We Are Controlling Transmission

Your Quick Reference Guide to WACT

2011-04-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

Welcome to We Are Controlling Transmission! While we've finished our 49-episode marathon viewing and reviewing an episode of The Outer Limits a day, we hope you'll come along for the ride after the fact and post your comments on the episodes as you make your way through the series. While you can access all of the entries in the Blog Archive in the sidebar, we thought it would be helpful to provide this index with links to each of the episode reviews, spotlights, season and series wrap-ups, all of the interviews we conducted, and the other special features posted.

The We Are Controlling Transmission (WACT) Crew (L-R): Peter Enfantino, David J. Schow, John Scoleri

An Introduction to We Are Controlling Transmission
David J. Schow's Season 1 Primer
David J. Schow's Season 2 Primer
Season 1 Wrap Up
Season 2 and Series Wrap Up

Season 1 Episode Reviews

"The Galaxy Being" Review - Spotlight
"The Borderland" Review - Spotlight
"The Human Factor" Review - Spotlight
"Tourist Attraction" Review
"The Architects of Fear" Review - Spotlight
"Controlled Experiment" Review
"The Hundred Days of the Dragon" Review
"The Man with the Power" Review - Spotlight
"A Feasibility Study" Review - Spotlight
"Specimen: Unknown" Review - Spotlight
"The Sixth Finger" Review - Spotlight
"The Man Who Was Never Born" Review - Spotlight
"Moonstone" Review
"O.B.I.T." Review - Spotlight
"Nightmare" Review - Spotlight
"Corpus Earthling" Review - Spotlight
"The Zanti Misfits" Review - Spotlight
"It Crawled Out of the Woodwork" Review - Spotlight
"The Mice" Review
"The Invisibles" Review - Spotlight
"ZZZZZ" Review - Spotlight
"Don't Open Till Doomsday" Review - Spotlight
"The Bellero Shield" Review - Spotlight
"The Children of Spider County" Review - Spotlight
"The Mutant" Review - Spotlight
"Second Chance" Review - Spotlight
"Fun and Games" Review - Spotlight
"The Guests" Review - Spotlight
"Production and Decay of Strange Particles" Review - Spotlight - Second Spotlight
"The Special One" Review
"The Chameleon" Review - Spotlight
"The Forms of Things Unknown" Review - Spotlight

Season 2 Episode Reviews

"Cold Hands, Warm Heart" Review - Spotlight
"Soldier" Review - Spotlight
"The Invisible Enemy" Review - Spotlight
"Counterweight" Review - Spotlight
"Behold, Eck!" Review
"Wolf 359" Review - Spotlight
"Keeper of the Purple Twilight" Review
"Expanding Human" Review - Spotlight
"Demon with a Glass Hand" Review - Spotlight
"Cry of Silence" Review - Spotlight
"I, Robot" Review
"The Inheritors – Part 1 and 2" Review - Spotlight
"The Duplicate Man" Review - Spotlight
"The Brain of Colonel Barham" Review - Spotlight
"The Premonition" Review
"The Probe" Review - Spotlight

Interviews in The Outer Limits Tavern

Additional Special Features

And please be sure to bookmark our next blog, To the Batpoles!, in which we turn our attention to the 1960s Batman.

Sandkings

2011-04-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Production Order: 01

Broadcast Order: 01

Original Airdate: 3/26/1995

Starring: Beau Bridges, Lloyd Bridges, Dylan Bridges.

Written by Melinda Snodgrass, based on the novella by George R. R. Martin.

Directed by Stuart Gillard.

Simon Kress (Bridges) is an obsessed scientist who sacrifices his family and his life to propagate a species of—brace yourself—ant-like Martian life forms.

JS: Talk about under-promising and over-delivering! It's no wonder the new Outer Limits went on to last seven seasons and 154 episodes. They kicked things off with their own take on "The Zanti Misfits." And just like that episode, there's no disclaimer indicating that none were harmed in the making of the episode.

PE: My first question would have to be: "why was this series so dismissed by the original OL crowd?" Not once during the initial series was I so enthralled by such a smorgasbord of evil delights. Yellow puddles of fright formed around my feet yet I found myself so entranced by and drawn into the drama that I could not rise from my bean bag chair to clean myself. I've read Martin's original story and it was a little too highfalutin' for my tastes (too many of those big sci-fi words) but Snodgrass seems to have found that middle ground between genius and stupidity. I'm in awe.

