watching all the remaining episodes so I can go back and watch the early seasons again in all their primordial splendor....

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#18 Post by MaiTaiMan »

This one wasn't one of my favorites. :? They had Rick as a total idiot, and almost as if he went off the deep end.

Then Magnum and T.C. deal with this goof-ball crook who has cheated these kids out of some club house. Talk about weak plots. :roll:

However, I always enjoy Elisha Cook, Jr. as 'Ice Pick'...so the scenes with him sort of saved this one a little.
"It was more ironic than a Robin Masters novel--she thought he was dead, he thought she was dead...and only the chauffeur knew the truth! He should have been the butler!" "Lest We Forget"

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miltontheripper
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#19 Post by miltontheripper »

MaiTaiMan wrote:This one wasn't one of my favorites. :? They had Rick as a total idiot, and almost as if he went off the deep end.

Then Magnum and T.C. deal with this goof-ball crook who has cheated these kids out of some club house. Talk about weak plots. :roll:

However, I always enjoy Elisha Cook, Jr. as 'Ice Pick'...so the scenes with him sort of saved this one a little.

Agree all the way! I like Rick too much as a character to see him portrayed as such a baffoon! Anyone in their right mind who won a million dollars would have seen a potential golddiger/scam artist who was also beautiful coming a mile away. Not that Claudia Cron wouldn't have caught my interest too, wow!!! Fairly weak and ridiculous plot with TM and TC continually in and out of jail over a clubhouse but in the end it's Magnum and every episode is worth watching. I rated it as pretty good.

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#20 Post by AmandaByNight »

J.J. Walters wrote:
golfmobile wrote:I wonder also if Claudia Cron was pregnant when this was filmed. She looks rather thick around the middle, and usually the female guest stars were, well, rather picked for their looks.
I wondered that, too. She does have three sons. She dropped out of acting in the early '90s and became a really good artist (oil paintings and graphite drawings)!

http://www.claudiacron.com/index.html
Wow, thanks for the link. I went on her facebook page and she looks really good! I love her artwork too. I had no idea what happened to her, so I'm glad to see she's doing well...

Of course, I love all Rick episodes, but I felt bad for him in this one because (if memory serves me correctly), it's kind of obvious she's not as into him as he thinks. I should have been there at the lottery! :)

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#21 Post by Croix de Lorraine »

Anyone else notice how much Claudia Cron resembles Ingrid Bergman? Surely not a coincidence...

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J.J. Walters
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#22 Post by J.J. Walters »

Wow, never thought of that before, but you're right! Her face does look an awful lot like Ingrid's! :shock:
Higgins: It's not a scratch! It's a bloody gouge!

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#23 Post by MaximRecoil »

Has any regular character in any '80s TV show ever come into a huge sum of money and been able to keep it? This happened quite a bit in '80s TV shows (maybe it still happens; I'm not familiar with more recent TV shows though). It happened twice on Magnum P.I. (to Magnum and Rick); it happened to Rosco on The Dukes of Hazzard, and on various other shows for which I can't think of specific examples off the top of my head.
J.J. Walters wrote:
DarCA wrote:I was just watching this episode and was wondering if this could be considered a flub. Magnum is asleep in the guest house bedroom when Rick is calling on the phone. He gets up to answer it, walks into the living room, but misses the call.

Why didn't he just answer the phone on the nightstand?
Hmm, the way they set it up, I don't think it would be a flub. You only hear one phone ringing, the phone/answering machine in the living area. No phone appears to ring in the bedroom (although it's hard to tell for sure). Maybe his bedroom phone is broken? Maybe once the answering machine picks up he can only answer that phone?
There is no way to tell how many phones are ringing if all the phones in the house have the same ringer and you are listening to a mono recording rather than actually being in the house. They would all ring simultaneously and they would all sound alike.

If you want to look at it from an "in universe" perspective, it couldn't have been Magnum's combination phone / answering machine that was ringing, because the sound was from an electromechanical brass dual-gong ringer, and that answering machine phone doesn't have such a thing; it has an electronic ringer, the same as nearly all phones have today. Magnum's other phones vary depending on the episode, but he usually has an Automatic Electric Model 80e in his room (and often on his coffee table in the living room too), which does have an electromechanical brass dual-gong ringer. When it is not an AE-80e in his room and/or on his coffee table it is an AE-182e "Starlite" (Automatic Electric's version of the Western Electric "Princess"), which has a single-gong ringer.

In reality, the phone ringing was just a sound effect, a common stock sound effect recorded from the C4A dual-gong ringer found in the venerable Western Electric 500 and 2500 series phones.

The chances of one of those old leased-from-the-phone-company phones being broken are slim. They were built to last because if they broke, the phone company had to come out and fix them at their own expense. They can easily go 50 years without anything going wrong with them. They are extemely robust.

Magnum's relatively modern answering machine phone that was probably built somewhere in Asia was far more likely to break down than any of his Automatic Electrics.

He would have been able to answer the call from any extension, regardless of whether the answering machine had picked up or not.

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Bruce Forsyth letter

#24 Post by runawayselleck »

Hi everyone,

I have always been a big Magnum PI fan and like a lot of people in the UK, was probably very suprised when Bruce Forsyth appeared in this episode.

I decided to write to him once to ask him his memories of being in the episode, and if he would like a copy of it! His reply was quite interesting and I thought you would like to know.

He wrote:

Dear Ben

Thank you for your letter and the very very nice things you said about me. Yes, Magnum was a good show and I did see quite a few episodes. I am only too pleased to answer your four questions so here goes:

1: A friend of the director suggested me for the part and I was really excited to accept, although very disappointed that it was such a small part.
2: It was filmed in Hawaii, which was where my wife and I spent our honeymoon in 1983, and strangely enough, she had just become pregant during that trip
3: No, we did not meet Tom Selleck, which was another disappointment. Larry Manetti, who played Rick was not very sociable, and I do not think he was well liked by the production team. I think...he was a miserable bugger!
4: Yes, I have seen the episode I was in, and thank you very much but I do not want a copy of it mainly because of my appearance being so small.

Thank you for saying I was excellent but when you go all that way to do so little it does seem futile. Nethertheless, thankyou for your interest and I hope this has enlightned you on the whole visit.

Good luck with everything

Yours sincerely

Bruce Forsyth.

I received this letter in 2003 and will always love it, mainly for it being the only Magnum related autograph where Larry Manetti is called a miserable bugger!

Thought I would share :) :D

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Re: A Little Bit of Luck, A Little Bit of Grief (6.20)

#25 Post by KingKC »

People did not have a lot to say about this episode and they sure didn't have much good to say since the rating came in at a 7.3 which probably puts it it the bottom 10 overall. Heck, I kind of liked it. Then again I like it when kids are helped out. I know a lot of people think TC overplayed the do-gooder role but I disagree. Maybe there was some subtle, racial issues about needing more black men as mentors but I just liked the fact his character did those things, period. I think this episode depicted Rick in as much of a flake as he could possibly be and what happens when you are the ultimate flake. Maybe that was a little over the top for the writers but not that much given Rick's history. In some respects I think these friendships of almost 40 year old men are being tested by episodes like this.

KingKC

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