Samstag, 20. September 2014

That's What We Watched On TV Year Ago # 14


I have thought long about whether I can write in this series about German-speaking crime film series. At last I have said myself, why not. Most from you will have never belonged from this series and I am sure also that these series were never emitted beyond the German-speaking space. Since by a translation would get lost a lot from the pun and the typical mood. Kottan ermittelt was an Austrian television series that was aired by Austrian and German television between 1976  and 1984. In the early episodes it started as a drama with the typical melancholic Vienna spirit and turned later into satirical appearance.

Major Adolf Kottan investigates for the Viennese security office. Kottan lives together with his wife Ilse and his mother who reads with pleasure crime films and develops theories on the perfect murder. Kottan is usually decayed and always roughly to his official assistant Schrammel who presents himself with pleasure as a pattern policeman, but Kottans Viennese Reviling does not understand.
Schrammel means to be able to educate further itself by the reading of crime films, and estimates particularly Mike Hammer-Romane of Mickey Spillane. Schrammel cannot always keep up intellectually with his colleagues.
Paul Schremser who has lost a leg by amputation will appeal later to the department leader and thereby Kottan early who stays at this time with inquiries abroad. Kottan uses him in the beginning as assistants, is much friendlier to him, nevertheless, than to Schrammel. His crutch is used by Schremser every now and then as a machine gun or is also used to bring brief to case. If three are unfully occupied professionally, they make music in the films together as a „Kottans Kapelle“ (playing their songs in a full playback).
Chief constable Pilch worries constantly about the respect of the police. His biggest enemies are in the first results a room aviation with whose hunt he falls several times from the window. Later he often fights with a coffee vending machine which was put up by major Kottan. Pilch accepts with the time more and more the trains of a mental patient.

It never was, actually, about the criminal cases, but how one can insert possibly many references and commentings in the respective episode. I remember one episode when the intro was the same as the intro from Rockford files. And Kottan lived in the same trailer Rockford did and working as a private eye. Songs were also often used to comment on scenes. For example, the investigators were called to a corpse. The name of the dead people was Irene - and in the background they played Leadbelly's Goodnight Irene.

In the 80s they got more and more anarchic by testing how far they could go with this series. In the episode emitted for the first time in 1981 on the German television 'Kansas City' the run writing ran in the first third: „Unidentified flying objects near Duisburg landed. Special broadcasting after this contribution …“ about the screen. Besides, it concerned a joke (by analogy with H.G.Wells' war of the worlds). The city of Duisburg was chosen because of the then popular scene commissioner Schimanski who solved there his cases. The ZDF news followed the radiation, however, in those was not reported about a such incident, then there were many reactions of German spectators who called at the police and partially immobilised the telephone networks. A complaint followed in ORF as well as an excuse on the part of the TV-station.

Have a good weekend.







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