JS: This episode brings together three generations of Bridges; the always hilarious Lloyd, his grandson Dylan, and his other son Beau. Seeing them all together reminds me what an amazing talent Jeff is.

PE: Actually, John, if you squint, Lloyd is Jeff! Take Beau's silly pony tail and Lloyd's persnicketyness and you've got Bad Blake. Maggie Gyllenhall makes a rare uncredited appearance as one of the sand kings.

JS: It's not hard to believe that Beau was nominated for an Emmy for his performance. Not since Tony Randall in The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao has a single actor portrayed so many varied roles. From the way he tears apart a head of lettuce, makes himself up to look like Fu Manchu, and auditions for the Val Kilmer role in the TV movie on the making of Oliver Stone's The Doors, he's at the top of his form. Yet none of that prepares us for his performance as a sand sculpture.

PE: I'm sorry, I'm still thinking about Maggie Gyllenhall. That's Val Kilmer? Looks like Gyllenhall.

JS: I really enjoyed the Martian death-match. These guys are far more realistic than the inarticulate Zanti puppets of years past. And the sand towers are pretty cool (when they don't look like Beau Bridges). If you look closely, you can even see the little Anti-Misfits scaling the walls of the sand-skyscrapers in the closing shot.

PE: Old-OL fans are so fucking uptight. Get a life, ferchrissakes, I says. This series blows away that dinosaur. And it's in color!!! I thought, given that Projects Limited had $47 per episode to spend on spfx, they did an admirable job of making tumbleweeds and frogs scary. This incarnation of OL obviously had quite a bit more to blow on their little creatures and Land of the Lost sets. I'm really looking forward to discovering new territories and reaching out to new OL fans (especially ones who can appreciate my wit).

JS: The episode falls short of perfection in that it's lacking an OL-babe, but future episodes will rectify that. Alyssa Milano here we come!

PE: Actually, John, if the subsequent stories are just as compelling, I don't need babes. I really do appreciate David J. Schow for changing his views on this show and urging us to cover it after all. Kudos to you, DJS! I'm looking forward to the next 14 months!!!

JS RATING:

PE RATING:

David J. Schow on "Sandkings":

From The Outer Limits Companion, Copyright © David J. Schow, 1986, 1998. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission and by special arrangement with the author.

Coming soon:

Next Up...

You didn't think we were serious, did you? A very happy April 1st to you all!

Special Thetan Ray Blasts!

2011-03-18T00:26:00.000-07:00

It's time for the We Are Controlling Transmission honor roll recognizing our own little band of Zanti Misfits.

The following artists put aside their work, deadlines, crossword puzzles, and pottery to help make WACT the definitive statement on The Outer Limits, for which we are extremely grateful.

Larry Blamire

Matthew R. Bradley

Wayne Carter

Matthew J. Dewan

Peter Farris

Christa Faust

Jeffrey Frentzen

Gary Gerani

David Holcomb

Mark Holcomb

David Horne

William Lenihan III

Steve Mitchell

John Kenneth Muir

Mark Philips

Larry Rapchak

Ted C. Rypel

Tom Weaver
and
The Cult of Flat Zanti

We also have to thank the hundreds of readers who made a point to stop by the site every day. When you take on a project like this, it's a huge inspiration to know that there are people anxiously awaiting that next post you're working on.

Last, and definitely not least, we all bow down before the master of the WACT treehouse, David J. Schow. DJS shepherded this nuttiness from the very beginning. Without his dedication and regular contributions (both in the posts you saw and his tremendous behind the scenes efforts), WACT would not have been anywhere near the success it turned out to be. So thanks again, David.

We hope that our small contribution to the legacy of The Outer Limits will continue to attract new fans and instigate further discussion for years to come.

Your Misfit Hosts,

John Scoleri & Peter Enfantino

Ted C. Rypel Presents: An Interview with Joseph Stefano

2011-03-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

By popular demand, we bring you Ted Rypel's interview with Joseph Stefano from TOLAIR!

Special Thanks to Ted Rypel for sharing this with the WACT family.

