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A Maid Almost Saw Everything

I got a PDF of episode 5 from Script City and noticed some differences between it and the episode, which you can watch here:

When the assignment is first given, Sedford has different ideas about setting the trap:

At the motel, Maxine accidentally activated Yoyo in a different way and he had an excuse:

After Alex and Yoyo convince Max that Yoyo's chest panel was a hallucination, the scene continued when a maid arrives:

A little more happens near the pool than what made it into the episode:

Some casual sexism:

And a different ending than Yoyo's rusty handshake:

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The Furniture Fight that Almost Happened

I managed to find a script for episode 2, "Funny Money". It had a few differences from the actual episode that I wanted to share. You can watch the episode here:

Here's the original scripted climax with the nearly invisible furniture fight and Yoyo reacting to the gun like a badass:

Here are some additional cut lines about Yoyo being broke. Yoyo does in fact get a salary, as Capt. Sedford says in "The Thornhill Affair", which goes towards parts and labor.

Some extra dialog reveals that Alex has 3 years of forgery training.

And a mention of Alex visiting a massage parlor:

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"TVparty!" by Billy Ingram (1998)

Here's a(n unflattering) description of the show (plus ABC's other android cop show, "Future Cop") from a 1998 book called "TVparty!" by Billy Ingram. I should also add that the author is mistaken about Alex and Yoyo being New York City detectives. The show takes place in California. Here's my previous post about it:

Article Transcript:

Nineteen seventy-six was a very good year for the big three networks. Prime-time commercials were selling at prices 50 percent higher than the year before and were sold out well into 1977. "This season we could sell a test pattern" was the way one network executive put it. And sell test patterns they did.

One of the misguided series foisted on unsuspecting viewers in 1976 was Holmes and YoYo. "To an eight-year-old kid it was cool stuff," one former viewer observed. "It was about a guy with a computer in his chest." Holmes and YoYo (Saturday nights from eight to eight-thirty) followed the misadventures of two New York City police detectives. Unknown to almost everyone, one of the partners happens to be a super-sophisticated robot.

Never was there a more miscast robot in television history. John Shuck (McMillan and Wife) played Gregory "YoYo" Yoyonovich, 427 pounds of police department relay circuits and body armor. He looked more like 220 pounds of doughnut-eating actor. Richard B. Schull [sic] played his partner on the force, Detective Alexander Holmes, Bruce Kirby played Capt. Harry Sedford, and Andrea Howard was Officer Maxine Moon, the girl who swoons after YoYo, never suspecting his secret.

YoYo has the power to eat anything, he possesses a built-in trash compactor that can absorb the shock of a bomb, a photographic memory, an independent power source, and he can print out full-color proofs. Just what you might look for in an assistant today, but YoYo is constantly malfunctioning. A bullet causes him to break out dancing, magnets fly out at him, he picks up radio signals from Sweden, and when his circuits blow he repeats, "Bunco Squad, Bunco Squad, Bunco Squad" over and over.

Holmes and YoYo was conceived as a comedy version of the highly successful 'Six Million Dollar Man/Woman/Boy/Dog' franchise that ABC was exploiting at the time. If the show reminded one of Get Smart, it's because they shared the same producers. Leonard Stern was executive producer and Arne Sultan producer.

Most of the jokes on Holmes and YoYo were Get Smart throwaways: "Whyn'tcha try a bite of my blue plate?" Holmes asks YoYo . YoYo eats the plate. Punch the laugh track machine all the way to ten.

To contrast the stupid jokes and add an air of danger, the crimes were treated more realistically than usual for a sitcom. The real danger proved to be on the other channels—Holmes and YoYo lasted only three months opposite The Jeffersons and Emergency, two gigantic hits in '76.

ABC had high hopes for another 'robot that looked like a man' series—a drama called Futurecop [sic].

The pilot was shown as a special two-hour movie on March 25, 1977, starring John Amos and Ernest Borgnine as two big-city cops who team up with a mechanical partner (Michael Shannon).

