Kenneth Johnson actually wanted the show's Hulk to be red, because he thought green was silly and red was the color of anger. It was the one change that Stan Lee refused to allow.
MeTV's SuperSci-Fi Saturday Night
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Kenneth Johnson actually wanted the show's Hulk to be red, because he thought green was silly and red was the color of anger. It was the one change that Stan Lee refused to allow.
Another reason he's The Man.
The Time Tunnel: "Devil's Island" was pretty mediocre -- mostly just a lot of routine prison-camp stuff, with cartoonishly extreme authority figures (though maybe it was really that bad?). Plus we got yet another person brought to the present, making it more and more ridiculous that they never manage to get Tony and Doug. And it was pointless, because the guy dismissed it all as a dream and it had no real impact on the plot.
Still, it was kind of educational. I don't think I'd ever heard of Alfred Dreyfus until I saw this episode in syndication back in the day. I think I wasn't sure he was a real person instead of someone they made up for the show.
Devil's Island has the exact same lagoon as Krakatoa. I wonder if they filmed those two back-to-back for the sake of the island set. The forest set in the Custer episode looked just like the one in the War of 1812 episode too, as far as I could tell.
How come sometimes their readouts tell them the year right away, but other times they can't determine the exact period unless they get some clues from the time viewer?
And next week's episode is also an exploration of historical French atrocities, this time the Reign of Terror just over a century earlier. Weird juxtaposition.
Still, it was kind of educational. I don't think I'd ever heard of Alfred Dreyfus until I saw this episode in syndication back in the day. I think I wasn't sure he was a real person instead of someone they made up for the show.
Devil's Island has the exact same lagoon as Krakatoa. I wonder if they filmed those two back-to-back for the sake of the island set. The forest set in the Custer episode looked just like the one in the War of 1812 episode too, as far as I could tell.
How come sometimes their readouts tell them the year right away, but other times they can't determine the exact period unless they get some clues from the time viewer?
And next week's episode is also an exploration of historical French atrocities, this time the Reign of Terror just over a century earlier. Weird juxtaposition.
There is a tv movie based on the Dreyfus Affair with... Richard Dreyfus!
Prisoner of Honor
(although he plays the role of Col. Picquart...)
I thought that was Clouseau's boss.
Land of the Giants two-fer:
"The Creed": A decent idea, the crew needing a giant doctor's help to operate on Barry. Implausible, though, since they operated in the forest without masks, so it's a wonder the kid didn't die of an infection afterward. And they flirted with making Betty relevant for once by having her be the closest thing they had to a medical expert, but of course she had to chicken out because she was just a weak, frightened female and the big strong male hero had to do it. Still, Paul Fix (Dr. Piper from Star Trek's second pilot) was surprisingly non-boring as the doctor.
The show is very inconsistent about language. Recently, they had that episode where the giant scientists had charts and labels written in alien script. Now, they explicitly speak and read English and can't read German. (And what a coincidence that it's in a language Fitzhugh knows.) And how do so many things from Earth keep crossing over to the giants' world? How do they have the Hippocratic Oath? Could it be that rifts between worlds have been opening for millennia? Could the parallels between worlds be because the giants' culture has actually been secretly, parasitically built on Earth knowledge all along? Could that be why the government is so eager to catch the Little People? That would've been an interesting idea to explore, if they'd actually been thinking in those terms.
"Double Cross": Fitzhugh participating in a heist is an interesting idea, but I wish they hadn't gone the amnesia route. The crooks captured the others as hostages anyway, so the script could've used that as Fitzhugh's motivation for helping -- or they could've had him go along willingly and recruit the others because there was something in it for them, like maybe they could use shavings from the ruby to repair the laser framizamicator in the ship's engine. Amnesia is just too easy. And I hate the TV trope of amnesia that can be toggled on and off by consecutive blows to the head. As if a second dose of head trauma can somehow fix the first one instead of making it worse.
The effects weren't very good either. There was that shot where the giants were clearly putting their hands on top of the table, but their hands disappeared behind the split-screen line. And some of the composite shots in the woods seemed to get the scale or perspective wrong, with the little people appearing too large relative to the giants.