The Outer Limits - The Wrap-Up

2011-03-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

Here we are, at the end of our 49 episode journey. Unlike Season One, it wasn't easy coming up with a "Top Ten" list for Season Two. In fact, we're taking advantage of the fact that it was essentially a half-season, and narrowing it down to our top 5 picks. (Any more and we may just have to pick from the tripe. -PE)

Our Season 2 Top Five Lists

Peter's Picks:

The Inheritors
Cry of Silence
Expanding Human
Soldier
The Invisible Enemy (and see! I did have to scrape the bottom-PE)

John's Picks:

Soldier
Demon With A Glass Hand
The Inheritors
Cry of Silence
The Invisible Enemy

Season 2 Best Actor

Peter's Pick: Steve Ihnat "The Inheritors"

John's Pick: Lloyd Nolan "Soldier"

Season 2 Best Actress

Peter's Pick: None

John's Pick: Arlene Martel "Demon With A Glass Hand"

Season 2 Best Babe

Peter and John's Pick: Marriana Hill

Season 2 Best Bear

Peter and John's Pick: The Sand Sharks "The Invisible Enemy"

Our Picks for the Best of The Outer Limits

Top 10 Outer Limits episodes

Peter's Picks:

The Man Who Was Never Born
Architects of Fear
Corpus Earthling
The Inheritors
The Sixth Finger
The Special One
The Zanti Misfits
The Forms of Things Unknown
It Crawled Out of the Woodwork
The Hundred Days of the Dragon

John's Picks:

Soldier
Corpus Earthling
Demon With a Glass Hand
The Architects of Fear
Tourist Attraction
The Zanti Misfits
The Man who Was Never Born
The Sixth Finger
Inheritors
The Invisibles

Best Actor

Peter's Pick: Robert Culp "Architects of Fear"

John's Pick: Lloyd Nolan "Soldier"

Best Actress

Peter's Pick: Salome Jens "Corpus Earthling"

John's Pick: Vera Miles "The Forms of Things Unknown"

Best Babe

Peter and John's Pick: Mariana Hill

Best Bear

Peter and John's Pick: The Zanti Misfits (was there any doubt?)

We've pleased to report that we've had more than 50,000 hits on the site since we started.

Your Top Ten Visited Episodes are:

Architects of Fear
The Galaxy Being
The Invisibles
It Crawled Out of the Woodwork
Demon with a Glass Hand
Behold! Eck
Soldier
The Invisible Enemy
The Forms of Things Unknown
The Inheritors

We look forward to hearing your picks, so bring on the comments!

Creating the Original OUTER LIMITS Trading Cards

2011-03-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

Gary Gerani chats with 1964 Topps writer/editor Len Brown…

INTRODUCTION

It’s amazing. To this day, there are still some fans who mistake the colorful, ‘50s-flavored storylines written for the 1964 OUTER LIMITS bubblegum cards for the actual teleplays (“You mean there wasn’t a ‘Jelly Creature”?). This unforgettable 50-subject product was an outrageous, delightful hybrid of colorized bears from the TV series (the actual name of this set is MONSTERS FROM OUTER LIMITS) matched with far-out original stories on the backs by a certain fellow named Len Brown.

The original '64 box and wrap: Chill Charlie (never actually used in the TV show) became MFOL's front man.

Serial buff, comics fan, rockabilly rebel (with a radio show to prove it), Len Brown is like a beloved big brother to me. As Creative Director of the Topps Chewing Gum Company, he hired Yours Truly back in 1972 as an “idea man,” and even helped me sell FANTASTIC TELEVISION to Crown a few years after that. But in ’64, he was best known for his involvement with Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R AGENTS comics, and as the guy who wrote the copy for Topps’ infamous MARS ATTACKS! cards two years earlier. Getting THE OUTER LIMITS set off to a typically disrespectful start, Topps didn’t even want to be associated with another “space invader” product (MARS had been controversial without being commercial), so it released MONSTERS FROM OUTER LIMITS under the alternate company name “Bubbles Inc.” Nothing personal, OL!

Anyway. I reconnected with Len recently – he now lives in Dripping Springs, Texas – and he offered to polish up his “rusty” brain for some MFOL-related questions, just for this blog. So, here goes…

GG: Len, it’s funny to be discussing THE OUTER LIMITS with you after all these years.

LB: Seems like yesterday, almost.

GG: Len and I used to have rather spirited “STAR TREK vs. OUTER LIMITS” battles in the Topps office.

LB: Well I have to admit, the original STAR TREK with William Shatner hasn’t aged very well.