The producers of that program were sued for plagiarism by noted science-fiction author Harlan Ellison. Ellison contended that the Futurecop screenplay was stolen from one of his teleplays, Brillo.

Brillo, which was written for ABC, was shown to an NBC executive. That guy then went over to Paramount and put together the Futurecop project and sold it back to the same guys at ABC who rejected Brillo. Ellison prevailed in court.

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A photo and short description from Starlog Photo Guidebook Robots.

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Here's a nice article from the Oct 24, 1976 issue of Pomona, CA's "Progress Bulletin" that offers some interesting behind-the-scene insights.

Transcript is below scan.

When asked to explain succinctly what Holmes & Yoyo is all about, executive producer Leonard B. Stern replies, "It's about a half-hour."

Asked to elaborate, Stern smiles, nods, takes a deep breath and says, "Holmes and Yoyo is a delightful excuse for us to revive the two-man comedy team which has been too long absent from the screen. Years ago, we had the marvelous antics of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Crosby and Hope, Martin and Lewis, Gleason and Carney...and then, suddenly, an unexplainable gap. But now, hopefully, Richard B. Shull (Holmes) and John Schuck (Yoyo) will fill this void."

Holmes & Yoyo, which airs Saturday nights at 8PM on ABC, follows the misadventures of an experienced but accident-prone police detective named Alexander Holmes and his partner, a pleasant rookie detective who happens to be a not-quite-perfect humanized computer named Yoyonovich—Yoyo for short.

Before teaming with Yoyo, Holmes had trouble keeping partners because whenever he made a tiny tactical error, the guy working with him ended up in the hospital. So, when the Office of Advanced Systems asked the police department to pin a badge on the "indestructible" Yoyo as part of a law enforcement personnel experiment, Capt. Harry Sedford (Bruce Kirby) realized he had a solution to the Holmes-related casualty problem.

Supposedly, no one but Yoyo's inventor, the commissioner, Capt. Sedford and a computer maintenance engineer named Dr. Babcock knows that Yoyo is a "computerperson." But Holmes knows. The others don't know he knows. It's a kind of secret. Because there is a bond between the two, Holmes & Yoyo has been described as a study in brotherhood…with special wiring. Two beings—one human, the other assembled—have discovered what they have in common: each, in one way or another, has been programmed.

"That's a very moving observation," chortles Shull, "but I wouldn't want to see too much emphasis placed on it. We're doing comedy, a beautifully choreographed comedy created by Leonard Stern to make people laugh. We'll accept titters, of course. A smile maybe? Well...anything but rejection."

John Schuck, familiar to viewers as Sgt. Enright, Rod Hudson's faithful aid in McMillan & Wife, is more philosophical in his attitude toward the series. Schuck, one of movie director Robert Altman's favorite players ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Brewster McCloud" and "Thieves Highway"), sees Yoyo as a sensitive, innocent, nearly-human being who wants but one thing in "life"—approval. "My ideas about how to play Yoyo came to me as I was playing with my dog Benjy," says Schuck. "I noticed that when I spoke to him, Benjy cocked his head, trying very hard to understand. And I saw that he was completely free of ego and totally dependent on me— a human being—for maintenance, sustenance and affection. Yoyo is like that. When he malfunctions, he is apologetic. When he does something praiseworthy, he is grateful for the praise. He is never smug."

The old adage that comedy is serious business does not apply on the Holmes & Yoyo set. Visiting the stage at Universal Studios, one notices that everyone around him seems to be on the brink of laughter. "It's Shull's fault," says producer Stern. "He makes faces, and there's nothing I can do about it. You don't reprimand people for doing what comes naturally, and besides—he makes me laugh, too."

