Legend (TV Series) Birth of a Legend (1995) User Reviews

Great start to the series ... very funny :-)

[VetteRanger · 9/10 · 13 February 2023]

The author of dime novels is mistaken for his hero and charged with a slate of crimes in Colorado, and he's never even been to Colorado. He goes to clear his name with a handful of affidavits proving he was in other places when the "crimes" occurred.

In the midst of all that are some wonderful scenes, great dialogue, and ever better delivery. My wife and I found ourselves laughing frequently, and even thinking back over what we'd just seen and laughing again. His conversation with Tim Thomerson, playing a gunman hired to kill "Legend" or run him out of town, is not to be missed. :-)

And so begins a series of adventures that, sadly, will only include eleven more.

And I found it somewhat amusing that for a series that aired in 1995, at the time of this writing the only two reviews of the pilot episode appear 28 years later within a week of each other. LOL.

Wonderful pilot for a woeful series

[aramis-112-804880 · 8/10 · 5 February 2023]

1876. Richard Dean Anderson plays the half-alcoholic dime novel hack Ernest Pratt, who created a legendary character: Nicodemus Legend. In the public mind, the two are conflated. In the modern world, this mistake is made largely by academics and graduate students desperate for a dissertation.

Suddenly, one day, all kinds of people appear out of nowhere accusing Pratt/Legend of diverting a river in Colorado. Pratt's never been in Colorado and is puzzled as to how to change a river's course.

Going to Colorado, Pratt has a run-in with an inventor named Bartok (John de Lancie, sporting an annoying and unnecessary faux-Hungarian accent) with an idea fixe against Thomas Edison (who that year was just setting up his invention factory). Bartok completes Pratt's transformation into Legend, whether Pratt likes it or not, and together the two use steampunk science (meaning lots of shiny brass and impossible electrical equipment) to defeat the bad guys.

Excellent stand-alone pilot for a series that went nowhere, with all the historical accuracy of F-Troop. Since Americans are all mean except for the cowardly, drunken Pratt; and only Bartok, who constantly runs down Americans, shows any real sense, the only people who can love the show are US citizens who hate their inheritance of the freest country ever formed. And power-mad, mean-spirited p.c. Wet blanket types who live in fear that someone out there may be feeling good about themselves.

Steampunk had a small appeal back then. I think it might play better today. But the woeful historical research that plagued the series is off-putting for me. I much preferred Sam Waterston's "Q. E. D." from the 1970s. It was silly, with the same sense of rollicking fun, but it made no pretense of historical accuracy.

Anderson has a strong sense of his character and a flair for comedy. Pratt's a far cry from the ever-polite MacGyver, who hated guns but didn't mind using his sledgehammer fists to nearly kill someone or use some gimcrack Rube Goldberg device to dump a ton of debris on people's heads to give them brain damage. I'd rather be shot.

Pratt's a good character. Bartok is well-thought out but too judgmental for my taste. All he seems to want to do is tear down the image of Edison before he was even well out of the gate, and talk about what dimwits his American hosts are (compared to himself).

1876 looked like a good idea at the time, being the US Centennial year (which was really more properly 1889) The year Bell patented his telephone, and the final years of Wild Bill Hickok and Custer; but if this was meant as an anti-Edison diatribe a later year would have been better chosen.

This pilot-movie works very well. Watch the pilot and forget the series, which never had a hope and came off as a second-rate, steampunk "Nichols" (the James Garner flop).