Anymore I think I all my thoughts have become conflated so I can't remember if that's a recent thing on my part with the new series or a long-held notion.
Regardless, the idea is out there anyway.
MeTV's SuperSci-Fi Saturday Night
- Thread starter JD
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Anymore I think I all my thoughts have become conflated so I can't remember if that's a recent thing on my part with the new series or a long-held notion.
Regardless, the idea is out there anyway.
(Maybe I should have posted some Jefferson Starship....)
This isn't the first time we've seen somebody watching a Wolfman movie, is it?
I think her aggressive behavior was definitely meant to channel a Hulk-Out...If it pleases the court, I respectfully submit Exhibit A.
...Exhibit B....
A videocassette! And it plays a key role in the plot! Kids, in 1979 most of us didn't have VCRs at home yet...we hadn't even seen one. This was...[holdsnose]THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE!!![/holdsnose]
(Did anybody catch if it was VHS or Betamax?)
Thanks to the old karate chop to the back of the neck...SOP at all the respectable mental institutions.
-28:12, back on formula...the constraints of the plot giving us one of those very ineffectual First Hulk-Outs, in which nobody driving the story sees the creature, and he doesn't even manage to simply escape from his surroundings.
I'll give the patients a pass from joining the Really Clueless Folk list, considering the circumstances.
[churchlady]How conveeeeeennnient....[/churchlady]
-5:58. The episode gives us a much-needed moment of levity by playing on the old payphone gag--David effectively transforms from being kept on hold for too long.
Surprising that he stuck around that long. He's hightailed it out of town faster for less.
And...Stock Lonely Man.
Noted, but I'm going to disagree.
Sarek's second wife...I hadn't realized.
I did notice the plot similarity...as did....
Glad you asked. Though it remains inconclusively unspoken, I was getting a definite vibe that David was there because he was interested in Dr. Murrow's research for its cure potential. See Exhibits A and B above. I'm inclined to count this as a cure-related episode by implication. I wouldn't be surprised if the story originally made it more explicit but it was cut from the script or left on the cutting room floor because it wasn't necessary to the story.
As noted above, I'd tend to agree with your assessment of the constraints on the First Hulk-Out...but...I can see what they were going for in general here. They were channeling the horror factor of somebody being wrongfully committed to an asylum...and multiple thwarted escape attempts just play into that, building a sense of helplessness. What falls apart in this case is that this protagonist turns into the Hulk, which should effectively resolve the story.
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I had the impression it was Beta based on the size, but I'm not certain. VHS tapes were available in the US by 1979, but they were newer than Beta, so Beta is probably more likely.
Well, the clueless people are the ones who should be able to deduce that he changed but don't, like the cabbie in "Terror in Times Square" or the kid and the flight attendant from "747" -- the ones who don't actually witness the change directly but who know that David was the only person in the closed room, vehicle, or whatever that the Hulk burst out of. These folks literally saw it happen, but nobody believed them -- which puts them in the same category as McGee, essentially.
That felt like a contrived way to get him angry. In the first Hulk-out, it seemed more than ever that he was intentionally trying to work himself into a rage, even banging his head against the cot as he wrestled with the straitjacket. And yet here, he had even more cause to get angry on his own, since someone else was in imminent danger. The phone call was, well, uncalled for. At the very least, they could've done something better than a hold message. After all, the cops had just gotten what they thought was a crank call from this clinic just minutes before. It would've been a better follow-through if David had gotten through to the police but they'd dismissed him as another crank.
It would've made more sense if David had been sedated just before the Hulk-out. We've seen the Hulk slowed down by drugs/poisons given to David before.
Or instead of encouraging him to leave, the other patients could've invited him to join in a game or something, been friendly to him and thereby calmed him down.
An often-asked question. But think about it just a bit. This is entertainment, meant to have a story. Now think about Tony and Doug, or any time traveler(s) landing in the middle of the ocean (a statistical likelihood). They flail around in the water and battle sharks. You want to watch that for an hour? How about landing them in the wastes of Siberia? Is that any better entertainment as you watch them try to survive in a most inhospitable place.
I could see perhaps an episode where the Time Tunnel manages to transfer them three or four times, each time plopping them in some inhospitable location. THAT could have been an interesting bunch of little stories, all comprised to make one hour episode. But such a group of settings for one episode could be a budget-breaker.
