MeTV's SuperSci-Fi Saturday Night

That's good!
Back in the 70s, when I was making up Night Stalker plots for fun, I had one where we learned (but Kolchak didn't) that it was all about karma from a past life.[/QUOTE]

That's good!

 

I was able to watch Wild Wild West and Incredible Hulk last night.
This WWW was a lot of fun, I think of all of the episodes I've seen this one had the most Bond in the Wild West kind of stuff. We got the evil mastermind with the secret headquarters, the deadly trap, and all sorts of gadgets. I have to admit, I actually was surprised by the last second twist. Although I was a little confused by a couple things with the twist at the end, were the woman and the archivist working together the whole time, and if so was he part of the whole Panhandle independence plot?
I didn't think this week's TIH was that bad. This was the first episode I saw with Marc Alaimo and only the second time I've seen him outside of Trek. The only other non-Trek show I've seen him on was the final two part of Wonder Woman. It was a little weird for me to actually see him play a good guy. I do agree with @Christopher that it was a little odd that Hulk couldn't catch the car the kidnappers used. Every time I see a episode that focused so much on the adult man bonding with a young boy, I can't help but think that people would be to paranoid today for something like that to actually be allowed to happen. I understand they wanted to develop the kid and David's relationship, but I think they took a little to long to get to the kidnapping and assassination.

 

Yeah, that's sad. It's one thing to be vigilant against a threat, but it's an overreaction to stigmatize healthy relationships just because a tiny number of sick people corrupt them into something harmful. Today's society has become too fixated on our fears, to the detriment of our sense of community and mutual trust.

Indeed, it used to be a pretty standard trope in fiction to have adult male characters as mentors/best friends/father figures to preteen boys, like Superman and Jimmy Olsen, Batman and Robin, Dr. Smith and Will, or Fitzhugh and Barry. Which lets me segue into:


Land of the Giants: "Deadly Pawn": This one had kind of a weird, contrived premise, but I guess if you're going to do a show about people in a world of giants, it's kind of a natural to have them turned into literal chess pieces at some point. In this case, it's a mentally unstable giant with a narcissistic need to prove his superiority over the Earthers by capturing them and forcing to play his deadly chess game, and being a total whiny brat about it when things don't go his way. (Reminds me of someone who's in the news a lot these days...) Plus we have our third giant played by a Time Tunnel regular, this time John Zaremba (TTT's Dr. Swain) as the loony chess guy's personal physician (and/or psychiatrist) and chess opponent. Zaremba is his usual serious, sympathetic self, trying and failing to keep Kronig from going full supervillain and threatening the Little People's lives. Although there's an unexplained gap in the narrative where he initially refuses to be a part of mistreating the LP but then goes along with moving the pieces for them.

I guess it's no surprise they made Barry the best chess player, although I was hoping it'd turn out to be Dan or Valerie. Meanwhile, Betty's still stuck back in the ship as usual. I find it amusing that the Spindrift's human-sized computer room and Kronig's giant chess computer room both had one of those ubiquitous Burroughs B-205 consoles that were also found in the Batcave, the Jupiter 2, and countless other places in '60s sci-fi. Speaking of props, Kronig's chess pieces have to be pretty enormous in order to be scaled right for the Earthlings to be tied to them, but it's justified in that he had the chess table and pieces built specifically for this purpose.

Musically, this is an interesting episode, not only featuring a nice new Joseph Mullendore score, but debuting the second-season main title theme at last, after using the first-season theme on top of the new title sequence for the first few weeks. I like the new theme better than the old one.


The Time Tunnel: "The Kidnappers": Another sci-fi-themed episode, and man, they must've bought their silver spray paint in bulk. This is the third set of silver alien/time-traveler villains they've had, this time Canopians from the 9th millennium who kidnap Ann as bait to lure Tony and Doug to their place and time. Why not just kidnap Tony and Doug directly? Anyway, it's a nice novelty to have Ann participating in the main adventure with Tony and Doug, and there's the additional novelty of a teaser that T&D don't even appear in. But otherwise it's a pretty mediocre episode. It's just more running around in corridors dodging silver people, a lot like the last far-future episode they did, and the attempts at portraying the aliens' world and technology are pretty silly. "We have evolved beyond the need for roofs!" "We don't feed on Sunlight, but Canopian light! The principle is the same!" And I love the '60s idea of computer futurism -- they still program using cards with holes punched in them, but they're made of indestructible metal! And the aliens from 6000 years in the future use the same hole-punch programming language as 1968 Earth. And after our characters spend half the episode angsting over how they'll never be able to deduce the operation of the alien time teleporter, it turns out to be "Stand on the platform and hit the red button."

