The man that supernal small-screen scribe Stephen J Cannell once referred to as his 'godfather' and 'hero,' assuring the world that they didn't come much better than him - Roy Huggins - rendered his screenwriting services for the motion picture industry with gusto for decades. And when it came to television if the Huggins stamp was on it, you could rest be assured that the respective series beget one successful season after another. Which was like one hundred in television years. With originator bragging rights for iconic series as 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, The Fugitive, The Virginian and Rockford Files - it was clear Huggins was well worth his sodium chloride. Straight out of the Universal and Warner Brothers producers pool . Mr Huggins was in fact, one of the very first writers and producers to embark on a long and lucrative career solely in television.
Famously self-effacing and never a miser in the modesty department, Huggins often wrote under the nom de plume John Thomas James and affectionately so, for those were the names of his three sons (no relation to Ernie, Robbie and Chip) Huggins had an affinity for staying power, practically immortalizing each of the brain children he birthed, in so that in many a case, those titular ones would be resurrected ages after their inception - most successfully when his character Dr Richard Kimble, a role originated by David Jannsen in 1963 would ring in a new age - thirty years to the day with Harrison Ford on honors duty.
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| Roy vey another eternal Huggins character |
The Rockford Files had it's own Lazarus moment when in 1994, James Garner would resume the role lest the elbow patches for the first of eight full length features that were tailored for television.
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| Garner but never forgotten. |
When all was said and done, Huggins had close to four-hundred writing credits under his belt, his surely must have been fifty-hour long days. And it is ever so pleasing that his apparitions abound, Roy Huggins, glorious ghost of television past.
