Unsung Moments in Apple History: The Lisa 1 appears on “The New Odd Couple”

I haven’t written anything about Apple’s 50th Anniversary yet. I kind of had my hands full with getting this site finished.

Besides, there’s still plenty of time for all of that. Apple’s going to be 50 years old for a whole year, after all. If I deserve any flak for not publishing anything about it on Wednesday, April 1, then so does everyone who jumped the gun and published earlier in the week, when Apple was still a mere 49 years, 51 weeks, and five or six days old.

Now that I’ve got a moment to breathe, I’m going to write about an exciting moment in Apple history that everybody else (looking sharply at you, Mr. Pogue) seems to have overlooked: the time in 1983 when an Apple Lisa was used as a pivotal plot device in an episode of The New Odd Couple.

Reviving the original Odd Couple while the Jack Klugman-Tony Randall version was still fresh on everyone’s minds seems like a strange choice for the times. Today, Paramount Plus could announce a reboot of The Big Bang Theory with new actors in the same roles, and nobody would even flinch. In 1983, I imagine that people wondered why ABC was taking the show out for a new spin – with the guy from Barney Miller and the guy from Sanford And Son playing Felix and Oscar this time – when (thanks to syndication) the original show was still airing all over the place.

Our house didn’t have cable TV or a VCR. And yet somehow, on May 13, 1983 (thank you, Wikipedia), I happened to catch Episode 16 of Season One: “The Perils Of Pauline.” I spotted a Lisa 1 on the TV, and I immediately started jumping up and down and shrieking with excitement.

…Inwardly. Nonetheless, I remember being super-jazzed about it. I knew about the Lisa from all of the Apple magazines I read. I wouldn't even see one in person until the 21st century. So spotting one on a sitcom was unbelievable.

In this episode, Felix throws Oscar a surprise birthday party and gives him one of those newfangled “word processors” to replace his typewriter…a broken-down manual machine that Oscar has been using forever, and affectionately dubbed “Pauline.”

(List price of the Lisa 1, in 1983: $9995. A Mazda RX-7 cost $124 less. This was one hell of a birthday present. Oh! And let's not forget the Apple Dot Matrix Printer next to it. It was a C. Itoh 8510 with Apple badging and it cost $699 in 1983 money. That would have been enough to cover Oscar's first two speeding tickets, so long as he kept it at less than 20 MPH over the highway speed limit.)

Oscar is upset. He’s sure that he can’t write on anything else, and (oh, what hijinks!) Pauline has already been hauled away as a trade-in. After Oscar’s failed attempts to get it back, Felix spends the rest of the episode trying to convince Oscar that he should at least give Lisa a try.

Felix tells Oscar that "LISA" stands for Local Integrated Software Architecture. I was going to jump all over that, armed with the sort of toxic, withering sarcasm that can only be summoned by a member of the generation raised on Late Night with David Letterman. I mean, wow… how much more made-up and techno-babbley could that name be?

…Then I remembered that “Local Integrated Software Architecture” had been made up by Apple themselves.

Ah. Well! It's a good thing that every other decision Apple made about the Lisa was 100% spot-on, right?

Felix used the official Apple product lingo and he even managed to say it with a straight face. But I’m sure the Lisa wasn’t there as part of any kind of product placement thing. Apple isn’t mentioned at all. And I doubt that Apple would have approved this piece of dialogue:

OSCAR: Lisa is dull and boring. She has no fun, no life. She's the Marlin Perkins of typewriters. I'm leaving, Felix. I'm going to find my Pauline.

(Marlin Perkins was a retired zookeeper who hosted Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. If you search for him on YouTube, the very first hit is entitled “Wild Kingdom's Marlin Perkins Wrestles an Anaconda.” Admittedly, this might have seemed tame to Oscar, considering that he was a New York City resident in 1983.)

There’s no mention of the Lisa's windows or menus or any of the things that defined the Lisa as a revolutionary PC in 1983. Get this: in the scenes where Oscar and Felix are using the Lisa, they don’t even touch the mouse! I’m pretty sure the show didn’t even bother putting it on the desk. I sure can't see it.

Honestly, the props department could have subbed in any desktop, of any make or design, without changing a single thing in the script except the name of the computer. Maybe the writers cajoled the producers into borrowing a Lisa from somewhere, just so that they could horse around with this revolutionary new type of computer for a week or two.

And it obviously went right back to wherever they got it from as soon as the episode wrapped. In the next episode (which would turn out to be the series finale), Lisa is gone. Pauline is back in the picture.

Is The New Odd Couple of any interest today, apart from its status as a footnote in Apple history? Yes! Ron Glass and Demond Wilson are well-cast. You’ll also get to see a pre-Ghostbusters Ernie Hudson in episode 4 (“That Was No Lady”) and Doris Roberts before Everybody Loves Raymond.

(I’m also predisposed towards enjoying anything John Schuck appears in.)

I think, in the end, The New Odd Couple couldn’t overcome the fact that it tried too hard to be exactly like the original show instead of taking the premise in a fresh direction. Ron Glass and Demond Wilson must have seemed like store-brand cola sitting on the same shelf as Coke or Pepsi.

But you can decide for yourself. “The Perils Of Pauline,” along with the whole rest of the series, is up on The Internet Archive.

Bonus: let's imagine that it's late 1982, and I'm a friend of one of the show's producers. They know I'm a computer nerd, so they describe the storyline of "The Perils Of Pauline" and ask me what kind of computer they should cast in the role of Oscar's first word processor.

An original 1981 IBM Personal Computer Model 5150 would have been a good pick if Oscar had a different reason for resisting the word processor. It's a big stack of metal boxes, with all kinds of cables exposed to the camera, and it came with literal boxes of manuals. If Oscar were scared and intimidated by new technology, that would've been perfect casting.

The 1982 Kaypro II would have been the right "dull and boring; no fun, no life" choice. I've got a big soft spot for this machine, and it was a big hit with writers. But it was about as charming as a high school metalshop project. It had none of the personality of Pauline, a chonkus manual typewriter from (?) the 1950s.

No, I think I would have made the same choice the show made. In the story, Oscar is so fixated on getting his old typewriter back that he doesn't even care that this Lisa is the sleekest, best-looking, most user-friendly, most modern, and most expensive desktop computer on the market. Oscar's issue is his obsessive belief that his broken-down old manual typewriter is the sole key that can unlock his Writing Mojo. The audience looks at the Lisa and thinks "Oh, hell yeah…jeez, what's his problem?"

Of all of the contemporary PCs of 1982-3 that I can think of (or Google image search), the Lisa 1 best served the needs of the story. I would also have been aware that my producer-friend probably would have let me play with it on-set. I wouldn't have had to wait until 2023 or thereabouts before I got to use one.