"To Walk With The Serpent" (Route 66 -Season 2, Episode 14 - 1962 ) While re-living old 'Route 66' episodes, we watched this one with our mouth in a frozen WTF gape........
Colorize it and it'd look like something you stumbled upon on in this week's nightly news.......or a Trump rally.
Briefly, for you young 'uns.......'Route 66' followed the ongoing adventures of two young men hoping to find their direction in life by tooling around the USA in their spiffy Corvette convertible.....
Stopping in endless big cities and small towns, every temporary part time job they stumble into invariably gets them embroiled in somebody's overheated drama. Our heroes, Tod (Martin Milner) a college educated preppie and Buzz (George Maharis) a rough and tumble street brawler usually resolve these mini-soap operas with common sense, empathy, a bit of romance and any number of fistfights.
Their stop in Boston somehow collides them with John Westerbrook (a superb Dan O'Herlily) a demented would-be Hitler, complete with his own set of slimy minions and a cadre of goon stormtroopers.
Westerbrook's ' Neo-Nazi 'Awake America' movement comes complete with his foaming-at-the-mouth speeches about sweeping the immigrant garbage out of America.........and even includes his followers using a stiff right arm 'Heil' type salute.
The FBI promptly recruits our two heroes to infiltrate this loathsome cabal and find out what they're planning to do with a truckload of plastic explosives they've stolen.
Buzz, being a 'mongrel' of dubious parentage, gets beaten and bounced out of the gang early on, but Tod hangs around to discover the mad, mad Westerbrook plots to blow up the crowd at one of his rallies......for no other reason than to call attention to himself.
A chilling episode for sure........and almost ruined by the music underscore consisting of a mock patriotic march implying that( the composer thought this stuff was funny.
As in many 'Route 66' entries, the climactic wrap-up and is rushed and abrupt, with the Feds thwarting Westerbrook before one his thugs detonates the explosive-laden tri-corner hat on Paul Revere's statue. The babbling, loony-toon make believe Fuhrer is immediately thrown into a straight jacket...........(if only the wheels of justice spun that fast for all of Trump's indicted swamp-thugs.)
What immediately struck us about this episode, of course, was the spot on resemblance of these idiotic nutjobs to the the modern day fascists that Trump embraces as 'very good people'.......which made watching it all the more unsettling.
..........and reminding us once again that the upcoming election is the most crucially important in United States history, a clear choice between democracy and totalitarianism.
For "To Walk With The Serpent", 3 prescient stars (***) .....for Trump and all the insane people he loves because they like him.......minus Infinite stars.
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