Also, while it was a nice touch to recognize that a day and night could be different lengths depending on how close they were to the planet's pole, it was silly just to leave all the guards standing there armed while they were dormant. The humans should've taken advantage of their dormancy to neutralize their threat -- disarm them, tie them up, pose them in comical positions, something.

And next week, it's more aliens. At least they aren't silver this time. All these format-breaking episodes in a row suggest that they'd lost faith in the show's core premise by this point. Just as well there are only two episodes to go.

 

Thanks.

 

I wonder if the show's premise would ever have worked in the long run. For how many seasons they could keep the audience interested in the story of two guys who everybody knew they would never return home (and considering that one season was composed of 30 episodes)?

Quantum Leap had a similar premise, but that show had a little more, I don't know, heart?

 

Remember, this was the '60s, when the standard was for adventure shows to be purely episodic with unchanging status quos. Nobody was looking for ongoing, evolving story arcs, except in soap operas. (Sure, TTT used "next episode" cliffhangers, but that was more to emulate the old theatrical cliffhanger serials than to suggest any kind of continuity.) The ideal was to establish a formula people liked and perpetuate it unchanged for as long as the show lasted. There were plenty of "quest" shows that ran for years with perpetual reset buttons -- The Fugitive, Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants -- heck, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was the only Irwin Allen series that wasn't about stranded characters perpetually failing to get home. And on any show where the main character had a secret, like a superhero show, they'd go for years without anyone new learning their identity -- as opposed to today's shows, where a superhero's secret identity generally becomes known to nearly all the main cast by the end of the first season.

What happened to TTT was pretty typical of Irwin Allen shows specifically, rather than representing any larger pattern. Land of the Giants went through the same process -- the second season became more and more dominated by way-out sci-fi ideas that drifted away from the core premise. It was just the nature of Allen shows to start out strong and then get lazy and slapdash. The shows became more uniformly weird-sci-fi both because the writers fell into a rut and because they liked to recycle ideas and scripts they'd used in earlier Allen shows.


What was Kolchak this week? Next in the sequence was "Horror in the Heights," but I want to make sure.

 

It was "Horror in the Heights."

I'd forgotten (if I ever knew) that that ep was written by Jimmy Sangster, who also wrote a lot of classic Hammer horror flicks.

 

Okay, then...

Kolchak: “Horror in the Heights”: A pretty good one, drawing on a demon from Hindu lore, and actually taking fewer liberties with the mythos than usual; rakshasas are indeed man-eaters with the power of illusion and shapeshifting, although not necessarily in the specific, restricted way shown here, which is very reminiscent of the Salt Vampire in Star Trek’s “The Man Trap” (right down to two different people seeing different illusions at the same time -- which, it occurred to me, would be the best way to identify a rakshasa, so hunting it alone was a bad idea). Interesting that it drew on the fact that swastikas were a Hindu symbol of good fortune long before the Nazis corrupted them.

This episode is unusual in that it actually gives us a chance to get to know the victims before they’re killed. Usually they just get a brief scene with Kolchak’s voiceover saying some quippy thing about how doomed they are, but here they get to have personalities. Kolchak even gets to know Phil Silvers’s character a bit before he buys it. I like the way that humanizes the victims and makes them more than just statistics.

The climax bugged me a little. The rakshasa’s illusions had all been silent, so I’d assumed that the way to tell them from a real person was whether they spoke. But then “Miss Emily” spoke to Carl at the climax, and she still turned out to be an illusion. They should’ve had the earlier ones speak so that red herring wouldn’t have been there. Anyway, I was expecting Emily to turn out to be the one Kolchak trusted, though it would’ve been more interesting if it had been Tony Vincenzo.

