Nope. It was my home air conditioning system that occupied my time while it was being replaced. Took a few hours after work, so my Hulk review (which was 70% complete by the time the installation was underway) had to wait a bit.
MeTV's SuperSci-Fi Saturday Night
- Thread starter JD
- Start date
Nope. It was my home air conditioning system that occupied my time while it was being replaced. Took a few hours after work, so my Hulk review (which was 70% complete by the time the installation was underway) had to wait a bit.
I don't get the impression that this was a backdoor pilot...just a one-off, formula-bending gimmick.
Yeah, just a pastiche of hard-boiled detective stories -- a genre where the detective's sardonic first-person narration was one of the defining tropes.
BTW:
There was no confirmation, but it certainly felt like it had the makings of a backdoor pilot. Mitchell carried more of the load than your average guest star, and his story did not necessarily end with the Romero affair. Moreover, since the Chandler-esque format was so hard wired here, it would have flowed in its own series without the square peg in round hole feeling of this episode.
This is the kind of episode that is hard to revisit, despite Cameron Mitchell's strong performance.
Land of the Giants: "Comeback" is ironically the title of the last LotG episode MeTV will be showing, though I plan to keep reviewing the remaining 12 episodes anyway.
So this one has John Carradine playing the giant equivalent of John Carradine, a once-great horror-movie actor named Egor Crull, who's now washed up and captures four of the Little People as his gimmick to make a comeback, with Jesse White as Manfred, the villainous low-budget producer who's willing to put the LP in danger for the sake of his movie. It's a reasonably fun premise, but it makes no damn sense. I know Roger Corman sometimes put together a whole movie in a matter of weeks, maybe even days, but we're supposed to believe that Manfred was able to set up and start shooting a movie in a matter of an hour or two, without a script or any kind of larger plan, and with Egor as the only giant cast member. Also, that he happened to already have a bunch of miniature sets and props in exactly the right scale for the LP -- which seems to defeat the purpose anyway. If the point is to wow audiences with the use of actual Little People to achieve images that couldn't be achieved without impossibly expensive special effects, then shouldn't the story prioritize interaction between them and giant people/environments? If they're mostly on sets in their own scale, audiences would just assume they were normal-sized giants being filmed from the rafters. The fact that every scene was shot by only one camera, with no alternate angles or coverage, wouldn't have helped much.
What's more, Manfred tries to set up the Little People to unknowingly kill Egor for real when he makes trouble -- and it's the first scene Egor has actually appeared in! Was he planning a Plan 9 from Outer Space thing where the rest of the movie would be some random guy doubling Egor with his cape in front of his face? Also, Steve shoved the giant gun barrel to the left from Egor's POV, yet the diverted bullet grazed Egor's right arm. That means the bullet would've totally missed him anyway, and Steve made things worse.
Moreover, the episode ends with Egor stopping Manfred and saving the LP, but Egor's own career is still just as complete a failure as it was before, his comeback scheme has failed, and there's nothing to say that he won't just go right back to the bridge he was planning to jump off of at the beginning. They could've put in a few lines to address that concern, but they didn't even bother.
One nice touch is one of the season's few original music scores, with Alexander Courage providing a score that evokes classic silent-movie music.
So this one has John Carradine playing the giant equivalent of John Carradine, a once-great horror-movie actor named Egor Crull, who's now washed up and captures four of the Little People as his gimmick to make a comeback, with Jesse White as Manfred, the villainous low-budget producer who's willing to put the LP in danger for the sake of his movie. It's a reasonably fun premise, but it makes no damn sense. I know Roger Corman sometimes put together a whole movie in a matter of weeks, maybe even days, but we're supposed to believe that Manfred was able to set up and start shooting a movie in a matter of an hour or two, without a script or any kind of larger plan, and with Egor as the only giant cast member. Also, that he happened to already have a bunch of miniature sets and props in exactly the right scale for the LP -- which seems to defeat the purpose anyway. If the point is to wow audiences with the use of actual Little People to achieve images that couldn't be achieved without impossibly expensive special effects, then shouldn't the story prioritize interaction between them and giant people/environments? If they're mostly on sets in their own scale, audiences would just assume they were normal-sized giants being filmed from the rafters. The fact that every scene was shot by only one camera, with no alternate angles or coverage, wouldn't have helped much.
What's more, Manfred tries to set up the Little People to unknowingly kill Egor for real when he makes trouble -- and it's the first scene Egor has actually appeared in! Was he planning a Plan 9 from Outer Space thing where the rest of the movie would be some random guy doubling Egor with his cape in front of his face? Also, Steve shoved the giant gun barrel to the left from Egor's POV, yet the diverted bullet grazed Egor's right arm. That means the bullet would've totally missed him anyway, and Steve made things worse.
