Trivia / The NBC Mystery Movie

• MAD Magazine's satires were titled Clodumbo, MacVillian & Strife, McClown and Queezy, M.E. (although the latter came along when it was an hour-long show). The magazine ran one for the revival, a Crossover satire called The ABC Misery Movie with Giddyup Olive^note Gideon Oliver A series starring Lou Gossett Jr. as a crime-solving Columbia University anthropology professor. B.S. Strikeout^note B.L. Stryker, with Burt Reynolds as a Florida-based private investigator. and Clodumbo all joining Giddyup in New York City to solve a murder.^note With an extended cameo from Jessica Fletcher, who discovers the "victim" had just fallen asleep because of how boring the others' shows were.
• Edited for Syndication: Some of the component shows, most notably Columbo, retained the original NBC intro with the Henry Mancini theme for syndicated reruns; they simply created a new title card at the end without any NBC references (the original had multicolored filmstrips with "MYSTERY" and the NBC "Snake" logo rolling upwards inside a circle, with the "NBC (day) Mystery Movie" text superimposed; the edited version simply had the "MYSTERY" filmstrips, with no NBC references either in the filmstrips or overlaid, going upwards at a slower pace). Other times (as was the case for some of the series that ran on Wednesdays), they would simply Fade Out before they got to the titlecard at all.
  • The four Quincy, M.E. Mystery Movies were edited down to fit into an hour slot and added to the Quincy, M.E. package. The original versions are on the DVD set.
• Follow the Leader:
  • After the show became a hit, ABC tried its own Wheel Program concept with The Men with an Isaac Hayes theme (Robert Conrad in Assignment: Vienna (produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), James Wainwright in Jigsaw (from Universal) and Lawrence Luckinbill in The Delphi Bureau from Warner Bros.) — it didn't last, and neither did any of the elements. Universal, the company behind the Mystery Movie strand tried to replicate the success itself with Great Detectives, shooting three TV movies (The Hound of the Baskervilles with Stewart Granger as Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Nick Carter starring Robert Conrad, and A Very Missing Person with Eve Arden as Hildegarde Withers) for a planned series. No go.
  • Similarly, James Stewart starred in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Hawkins as a high-priced rural-bred lawyer who regularly looked into the cases took... Stewart pulled out of the series because he felt the script quality couldn't be sustained. Perhaps Andy Griffith wasn't available/old enough at the time. MGM also gave their TV version of Shaft this treatment. Richard Roundtree returned for the series and apparently got paid more than he did for the original film!
    • Allegedly, Hawkins was created with Andy Griffith in mind for the role.
• The Other Darrin: In the pilot for The Snoop Sisters their chauffeur Barney and their friend on the force Lt. Ostrowski were played by Art Carney and Lawrence Pressman respectively; for the series Lou Antonio and Bert Convy took over those roles. This wasn't the only such example for the strand - see below.
  • Stuart Margolin played Lanigan's Rabbi in the pilot for said show, but his commitments to being Angel in The Rockford Files precluded any involvement in the series.
• Playing Against Type: Bert Convy as a police officer- everybody else knows him from various game shows (Tattletales in the 70s, Super Password and Win, Lose or Draw in the 80s (the last one he co-produced with Burt Reynolds, and aired on NBC- though the NBC version didn't have him hosting)).
• Referenced by...: Mystery Science Theater 3000 had a recurring joke in early seasons, where characters holding flashlights were met with calls of "It's the NBC Mystery Movie!" The joke was eventually forcibly retired by co-host Joel.