Looking up the credits of an actress in a Murder, She Wrote episode, I discovered that there was a Casablanca TV series made in 1983 (she guest starred in an episode). It only ran for five episodes, though the reviews for the DVD on Amazon say that this was a pity because it was actually good.

I’m skeptical.

There is a clip of the title sequence on YouTube, which uses the song As Time Goes By as the theme song for the show:

I’ll admit that it looks better than I expected, though it still doesn’t fill me with confidence. At the time of writing, the DVD is out of production and used copies are going for $80 and up, so I’m not likely to find out for myself what it was really like. This sort of thing is the reason why copyright should have a relatively short initial term (like 20 years) and require active renewal in order to be extended, if extensions are really necessary. It would be really interesting to find out what the heck this show was, and I really doubt that anybody is seeing royalty checks from it these days anyway.

Supposedly this was a prequel show to the movie, focusing on the small, local adventures of Rick. It’s kind of crazy that this got as far as having one episode made, let alone five!