AustLit

Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee runs an outback adventure business with his trusted friend and self-proclaimed mentor Walter Reilly. When he survives a crocodile attack, the news travels well beyond the Northern Territory, and a glamorous New York journalist, Sue Charlton, arrives to interview him. He invites her to come with him to the place where he was attacked. When Sue herself is attacked by a croc, Mick saves her. This leads to an invitation for Mick to visit his first ever city: New York City. Mick finds the culture and life in New York City a lot different than his home.

Reuniting script-writer Gordon Chater and Ralph Peterson (who had previously successfully worked together on the highly successful sit-com My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?), Snake Gully with Dad and Dave was a modernised and updated version of Steele Rudd's popular characters--albeit a version that, as Don Storey notes in his Classic Australian Television, was based more on the 1930s' radio version than on the original novels.

Just as the radio version had updated the setting to a contemporary 1930s, Peterson's television scripts updated the setting again to the early 1970s, moving Dad and Dave further away from the late nineteenth-century selector culture of Rudd's original narratives. In this version, then, Dad and Dave are farmers on a small, struggling farm.

Despite these alterations, Storey notes that 'ATN-7 held high hopes for the series. The same combination of Ralph Peterson and Gordon Chater that worked on the McGooley series, couple with well-known and liked traditional Australian characters should have guaranteed success.'

It did not. The series was poorly received by both critics and viewers. Storey concludes that 'Budget limitations notwithstanding, the fact remains that a major shortcoming of the series was that the characters did not work well in a modern setting. It can be argued that if the traditional setting could not have been maintained, then the series should not have been made at all.'

A highly successful soap opera, Number 96's permissive and adult tone emerged, in Moran's terms, from 'the atmosphere of censorship liberalisation that had occurred in Australia in the early 1970s, and the intention to screen the serial in a late evening timeslot'. As such, the programme interspersed the domestic and romantic storylines that usually drive soap operas with plots exploring rape, drug abuse, and homosexuality. For example, the long-running character Don Finlayson (played by Joe Hasham) was an openly gay character whose relationships attracted neither censure nor any unusual degree of attention from his neighbours, showing him as unusually (for the time) integrated into a mainstream community.

According to Moran, 'Number 96 moved the Australian television soap opera completely away from its radio predecessor by organising a series of simultaneous storylines with various characters moving in and out of these, the storylines lasting only two to six weeks on air.' Long-running storylines included the 'Knicker Snipper' (a msyterious figure stealing the residents' underwear) and the Pantyhose Murderer (a serial killer).

As the show's ratings began dropping in 1975, various attempts were made to revitalise interest in the series, including killing (or otherwise writing out) long-running characters, increasing the amount of location shooting, and publicising the increased amount of nudity in the show (including both female and--briefly--male full-frontal nudity). Despite this, ratings continued to drop to the point where the show was cancelled in July 1977.

Revue.

Revue.