Monthly Archives: May 2021

Ray Bradbury Theater Listings on Amazon Prime

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Occasionally, I think about revisiting Ray Bradbury Theater.  My original takes were pretty negative.  As mentioned yesterday, maybe my expectations were too high.  Maybe I was in a rush to post every day back then.  Maybe it was due to the very poor transfers on the $9 DVDs.

I remembered that they are on Amazon Prime, so decided to try a couple.  When I saw the disrespect Amazon gives the series, I started to think maybe I was right. These icons are exactly as they currently appear on Amazon, and they have been there for quite a while.

I’m pretty sure that 3rd picture is Saul Rubinek from the dreadful episode Gotcha!.

Carol Kane and Shelley Duvall were only in 1 episode each, so I don’t know how they were both in 2 different seasons.  And wearing the same clothes.

Leslie Nielsen’s name is misspelled.  

But most likely to prevent me from watching it again:

Tales of the Unexpected – Edward the Conqueror (05/05/79)

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Well, one of the cast played Luke’s Uncle Owen in Star Wars.  I guess that’s something. 

And I do like watching cats.  Like the car in Vanishing Point or the choppers in Easy Rider, you can have a good time just watching them travel across the screen.  But that’s about all you’re going to get out of this episode.  It’s a shame, too, because with some of the dry wit that TOTU is capable of, this could have been fun.  Couldn’t anyone on the set . . . the caterer? . . . anyone? . . . have said, “Maybe we could liven this up a bit.”

The horror of this house’s architecture would have made for a better story, BTW.

Edward, the inexplicably titular conqueror, is burning brush behind his house.   His wife Louisa notices a cat watching the fire.  Edward shoos it away, but somehow it mysteriously turns up later inside the house.  

Louisa finds it on their sofa and tries to make it comfortable by a) putting out a saucer of milk, b) bringing out that leftover tuna, or c) playing a little Schuman on the piano.  Of course it is C, although why there is a Schumann song in a book that says LISZT on the cover is not explained.

She also tries playing some Liszt and Bach to see what the cat prefers.  He makes his preference known by knocking over her collection of great composer bobble-heads, except for Liszt.

Louisa excitedly calls Edward into the house.  She says she believes the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt.  Edward face-palms and thinks, “How did I end up here?  I was in freakin’ Citizen Kane!” [1]  She plays a few bars of Liszt and the cat suddenly becomes frisky, jumping off the couch.  Hey, maybe I need me some Liszt!  Feeling vindicated, she takes off her glasses and gives Edward a smile that probably worked when Ike was President.

Edward wants to again test the cat’s ability to identify its own music, but Louisa says,  “I refuse to treat him like a circus animal”.  Well, it sure is nice to see she is such an activist for animals’ welfare.  To get proof, Louisa goes to visit a local crackpot that specializes in reincarnation — and leaves the cat in the car with the windows rolled up. 

The scene with the reincarnation expert is intended to be the comedy portion of the show.  Really, it is mostly a series of non-sequiturs spouted by the expert such as “Epictetus came back as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cicero returned as Gladstone” and so on.  There seems to be no effort to connect the pairs and, of course, there is not a peon or a serf in the bunch.  However, he also mentions that Lord Byron was reincarnated as a tiger and the proof was a physical deformity: The tiger was “lame” and Byron had a “club foot”.  I suspect there are more woke ways to say that, but I shant waste a second looking for them. OK, this was actually a pretty good scene, but it did feel like a squandered opportunity. [3]

Luckily it was a typical pre-Global Warming English afternoon, so the cat survived being locked in the car.  Louise discovers that Liszt had 5 large warts on his face.  She then finds 5 bumps on the cat’s face.  QED!

Edward is still unpersuaded, so Louise plays a Chopin piece that Liszt was known to hate.  As she begins playing, the cat meows and runs off to another room.  When she changes to a Liszt piece, the cat comes back.  Edward actually begins to believe this is the reincarnation of Liszt, but is horrified that Louise wants to go public.  

She is sick of him oppressing her throughout their whole marriage, and he seems to hate that she has found something that might get her a little attention.  He orders her into the kitchen to make dinner.  Given the nature of English food, he must really be pissed.  She says, “You poor dear, you must be famished.”  It is a nice switcheroo when it is revealed she was talking to the cat.

Louise prepares a cat-meal fit for a maestro while Edward goes out to build up the fire.  He smiles for the first time maybe ever as he pitches something into the fire.  When she calls the cat to eat, he does not come.  However, Edward comes in and his hands are covered in bloody claw-marks.  Louise grabs a knife and advances on a terrified Edward.  A different cat enters their house through an open window. 

I find that I like these episodes more on the second viewing.  As I’ve said before, maybe I need that first pass to lower my expectations.  If I’m ever trapped in the house for extended period of time with nothing to do, maybe I’ll rewatch Ray Bradbury Theatre.  No, it will take more than COVID.  

But this episode did grow on me more than my notes would indicate.  It still had rough patches, especially the ending.  The editing could have been done by the architect who designed that house.  I guess Edward killed the cat first, then pitched him into the fire because we don’t hear any caterwauling or just plain wauling.  Then the other cat enters.

