Current/All-Day Status: Watching my own Columbo-marathon.

I haven’t had a chance to talk about the sad news of Peter Falk’s death. - Now I’ve never mentioned it on here before, but I was a *HUGE* Columbo fan in my younger days… I not only own all episodes of the original series of Columbo on DVD, but before DVDs made it “easy” to own an entire series, I had recorded every episode of the original run of Columbo on VHS, from back when it ran on A&E in the mid-90’s (….and still have all of those obsessively labeled & numbered tapes in a box in my attic!).

I first started watching the show on late night’s (usually during school vacations) when CBS ran the repeats after the late news… this was way back in the early-mid 80’s, long before they had Letterman at 11:30.  Then, in the early 90’s, A&E began running the shows twice a day.  One of my early college roommates knew I liked the show, so he got me the book “The Columbo Phile”, which was basically an episode guide, with behind-the-scenes info on the show. - Remember, this was the days *before* you could get an episode-guide of every TV show on the internet! Back then, the only shows that you could get that kind of a guide for were the cult Sci-Fi shows (i.e.: The X-Files, all of the various Star Trek shows, etc.)

    Here’s a quick look at my collection (not counting the VHS tapes):

Once I had the episode guide, I became obsessed with recording every episode, in order when I could, which could be tough with A&E’s schedule- especially because the series would often switch between 90 mins & 2 hour episodes many times a season, so A&E would show the 90 min ones on Mon-Thurs, and then run all the 2 hour ones on Fridays. - Plus, at the time, A&E didn’t own the rights to the two original “pilot” Columbo movies, which the series was launched from, so I had a tough time tracking those down in the (very) early days of the internet.

Once I started collecting the episodes, many of my broke college friends would borrow the tapes of Columbo (and my other collection: MST3k) from me whenever they had no cable for the month. - Plus, while we were on smoke-breaks from the campus newspaper, I often entertained the staff with my Columbo impression (which was basically just a rip-off of Kevin Pollack’s impression), I would do it now, but no longer have the raincoat. 

R.I.P. Peter Falk - Thank you for being such a big part of my younger days.