188075-maya-two-boys-and-an-elephant

The Adventures of Two Boys and an Elephant

At its best, Maya serves as a window into an era of kids' adventure series with unusually authentic production values and undercurrents of thoughtful attention to cultural differences.

Two boys and an elephant wander through India. That’s the simple summary of Maya, which lumbered onto the air during an era when many odd premises were being tried out. Largely forgotten since failing to last the full 1967-68 television season, it’s available on demand from Warner Archive after more than 40 years. While most of the one-season wonders littering TV history merit their oblivion, this one counts as an unusual effort with certain elements out of the ordinary.

The series was based on the 1966 feature of the same name that starred the same two young actors and presumably the same elephant. Honestly, I can’t swear in court that the series always uses the same elephant. Maybe it employs stunt elephants. Anyway, the show is named after that gentle beast, and not many elephants can say the same. This makes it one of the era’s animal series (like Flipper, Gentle Ben and Daktari ), but its premise aligns it more closely with the many “fugitive” shows like, well, The Fugitive, albeit with adventure elements akin to Ron Ely’s Tarzan.

Jay North had become a TV star as Dennis the Menace. Now a tall and skinny teenager whose hair is darkened from his former towheaded look, he plays Terry Bowen, an impetuous and somewhat sullen American lad from Montana. He arrives in Bombay to meet his father, Hugh Bowen, a hunter employed by the Prince of Madrapur. Terry is informed by the American consul that his dad is presumed dead after an encounter with a tiger, although authorities haven’t found his body nor that of his guide, Gammu Ghatt.

Insisting that his father must be alive, Terry rushes off and makes friends with another orphan runaway, Raji (Sajid Khan), an “elephant boy” (or “mahout”) who is plotting to free (or steal) his elephant, Maya, from a work crew. Declaring themselves brothers instantly, Terry and Raji embark on a journey across the hills and valleys of India, pursuing increasingly unlikely rumors and clues that they hope will lead to finding Terry’s father. They must avoid authorities, who will deport Terry and confiscate Maya. They hardly follow any reasonable plan, but the premise is intended only as a flimsy excuse for their peripatetic adventures.

TV dramas of the ’60s were a world of restless wanderers, either on a quest for a goal that seemed out of reach or fleeing from pursuit, or both. Due to the nature of series TV, in which producers had no chance to wrap up a storyline when informed of cancellation, very few such shows ever reached a satisfying conclusion. Maya, cancelled at midseason after 18 episodes, is one of these unfulfilled odysseys.

Respected writer Stirling Silliphant is credited with developing the concept for TV and writing three scripts. It’s odd that this children’s show is what occupied his attention after Route 66, but they’re similar when you think about it, except that the buddies are younger and travel by pachyderm instead of Corvette.

Actually, Silliphant was working on something a bit more important to his career, as he wasn’t far from winning an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night. In this light, Maya could be seen as a paradigm of interracial friendship, and it was almost certainly the first American series to co-star an Indian actor as distinct from a cartoon Indian, like Hadji in Jonny Quest. A crucial scene in Silliphant’s pilot involves Raji rubbing mud on Terry in order to disguise him as a local boy. Their self-described brotherhood stands as some kind of pop-cultural marker in American TV, albeit one set on the other side of the planet.

Perhaps needless to add, the series never touches on any communal tensions within the country, and the uneducated wouldn’t guess that aside from Hindus, there were such things as Muslims, Sikhs, and others in India, as well. But then, you wouldn’t gather that from most Hindi movies, either. I noticed only one episode, “The Root of Evil”, in which one character accused another (a policeman) of not believing in the local faith.

The series’ main distinction is having been shot entirely in India. This explains why its pace and padding are like not unlike the movements of that elephant, for long sequences are devoted to wandering around in a way that shows off lots of local color and natural production values. This was an exotic vacation to US viewers, and it’s why most episodes feel twice as long as their story warrants. Overextended chases mark many plots, and so does a general lack of logic and the kind of pat resolutions that signal a show aimed at young viewers, even though kids comprise the kind of audience that spots logical problems most relentlessly, as every bedtime storyteller knows.

Apparently, the writers got tired of being saddled with an elephantine plot device, for Maya’s sidelined in most episodes. However, she’s called upon to toss and crush the same stuffed tiger in footage recycled in three episodes, and tigers who must be killed show up at least twice more. In fact, whenever an episode needs livening, a tiger shows up in a scene that looks suspiciously like previous footage. There’s one adventure where villagers disappear without a trace, and Terry and Raji are satisfied that the tiger is responsible even though they don’t accept that solution for the disappearance of Terry’s father and his guide. Kids.

Some episodes are more fanciful than others. “Tiger Boy” is about a feral child raised by a tiger, thus evoking characters like Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. “The Khandur Uprising” seems to be a vague and none too convincing restaging of Gunga Din, with Raji temporarily serving as a water boy until he rides (endlessly) for help. Out of all the bandits’ horses to steal in the night, he picks the white one.

