Ironside (TV series)

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Ironside
Image:Ironside.jpg Raymond Burr as Ironside </small>
Genre	Drama
Running time	60 to 90 minutes
Creator(s)	Collier Young
Starring	Raymond Burr as Robert Ironside Don Galloway as Det. Sgt. Ed Brown Don Mitchell as Mark Sanger
Country of origin	Image:Flag of the United States.svg United States
Original channel	NBC
Original run	March 28 1967–January 16, 1975
No. of episodes	195

Ironside (originally broadcast under the name A Man Called Ironside in the United Kingdom) was a television series which ran on NBC from 1967 to 1975.

The show starred Raymond Burr as former San Francisco Police Department Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside, who became a consultant to the department after a sniper's bullet paralyzed him from the waist down confining him to a wheelchair. As a consultant, Ironside retained his office space at police headquarters and made use of a specially modified police van to accommodate his wheelchair.

As the show became a big success, many supporting characters who helped Ironside out through this difficult time were Police Commissioner Dennis Randall (Gene Lyons) and two of Ironside's former assistants, Sgt. Ed Brown (Don Galloway) and officer Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson). The latter two continued to support Ironside after his accident, together with delinquent-turned-bodyguard Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell), who subsequently graduated from law school to become a lawyer. By the show's fourth season, Eve Whitfield was replaced by another young policewoman Fran Belding (Elizabeth Baur), who filled much the same role for four more years.

One of the longer-running police dramas of the day, the series featured appearances by a number of actors who would go on to become stars, such as Harrison Ford, Joan Van Ark, Bill Bixby, Kent McCord, John Rubinstein, Jack Lord, Norman Fell, Gavin MacLeod, Gary Collins, among many others. Music legend Quincy Jones, who wrote the Ironside theme song, made a guest appearance as well.

Burr and the rest of the cast reunited for a made-for-TV movie in 1993 which aired not long before Burr's death. Burr was starring in an ongoing series of Perry Mason TV movies at the time, so in order to make himself look less like the other character, he dyed his hair red and shaved off his beard for the Ironside movie. Unlike the original series, which took place in San Francisco, California, the reunion took place in Denver, Colorado, which was also where the last few of Burr's Perry Mason films were produced.