Category Archives: TV

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Toynbee Convector (S4E8)

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bradbury02I’m not sure if this series is wearing me down, or if it was just a late bloomer — I’m actually starting to like some of the episodes, or at least I can appreciate them when I can see through the figurative filter of 80’s style and the more literal filter of an awful DVD transfer.

It also helps to not go in expecting The Twilight Zone.  As much as Serling was praised for his humanity, it is Bradbury that really digs into it.  The science is given a complete pass, sometimes there is a lack of twist, irony or even closure; sometimes it is just a slice of slightly askew life.

The evidence in this case is that the twist is obvious almost immediately — yet it still kept me interested.  It was well-cast and well-acted; Bradbury’s rambling prose was appropriate to the story and was well executed.

Craig Bennett Stiles (James Whitmore) is looking out at a beautiful day.  There are boats sailing on the blue waters, people are hang gliding in clear blue skies.  A helicopter is flying in carrying reporter Roger Shumway.

rbttoynbee02In the control room, they are running tapes of “burning rain forests, smog alerts, gridlocked cities, sea birds caked with oil — that’s how it was as we entered the [19]90’s”.  But 100 years ago, in 2000, Stiles became the first and only man to travel through time.

After his trip 100 years ago, Stiles went into seclusion after showing the world the pictures he took of the pristine future where man had conquered the ecological chaos he had created in the late 20th century.

Stiles selects Shumway out of the pool of reporters because he has a reputation of telling the truth — that would certainly make him unique in 2015 also.  At 4 pm that afternoon in the year 2100, the world will see his ship whiz by on the time-travel journey he made 100 years earlier.  Stiles and Shumway enter his home.

Stiles shows off the time machine, the Toynbee Convector.  Styles tells us it was named for Arnold Toynbee who said, “If a people, civilization does not rush to meet the future, the future will plow them under, kill and bury them.”

rbttoynbee03I’m not sure if that is an exact quote. Wikipedia summarizes his study of civilizations as “he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders.”  Which seems pretty self-evident — if they don’t meet the challenges, they fade away.  And there will always be a certain segment of any society that is the smartest or most creative.  Unfortunately, today “elite” has come to mean politicians and actors, both groups which have more than their share of criminals and imbeciles.

Stiles recalls his return to ticker tape parades and the people as he showed them the pictures of the future that was possible for them. “We cleaned and made fresh the air we breathed, we replanted the forests, reclaimed the oceans, lakes and river.”

When Stiles fly-by does not occur at 4:00, Shumway realizes that the whole story, for 100 years, has been a lie.  Seeing the shape of the environment, Stiles came up with the idea of the time-travel to inspire people to change their ways.  He faked tapes, even built tiny perfect fake towns under blue paper skies.  Seeing this beautiful future, people know it was possible and made it happen.

Stiles crawls into the time machine and just seems to die; in the short story, it is more like a suicide.  In the episode, Shumway edits the tapes of his talk with Styles so his deception is cover up, and his words are inspirational,  He even uses laser technology to simulate Stile’s fly-by.

In both versions, Stiles lie is covered up.  The episode is a little more uplifting though, further establishing Stiles as a world-changing hero.  It is nice for a change in sci-fi seeing someone’s lie or hubris actually work out well, and have them be elated at what they have done.

Post-Post:

  • Short story first published in Playboy, January 1984 (by which time its incredibly poor photographic style had literally made the magazine into the joke that it had always inspired — worth a purchase only because of the articles).
  • The plan could have easily backfired.  When presented with tapes of the clean, beautiful future, people could have thought that if they keep doing what there were doing, things would still turn out fine.
  • In any event, maybe we could have kept Al Gore off TV for the past 10 years. That’s gotta be worth something.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Silent Witness (S3E5)

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ahpsilentwitness06Professor Donald Mason is reading from Richard III (bloody sequels!). One student in particular is enthralled. Claudia stays after class and asks if the line “my conscience hath a thousand several tongues” is Freudian — yikes!  She asks if he is getting a guilt complex — it is clear they are having an affair.

Just wait until Act 6 when she reads “My kingdom for a horse.”  Now that will give him a complex.

When he tries to make an excuse not to see her that night, she busts him on his alibi and says she knows that this is his wife’s gym class night.

That night, Mason suggests that he and his wife go for a drive or to a movie.  When she enters the room, we see she is played by Alfred’s daughter, Pat Hitchcock.  After playing a series of spinsters, maids, schoolmarms and “nottie” friends, here she is cast as the dowdy wife who can’t possibly compete with Claudia on a physical level.  It is piling on to have her character going to the gym — it just ain’t gonna make a difference. She even says, “I’ve got to control my figure if I want to compete with all the jail-bait in your classes.”

Claudia calls him at home.  She says she took a babysitting job at his next-door neighbors, the Davidsons — and can see him right that second. She invites him over after his wife leaves, but he refuses.  Yeah, but he does show up as soon as Pat is out of the house.

