Trivia / Benson

• California Doubling: Averted in "Made in Hong Kong" which had extensive location shooting there.
• The Cast Show Off: At least one episode per season gave Robert Guillaume a chance to show his singing chops.
  • The first Christmas episode gave us this clip of Guillaume singing "O Holy Night."
  • The second Christmas episode had him sing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" with the extra bonus of lighting the tree with his music.
  • Season 5's "Too Pooped To Pip" let him do a duet with Gladys Knight.
  • Season 6's "Solid Gold" had him sing "Tonight It's My Party," written for the show by Guillaume's son.
  • Inga Swenson, a noted Broadway actress, also sings in a couple of episodes: "Stille Nacht" in the above-mentioned Christmas episode and "In the Still of the Night" during a telethon.
  • The Season 6 two-parter, "Made in Hong Kong," shows Rene Auberjonois speaking fluent Chinese and displaying an impressive amount of local knowledge about Hong Kong.
• Fake Nationality: Kraus is German. Inga Swenson, the actress who plays her, is not.
• He Also Did: Tony Mordente directed five episodes. Mordente is best known for playing A-rab in West Side Story.
  • Rene Aubergenois and Ethan Phillips would go on to become major characters on the Star Trek series, as Odo and Neelix respectively.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Only Seasons 1 and 2 have been released on DVD so far, despite every season of its parent program Soap being readily available on DVD and on Netflix, and the show rarely plays in reruns anywhere (though it began airing in the U.S. on Antenna TV in 2012). However, given the series' DVD rights are now owned by Mill Creek, the possibility of future seasons finally being released may finally occur.
• Small Reference Pools: Nowadays, when this show is talked about, it is often to mention that time they infamously fired Jerry Seinfeld for creative differences and not telling him that until he sat down on the rehearsal table, read the script and found out his character had been cut.
• Shoot the Money: A two-part episode in Hong Kong in season 6.
• What Could Have Been: A show runner revealed that if the show hadn't been cancelled, the eighth season would've featured Gene winning re-election and Benson becoming a Senator.
• You Look Familiar: Both from the parent show, Soap. Inga Swenson (Kraus) had played Corrine's birth mother Ingrid Svenson, while Caroline McWilliams (Marcy) played Burt's secretary, who claimed to have had an affair with him at the behest of Ingrid.

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