James Darren has relayed the tale that their tumbling landings were accomplished by having he and Robert Colbert jump off a ladder and roll into the frame, all with an over-cranked camera to slow down the action.
Of all of the people who will come and go through time in the 30 episodes, only Carroll O'Conner was honored with being seen in the "time vortex" like Tony and Doug are seen every week. His trip was accomplished with a green screen and him standing and bending around. Darren and Colbert used ropes and belts to float on their journey through the vortex.
Everyone else sort of blinked in and out.
Yes, that much is entirely obvious. My point is that if you want to tell a story that has the characters constantly ending up in exciting or important situations, then it would be more plausible if the mechanism for putting them into those situations were not supposedly random -- if there were an in-story explanation for why they kept ending up right at important crisis points, so that it didn't feel so contrived. For instance, in NBC's new Timeless, the characters are chasing after the villain as he attempts to change important moments in history. And in Quantum Leap, there was some unknown force intelligently guiding Sam to points in history where he could make a difference. Those stories provide a reason why the characters end up where they do. And that's preferable to a supposedly random mechanism that keeps landing people in precisely the most dangerous and critical moments in history.
In other words, yes, of course, storytelling is about artifice to entertain the audience, but you don't want to make it too obvious that the writer's hand is moving the characters and events into the desired position. And that's what happens when you don't provide a good in-story reason for things to turn out the way they do.
In this case, maybe they could've handwaved something about the Tunnel gravitating toward nexus points in time, moments of great import and decision where the lines of probability converged or something. Sort of like how "The City on the Edge of Forever" justified Kirk, Spock, and McCoy being drawn to Edith Keeler.
Sometimes, maybe. But in the two shots I described, they were clearly holding onto something just above the frame that was sliding them over the stage floor.
At the time, it would've most likely been a bluescreen. Greenscreen didn't become the standard until after the turn of the century, because it works better with digital cameras. Before then, bluescreen was the most common matte process, because you could use optical printing techniques to easily filter out the blue color.
Indeed.
Although I have to admit to a bittersweet fondness for "Ring My Bell." The girl I went to the prom with used to sing that all the time.Now ye're talking.
Here's a 1967 American Cinematographer article about the effects on The Time Tunnel:
http://www.thechampions.tv/tictoc/tac6707a.htm
Some neat stuff about the effects behind the Tic-Toc complex, too. The miniature of the compound, with the residence complexes and elevators and such, was 30 feet high and 10 feet wide!
http://www.thechampions.tv/tictoc/tac6707a.htm
Some neat stuff about the effects behind the Tic-Toc complex, too. The miniature of the compound, with the residence complexes and elevators and such, was 30 feet high and 10 feet wide!
Yes--Marty Balin's name came to mind! I guess you could not post any of the songs with Balin, since he was no longer a member by the year of this episode's airing (Grace Slick being the postergirl for substance abuse among a few reasons).
No, the first was in episode three of this season--"Ricky"--where the lead was watching scenes from the same film--Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
The scenes--and by association Banner--meant this was another cure search (because of an interest in Kathy's anger), I counter that David's reactions are not limited to one emotional state; as we have witnessed, heartbreak and sadness also triggers the transformation--at other times, there's other emotions at work :
- During the nightmare from "Married, " David was smothered in feelings of extreme fear, panic and loss as he imagined Caroline being spirited away by the Spectre of Death. That fear did not move to anger, yet it triggered a transformation.
It was VHS. A couple of my friends had VHS recorders in '79, and the tapes matched what was tossed around in this episode; they were like a hardback book--heavy, and the play cycle of the machines were so LOUD.
..and long used by TV spies, starship captains and doctors, sitcom characters....
He was drugged, hence the reason he slowed down to stop a mere 47 feet from the gates.
The threats were removed, and his enemy--McGee--was nowhere around. He probably felt he had a little bit of breathing room.
At the end of it all, I see the real world influences of this episode--the nightmare of another medical institution performing experiments on captive individuals (and the items posted yesterday), so this was not--as that very lazy-minded reviewer of the era tried (and failed) to write it off as a take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
If we rewind a bit, though, this one's chart debut fell late in Season 1, in the extra week's gap between "Earthquakes Happen" and "The Waterfront Story"...looks like Balin was still in the group then:
I see where you're coming from, but anger is still treated as the primary cause, and @Christopher has been outspoken in the past about David needing to address anger management, so I think this episode was meant to be a nod in that direction. We've seen David aim his wanderings toward potentially helpful research before, so I think there's implicitly a little more going on here than just another random job of the week...he's not working at the car wash or a racetrack.