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"The New Television Season" (Starlog Magazine, 1976)

Here's a scan I found from Starlog magazine that describes "Holmes & Yoyo". Here is a transcription of the relevant parts:

And, finding that science fiction does indeed have an audience (how could anyone have doubted it?), ABC has gone ahead with two other shows. The first of these is a situation comedy called Holmes and Yoyo. The basic premise is that of assigning a 425 pound robot, which is supposedly indestructible, to be the assistant to an accident-prone police detective, whose accidents are often fatal—to his assistants. There has been a great deal of confusion between this show and an ABC Movie of the Week called Future Cops, starring Ernest Borgnine. Future Cops used the same basic situation, but in a straightfor- ward, adventure-story approach to the subject. Holmes is obviously played for laughs. Holmes is played by Richard B. Shull, and both the robot Yoyo and its creator, Dr. Gregory Yoyonovich, are played by John Schuck. Obvious- ly the robot was "modeled" in the likeness of its creator, and that is just about as close to a message as the show will get. Also appearing will be Bruce Kirby as Capt. Harry Sed- ford and Andrea Howard as Officer Maxine Moon. Maxine finds Yoyo absolutely irresistible, not least because the robot has no romantic programming at all. John Schuck will, of course, be recognized from his role in the movie M.A.S.H. as Pain- less, the dentist, from numerous other films, and his role as Sgt. Enright on McMillan and Wife. PHOTO CAPTION: Below: Richard B. Shull is Detective Holmes in the new ABC comedy, Holmes and Yoyo. He is trying to figure out the inner workings of his robot assistant Yoyo, played by John Schuck.

I'd like to know where James M. Elrod got some of that information. Yoyo's creator didn't appear in the show, though Chief Buchanan's comment upon meeting Yoyo in episode 2 ("Yoyonovich? Do you have a brother who's an inspector?") implies a likely resemblance, so if the original Gregory Yoyonovich (whose sole namedrop did not include the title "Dr.") had shown up, I wouldn't have been surprised if John Schuck also played the role. Also, I never felt like Maxine was portrayed as crushing on Yoyo. She was friendly to him, but she was just as friendly to Alex. When she had to go undercover and pretend to be newlyweds with Yoyo in episode 5, she was focused purely on the job. No sense of desire or sexual tension whatsoever. However, I think that Max crushing on Yoyo and Yoyo trying to deal with that and Alex trying to deal with Yoyo trying to deal with that without hurting Max would've been a rich vein of conflict and comedic situations to mine.

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2021 Interview with John Schuck

I found an interview with John Schuck dated Aug. 9, 2021 on "Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast". I transcribed the parts related to "Holmes & Yoyo" below, but can listen to the whole interview at this link:

1:07:41

Gilbert Gottfried: Now-- Now we can't be nice to you any longer.

Frank Santopadre: Uh-oh.

GG: Talk to us about "Holmes and Yoyo".

FS: Also created by Leonard Stern!

John Schuck: Created by Leonard Stern… Well, it wasn't… [laughs] I must say…

[GG and FS laugh]

JS: All right guys, it was a crap show. Come on…

[GG and FS laugh]

JS: It was well-intended. It was an-- It was an attempt by Leonard to get back to two-man comedy like Abbott and Costello.

FS: Mm-hmm.

JS: I mean, you name your duo. Of course, it never turned out to be that. But several interesting things happened. The craftspeople that could make something funny no longer existed in Hollywood. For instance, if you wanted to take a phone and water squirt and some guy pours water in at one end it comes out and hits them-- the other guy in the face-- those gags, they didn't know how to recreate.

FS: How interesting.

JS: Um, we had a-- a radio that was supp-- I forget what it was. Um, and I remembered that it was-- it couldn't-- it couldn't do that-- there were a number of things… I'm-- I'm babbling here… um, maybe that was one of the problems with the show. But, we worked hard at it. John Astin directed most of them. We re-- we did a lot of naughty things. We rewrote, uh, Richard Shull, a wonderful actor, um, and an interesting man. Uh, we worked 18, 19-hour days for that show, and it just was definitely a dud. Interestingly enough, the previews for it were shown on ABC during the Super Bowl, and so, for our first night, we had the highest-rated show [chuckles] of the year!

