Where's the old footage in Boston Legal S03E18 from?
In Boston Legal Series 3, Episode 18, Son of the defender Denny Crane and others are taken hostage. The hostage taker turns out to be the son of a woman murdered by a man who Denny got off the charges in his first case, along with his father.
The episode is interspersed with footage (as flashbacks) from a black and white television program or film with a person who looks like William Shatner.
Where does this footage come from or was it made for Boston Legal?
Best Answer
It's actual footage of Shatner from Studio One - The Defender
Because Shatner has been around forever and has been a TV and film fixture for so long, footage from his 1957 appearance in the TV pilot The Defender was able to be incorporated into this week's episode.
Wikipedia clarifies
A third-season episode of the ABC legal drama Boston Legal, "Son of the Defender", used clips from the two-part Studio One episode "The Defender" (February 25 – March 4, 1957), featuring William Shatner as an attorney joining his lawyer father, played by Ralph Bellamy, in the defense of a 19-year-old, played by Steve McQueen, who is accused of murder. Utilizing clips of the older show for flashbacks, the Boston Legal episode portrayed Shatner's Studio One character as a young Denny Crane trying his first case alongside his father
PS: I can't find any clarification if this was deliberate in that the writers based the episode on knowing this old show existed and could be used but I'm still looking.
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Why was Boston Legal Cancelled?
The ratings slowly declined each successive year and last season, Legal averaged 9.8 million. Though that's still a decent audience, ABC announced that season five would be the final one.What happened on the last episode of Boston Legal?
The usage of the Studio One footage with Ralph Bellamy as Denny Crane's dad is a master stroke when it is combined with an adult man who is convinced that the guilty party in his mothers murder got off due to Cranes using of court room theatrics is an excellent plot.Lost Frequencies ft Calum Scott - Where Are You Now (Official Video)
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Answer 2
From
One of his picks for landmarks in the history of legal dramas is Boston Legal, and the chapter on this show closes with a mention of this very episode.
One of the most original Boston Legal episodes—one in which he did work with a co-writer, Phoef Sutton—was 2007’s “Son of the Defender,” in which Denny Crane was forced to recount a murder trial he’d helped argue fifty years earlier, as a young lawyer working alongside his father in the new family firm. For flashbacks, the Boston Legal episode used kinescope footage from Reginald Rose’s two-part “The Defender” episode from CBS’s Studio One—the one where Ralph Bellamy played the father, and a young William Shatner the son. That live telecast was from fifty years earlier and was a uniquely clever use of a very old TV legal drama to tell a completely new story.
I also found it interesting that something similar happened on an earlier Shatner show. The two-part episode "The Menagerie" from Star Trek incorporated footage from the original pilot for the show "The Cage". While Shatner didn't have a role in the pilot, Leonard Nimoy played Spock in it, so the episode was focused on his relationship with the earlier Captain of the Enterprise.
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