The rakshasa hunter is played by Abraham Sofaer, Star Trek’s Thasian and Melkot voice. He's playing a South Asian character, but he was actually of Middle Eastern ancestry, though born in Burma/Myanmar. And this was his final role.

 

The Incredible Hulk
"On the Line"--

In an area near Wake Forest (North Carolina), a man plants an incendiary device which sets off a large blaze near a region already ravaged by fires. At the firefighter's base station, recently rescued David Brown (barefoot and shirtless after an off-screen Hulk out) is not having much success getting the boss (Eric Wilson) to give him a lift out of the woods. Instead, Wilson reminds David of how grateful he should be, so the reluctant David ends up employed--ferrying injured workers and being the base chef.

While dispensing water to the firefighters, David is shocked to see a woman among the crew--

Randy Phelps: "You know, it doesn't matter how bad the fire is, I always get a reaction."
David: "I'm sorry. I was just surprised."
Randy: "What? To see a woman doing a man's work? It's okay. I'm used to it. My name's Phelps. Randy Phelps."
David: "David Brown."
Randy: "Are you new?"
David: "Yeah, I'm just helping out in the main tent, bringing water up to the line."
Randy: (sarcastically) "Oh, really? I'm just a little surprised to see a man doing woman's work."
David: "Well, I don't think helping out is necessarily a woman's work."
Randy: "Oh, well, then you're the exception to the rule, 'cause most men consider helping a woman's stock-in-trade. You know, she's got to be protecting and nurturing. She's got to be sensitive to the needs of others. (looking at the fire) Boy, this is really something. I tell you--I get something from fires I don't get from anywhere or anybody else. I guess to most people, that just makes me something less than a woman, huh? "
David: "I don't know. Maybe you're just the exception to the rule."
Randy: "Maybe I am."

Miles down the hill, McGee and Willard--a rival reporter--are prevented from entering the fire site; Willard's paper reported a sighting of the Hulk--who did not emerge from the forest as the creature or John Doe. McGee decides to gain access by pretending to be a volunteer...

Later, disgruntled firefighters rant about the threat of arson, and risk to his life, but Wilson blows off the risks as part of the job. Randy cannot imagine being anywhere else, feeling it was her lifelong calling.

Elsewhere, the mysterious arsonist strikes again, this time David (transporting the injured Mackie by jeep) spots the figure, who turns out to be Randy. As David tried to put out the fire, and a burning tree falls on Banner, triggering a Hulk out. The creature escapes and manages to pull the jeep and passenger to safety.

At base camp, David is confronted by Wilson, who half believes Mackie's stories--

Wilson: "You ain't talking at all and Mackie can't shut up about seeing you go over a hill that 10 seconds later was on fire. In fact, he's convinced you started those fires. But he's also ranting and raving about seeing a green man, so I think he got a little too much oxygen. At least that's what I'll try and convince the other men...and some nosy reporter I got camped outside."
David: "Ah, look...maybe it would just be better if I got out of here."
Wilson: "If you do that, I'll call the police. Just in case Mackie wasn't seeing things. My guess is, they'll find the man who's setting those fires, and you'll be off the hook. Besides, I still need an extra pair of hands."
David: "Have you ever stopped to consider that most of the men may not wanna work with someone they think is an arsonist?"
Wilson: "Seems to me hat a few dirty looks are preferable to spending time with a state trooper."

Randy approaches David, defending herself by (once again) talking about her life ling interest in what is considered the unfeminine profession of firefighting, but she's still an outsider considered "different" from the rest. That sentiment is shared by the hotheaded Weaver, who intends to prove David--another outsider--is the arsonist, a plan David understands all too well as Weaver sends him to shovel alongside Randy, the scatterbrained idea being David would be less likely to set fires if he was forced to suffer fighting them.

