I’ve never made a secret of my ongoing affection for Bill Forsyth’s classic fish-out-of-water comedy “Local Hero,” the sort of pixiedusted picture that conjured an adoration for small town Scotland even in people who’d yet to venture there when it came out in 1983.

And there’s nothing like sitting down for a periodic renewal of my connection to “Northern Exposure” to remind me of the year (it felt longer) I spent in Kodiak, Alaska. It might be TV’s best “fish out of water” comedy, and it’s inspired movies and movie characters, plot threads and casting whims in many a film since its heyday.

But I never made the connection between the two until this latest dial-hop-stop for “Local Hero.” Historically, Russians have not been strangers to Alaska, from their efforts to colonize it to Old Cold War and New Cold War efforts to threaten it. When I lived there, Russian trawlers would drop in for a touch of unofficial “good will” shore leave, just long enough to shock the crew into how expensive Alaska’s version of America was to shop in. I toured a trawler or two that stopped in when I worked for the NPR station there, always with a a fishing trawler equivalent of the Party Hack/security officer (Zampolit) trailing me as I asked innocuous questions about what they were fishing for and how often they made U.S. port of call stops.

The 1994 “Zarya” episode of “Northern Exposure” is a straight-up knock-off of a “Local Hero” episode — a quaint coastal village gets regular visits from their favorite Russian. Cicely, Alaska wasn’t coastal, but the plot element was close enough to matter, and plainly taken from Forsyth’s film.

Forsyth could have co-created or directed episodes of the show, thanks to the matching tone and colorful eccentrics populating his corner of Scotland and Alaska’s version of “The Middle of Nowhere.”

Late period Cold War comic twists on the cliched “Red Menace” leaned on another Russian stereotype — the gregarious, big living, big loving, hard drinking and singing life of the party Tovarich. We’ll likely never see their like on film or TV again until Putin and his puppet have passed from the stage.