I heard this many years ago, and now TV Guide's Televisionary talks about it after getting a question from a reader.When Columbo first started in the late 60s (first as the movie Prescription Murder, and then as part of the NBC Mystery Movie in the 70s), they never said what Columbo's first name was. He was always just "Lt. Columbo" or "Columbo," and they never even played with the audience in any way, like showing a piece of paper with a thumb blocking his first name or anything like that. They just never addressed it. But when a spinoff show was made in the 80s (yes, there was a spinoff to Columbo), Kate Columbo, they finally revealed his name as "Philip." The spinoff did what Columbo did, only in reverse: they showed his wife all the time, solving mysteries, but they never showed her husband. I remember seeing this show, and it wasn't that great. Later they even changed the name of the show to get rid of the Columbo connection.
Now, this doesn't mean that his first name was "officially" Philip. It might be one of those cases where some other show answered a question, but it was never made official, sort of like how the new Superman movie pretends that Superman III and IV never happened. But it's a cool trivia question to ask your friends.
Update: As reader Bill points out in the comments, check out the Wikipedia page on Columbo for more clues about his first name.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-08-2006 @ 7:07PM
aphoward said...
Actually the new movie pretends that III and IV never happened. And yes, I realize no one cares :)
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6-08-2006 @ 10:08PM
Dave said...
She may have been "Kate" on Mrs. Columbo, but I just watched a Dean martin Celebrity Roast of Frank Sinatra where Falk played "Lt. Columbo" asking Sinatra for an autograph for his wife "Rose"
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6-08-2006 @ 10:41PM
Sam Goldman said...
Hey, III had Richard f'n Pryor, man!!! Nothing Pryor does should ever be forgotten.
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6-09-2006 @ 12:01AM
Toby OB said...
I treat 'Mrs. Columbo' the same way I do the ending of 'St. Elsewhere' - I choose not to accept the interpretation forced upon us by the producers. In the case of 'Mrs. Columbo', so far as I'm concerned, she was the wife of another Lt. Columbo on the LAPD police force. It's not that uncommon a name and the police force for the City of Angels is probably large enough to make having two Lt. Columbos feasible.
What makes this easier is that it's stated several times in the original series that Columbo and his wife were high school sweethearts. So that invalidates Kate Mulgrew (about a quarter century younger than Peter Falk) as being THAT Columbo's wife.
And thus, anything she said about Columbo during the run of the show can't be about the rumpled detective we all know.
Plus - during the run of the show she apparently divorced him and reverted back to her maiden name (Callahan). The kid even had her name changed to Callahan.
So why should anything from that show matter when it comes to Columbo? I say his first name is still a mystery.
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6-09-2006 @ 2:34AM
Mark Kawakami said...
Nope, it wasn't "Phillip", or at least if it was, we don't know it from the god-awful show that was titled -- depending on which moment of its one year run we're talking about -- "Mrs. Columbo", "Kate Columbo", "Kate the Detective" and "Kate Loves a Mystery". That's right, four name changes in one year. At any rate, the show had basically no association whatsoever with the Columbo or its creators, and over the course of its short run it was revealed that Kate Columbo's husband was not the same Lt. Columbo we all love, but some other LAPD detective named "Columbo", whom she may or may not have divorced. Reading between the lines, the show was a cheap gimmick to hook in Columbo fans, all of whom hated the show and the failure to get crossover fans meant re-re-reinventing the show.
At any rate, I'm really surprised TV Guide are spreading this myth, they should really know better: Columbo's first name is unknown. That's the party line from Peter Falk himself, the show's creators Levinson and Link, and pretty much anyone else who had any close association with Columbo's production.
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6-09-2006 @ 5:42AM
MrAkai said...
Snopes will set you free:
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/nonames.asp
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6-09-2006 @ 9:30AM
Smeagle said...
Interesting, but how about a show where almost all the characters full names were never known? On Gilligan's Island we knew the names, Gilligan, the Skipper, the Professor, Lovey. The characters full names were Willy Gilligan, Jonas Grumby (Skipper), Dr. Roy Hinkley (Professor), Mary Ann Summers, Ginger Grant, Thurston Howell III, and Lovey was Eunice Wentworth Howell. Theres some useless trivia for your next party!!
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6-09-2006 @ 12:03PM
Bill said...
According to Wikipedia's Columbo page, his first name was Frank. They even have a picture of his ID from the show, and you can clearly see where it says Frank Columbo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbo
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