Joe Don Baker

The Pack is a great JDB movie…he fights a pack of wild dogs

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You watch Joe Don Baker movies?

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Its a dirty job but someone has to do it.

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He’s pretty good in JUNIOR BONNER.

He also gets punched through a window by Steve McQueen.

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Joe Don Baker is excellent in the 80s miniseries Edge of Darkness

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This is great! The Pack: never heard of it, but it sounds like good fun.

Don’t remember him at all in Junior Bonner.

This is making me thirsty for a “Cape Fear”: equal parts Jim Beam and Pepto Bismol, poured over ice. Only way to drink either of those substances IMHO.

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Joe Don Baker played a carnival sharpshooter recruited in Guns of the Magnificent Seven.

I did like his role there as I do like Westerns and that movie has its own charm.

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You can’t really top Golden Needles (1974) which is a kung-fu remake of The Maltese Falcon starring Joe Don Baker. No, I’m not making that up.

Also Burgess Meridith (who apparently lost all sense of shame after portraying The Penguin in the Adam West version of Batman) plays the main bad guy, Elizabeth Ashley is the femme fatale inexplicably drawl to slovenly human sourdough starter Joe Don, and at one point they get Jim Kelly to wander onto set as some buddy of Joe Don’s we’ve never seen or heard of before, who performs one fight scene, and then wanders off again. (He gets third billing, by the way, despite only being in about 5 minutes of movie.)

If ‘Walking Tall’ was the film that made Joe Don Baker’s acting career, this was arguably the one that broke it. (It was a box office bomb, and not helped by the fact that it was a thoroughly confusing American/Hong Kong co-production where neither side could understand the other, and nobody could understand the script.)

https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/standard11/uploads/mst3k/original/2X/2/2724626aa33b95fb57995669d356312c3b494ced.jpeg

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Let’s not forget he plays a dumbass CIA analyst in the first two Brosnan-era Bond films…

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And the bad guy in one of the Timothy Dalton movies!

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Wow…never heard of that one.

That’s one they should riff in the future on the show.

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Bit part in Goldeneye…

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He was also in Tomorrow Never Dies, same character.

Also, Fletch as the corrupt police chief.

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JDB was genuinely unnerving and intimidating as the ruthless antagonist in Charley Varrick.

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Really, while the characters he played in the movies riffed on MST3K were mostly unpleasant, JDB isn’t a bad actor. He does well with what he’s given…but what he’s given isn’t all that great.

Edit: Also, Mike says it in the RT intro to the MST Final Justice, “We love Joe Don Baker. He does not love us.”

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Molly! Gawd he was terrific there, in such a great movie.

And a master of manly seduction in his scene with Sheree North (the shady, hep photographer). Maybe not. :nerd_face:

Why are there people like Mitchell?

peoplelikefrank

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I often wonder why so many people aren’t.

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Aren’t they, though?

No, many people have the Mitchell slack-jawed yokelism, but Mitchell had some…qualities…no…he needed a little bit of motivation.

48VR

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He got to cash a paycheck and munch some scenery in 1994’s Ring of Steel. It seems the fate of every actor of JDB’s vintage was to play the villain in at least one bad martial arts and/or cyborg movie in the 90s-00s.

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If anyone is in the marked for JDB’s Final Justice “Special Edition” (?!), I just saw it listed among blu-ray.com’s current deals list (via Amazon).

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