Randy fingers Wilson as the arsonist, but David is sidetracked by the presence of McGee, who nearly glances at David removing the scarf covering his face. Banner narrowly escapes to get help as Randy is called away to rescue a woman in the nearby Falls Lake campgrounds. David, Wilson & Weaver follow, but their path to Randy and the survivors is cut off by a wall of flame. Their only hope is to flood the area by destroying a nearby water tower, which requires explosives. Much to Weaver's shock, David forces Wilson to admit he's carrying explosives in his pockets. Weaver attacks Wilson, damaging the explosive's timing mechanism, leading Wilson to set off the charge manually--guaranteeing his death. David tries to stop Wilson, but is tackled by Weaver, causing both to tumble down a hill...triggering a Hulk out. The creature stops Wilson from detonating the charge, then uses a steel pipe to rupture the water tower, flooding the entire region where Randy was trapped.

With the fires out, and David ready to leave town, Randy mentions Wilson has been taken to some form of treatment, but understands (not supporting) how his thirst to be seen as a hero pushed him to keep the fires going via arson. Once again, Banner walks out of another town.

NOTES:

"On the Line" was the final episode of season three, originally airing on April 11, 1980. Only four months into the new decade, live action superhero adaptations on TV had been wiped from network schedules and serious consideration for production. With the exception of TIH, all other 1970s TV superheroes had been written off as childish, or not getting the ratings network bosses claimed they were looking for. After the relative failure of the D.O.A. Doctor Strange and two Captain America movies to launch a series, Marvel (specifically Jim Shooter) still thought about adapting various characters, such as the Human Torch, the Silver Surfer and Ant Man. Obviously, none would ever become a reality in the 1980s, which left The Incredible Hulk as the only true superhero series (Marvel or DC) in the game for some time to come. One cannot underestimate Kenneth Johnson's serious approach being the central reason for TIH's survival into the new decade, and certainly established the idea (barely followed in two and a half decades of superhero movies) that a comic adaptation could win an audience willing to accept material treated with maturity & respect.

This is not a cure related episode.

Shades of Irwin Allen! The stock footage of airplanes being prepped was too old to be seamlessly edited into TIH's scenes, considering the fact the airplane types and their function had nothing to do with extinguishing fires.

Last Near Miss McGee of the season during the "water" scene.

McGee the Immoral rears his head again, by pretending to help put out life-threatening fires...all just to capture the Hulk. Seasons 2 & 3 have painted a very dark portrait of the character.

Randy's "I'm different" stories were laid a bit thick. One might suspect that Harris & Sherman's character study meant to address something else, but did (or could) not.

GUEST CAST:

Kathleen Lloyd (Randy Phelps)--

• The Sixth Sense (ABC, 1972) - "The Eyes That Wouldn't Die" (series finale)
• The Car (Universal, 1977)
• It Lives Again (Warner Brothers, 1978) - sequel to It's Alive
• The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1986) - "Monsters!"
• Amazing Stories (NBC, 1986) - "Dorothy and Ben"
• The Craft (Columbia Pictures, 1996)
• Babylon 5 (PTEN, 1997) - "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars"

Don Reid (Eric Wilson)--

• The Magician (NBC, 1973) - "Pilot"
• Future Cop (ABC, 1977) - "The Kansas City Kid"

 

Meh. Not exactly the best MA band, but I don't hate them. Although I do want to punch J Geils in the nose for "Must Of Got Lost."

I like Linda Ronstadt, but this is not her best.

I have to admit, I love this song. I even had a character singing it in a story I wrote at the time.

The B-52s are great and this is a classic.

Could this be Michael Jackson's best song? Maybe. It's certainly a heartbreaker.

 

“On the Line”: Another season finale that’s just a routine episode. They’ve actually been fairly close to production order for the past few weeks, and this was the last episode shot before “Prometheus” at the conclusion of the third production block, but that 2-parter was postponed to be the season 4 premiere instead. Anyway, a decent but unremarkable story about fighting a forest fire. No surprise that David gets suspected of starting the fires, but it’s kind of refreshing that the suspicious jerk’s retaliation is just “Make him fight the fire along with us” instead of “Beat him up and throw him somewhere out of sight.” Kathleen Lloyd is appealing as the female firefighter, though it’s so quaint now to watch a story where a woman in a lifesaving profession was still treated as an anomaly that needed to be discussed and defended. Of course it was a good thing that the statement was made back when it needed to be, but now that the battle’s been largely won, it’s not as interesting to revisit the debate.

