Baretta
American television series
Baretta is an American detective television series which ran on ABC from 1975 to 1978.
The show was a revised and milder version of a 1973–1974 ABC series, Toma, starring Tony Musante as chameleon-like, real-life New Jersey police officer David Toma. When Musante left the series after a single season, the concept was retooled as Baretta, with Robert Blake in the title role.
"Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow", the show's theme music, was composed by Dave Grusin and Morgan Ames and sung by Sammy Davis Jr., in addition to being a chart hit for two other artists.
Overview
Anthony Vincenzo "Tony" Baretta is an unorthodox plainclothes police detective (Badge #609) with the 53rd Precinct in an unnamed, fictional city. He resides in Apartment 2C of the run-down King Edward Hotel with Fred, his Triton cockatoo. A master of disguise, Baretta wears many while performing his duties. When not working he usually wears a short-sleeve sweatshirt, casual slacks, a brown suede jacket and a newsboy cap.
Baretta is often seen with an unlit cigarette in his lips or behind his ear. His catchphrases include "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time", "You can take dat to da bank" and "And dat's the name of dat tune." When exasperated, he occasionally speaks in asides to his late father, Louie Baretta.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baretta” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.