There was a scene from an old episode of Adam 12. Martin Milner has to tell a child that his mother wasn't coming back. She had abandoned him and his brother and sister. The kid is played by Buddy Foster, Jodie Foster's older brother.
For years, Adam 12 was shown in syndication on a local station. They kept running a promo with that scene. I was a kid myself and I hated it. I wanted gunfights, not some child whining because he would never see his mother again.
Years later, I realized how deeply emotional the scene must have been.
Well, they're showing Adam 12 on TV again and I just saw that episode for the first time in over forty years. It wasn't that bad either way. Malloy had a surprisingly easy time breaking the news to the kid and it didn't bother the kid nearly as much as you'd think.
Buddy Foster has haunted me for years. That episode of Adam 12, the commercial where he asks Mr Owl how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, and there was a scene on Mayberry RFD I only saw once around 1970. I won't go into it, but I found it weirdly troubling. I had lost all interest in The Six Million Dollar Man by the time he appeared as the Wolf Boy.
I liked him in that movie where he played a southern rural degenerate teenager with Mercedes McCambridge as his mother.
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