“Will the Prince Please Get Lost” is credited to writer Peter Berneis. There’s nary a mention of Mark Twain, but it’s simply The Prince and the Pauper with the dual role given to Sajid Khan. It turns out that Raji is the spitting image of a poor little rich prince. When they switch for a day, Raji discovers the boredom of protocol while the prince realizes the people’s unhappiness under the rule of his greedy uncle.

That fat little uncle, who’s evidently overthrown by being tossed in a pond, is played by Manmohan Krishna, a prominent authority figure (fathers and cops) in many Bollywood classics. In a much later episode, he’s the rich father who must pay “The Ransom of Raji”, because Raji has once again been mistaken for a wealthy boy!

The prince’s loyal valet is played by Zul Vellani, who also played the beleaguered village headman in “The Allapur Conspiracy”. He’s more likely (though not very likely) to be known to western audiences for his supporting role in the 1972 arthouse film, Siddhartha.

Another by-product of filming in India and the use of Indian actors means that most of the dialogue is dubbed, I suspect, by American voice actor Marvin Miller, who provides the narration after the opening credits. (In my review of the original movie, I thought Paul Frees was the dubber, but I’m changing my mind.) We can see that the actors are mouthing their lines in English, because one convention of this series is that everyone speaks English, even the poorest and most isolated villagers. But they all sound the same when they speak; a gruff growl or a higher breathless tone.

The women of the series must be consistently dubbed by June Foray, because they all sound exactly like Rocky the Squirrel with a slight Indian accent. In the two or three brief scenes with natives speaking in Hindi (e.g., “The Witness”), the soundtrack is muddy, which may explain something; perhaps the whole series was postdubbed for technical issues.

Sajid Khan, who spends much of the series tilting his head and squinting pensively, was a well-known child star in India, thanks to his roles in the monumental Mother India (Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film) and Son of India. By the same token, as we’ve already indicated, some of the guest stars were famous in Hindi cinema, although US audiences would have been unaware of this. Compounding the viewer’s ignorance is the show’s unfortunate habit of failing to credit many of its guests, not to mention the tendency of Indian actors to adopt variable screen names.

Jairaj, a heroic superstar dating back to the pre-Independence industry, appears as the Prince of Madrapur in two episodes, “Blood of the Tiger” (the pilot or premiere) and “Natira”. The Prince is the only recurring role besides the two boys and their elephant.

“Natira” has a supporting role as a postmaster for distinguished Jewish-Indian actor David Abraham, while the spunky runaway heroine (all about true love vs. arranged marriage) is played by Salome Aaron, who would later win Miss India 1972, become a prominent Bollywood choreographer, and have heart-throb actor sons Kunal and Aditya Roy Kapur. The female-centered episode is one of two scripts by Kay Lenard, who wrote for many ’60s shows before settling into soaps.

The handsome Iftekhar Khan (billed as Iftikhar Ahmed), famous for playing distinguished policeman and sometimes villains in Hindi movies, plays bad guys in two consecutive episodes: a gruff village tyrant in “The Allapur Conspiracy” and a smuggler with an ice cream suit and dapper English accent in “Caper of the Golden Roe”. Several episodes later, he’s a police inspector in “Deadly Passage”. It’s likely that few viewers noticed.

Prem Nath, another actor famous for villains, plays an elephant hunter in “Twilight of Empire” and the bad guy in “The Root of Evil”. Still later, he shows up in an uncredited role giving testimony in “The Witness”. He’s easy to recognize as a dead ringer for character actor Simon Oakland.

Famous comedian and director I.S. Johar appears twice, as the greedy guardian of “Natira” and as a swindler who grins with all his teeth in “A Bus for Ramabad”. The latter episode is easily the best in the series. While most of the adventures are contrived melodramas written by people who specialized in such things, this script is by Howard Merrill, a former child actor who turned to writing and spent most of the ’60s on sitcoms, most notably The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The gentle and unique story, about a decrepit bus purchased for use by a poor village, seems characteristically Indian in the manner of R.K. Narayan’s village tales and comedies of manners. The leisurely pace is suited to this premise, which also makes practical use of the elephant, who’s otherwise often a bystander or afterthought. Marvin Chomsky, who directs the tiger’s share of early episodes, does an especially nice job here. Still in the first few years of his directing career, he’d eventually become one of the award-winning top-rankers in TV movies and miniseries.

This episode has a supporting role for Karan Dewan as the bad guy’s half-comical stooge or second banana, and he shows up again as a good guy in “The Treasure Temple”. He’d been an absolute heart-throb in Bollywood’s golden age, playing the romantic lead in the blockbuster Rattan (1944) and R.V. Shantaram’s excellent (yes, I’ve seen it) Teen Baati Char Raasta (1953).