And that first cop who appeared is terrible at his job. The curator of a museum full of valuable items finds that the front door is mysteriously unlocked, and the cop just shrugs it off rather than taking a precautionary look around?
"The Creed": A decent idea, the crew needing a giant doctor's help to operate on Barry. Implausible, though, since they operated in the forest without masks, so it's a wonder the kid didn't die of an infection afterward. And they flirted with making Betty relevant for once by having her be the closest thing they had to a medical expert, but of course she had to chicken out because she was just a weak, frightened female and the big strong male hero had to do it. Still, Paul Fix (Dr. Piper from Star Trek's second pilot) was surprisingly non-boring as the doctor.
The show is very inconsistent about language. Recently, they had that episode where the giant scientists had charts and labels written in alien script. Now, they explicitly speak and read English and can't read German. (And what a coincidence that it's in a language Fitzhugh knows.) And how do so many things from Earth keep crossing over to the giants' world? How do they have the Hippocratic Oath? Could it be that rifts between worlds have been opening for millennia? Could the parallels between worlds be because the giants' culture has actually been secretly, parasitically built on Earth knowledge all along? Could that be why the government is so eager to catch the Little People? That would've been an interesting idea to explore, if they'd actually been thinking in those terms.
"Double Cross": Fitzhugh participating in a heist is an interesting idea, but I wish they hadn't gone the amnesia route. The crooks captured the others as hostages anyway, so the script could've used that as Fitzhugh's motivation for helping -- or they could've had him go along willingly and recruit the others because there was something in it for them, like maybe they could use shavings from the ruby to repair the laser framizamicator in the ship's engine. Amnesia is just too easy. And I hate the TV trope of amnesia that can be toggled on and off by consecutive blows to the head. As if a second dose of head trauma can somehow fix the first one instead of making it worse.
The effects weren't very good either. There was that shot where the giants were clearly putting their hands on top of the table, but their hands disappeared behind the split-screen line. And some of the composite shots in the woods seemed to get the scale or perspective wrong, with the little people appearing too large relative to the giants.
And that first cop who appeared is terrible at his job. The curator of a museum full of valuable items finds that the front door is mysteriously unlocked, and the cop just shrugs it off rather than taking a precautionary look around?
When Jenkins wrote his novelization, he alluded to the two worlds being "in resonance". I guess this was supposed to be a handwave for both the similarities and the crossovers. Unfortunately there's so little science behind the concepts that all you can really do is offer handwaves and implications.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PercussiveMaintenance
Edit to add: Well, okay, you can go a long way toward explaining some of the parallels if you establish, as you said, that one society is parasitically based on the other. The writers could have gone there if they wanted. What has to be handwaved away by words like "resonance" is why the two worlds are that similar in the first place. (As well as all the rifts or crossovers.) If the writers had ever wanted to go there.
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Lots of older SF, certainly in the mass media and to some extent in prose, is built around the idea of alien worlds that recapitulate human evolutionary or cultural development except for one big twist. There's rarely any explanation behind it beyond the kneejerk assumption that, as the one and only known example of an intelligent species, our development must be typical by default. It goes back to things like Jules Verne and other 19th-century writers accepting as axiomatic that we would inevitably find new human racial variants on the Moon, Mars, Venus, etc., because after all we'd found a bunch of them on the various continents of Earth (save Antarctica), so why not?
It takes a greater exertion of imagination, I think, to realize that one's own nature and circumstances are not a natural default setting. So a lot of people have never stopped to question humanoid aliens or English-speaking aliens or Ancient Roman aliens or whatever, which is why there have been so many of them in fiction. It's only as assorted people have raised questions about those things over time that other people have been prompted to wonder about them too, so we've grown collectively more inclined to question them. Although not entirely, since we still get plenty of sci-fi with humanoid aliens or English-speaking aliens -- Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Jupiter Ascending, Supergirl, etc.
