Trivia / Hawaii Five-O

• Acting for Two:
  • In "A Bullet for El Diablo", Edith Diaz plays the title dictator's daughter and the double who replaces her in an attempt to assassinate him. (It works.)
  • In "Welcome to Our Branch Office", where criminals have set up a phony Five-O office with simulacra of our heroes, three of the main four are impersonated by people with similar attributes — but the fake Danny Williams, like the real Danny Williams, is played by James MacArthur (in the end credits, "Fake Danny" is the only one of the four not listed).
  • In "Deep Cover" Dale Robinette plays a Navy engineer and his lookalike in a spy plot.
  • In "Labyrinth" Tricia O'Neil plays a plastic surgeon's wife after reconstructive surgery... which makes her look like the surgeon's mistress played by the same actress.
  • Steve McGarrett comes face to face with his double in "The Ninety-Second War, Part I"; and in "Woe To Wo Fat" Jack Lord plays McGarrett and Prof. Raintree.
• Actor-Shared Background: Both Jack Lord and McGarrett are Capricorns, and have had experience as sailors.
• Banned Episode:
  • The 1970 episode "Bored, She Hung Herself" was banned after a viewer supposedly died from imitating a deadly yoga technique that looked a lot like Autoerotic Asphyxiation. The episode was barred from ever airing again, not even in syndication, and it's not included on the second season DVD box set.
  • The 1977 episode "A Capitol Crime" was pulled from syndication after 9/11. The episode is about an old man holding hostages in a courthouse with a bomb strapped to him, which obviously wouldn't play too well after the Twin Towers bombing. It was eventually reinstated in the syndication package.
• Creator Backlash: David Gerrold, in his days as a script typist for CBS, had the pilot script as one of his assignments - and he hated the drafts so much they immediately put him off watching the series!
• The Danza: In "Number One With A Bullet," in a crossover with Cast the Expert, genuinely Hawaiian singer Yvonne Elliman (Jesus Christ Superstar, Saturday Night Fever) plays aspiring singer Yvonne Kanekoa. See also Susan Dey as Susan Bradshaw in "Target? - The Lady."
• Dawson Casting:
  • In season 2's "Just Lucky, I Guess", Elaine Joyce played an 18-year-old prostitute; she was in her mid-20s at the time. There were other examples throughout the series... In season 9's "See How She Runs" then 27-year-old Jessica Harper plays 17-year-old Sunny Mandell.
  • The then 19-year-old Linda Purl plays the title role in "The Hostage" namely a teenage (But said to be younger than 19) girl called Ruth.
  • Averted in "Image Of Fear" with teenage Annie Carter played Katy Kurtzman, aged 13 during filming.
• Directed by Cast Member: Jack Lord, of course; in addition to directing six episodes he was also more or less an uncredited executive producer (especially after creator and actual EP Leonard Freeman passed away in 1974).
• Fake Nationality:
  • Wo Fat, played by Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese-American Khigh Dhiegh.
  • Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán gets it twice: as the Japanese Tokura in "Samurai" and as European race car driver Alex Pareno in "Death Wish On Tantalus Mountain".
  • Mark Lenard, alias Sarek, played a Japanese saboteur in "To Hell With Babe Ruth" with the intensely European Will Kuluva also cast as a Japanese. Oh dear. (Then again, Lenard's role was originally meant for Montalbán. As Karen Rhodes put it in her book on the series Booking Hawaii Five-O'', "apparently a Japanese actor wasn't considered.")
  • In "Ready, Aim.....," Fijian Manu Tupou and Vietnamese-French France Nuyen are cast as Japanese. She plays an actual Hawaiian which (would also make her a Fake American) in "Small Witness, Large Crime".
  • In "Clash of Shadows", George DiCenzo, of Italian descent, played Jewish Nazi hunter Yuri Bloch.
• Fake American: A more traditional one turns up in "To Die In Paradise," with British actress Pamela Franklin as kidnapped country singer Bobbie Jo Bell. Much like Jane Seymour and Emily Blunt, Pamela Franklin played American as often, if not more often than she played her own nationality.
• Fake Brit: In "Termination with Extreme Prejudice" the very British Lady Sybil Danby is played by actual Brit Juliet Mills, her husband Lord Charles Danby is played by Australian Murray Matheson.) Jack Lord briefly in "The Forty-Second War"; his surgically-altered double is a British double agent.
• Follow the Leader:
  • While not the first US drama to be set in exotic climes, or even the first to be set in Hawaii, Warner Bros. Television beat them to the punch with Hawaiian Eye in the The '50s... but Hawaii Five-O was the first to be completely shot on location. (Apart from the odd episode filmed on the mainland like "Once Upon A Time".) QM Productions attempted this three times: with the Pilot Movies Code Name: Diamond Head and The Paradise Connection (with former Hawaii Five-O guest star Buddy Ebsen as a Chicago lawyer looking for his son), but before all of these was the Short-Runner Caribe (a series which Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders is a Spiritual Successor to) set in The Caribbean... But filmed in Florida thanks to its Troubled Production ensuring filming throughout the various individual countries wasn't feasible.
  • And then of course there were Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and Death in Paradise