[GG laughs]

FS: Oh, interesting!

JS: An-- And it went quickly down.

[GG laughs]

JS: I mean, by today's standards, with so many s-- We-- We went down like from a 22 to 16, you know.

FS: I always thought of it as Leonard trying to take Dick Gautier's Hymie the Robot from "Get Smart" and spin it off into-- into his own series.

JS: Uh yeah… no?…

FS: Although, you had th-- "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Man--

JS: no

FS: Uh, "Woman" were going strong at that time, so--

JS: That's right.

FS: You could understand the thinking.

JS: I also think we made a-- and here I had my-- my argument with Leonard.

[clearing throat]

JS: In the pilot… uh, there's an accident and I'm-- I fall apart on the street and, as a result, Dick Shull knows that I'm a robot. And I said that should never have happened. He shouldn't know that I'm, uh, a robot that way there's much more conflict about why can't I act like normal people and blah, blah, blah and all that kind of stuff. But, um, it-- it was what it was, and we did our 18 shows and… uh, I did have the honor that year, though, with it of being the first actor to be on two tele-- national television series on two different Networks.

FS: There you go! Oh, "McMillan & Wife" and "Holmes & Yoyo".

JS: Right.

FS: Very good. You know, we joke about it because it's easy to-- it's easy to poke fun at-- at-- at-- shows--

JS: I joke about it.

FS: Yeah, of course!

[GG laughs]

FS: But you-- you have to applaud Stern for trying to bring back that kind of classic comedy form to prime time.

JS: Yeah. And you know, we never made a pilot for it. [clears throat] Uh, Jackie Cooper directed the-- we had a-- a scene and Jackie Cooper directed it, and we went up into Sid Sheinberg's office and moved all his furniture away, and Dick and I did the scene. And on the basis of that performance, he-- he let the show go on the air. So, we never made a pilot which was unusual.

FS: Why did the r-- Why did the android have a Russian name?

[laugh]

FS: Why was he Yo…yo…

JS: Gregor Yoyonovich?

FS: Yoyonovich.

[GG laughs]

FS: Why wasn't he just "Yoyo"?

JS: I dunno. They couldn't find a Scandinavian one?

[laughter]

[projector starting up sound effect]

[The "Holmes & Yoyo" opening credits play.]

[Polaroid ejecting sound. Brass music sting]

Capt. Sedford: You've got four partners in the hospital! Come on, Alex! You're a good cop!

Alex: By the way, who's my new partner?

[Sounds of Polaroid ejection, typing, and typewriting bell]

Narrator Paraphrasing Dr. Babcock: We call him Yoyo. He weighs 427 pounds. He's a completely mobile computer specially programmed for police work.

Capt. Sedford: Is he indestructible?

Narrator: We think so.

Capt. Sedford: Send in Holmes.

[peppy funk theme music]

Narrator: This is top secret. No one, including Holmes, must know his identity.

Yoyo: Alex, no! Don't!

Alex: You're not a person!

Yoyo: You're not going to tell them?

Alex: In my book, you got the makings of a good cop. That's what I put in my report.

[music]

[laughter]

FS: One episode was directed by, uh, Jack Arnold. I don't know if--

JS: Yes.

FS: --you'd remember this, Gilbert, the director of "Creature from the Black Lagoon", "Incredible Shrinking Man", and "Tarantula".

1:51:28

FS: By the way, Richard Shull-- I was talking to John, by the way, who, uh, who starred with Richard Shull in "Holmes & Yoyo"-- By the way, you worked with Richard Shull and Richard Stahl.

JS: Yep.

FS: But possibly not Richard Schaal--

JS: No.

FS: --who was married to Valerie Harper…

JS: To Valerie, yeah.

FS: Okay, okay but there you go. But he told me, what? He was a throwback who drove a car from the '40s? Richard-- Richard Shull?