Gajanan Jagirdar, a prolific character actor, plays a kindly village elder in “The Demon of Kalameni” (one of the tiger episodes) and an angry village elder in “Deadly Passage”. Krishnakant, typically an authority figure, shows up as an angry agitator in “The Root of Evil”. Pencil-mustached little Shatrughan Sinha (billed as S.P. Sinha) plays murderous rogues in “The Khandur Uprising” and “The Witness”; like many Indian actors, he went into politics.

Tarun Bose is an actor probably best known for his roles in the excellent films of Bimal Roy (seek them out!) and for the unofficial Ten Little Indians remake known as Gumnaam (introduced to many non-Indian viewers by a clip in Ghost World ). He plays the retainer of a retired British colonel (Ivor Barry) in “Twilight of Empire”, which has a few thoughtful moments about the changes in post-colonial India as the colonel indulges in self-pity and his servant engages in a dialectic. This script is courtesy of Richard Collins, who recanted his communist youth at the HUAC hearings, divorced his wife (fictionalized in the movie Guilty by Suspicion), and went on to write lots of TV.

Among the handful of Hollywood guests, the most recognizable is Nehemiah Persoff, who showed up in just about every series on American TV at this time. He literally parachutes into “Deadly Passage” as an escaped killer and thief who loudly chews the landscape. Equally ubiquitous on ’60s TV were David Opatoshu, here the villain who runs “Mirrcan’s Magic Circus”, and Michael Pate, who holds the boys prisoner in “The Treasure Temple”. Fred Beir is the ruthless American ivory hunter in “Twilight of Empire”, and Oliver McGowan is another retired British officer who’s outlived his relevance in “The Khandur Uprising”.

The actor in the pilot who plays Mr. Seldes, the U.S. Consul, isn’t credited, but IMDB says it’s somebody named Tony North — apparently no relation to Jay North. I mention it because among his sparse credits is a film shot around the same time in India, Kenner, in which an African-American (Jim Brown) travels to that country to avenge a murder and becomes a better person. Another actor in that film is Ursula Prince, who happens to play the Consul’s pretty assistant in this same episode and, again, it’s one of her few credits. They look like a package deal; perhaps they were filming their scenes for both projects in the same month, if not the same day.

The final episode, “The Legend of Whitney Markham”, teases us into thinking Terry’s father might have shown up looking for him, but it turns out to be a nosy American reporter (Mort Mills) on the trail of a Nobel-winning American scientist (E.J. André) who vanished from publicity in order to help poor Indian villagers. And how the simple folk love their great white doctor-saab! This premise is clearly inspired by the famous Victorian example of Dr. Stanley Livingston, who was very much a part of TV culture at this time if only for the catch-phrase “Dr. Livingston, I presume.”

The doc evidently believes he couldn’t continue to work there if he were known or couldn’t usefully raise any money with the publicity, leading to one of those painful contrivances where a journalist renounces the story of his career as somehow the right thing to do. Let’s publicly shame writer Norman Katkov on this one, although this episode does include intriguing scenes where Terry falls into depression while the hurt Raji, out of love for him, offers a prayer to Lord Krishna. One of the series’ better elements is the contrast between how Raji and Terry approach the world, with Raji as the easy-going, morally relative pragmatist (with Hindu faith) and Terry as the stubborn, dogmatic sentimentalist who’s often wrong.

Aside from those mentioned, the other writers were Rik Vollaerts, a story editor for the show; William Hersey, another story editor; Maxwell Shane, also a noir director and TV producer; Mort Lewis, co-creator of pioneering legal drama The Public Defender; Edwin Blum, whose career high was Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17; Paul Franklin, specialist in westerns; Lee Erwin, of many juvenile adventure shows; and Richard David, about whom I’ve no idea.

The original movie was produced by brothers Frank & Maurice King; they’re listed as producers for ten irregularly placed episodes of this MGM series, usually with Harry Franklyn and Frank Sylos as their associate producers. On the rest of the episodes, the Kings are executive producers while Herbert Coleman functioned as producer with Sylos as associate.

Coleman, who also directed many episodes, had worked as associate producer and 2nd unit director on several prominent Alfred Hitchcock films in the ’50s before moving into TV and producing the popular crime series Checkmate and the final season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Oddly, his work on Maya is currently unrecognized on the standard internet sources.

Besides Coleman and Chomsky, Hollingsworth Morse and Allen Baron round out the directors. The style is consistent throughout the series. All episodes were shot by Günther Senftleben while the supervising editor is Richard V. Heermance, both of whom had performed the same duties for the feature film. The majestic theme and other frequently recycled quasi-exotic music was provided by Hans J. Salter, most famous for Universal horror movies. Ram Yedakar was the art director, and was as important to the show’s look as anyone else.

Warner Archive’s set of five discs contains all 18 episodes with no extras. The prints don’t quite look restored and sometimes obvious damage is visible, but they’re not so faded as you might expect. The plots adopt certain formulas and conveniences, but at its best, the series serves as a simple window into an era of kids’ adventure series with unusually authentic production values and undercurrents of thoughtful attention to cultural differences.