“Have some raisins. They’re healt’y, full’a iron!”
Perhaps the most bizarre poor-bastard in Columbo’s history. If McCann is memorable to a contemporary audience at all, it’s for a very specific (and aging, sorry folks) tribe as one of The Far-Out Space Nuts – and even then, it’s a cult niche who’ll remember that much.
His twitchy, gooey, unsettling manner, in this scene, seems to be exaggerated parody of some figure either prominent enough to be known by the audience or risible enough to be worth getting razzed from the writer’s room. Either way, it’s the stand-out performance for this episode, if only for its compelling weirdness…
This is so funny because McCann filmed a movie called “The Projecionist” three years earlier in which he played a projectionist “bored with his everyday life and begins fantasizing about his being one of the superheroes he sees in the movies he shows”