JS: He-- He and his wife, Marilyn, lived in the '40s.

[FS laughs. GG laughs.]

JS: They bought u-- all their clothes from the '40s. It's-- it's various stores. He would write only with a-- a fountain pen. He had a 1940 Chevy or something. A Buick or Chevy. He had-- He was a railroad aficionado, and he owned his own railroad car.

FS: Wow!

JS: And for the opening gift, uh, because he knew of my affection for, as a kid, of-- of taking the train from Buffalo, New York to New York-- to New Jersey to see my grandparents, and I had remarked on the-- on this doeskin type, uh, blankets that they used to have, he gave me one of those blankets numbered so you could find out where it came from. Which compartment on which-- which train.

FS: That's cool.

JS: Very thoughtful, but he was-- he was eccentric. And their-- their house was all, um, from the '40s. All their furniture. Everything.

FS: He was like a-- sort of a-- a-- a-- a curmudgeonly actor. A little bit like a Matthau.

JS: Yes.

FS: In some ways.

JS: Yes, he had this wonderful, unusual, mobile rubbery face, and, uh, very distinctive and--

FS: Loved him!

JS: Um, he was doing a Neil Simon play, went home between shows in New York, and never c-- you know, the break, never came back.

FS: Oh.

GG: Ohh.

JS: It was a bit of a shock. I hate to end this on such a downer but…

FS: All right then, sing us a little more from "Annie".

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Holmes & Yoyo Promo Folder

You can find this Holmes & Yoyo promo folder for sale on eBay:

Here are the images from the listing for posterity. I think that the description of the show in image 3 is a nice one.

Here is a transcription of image 3:

A HALF HOUR SERIES Although veteran detective Alexander Holmes is really an effective and intuitive street cop, something always seems to go wrong on his assignments. And after his last four partners each ended up in the hospital, drastic measures had to be taken by his exasperated precinct captain. Enter the ultimate partner for Holmes: a top-secret, human-looking, mobile computer, Gregory "Yoyo" Yoyonovich, who has been programmed to be logical, thorough, loyal— and most of all, indestructible. Named for his creator, Yoyo is an outstanding example of sophisticated technology. He's compact with an independent power source and a photographic memory that even makes prints. But like all machines, he can sometimes malfunction and his electronic circuits can go awry. The use of an electric-eye garage door opener can activate him into doing a complete somersault. The operation of a television remote control can cause him to do quarter turns with each change of channels. And of course, he has a strong physical attraction to magnets. Clearly, machines— like people— aren't perfect. Holmes' inadvertent discovery of his partner's true "identity" is startling to be sure— but he decides to keep the secret and partnership intact. After all, his street-smart, emotional approach combined with Yoyo's deductive reasoning and indestructibility make them a solid, crime-fighting team. And besides, as Yoyo points out, they're not really so different from each other: Yoyo may be a machine, but Holmes is just five dollars worth of chemicals and a few gallons of water. A Universal production, this inventive comedy has been developed by executive producer Leonard Stern who was actively involved for many years with Get Smart,and more recently with McMillan And Wife. In the starring roles are Richard B. Shull, who appeared in the films Slither and Hearts Of The West; and John Schuck, a regular on McMillan And Wife. THE CAST Richard B. Shull as Det. Alexander Holmes John Schuck as Det. Gregory "Yoyo" Yoyonovich

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The Show's Setting

When I watch old stuff, I like to look at the background details just to see what the environment of a past place looked like. Noticing some maps in the background got me wondering, where in California does the show take place?

Since episode 4 involves a trip to a movie studio lot after the attempted murder of a movie director (other than that, the show's location has no impact on the kinds of cases Alex and Yoyo encounter), the safe bet was Los Angeles. Unsurprisingly, background details support this:

It's pretty blurry, but the newspaper's title (over the headline "Hollywood Love Slaying") appears to be "Los Angeles Tribune":

While one could argue that such details may be incidental to filming someplace convenient, when Alex and Yoyo confront the gangster Tony Pappas in episode 10, Tony's associate asks if he should drive the car back to the house in Beverly Hills (that's the location mentioned in both the French and German dubs. The original English is unavailable.). In episode 3, Capt. Sedford mentions having graduated from UCLA. However, the badge and patches on uniforms don't look right for LAPD as far as I can tell from Google-searching about it.