Cute touch with David and McGee inadvertently fighting the fire next to each other, but as excuses to get them in the same place wearing masks goes, it was anticlimactic after “Equinox.” There, McGee was as relentless as the Terminator; here he was more take-it-or-leave-it, giving up when the going got too tough. I guess we could rationalize that his conversation with “John Doe” in “Equinox” has given him some doubts about the legitimacy of his pursuit, but that’s pure conjecture.

This episode is one of only three directorial credits for actor L.Q. Jones, who played the title character in “Jake” earlier in the season. The others were a 1964 indie Western called The Devil’s Bedroom and the 1975 film adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s post-apocalyptic tale A Boy and His Dog. And I wonder if maybe his lack of TV-directing experience explains something: There are two sequences, the one with McGee and the fellow reporter at the beginning and the farewell scene with David and Randy at the end, where the close-ups of the two actors are just optical close-ups on portions of the wider two-shot master take (you can tell by their grainy quality and by the identical camera angle). That suggests that the director failed to shoot adequate coverage for the scenes (i.e. alternate angles and close-ups that the editor could choose among), so that they had to fake close-ups using optical zooms. It’s not an uncommon technique in Universal shows of the era, but it’s kind of cheap-looking.

 

I beliveve it was early to keep the finger pointing confusion going on, otherwise, process of elimination would easily point to the most unlikely suspect--Wilson.

Im surprised he did not use that on a regular basis, as that name is so perfectly common that it blends into the background..just what a fugitive would want in a name.

Agreed--Banner coming into the story after a recent Hulk-out adds to his troubled life, though the "no memory of how he got there" bit happened a couple of times early on, but the series sort of abandoned that as they allowed Banner to remember more of his experiences as the Hulk.

The homeless are often blamed for just about anything, so its not surprising to see Banner accused of arson.

Overall, a character living through two forest fires within a year's time sends the retread meter in the red zone..and yeah, McGee says hi to injured Mackie...

Ohh, the memory of endless rolls of quarters dumped into that dastardly, soul-sucking Pac Man machine...

Very upbeat leap into the new decade from Paul, and still proving that he still held the title of Most Musically Versatile Ex-Beatle.

May 1980--aside from all three songs being a last gasp of quality (to varying degrees) for each, and played everywhere that month and well into the summer, you could not go anywhere without people discussing a movie--The Empire Strikes Back--before its release and certainly after. In southern California, I was there for the opening day (5/21), and it was a great experience rarely been matched for an event film--ground zero of Star Wars at the height of its cultural impact.

 

Same here. Very common tomboy behavior, if not laid a little thick to prove a point for the story.

We're talking about TIH--not CW/DC series.

Working on that....

So far, that's pretty short list, and that's a good thing.

 

I was camped out on the sidewalk in front of the UA 150 theater in downtown Seattle with pretty much my entire college science fiction club, whom had taken a road trip just to see the movie.

 

I don't doubt it. That song kills me, especially with headphones.

Hulkie says, "Only you can prevent forest fires."

Funny how this character has the same name as one of the Beatles.

Frank Sinatra singing. People, the emperor has no clothes!

This is a beautiful song. Possibly the last such that Elton John ever did.

This was a good song and quite timely. It was weird to me at the time listening to people complain about the very things that were rejuvenating music.

I love 70s Olivia Newton-John. I don't love 80s Olivia Newton-John.

Not their best, but decent.

Now, in contrast to the grindhouse comedy of "Ride Like The Wind," I cannot stand this one.

Not their best, but not bad. They're past their prime, undoubtedly, but they'll do better, briefly, later in the 80s.

Meh. Another artist past her prime.

Did Queen ever do anything that wasn't good? I don't think so.

A good song, if strangely mainstream. But what could match the weirdness of their first album?

Ah, the good old days when we used to eagerly await new comics every month.

At that point, I still hadn't seen Star Wars, because the previews and everything else I had seen about it looked so bad-- I was baffled by its phenomenal success. But my best friend dragged me off to see ESB-- and I loved it. I soon tracked down a video of the original (I don't remember if it was bootleg or if it was actually available then), thinking that I must have been wrong. But, no, I wasn't.