No argument. But in this case the one big twist is so big (so to speak) that it requires a lot more handwaving (or chutzpah) to pretend that everything else would be exactly the same. I think poor Jenkins was limited on what he could justify in the length of a short adaptation novel.
Although he did note some other logical differences, like the fact that the giants' buildings could be no more than a few stories tall due to the limitations of concrete and steel. And suggesting that giant aircraft weren't even possible.
Although he did note some other logical differences, like the fact that the giants' buildings could be no more than a few stories tall due to the limitations of concrete and steel. And suggesting that giant aircraft weren't even possible.
Interesting. The show itself tended to ignore issues of physics like that (even the issue of whether the Earth people would even be audible to the giants -- there was a lot of whispering to avoid being heard in "Double Cross"), so I've always found it kind of ambiguous whether this actually was a planet of giants or if the space warp had somehow miniaturized the things that came through it from Earth. After all, the show used overhead camera angles to make the crew seem small as often as it used low angles to make the giants seem big.
The square-cube law would support that a lot more than it would support (heh) guys who are 70 feet tall and don't tear a muscle every time they move.
Though then the crew should obviously have been stronger.
Isn't there some episode where Steve and Dan get sent back in time to Earth before their disappearance but they're still miniature-sized? That might support your suggestion.
Though then the crew should obviously have been stronger.
Isn't there some episode where Steve and Dan get sent back in time to Earth before their disappearance but they're still miniature-sized? That might support your suggestion.
If they'd used science at all, Land of the Giants could never have been made. I think one of Isaac Asimov's science columns in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction around the time was devoted to talking about the flaws in the show's premise, with regard to the square-cube law and the like. I should check to see if that essay's in any of the collections I have.
That does not apply in the series; it was not the intention of Irwin Allen to have real world science explain the fantastic events of his various TV series.
Not exactly. You are thinking of the penultimate episode, "Wild Journey" (3/8/1970) where Steve & Dan steal a Space Time Manipulator from aliens Thorg (Bruce Dern) & Berna (Yvonne Craig) and as you point out, travel to Los Angeles in the hours before the Spindrift's flight. However, they return at normal size. It is only when Thorg & Berna track the humans that they use another S.T.M. to reduce the heroes to the 6-inch size they were on the giants' world as incentive to get them to restore original history by piloting the Spindrift to its fate.
This is historically accurate. Allen was about real and imagined technobabble adding that extra edge to his fantasy (and occasionally drama) spectacles. Otherwise, he was not held down by facts or theories that would get in the way of his creative process.
Ah. I'm afraid it's been a very long time. My present exposure to the show is limited to right here.
Fair enough. But by that same token: if 1) he didn't want to let facts get in the way, and 2) he made the onscreen evidence ambiguous as to whether the giants were gigantic or the crew was shrunk, and 3) someone else tries to judge (for themselves) which phenomenon was "really" the case, then Word of God loses some authority on the answer. And I'd choose the square-cube law over Irwin's Law, if Irwin didn't care enough to enforce it.
Even so, by real physics, miniaturized humans don't work any better than giants. There are square-cube law problems in both directions, along with other problems raised by miniaturization (where does the mass go -- or are they just hyperdense, which would have a ton of its own problems?).
And what do they breath?
Not just that. After all, he only had 8 separate lines in the entire episode there, so it hardly seems fair to count it. But I've seen him in a couple of other things where he didn't impress me, like Battlestar Galactica's "Take the Celestra," and The Time Tunnel's "The End of the World," which we discussed herein a few weeks back.
I agree. NIGHT GALLERY hasn't aged well. I loved it too as a kid but now...it seems kind of cheesy. There are a few episodes that still give me the creeps though. 'Lagota's Heads' is one. (not even sure I spelled it right) There was another one too but I cant remember the name. It had to do with an old woman who was obsessed with gardening and someone who was trying to take her property away. She cut off a finger and buried it and died I think. I don't know what exactly happened to make her die but she grew like a plant from her cut off finger. I can remember her sitting in the rocking chair with vines growing out of her and dirt on her.
Fix did a good job as a regular supporting character on The Rifleman.