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Interview with Leonard Stern

Here is a short section of a 5-hr long 10-part interview with Leonard Stern, who was the executive producer of H&Y and also wrote for/directed a couple episodes. Thankfully, the site where I found it (https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/leonard-stern?clip=86308#interview-clips) was extremely well-organized about dividing it into sections so I was able to find the part about H&Y right away. This is from "Chapter 9" (the ninth video), "On Holmes and Yo-Yo with Richard B. Schull and John Schuck". Below the video is my transcription of that part.

TRANSCRIPT

[6:16]

"Holmes & Yoyo" was a creation of Jack Sher and Jack Rose that I liked, uhh, because it had-- uh, it was dealing with technology. It was a police and a robot. Uh, policeman paired with a robot.

The big debate, uh, was whether the, uh, police officer paired with the robot should know the robot is a robot or not, and is it funnier if he doesn't or, or is it, uh, more hilarious if he's trying to cover for the robot who he's come, uh, unaccustomedly fond of as a-- as a-- an almost human being.

Um, and we debated it back and forth and we did it where he becomes aware at the end of the first episode, and I don't know if that was the best choice.

It was well-performed by, uh, John Schuck and Richard B. Shull, and ultimately, y'know, it became a big thing-- the movies about the police robot.

[7:17] -------------------------------------------- I assume that end part was referring to the concept of a robot cop being big since H&Y only had 1 season. I'm also confused about the creation credit since the episodes credit Jack Sher and Lee Hewitt.

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Yoyo's first report

Out of curiosity, I slowed down the end of the first episode of "Holmes & Yoyo" at the part where Yoyo starts typing his report.

The date is "6-16-76"

There appears to be the name "Lt. George", last name illegible. This is the clearest version I have.

In the space marked "command" is the name "Capt. L. Bird". No idea who that is. The only captain we see is Harry Sedford.

The time is marked 5:15 to 6:30. So, did the entire story take place within an hour and 15 minutes or is 5:15 when Yoyo showed up? Still, seems awfully quick.

The rest appears to say, "Prowler call to 932 Oakhurst Street."

More typing happens, but the blur from the camera zooming out makes it illegible.

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My reaction when... I feel better after a sick day!

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Some Alex reaction GIFs!

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A.V. Club Interview with John Schuck (2012)

Here is an excerpt from an interview with John Schuck dated Jan. 2012. The full interview can be found here (when I pasted it into a Word doc, it ended up being 9 pages!):

The relevant excerpt:

AVC: You were kind of a precursor to Robocop for a while there in the mid-’70s.

JS: Holmes And Yo-Yo was an attempt, not a very successful one, but an attempt at two-man comedy á la Abbott and Costello. I played a robotic policeman, and here’s another case where I had an argument with the creators. I said that my partner shouldn’t know that I was a robot, but they decided that at the end of the pilot, he finds out. I thought we lost lots of chances for conflict and comedy.

The other thing we had a real hard time with was, during those days of farces in the ’30s and ’40s, and all the little shorts they did with the Three Stooges, the props people, if they needed a funny radio, they built a funny radio. There wasn’t any of that for us. It was very difficult to get things to work so that they were humorous. So we suffered a lot there, but the main problem with it was that the writing just wasn’t up to snuff. It met a fairly quick demise; I guess it closed down after about 10, 11 episodes, something like that.

But again, it was fun to make. I got to jump around, do stunts. John Astin was the director for most of the episodes, whom I loved working with. Richard B. Shull, who played my partner, was a very funny actor and a unique man. He sadly is no longer with us either. He lived in the ’40s. He bought ’40s clothing, he only used pen and ink, he had his own railroad car which he would attach to trains and travel around the country. He had a 1949 Chevrolet car. I mean, he truly lived in the past. Quite remarkable.

