Michael McKenna

American television networks began producing and airing made-for-television films in 1962, but the ABC Movie of the Week made them a fixture of American broadcasting. A total of 243 aired between 1969 and 1975: genre-bound films with compact running times, small casts, low budgets, and limited ambitions. A few—including Duel (1971), The Night Stalker (1972), and Bad Ronald (1974)—were hailed as genre classics. Others served as pilots for successful ABC television series, such as Alias Smith and Jones, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Starsky and Hutch. A third group dramatized the divisive social and cultural issues of the day: the counterculture in The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969), the Vietnam War in Tribes (1970), race relations in Carter’s Army (1971), homosexuality in That Certain Summer (1971), drug abuse in Go Ask Alice (1973), and gun violence in The Gun (1974).


Michael McKenna’s book breaks important scholarly ground by treating the series in both breadth and depth. The first half offers an interpretive history of the series in roughly 180 pages: a chapter per season, and a page or two of text apiece for the films that McKenna judges the most significant of that season. The second half uses another 180 pages to provide a chronological listing and alphabetical filmography of all 243 films aired in the series. The two pieces of the book reinforce one another: the second providing an authoritative guide to the series, and the first making a case for its social and aesthetic significance. The illustrations, reproductions of period newspaper advertisements for the films, are an unexpected bonus. They suggest the surprising frequency with which ABC relied on visual promises of sex, mayhem, and seamy realism to draw viewers to the films.



The book’s comprehensive, detail-oriented approach comes, inevitably, at a price. There is, for example, no discussion of the advertisements’ use of exploitation-film techniques, or of the parallels in subject matter and production techniques that united the ABC productions with the “B” features of an earlier era. Production details are drawn primarily from actors’ published interviews and memoirs, and so appear sporadically and haphazardly. The earlier careers of film-and-television veterans who worked on the films go unmentioned. Discussions of the social-problem melodramas seldom tie them, in more than a broad sentence or two, to the real-world developments that inspired them. McKenna’s coverage of individual films are brisk introductions, rather than in-depth explorations.


Despite these limitations, The ABC Movie of the Week: Big Movies for the Small Screen decisively supersedes Michael Karol’s slender, selective, idiosyncratic ABC Movie of the Week Companion as the definitive book on the series for scholars and serious fans.… (más)

In a match of Australian Rules Football, the rover is, as the name suggests a nomadic player. His game involves one of the highest running components of any of the positions on the playing field (Jacques and Pavia 1974). The rover covers large distances during the game, being involved in passages of play all over the ground (Pyke and Smith 1975). He moves from deep in defence, to the wide open spaces of the wings and to attacking positions in the forward line. The rover is also often one of the leading ball-handlers during a game and figures in plays such as centre-bounces and goal scoring.
Thus the rover is very much in the public notice – this being reflected in the rovers fine record in various media, League and club awards. As a result of this attention, much has been said and written as to what makes a good rover without being specific and without being supported by objective data.
This study then, attempts to give some objective definition to the answer to the question “what makes a good rover?”
It attempts to do this by using tests with can be conducted in the field rather than only in a laboratory. This means that the findings of this study should be more applicable to the widest possible range of situations and person, including coaches and players. Providing that standard procedures are utilized, and limitations such as the validity and reliability of the test, and its specific application to the athletes being tested, are recognised and accepted, field testing is a viable alternative to laboratory testing (Munro 1982). Field equipment is also generally cheaper, transportable and easier to use.
The overall aim of the study was two-fold:
(1) to give a descriptive profile of the Victorian Football League (VFL) rover, identifying common characteristics.
(2) to present a more analytical profile of the rover, attempting to discover any possible differentiating characteristics between rovers of different abilities, thus allowing an objective look at “what makes a good rover”.
The sample was drawn from rovers competing during 1982 in the VFL and represented a wide variety of rovers with respect to ability, level of competition and age.
Both the physical and the psychological characteristics of the rover were investigated.
The physical characteristics examined included their ability to utilize the three energy supply systems, namely the oxygen, lactic acid and phosphagen systems; and various anthropometric measures.
Personality factors and orientation types, self-motivation and perseverance, and attentional styles were the psychological variables evaluated… (más)