Sundays with Charlie

As a kid, I looked forward to Sunday mornings with the kind of glee usually associated with Saturday mornings. (Which I also looked forward to, let's not muddy this up with semantics.) I would wake up at the crack of nineish, go to the kitchen, get a cup of joe (90% milk), promptly add the rough equivalent of a bumper crop of sugar cane, stir, find a breakfast of some sort, usually sugar saturated, and plant myself two feet away from the television because at ten o'clock in the a of m, central standard time, WGN would run a block of programming any kid worth his geek would sit motionless for. The Cisco Kid and Lone Ranger came on followed by Star Trek, One Step Beyond, The Twilight Zone and then the main attraction, a Charlie Chan movie of the week.

Actually it was a rotating Mystery Movie featuring either Charlie or Sherlock Holmes. I was good with either one but always preferred the Charlie Chan films. And I really preferred the great Sidney Toler's films to Warner Oland's. Not that any of them weren't enjoyable, I just liked Toler's take on the character more. He was kind of a smart ass, and more than a little sarcastic and he always knew more than you did. You could see it in his expression. Besides that, Number 2 Son, Jimmy, played by Sen Yung, was just a lot more fun than Number 1 Son, Lee, played by Keye Luke.

Blasphemy, I know.

In fact, the Toler movies were just more fun altogether, but I'll give the edge of better mysteries to the Oland series. It's amazing though how popular the series was at the time, we complain about sequalitis in Hollywood now but there are a remarkable forty four films in the series if you count in the six films starring Roland Winter, who took over the role after Sydney Toler's death in 1947. Unfortunately, I've never, to the best of my recollection, seen any of those. There are also some films from early in the series that just no longer exist and I think that's a shame. This is a wonderful cinematic character that I still enjoy to this day.

They've released several sets of DVD's and I own most of them, I will eventually own all of them and watch them frequently. They are my go to, mood lifter, lazy day, relax and enjoy movies. They remind me of times spent with my mom, who was a super mystery nerd, and they take me back to a simpler time in my life when all I had to worry about was waking up on Sunday, having a mostly milk coffee doused in sugar and watching some great television. Good times.