Moreover, the episode ends with Egor stopping Manfred and saving the LP, but Egor's own career is still just as complete a failure as it was before, his comeback scheme has failed, and there's nothing to say that he won't just go right back to the bridge he was planning to jump off of at the beginning. They could've put in a few lines to address that concern, but they didn't even bother.
One nice touch is one of the season's few original music scores, with Alexander Courage providing a score that evokes classic silent-movie music.
Do you know if Donna Anderson/Marshall played the older woman that was made into a vampire by Yorga in Count Yorga, Vampire?
"Comeback"--a very low point from LOTG's second season; it appears TV producers only thought to use / trade on the aged John Carradine as a parody of his horror movie actor status; The Green Hornet did this over two years earlier in "Alias the Scarf", while The Munsters had him make several appearances as Mr. Gateman, Herman's creepy boss at the funeral home. It comes off like filler.
As I recall, Carradine also popped up as an aging horror star on an episode of McCloud.
Donna Anderson/Marshall was..."Donna" in Count Yorga, Vampire, the lead female. The only older vampire was Donna's mother (Marsha Jordan), vampirzed by Yorga off camera, but fully appearing in the last quarter of the film.
And, of course, Mariette Hartley, who starred in "The Bride of the Incredible Hulk," also played the female lead in "The Return of Count Yorga."
It's a Unified Field Theory!
Thanks for the info. I wouldn't mind seing a remake which focuses partially on Donna's mother being vamped, with her being played by somebody like Glenn Close or Sharon Stone.
Didn't these older show do a lot of these kinds of gimmick episodes, without them always being backdoor pilots? It would take a lot more than just the different format to make me think this was actually intended to be one.
I think that the whole point of doing an episode like this was to have fun playing with a hackneyed old genre that everyone knew. Because it was a hackneyed old genre that everyone knew, it didn't really have any potential as a series pitch.
Sure, but TIH was not new to exploring backdoor pilots; season two's "Another Path" and its sequel, "The Disciple" (intended to springboard Rick Springfield's character into his own series) also placed Banner in situations out of the norm with the guest's character getting the lion's share of exploration. That made me think "Goodbye, Eddie Cain" could have been another attempt. Again, no official confirmation, but it seemed like familiar territory in the way it was handled.
...but who would be the new Yorga? Robert Quarry made that role his own almost more than any other actor taking on a vampire role.
Shoot, I went and forgot TIH was starting on H&I today. I'm not planning to record it, but today I could have put it on for shits and giggles.
There are plety of actors who could play Yorga quile well, I'll bet.
Remaking YORGA would be tricky, because what made the original fresh and different back in the 1970s--transplanting a traditional vampire to modern-day America, with a certain degree of dry wit and self-awareness--is practically its own subgenre now. And its once-shocking twist ending (which literally gave me nightmares as a kid) is pretty much par for the course these days.
In a post-BUFFY, post-TRUE BLOOD, post-VAMPIRE DIARIES world, I'm not sure how you distinguish YORGA from any other snarky, contemporary bloodsucker.
In a post-BUFFY, post-TRUE BLOOD, post-VAMPIRE DIARIES world, I'm not sure how you distinguish YORGA from any other snarky, contemporary bloodsucker.
Not airing on MeTV this week:
The Incredible Hulk
"King of the Beach"
Originally aired February 6, 1981
Events in the news in the weeks since the previous episode:
New on the charts in those weeks:
"Aint Even Done with the Night," John Cougar
(#17 US; #44 Rock)
"Rapture," Blondie
(#1 US the weeks of Mar. 28 and Apr. 4; #1 Dance; #33 R&B; #35 Rock; #5 UK)
"Once in a Lifetime," Talking Heads
(#103 US; #20 Dance; #14 UK)
"Don't Stand So Close to Me," The Police
(#10 US; #11 Rock; #1 UK)
"While You See a Chance," Steve Winwood
(#7 US; #17 AC; #2 Rock; #45 UK)
_______
The Incredible Hulk
"King of the Beach"
Originally aired February 6, 1981
Back when they cared MeTV said:
Events in the news in the weeks since the previous episode:
New on the charts in those weeks:
"Aint Even Done with the Night," John Cougar
(#17 US; #44 Rock)
"Rapture," Blondie
(#1 US the weeks of Mar. 28 and Apr. 4; #1 Dance; #33 R&B; #35 Rock; #5 UK)
"Once in a Lifetime," Talking Heads
(#103 US; #20 Dance; #14 UK)
"Don't Stand So Close to Me," The Police
(#10 US; #11 Rock; #1 UK)
"While You See a Chance," Steve Winwood
(#7 US; #17 AC; #2 Rock; #45 UK)
_______
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