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"TV Talk 2" Interview with John Schuck (1976)

There may not be a lot of "Holmes & Yoyo" content out there, but I still have some things like interviews and TV Guide scans that I've found around the internet and need to get around to posting. Here's part of an interview with John Schuck from a 1976 book called "TV Talk 2". It was transcribed by catlover79 and posted to a forum called Sitcoms Online in March of 2011 at https://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=281365 catlover79 wrote,

"I found an old book via Amazon, published in mid-1976, called TV Talk 2, by Peggy Herz. It was published by Scholastic, so I think it was aimed towards younger readers. But it is still a fun read, and interesting to see what these sitcom stars of the time had to say."

Here's the part of interview transcription related to H&Y:

"John Schuck plays a what?" I asked. "A robot policeman, in Holmes and YOYO," answered an ABC publicist. Well, I thought, I guess that's one way to outdo Kojak and Columbo. After all, they are mere human beings. "Would you like to interview him?" "A robot?" I asked hesitantly. "What's he like?" "He's very nice." How could I resist? I've interviewed Kojak and Columbo - why not a robot named YOYO?

John Schuck also happens to be Sgt. Charles Enright in NBC's McMillan & Wife - so I had no trouble recognizing him when he walked in for our interview. He wasn't even wired up to his computer, in fact!

YOYO, I learned, is a robot with an electronic, computerized system. It is a very advanced system, but sometimes things go wrong, causing all kinds of problems for YOYO and his partner, Holmes.

"YOYO behaves like a human being," John explained. "There's no attempt to act mechanical in behavior. He's been programmed to be good at what he does - and that's police detective work. He has no amazing physical attributes. He's not a man of tremendous strength. He's not superior in that way. He has a photographic memory, he speaks many languages, he can do imitations very well. He can be hurt as any machine can be hurt. He can be broken - like a TV set with a picture and no sound.

"In terms of literature and humor," John pointed out, "monsters are something we've always identified with. That's basically what YOYO is. We love machines. We love gadgets. We love dolls we cam [sic] take apart and put together again. We're fascinated with circuitry."

John loves playing roles in two different TV series, he said. He's a policeman in both - but there's quite a difference between the two!

I think it's interesting what he said about humans relating to monsters, which rings true to me. I bet that it has something to do with how humans are so different from other animals and capable of both great wonder and great destruction. It leads to us wondering why we're different... freaks, why we seem to be alone in the universe, and how to wield our power responsibly.

There's more to the interview, which you can read at the link, but just in case anything happens to it, here are some screenshots of the whole transcription:

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Dick Halligan on "Holmes & Yoyo"

I was doing one of my occasional searches for anything new regarding the show (still hoping to one day be able to watch it in original English or find that one last TeleJunior comic I need to complete my collection) when I saw that the composer, Dick Halligan, had died in January this year. After a little research, I found that he'd written an autobiography called "Musical Being" published in 2013. Unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot he had to say about working on the show's music, which is wonderful stuff BTW, but I did find this paragraph in the book:

I was also writing a lot of music for television in those years, mostly at Universal Studios. Coincidently, I was having lunch with my daughter one day in Venice, Ca., when I recognized a man walking by, who had been the star of one of the first TV series that I worked on, "Holmes and Yo-Yo". It was a terrible detective comedy show that aired in 1976 for thirteen weeks. This actor, John Schuck, played Yo-Yo, a partially mechanized Russian detective. I wrote comedy detective music, with synthesizer sounds suggesting his mechanical nature. That's what I remember anyway. It was an absurd way to make a living. I didn't say anything to him, fearing that he might probably be embarrassed by his association with the show. Maybe I would have too.

If you want to read his book, you can buy it here:

You can also read about his career here:

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Got a nice birthday present. :)