• Missing Episode: See Banned Episode above.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Tim O'Kelly as Danno, Lew Ayres as The Governor and James Gregory as State Department official Jonathan Kaye (a recurring character on the series) in the pilot movie; Both Ayres and Gregory later guested on the series (Ayres twice, in different roles, Gregory just once), as did pilot cast members Andrew Duggan (four times!) and Leslie Nielsen. Kaye, meanwhile, was played by a total of six different actors.
  • Albert Paulsen played villain Charley Bombay in season two's "Just Lucky, I Guess"; when the character returned in season eight's "McGarrett Is Missing" he was played by Charles Cioffi (making him The Danza). He also had his name slightly changed to Charlie.
• Outlived Its Creator: The show outlasted Leonard Freeman by six years.
• Playing Against Type: Andy Griffith is a con artist in "I'm a Family Crook — Don't Shoot!" while Buddy Ebsen as a crooked college professor running a scam involving stolen traveler's checks in "3,000 Crooked Miles to Honolulu".
• Playing Their Own Twin: Sharon Farrell, before becoming a regular, in "Why Won't Linda Die?" Except it's a subversion - she plays one woman pretending to be two.
• Posthumous Credit: Series creator Leonard Freeman died of complications from heart surgery shortly after the sixth season finished production on January 20, 1974. He's still credited for his work.
• Production Posse: When Seeleg Lester became story consultant in the show's final years, a lot of writers he'd worked with on The Outer Limits (1963) and Perry Mason contributed scripts.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • In "Retire in Sunny Hawaii... Forever," Danny's Aunt Clara is played by James McArthur's mother Helen Hayes.
  • James MacArthur's real-life wife Melody Patterson appeared in the episodes "The Devil and Mr. Frog", "Nightmare in Blue" and "Bomb, Bomb, Who's Got the Bomb?".
  • Dennis Chun, Kam Fong's son, appeared in three episodes of the original series. He went on to play Sgt. Duke Lukela in the reboot.
• Recast as a Regular: Al Harrington and Herman Wedemeyer appeared in different roles on the show before assuming the roles of Ben and Duke respectively. Wedemeyer was in the first episode, playing Honolulu Police Lieutenant Balta.
• Stunt Casting: In "The Bells Toll At Noon," famed mimic Rich Little plays a movie buff gunning for the men who he blames for his daughter's fatal overdose, with a very heavy amount of James Cagney imitation.
  • Also "Trouble in Mind," with Nancy Wilson as a singer - not that one, the jazz singer.
  • One of the main guest stars in Season 11's "Number One With A Bullet" two-parter is played by Hawaiian singer Yvonne Ellman as... Yvonne Kaneoka.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Richard Boone, Gregory Peck and Robert Stack were offered the lead role of McGarrett.
  • CBS told Jack Lord that if he didn't behave himself, they had Lloyd Bridges on one of the islands, ready to take over for him.
• Written by Cast Member: As well as playing the title role in "Stringer," guest star Paul Williams also has co-story credit.
• You Look Familiar: Very prevalent. Among the most notable examples:
  • Actor Al Harrington appeared in five episodes, playing five different characters, before landing the recurring role of HPD Detective Ben Kokua.
  • Martin Sheen appeared in two episodes as different characters. As did Meg Foster
  • Bruce Boxleitner appeared three times as different characters — and two of them were in the same season!
  • Both Sharon Farrell and Moe Keale were guest actors (in three and eleven episodes respectively, each time as a different character) before joining the show as regulars in the final season.
  • Leslie Nielsen was a government agent in the pilot and a vengeful rancher in his only other episode ("We Hang Our Own").
  • Andrew Duggan, also a government agent in the pilot (but unlike Nielsen's character, he turned out to be The Mole), appeared in several other episodes, usually as a villain.
  • Sportscaster Al Michaels, then the voice of the baseball Hawaii Islanders, appeared in a second season episode as a defense attorney for an AWOL sailor accused of murder.
  • Elaine Joyce plays a prostitute is season 2's "Just Lucky, I Guess" and season 9's "Oldest Profession - Latest Price." Her character isn't murdered in the latter.

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