Claudia surprises Mason by suggesting they get married.  When he says that is impossible, she threatens to “ruin him forever.”  Then he ruins her forever by strangling her. Then the baby starts crying.

The next day a detective comes to question him.  The detective says that there is a witness, but Mason is relieved to hear that he is just talking about the baby.  “If only she could talk,” the detective says.

ahpsilentwitness15He is less relieved when his wife tells him later that at one year, babies start to understand the world.  That there are cases where babies start to talk about things that they saw before they could speak.  At 14 months, this kid could start squealing soon.  And not in the good way . . . no, wait . . .  yes, the good way.

Mason sees Mrs. Davidson in the yard and she says the baby has been acting strange.  When Mason leans in to look at her, she screams at him.  Mason starts getting paranoid that the baby is growing up and will be talking soon.  Later that day, he peeks at the baby again, setting her off.

The next day, leaving for work, he sees the baby in a stroller and learns that she has said her first word, “Dada.”  Now that the tike is capable of discussing the early 20th avant-garde art scene, we see in his eyes that he is actually thinking about strangling the baby.

Just in case you aren’t clear — this is the Police Station.

Overcome with paranoia, he goes to the police station and confesses.

Mr. Davidson finally gets home from Germany.  When he looks in on his daughter, she again begins screaming.  Mrs. Davidson says the baby is always around women, so has that reaction whenever she sees a man.

There are really no problems here other than it is just a ludicrous plot point to worry that a 14-month old baby is going to rat you out.

One negative is that the beautiful Claudia (Delores Hart) disappears from the story so early.  She also disappeared from Hollywood pretty early, having no credits after age 25.  According to IMDb, she became a nun and remains one to this day.

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  Patricia Hitchcock, and Katherine Warren Theodora Davitt and Dolores Hart are still holding on. [CORRECTED]
  • At 37, the Professor is almost exactly twice as old as Claudia.  I am very disturbed by this; I mean disturbed that I didn’t go into teaching.
  • The Professor’s name is Don on IMDb and is referred as Don in Hitchcock’s remarks.  In the episode, however, he is called Bob.

Night Gallery – The Painted Mirror (S2E13)

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ngpaintedmirror23Now this is more like it.  No one will ever call this “one of the best” yet I can imagine this would have very effectively creeped me out as a child.

This is the city, as Jack Webb used to say.  Gridlock on the freeways, wrecking balls demolishing buildings, jackhammers jacking off — just a nightmare of noise.  Even in elderly Frank Standish’s Thrift Shop there is no reprieve.  An electric eye announces visitors with a loud bell, a dog barks constantly for no reason, his partner Mrs. Moore (Zsa Zsa Gabor) plays obnoxious stock-and-roll music.  This could drive a man to murder.

Elderly Ellen Chase enters the shop with a mirror she hopes to hock.  Strangely, the mirror has been painted over with gray paint.  Standish (Arthur O’Connell, the other priest in The Poseidon Adventure) begins slowly chiseling away the gray paint.  Even through the small area he has cleared, he can see this is no ordinary mirror.

Mrs. Chase comes back the next day to the displeasure of Zsa Zsa who doesn’t approve of her socializing with Standish.  The old man continues scraping away the paint.

Finally, the last bits are removed and they are amazed at the lifelike other-worldly landscape. They are even more amazed when Zsa Zsa’s cat runs through the frame and down the path in the painting.  Seconds later, it comes screeching back out, scared to death.

Zsa Zsa decides to buy out Standish’s share of the partnership, and apparently he can’t refuse.  This is especially disconcerting to him as Chase and Standish seem to have used the back room for some hanky-panky.  And I mean really disconcerting as Zsa Zsa, at about 60, is the youngster in this group.

ngpaintedmirror26Tired of Zsa Zsa’s dog constantly yapping, and none too crazy about Zsa Zsa’s yapping either, Chase hurls the dog’s ball into the painting, sending him running to fetch it. Even better, Zsa Zsa follows to fetch her dog.

She seems strangely oblivious to the fact she just stepped through a portal into dimension filled with bright colors, pointy volcanoes, strange plants.  She continues further into the strange land calling for her dog.

What she succeeds in attracting, however, are dinosaurs.  As they begin closing in on her, Chase and Standish begin repainting the mirror, sealing her in.  And her little dog, too.

The story lacks focus — much is made in establishing the loud, hectic atmosphere of the city and the shop — but that is disregarded and it is really the thought of losing their “bachelor’s boudoir” that motivates the geezers to condemn Zsa Zsa to death.

ngpaintedmirror27But the double mind-intercourses of 1) the mirror as a portal to another dimension, and 2) Zsa Zsa being sealed in this hostile world by the mere strokes of a brush make this a winner.  It is especially fun to know that she is seeing them painting in the last bit of the mirror like Fortunato seeing Montresor placing the last brick in The Cask of Amontillado.

As frequently happens, the victim here is getting much worse than she deserves.  But that doesn’t stop this from being fun stuff.

