THE GOODS: November 2017

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

TERROR TEE-VEE: A Countdown to Halloween (Day 31)

Well, here we are again at the end of another Halloween Season, nothing but candy in a bag and tired feet to show for it. Sure the ride was an amazing, sure the knowledge gained was great, but now comes the hard part...

Saying goodbye to the holy day of holy days, putting the Halloween Tree away until next year.

KOLCHAK

What makes Carl such a great protagonist is that he's your average Joe in a seersucker suit and straw boater hat whose only mission is to be a truth-teller, to find the facts and report them to his audience, the reader. What makes him even greater is that he not only uncovers great supernatural evil on a regular basis on his own, but he usually either dispatches or destroys it.

Sure, he does all of this while being scared out of his gourd, but he overcomes it, in part due to his sense of fact-finding—but there clearly is a sense of civic responsibility, too. Course, he’s also a silver-tongued, wittily sly guy who can usually talk himself into more trouble than he needs and out of more trouble than you would expect.

Born in an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice entitled The Kolchak Papers, the story was adapted by Richard Matheson into the 1972 film The Night Stalker and starred the great Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak, hunting down a vampire killer. This TV movie was the most highly rated of all time and led to a sequel (The Night Strangler).

The series began on Friday, September 13, 1974 and ran for 20 episodes. Some of these are great and some are less than good. Don't worry, Carl knows what to do with stories that just don't fit and ideas that stretch the imagination beyond the breaking point...

TERROR TEE-VEE: A Countdown to Halloween (Day 30)

TWILIGHT ZONE

Rod Serling brought mind-bending storytelling to primetime television in America in the 1960’s via his thought-provoking series and it changed the country for the better. The wide-ranging themes and genres, the twist endings, the morals and social commentary all kept audiences on their toes while entertaining them differently each week.

Lasting five seasons from 1959 to 1964 and compromising 156 episodes, The Twilight Zone was begun with a single script purchased by CBS in 1958 called “The Time Element” (a story in which a psychoanalyst’s patient tells him of a recurring dream where he tries to warn people of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor before it happens, until in one dream he is shot and killed—the psychoanalyst finds his picture on the wall of a bar and is told the guy used to tend there, but was killed in Pearl Harbor) and shelved.

It wasn’t until a producer for Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse found the script and shot it that aired to great praise. This overwhelming positive feedback convinced execs that a series of such stories could be a success and they entered talks with Serling shortly thereafter and the rest became history.

Although Serling bore the vast writing duties of writing or adapting nearly two-thirds of the series episodes, many great writers worked for the show, such as Charles Beaumont, Earl Hamner Jr., George Clayton Johnson, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, etc.

As for the darkest episodes of this superb series, I recommend:

"Mirror Image"