I'm tempted to create a new category for implicitly cure-related episodes, but I think I'd need at least two of them to rub together.
I'll admit that Bixby was acting a little not fully calm and rational in that scene, but the dialogue implies that he hasn't been shot up with anything yet.
That they ignore the fact that McGee should be on the scene doesn't change the fact that he should be, as established by numerous other episodes when he's on the scene a little too quickly over one Hulk report.
He was definitely not yet drugged at the time of the first Hulk-out. In fact, they left the room in order to get a sedative to calm him down, and it was his fear of being sedated that triggered the metamorphosis. By the time they got back with the sedative, he'd already broken out.
Maybe the reports were dismissed because they came from within a mental institution. True, Sam, Dr. Murrow, and Murrow's goons saw the Hulk, but they might not have wanted to admit it for fear of having their sanity questioned. I've read in the past about a certain prejudice in the mental-health industry to be too quick to assume someone is mentally ill rather than considering alternative possibilities -- as we saw here with Dr. Hill's unquestioning acceptance of Murrow's claim that David had snapped and that his claims were paranoid delusions. So practitioners in a mental hospital may have been reluctant to admit that they saw the same things their patients claimed to see, for fear that their colleagues would institutionalize them.
Land of the Giants: "The Flight Plan": Okay, that title has nothing at all to do with the plot. This is an out-there idea, a giant (Linden Chiles, whom we recently saw as Tony Newman's dad in The Time Tunnel) miniaturizing himself to con the humans -- which seems more like something you'd see in a second-season episode, when there's been time for the giants' world to react to the knowledge of the "Little People" and devise responses to it. But it's mostly just more of the usual capture-and-escape-and-climb-stuff dynamic. And it doesn't entirely hold together. If Steve heard "Joe" crying for help after the guard caught him, why didn't he hear "Joe"'s equally loud confession to being a miniaturized giant? After all, Steve would've been much closer to that end of the pipe at the time. It was also pretty clear that the writer didn't know what "ion" meant or how to use the word.
Planet of the Apes: "Tomorrow's Tide": Another routine capture-and-escape story, and another routine "Alan and Pete teach rudimentary technologies to the ignorant apes" story. Though it benefits from Roscoe Lee Browne's inclusion and from the mutual exasperation between Galen and the astronaut duo. This is one of the bigger roles McDowall has had lately. I also rather liked their con game, how they got out of the situation by letting Browne's character and the old man take the credit for their invention, so basically everyone came out ahead. Still, overall, a forgettable episode, and I expect there will be more. Well, we're almost halfway through now.
Planet of the Apes: "Tomorrow's Tide": Another routine capture-and-escape story, and another routine "Alan and Pete teach rudimentary technologies to the ignorant apes" story. Though it benefits from Roscoe Lee Browne's inclusion and from the mutual exasperation between Galen and the astronaut duo. This is one of the bigger roles McDowall has had lately. I also rather liked their con game, how they got out of the situation by letting Browne's character and the old man take the credit for their invention, so basically everyone came out ahead. Still, overall, a forgettable episode, and I expect there will be more. Well, we're almost halfway through now.
Which is worse, someone a bit more open to suggestion, or a rage-aholic?
And at the last the cure didn't seem as much.
That does get old: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppeaseTheVolcanoGod
I might have them at the lighthouse at Anjer.
https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Krakatoa-Loss-of-the-Fourth-Point-Lighthouse1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyer
Or maybe aboard the S.S. Governor General Loudon
http://www.throughouthistory.com/?p=2214
Observers and locality--if I were to take a guess.
If it is true that new timelines emerge during which choices are made--where timelines fork the most (very busy historical activity)---it could very well be that a malfunctioning machine is drawn to the forks. Sedate backgrounds with no activity simply don't draw as much.