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.  Although there is a definite Little Girl Lost vibe.
  • Yikes — this from Vanity Fair:  While Gabor was still married to Conrad Hilton, she admitted to having once had sex with her stepson.

Night Gallery – The Messiah on Mott Street (S2E13)

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ngmessiah01

The hell with Mott Street — I want to hear the story that goes with that dragon sculpture.

Another so-called “one of the best” episodes of Night Gallery, which usually means it will be maudlin if not unwatchable.  Additionally, this is a Christmas episode, so confidence is not high.

Dr. Levine (Tony Roberts) pays a house-call (a what?) to Abraham Goldman (Edward G. Robinson).  The old man is on his deathbed.  Levine warns that he will surely get pneumonia if he does not go to the hospital.  Goldman refuses to go as it would cause his grandson to be sent to an orphanage.

That night, grandson Mikey fixes Goldman tomato soup for dinner. Goldman says he is waiting on the Messiah — “a messenger from God, looming big and black against the sky, striking down our enemies and raising us up to health and wealth and contentment.” He will even bring ice cream, toys and the Giants back to New York.

ngmessiah05Mikey goes out in the streets looking for the Messiah.  He finds Yaphet Kotto meeting the “big and black” criteria and brings him back to the apartment.

Yada, yada, he turns out to be the real Messiah, curing Goldman’s ills and even putting a few bucks in his pocket.  It’s a Festivus miracle!

It’s all well done, it’s just been done so many times before.

Post-Post:

Tales From the Crypt – The Reluctant Vampire (S3E7)

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Image 002Minor gripe: The cover art that introduces the episodes usually has pretty good cartoon likenesses of the actors (although Whoopi Goldberg did look like she should have been a character on the Simpsons).  This time, though, I am not seeing Malcolm McDowell or George Wendt in this drawing at all.

Which is ironic because the two best known genre actors in this episode are not quite themselves. Hint:  Cheers is not a genre.
An alarm clock rings and titular reluctant vampire Malcolm McDowell arises from his Murphy Coffin (which flips back up into the wall to save space).  We don’t get a good look at him until he is startled by the mention of vampire hunter Van Helsing on the Today Show (or some equivalent unwatchable a.m. trash).  Despite the many ways McDowell has been made-up in his long career, his wig here renders him almost unidentifiable.
He goes to his job as a security guard at the blood bank.  George Wendt, on the other hand, is recognizable despite not having a bar-stool attached to his ass.  Not exactly known for his range as an actor, Wendt falls back on his Mr. Kreitzer alter-ego from one episode of Cheers.  He is chewing out lovely Sally for the mysterious low levels of blood in the bank.  
McDowell defends her from Wendt’s tirade and — ewww — awkward advance.  Sally finds his gallantry sexy.  When she tells that to McDowell, he experiences a new phenomena in vampirism — apparently it is his fangs that grow when he is aroused, which he ashamedly hides from Sally.
tftcreluctantvampire15After she leaves, he is filled with self-loathing for about 2 seconds, then raids the vault for fresh blood.  On the prowl that night, he just can’t bring himself to attack an old lady, but is OK with attacking a mugger that holds her up.  He Heimlichs  the mugger dry to replace the blood he stole the night before.  Although wouldn’t it have been a lot simpler to go directly to the mugger for his fix, and not drink the blood at the bank?
The next day, Van Helsing arrives at the police station to offer his assistance on the murder of the exsanguinated (vocabulary credit to The X-Files) man.  He is played by Michael Berryman who is partially disguised by wearing a hat over that iconic bald head made famous in The Hills Have Eyes and many other joints.
To save the blood bank from bankruptcy, McDowell goes on a vigilante spree.  He procures 500 pints and saves the bank.
tftcreluctantvampire18Coming home that night, Wendt is waiting for him with a gun.  He has figured out that McDowell came up with the blood and plans to blackmail him for more.  McDowell is able to bonk him on the head with the Murphy Coffin, and stuff him into it.
The detective and Van Helsing bust in the house and Van Helsing stakes Wendt.  This turns Sally on so much, she asks McDowell to make her a “creature of the darkness.”
Although George Wendt is incapable of playing anyone but Norm Peterson, the rest of the cast makes the episode.  Horror icons McDowell and Berryman are their dependable selves despite the skull-coverings.  The detective is played by late uber That Guy Paul Gleason (Die Hard, Breakfast Club, Trading Places, etc).  I don’t know much about Sally, but she works regularly and was OK here.

Post-Post:

  • Sandra Dickinson played Trillian in the BBC production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
  • McDowell’s character is named Donald Longtooth.
  • In the opening shot, McDowell puts in false teeth.  The false teeth don’t have fangs, and false teeth could not cover up or shorten fangs — so what are they for?
  • Director Elliot Silverstein has a ton of credits including four Twilight Zones, Cat Ballou, A Man Called Horse and the classic 1970’s cheapo classic The Car.
  • The last of three episode scripted by Terry Black, and probably the best.  Kudos for the highlarious questioning of McDowell’s victims.