First, we are shown him entering through an open window which kinda wrecks the effect of the mysterious appearance of the first cat in the house.  Second, why is it a different cat?  Does that mean Liszt’s soul was in both cats?  Or did Liszt just seize this new cat’s body and kick out its existing soul when his old body got burned up, like Steve Trevor did to that rando in Wonder Woman 1984? I kinda thought reincarnation was baked in at birth. [4]

So again, I am left with a slightly positive feeling about an episode that I would never in a million cat-years recommend to anyone. 

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Joseph Cotton was indeed in Citizen Kane. He played Jed Leland, who ratted out the Governor of New York for having an inappropriate sexual relationship.  Hey, what is this, Science Fiction Theatre?  That could never happen today. [2]
  • [2]  To be fair, Andrew Cuomo’s circumstances are different.  Kane was only a candidate for NY Governor.  Also, Kane did not use the story as a distraction to enable the corrupt media to largely ignore the worse crime of how he doomed hundreds of old people by sending them to nursing homes to catch COVID and then lied about it.
  • [3]  For example, he says Julius Caesar was reincarnated as Abe Lincoln.  Why not reincarnate Caesar as Ty Cobb for a salad theme?  Or Lincoln as Henry Ford then Freddie Mercury for a car theme?  So, something like that except a lot more clever.
  • [4]  And, yes, it is Liszt again because it goes straight to the still-standing Liszt bobble-head.  Shouldn’t this be called Liszt the Conqueror?  How is Edward a conqueror?
  • We learn Liszt was Wagner’s father-in-law.  Or, at least, I did.

Science Fiction Theatre – Doctor Robot (11/30/56)

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This week, Truman Bradley is excited to show us a keyboard on which the keys play sounds from the English language.  Maybe I’m not appreciating this leap in technology, but it is pretty unimpressive.  He says the goal is to create “a machine that translates a given text from one language to another.”  So far they have invented the See n’ Say. [1] Baby steps, I guess.

Dr. Edgar Barnes, head of Operation Polyglot, has come in early to see if anyone was tampering with the machines.  He finds that someone has soldered some wires to a terminal.  Worse, he realizes it will take a year of programming to make the machine understand the word “solder” does not rhyme with colder.  He also notices the debris leftover from some computer punch-cards.

He takes the bits of paper to Security Chief Phil Coulson — wait, what?  They go back to the lab.  Barnes — is his nickname Bucky by any chance? — shows him the typewriter where words are input, and the other typewriter where they come out in “French, German, Spanish, Russian and Chinese” although I am dubious of a 1956 Smith Corona having a 废话 key. [2]

He says no one could have punched those cards except his 3 subordinates.  But they passed the rigorous 1956 security screening by being US citizens over 21, white, male, and owning a hat.  Coulson goes undercover as a member of the foundation supporting their work, and takes the gang out to dinner.  They discuss what they do in their off hours.  Sadly, Dr. Lopert’s wife “has been ill for some time” so he hangs out at the lab most of the time.  A government worker putting in those kind of hours sounds suspicious to our guys, so they go back to the lab and go through his desk.  They find letters written in several languages.  Luckily, they have just the machine to translate them.

After a couple of embarrassing letters to Russian mail-order bride magazines, they discover a letter from a German doctor stating his experience treating sub-acute bacterial endocarditis — hey, that’s what Mrs. Lopert suffers from!  So, Lopert has been using the machine to help his wife.  Coulson still thinks there might be something nefarious encoded in the letters, but he thought the same thing about his Alpha-Bits this morning.  After all, a man with a sick wife might be willing to sell secrets to the Russkis for cash or a coupon to upgrade his new mail-order wife from a dumpy 1950’s model to a swinging 1960’s Commie babe.  A search of Lopert’s home reveals a soldering iron and punch-cards.

I don’t know what this is, but it was a recommendation from dailymotion on this same page.

They catch Lopert in the lab that night tinkering with the computer.  He says he is using its logic to assess the best surgical treatment for his wife.  Touched by this, Coulson helps him and they work through the night.  The computer finally recommends a medical strategy, and even provides a contingency plan in case the procedure fails — insist on a Ukrainian girl.

The Loperts accept the computer’s decision and Mrs. L. has the operation.  In no time she is back in great health, and Lopert has lost his deposit from the magazine.  Even better, a grant has been approved for him to continue researching medical applications of the device.

Despite the always welcome presence of the gnome-like Whit Bissell, one of the series bigger slogs.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Why is the turkey quacking like a duck?  Maybe this technology is trickier than I thought.
  • [UPDATE] Starting the video a bit earlier, I see the pointer started on the duck.  I am not going erase the observation, though, because it was literally the most entertainment I got from the episode.  And in fairness — to me — it is a pretty poor design.  You point at the animal you want to hear, then pull the string.  The pointer spins while the noise plays.  There is nothing to contemporaneously associate the sound to the original selection.
  • [2]  A little off-point here, but what do Chinese people eat for breakfast?  They have lunch and dinner covered, but where are the Chinese joints open at 6 am for breakfast?