On the flip side, if time travel is even easier, one might posit that that is how the chronology protection conjecture works. So many folks are trying to go back in time and kill Hitler--that none of them do. If everyone is super no one is. If everything has rights (wolves, sheep, etc) nothing does. That sort of thing. The many interactions null everything out to base point...i.e. no net change. You wanter blindfolded away from a pole, you might fork your own path to the point you run back into it nose first.
If you have time travel via spaceflight by cosmic strings passing each other, then the timeline you reach would be random.
http://www.dummies.com/education/science/physics/crossing-cosmic-strings-to-allow-time-travel/
Thus, time travel with inhabited planetary surfaces may actually guarantee some type of historical interaction, so long as you don't have too many time travellers all doing the same thing.
(Please set BS-ometer to 11)
Now if you'll forgive me, my cosmic string zip line is waiting
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Heh...just slipping through.....and with (arguably) the last decent song from Jefferson Starship period of the group.
He was incorrect. Banner has never been presented as having anger management issues. In the pilot, he tells Elaina that his mother instructed him not to lose his temper, but in the regular series, time after time, if we carefully study every anger related trigger for Hulk-outs, it always stems from situations that would lead to anger in anyone:
- beatings
- threat of being buried
- other acts of attempted murder
- near-drowning
- near-airplane crash
- animal attacks
- threats against another person
- body parts crushed
- natural disasters
- auto accidents
- kidnapping / imprisonment
I thought of the same thing earlier. That's a good sub-category, like the list of characters who learn David's secret.
He was placed in a straitjacket; to reduce more threats from a patient, occasionally, sedation is part of restraining . Moreover, why else would the Hulk--an energy dynamo--appear to grow fatigued from a short leap to and run through the grounds? We have witnessed the Hulk flip cars, people and run like there's no tomorrow. We witnessed the Hulk drag an adult male tied to a heavy airplane wing miles over uneven mountain territory to escape a raging forest fire, and only after that--did he appear even remotely worn. With examples like that, the Hulk's sudden rest stop at the sanatorium--acting as if he was not clear-headed, and continuing that behavior when back in Banner form suggests he was drugged at some point after Banner was knocked out by the orderly earlier in the episode.
The series also established that the Register is not always willing to pay trips every time someone claims to see the Hulk. Moreover, being a medical facility with a fresh scandal, the last thing Dr. Hill would report is a Hulk sighting. As a professional, she would not want to risk ridicule for joining in on what is seen as a tabloid hoax.
He just got tired because he was changing back to Banner. I might be more inclined to believe that there were drugs involved if we didn't already have a history of ineffectual First Hulk-Outs that were just there to be there...the ones in "Rainbow's End" and "Haunted" come immediately to mind. In the latter, he basically pushed around some furniture and didn't even leave the house, then changed back.
This one also fell within the life of the show...debuted on the charts the week that "The Final Round" aired:
And it looks like we'll have a couple of other JS hits falling into later seasons.
And it looks like we'll have a couple of other JS hits falling into later seasons.
Yeah, but the point is that the change happened far too soon. Generally the Hulk changes back once he's calmed down and no longer feels threatened, but we've seen plenty of instances where that took much longer after the initial rampage.
But those were both cases where he changed back once he was alone and no longer under threat. He's rarely changed back when he was with other people, unless they were people he felt safe with and trusted. (Well, except for the time he started to change back after saving McGee in Las Vegas -- that was a bit anomalous too.) He certainly hasn't changed back when surrounded by a whole crowd of people; I'd think that would be a situation that would keep the Hulk alert and agitated, especially given the urgency with which the patients were egging him on to get out. Generally the Hulk is receptive to the suggestions of people he doesn't perceive as threats. So this was very inconsistent with past precedent.
I think the bottom line is that he changes to and fro whenever the hell the plot feels like it! 
You explained the "ineffectual" Hulks outs as being there just to be there, and I can accept that. On the other hand, that assessment was not the case in The Quiet Room, where drugging Banner was a stated action the plot. In addition to the earlier examples of the Hulk's "engine" having no off switch, there are more cases throughout the series of the Hulk not wearing down so quickly. Again, considering he was locked in a sanatorium where drugging was part of their regular procedures, and both the Hulk & Banner's dazed state, the scene more than implies Banner had been drugged.
I think the bottom line is that he changes to and fro whenever the hell the plot feels like it!
Yes, but sometimes it makes less sense than others, and this was probably the most arbitrary one yet.