GG: Neither has Shatner. He’s beginning to look more and more like Jabba the Hutt every day. Let’s talk about the birth and development of MFOL. Licensing was very different back in the early ‘60s. Although OL was a United Artists TV show for ABC, I’ll bet a smaller outfit handled the merchandising.

LB: That’s right. I forget the name of the company who handled the whole thing. There were two partners who represented the property, and they had a small licensing company in Hollywood. I went out there (Topps was based in Brooklyn at the time) and met with Al Schmittman. I forget the partner’s name. I seem to recall it was Schmittman who also introduced me to Mary Tyler Moore on the set of THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW, as he was showing me around the lot. I believe we had already done some business with A.S. when he told us about THE OUTER LIMITS.

GG: Who was it at Topps that decided OL was a strong enough property for the company? Were you and (Senior Creative Developer) Woody Gelman pushing to do the show BEFORE it even went on the air?

LB: The thing that got Woody and I interested was that Schmittman promised a different monster in every episode. Since we had success with monsters in the past (FUNNY MONSTERS, UNIVERSAL MONSTERS), we were very interested in securing a license for THE OUTER LIMITS. The show was not on the air and I believe I flew to California to look at the photos they could supply us with. They had very little color photography, so I believe we accepted their black and white stills and had them painted. United Artists had even less. I think we used every picture they had.

Here's a page from Topps' long-defunct archives; cards from all series were literally pasted into loose-leaf books.

GG: Who came up with the idea to do the set in “color”?

LB: I don’t know who or why we came up with the idea of colorizing the photos, except there was a general feeling that kids would enjoy full color cards more than they would black and white pictures.

GG: I’m assuming veteran Topps art director Ben Solomon was involved.

LB: As you know, Ben always liked to have his re-toucher go over photos to improve the quality for reproduction. In the case of OUTER LIMITS, I guess that would have been Ray Hammond.

GG: I remember Ray – a grouchy-looking guy who was actually very nice. And for the record, both Ben Solomon and Woody Gelman used to work on the old Fleischer POPEYE and SUPERMAN cartoons of the 1940s. Often in a meeting, I’d notice Ben doing a Popeye doodle when he got bored.

LB: That’s right. They both worked on those cartoons. They even got credit.

GG: Back to OUTER LIMITS… Let’s talk about the text.

LB: I seem to think we originally thought we could automatically adapt the actual storylines from the TV series, but before we went to press, we were told that the writers of the scripts would want a piece of the action, which Topps couldn’t afford. So that’s why we came up with those ludicrous stories to describe the front of the cards.

GG: Listen, they have their own special charm! My favorite is “The Brainless Glob,” your version of Joe Stefano’s “Don’t Open Till Doomsday.” When I showed Joe the card, he joked that he preferred your storyline to his own.

LB: My God, how embarrassing for us. This is the screenwriter of PSYCHO, and we re-wrote his story in such a ridiculous way.

GG: Did you write the entire set, or did Woody pitch in?

LB: Woody might have read a few of the card backs, but I pretty much had the freedom to write ‘em all. Of course, we had to send the copy to California for approval, and since they wouldn’t let us use the stuff from the TV series in story form, they just quickly approved the silly stuff I wrote, without any changes.

GG: How did the set sell?

LB: When we first tested OUTER LIMITS in stores, it only sold fair. But I seem to recall that ultimately, it was looked back as a successful item. Initial orders seemed slow, but one day Woody came in looking very happy, and he said that the item had sold about 13,000 cases. Anything over 10,000 in the early ‘60s was considered a nice hit. So we never regretted having issued OUTER LIMITS cards.

GG: You’re a huge sci-fi fan. What were your favorite episodes of the show itself?

LB: I remember really loving “The Galaxy Being.” That was Cliff Robertson, wasn’t it? Always a fan of his. One of my favorite OUTER LIMITS episodes was the Adam Link one (I, ROBOT). It had previously been adapted for comics by EC in the 1950s, and there was nothing I loved more than WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY comics back then. In fact, I still do. I was buying the hardcover reprints and was heartbroken when they stopped in the middle of reprinting the books. I understand they are still hoping to continue someday…

GG: You and I used to have all kinds of fun OUTER LIMITS debates back in the ‘70s, when I was writing about the series. I remember walking into my office and seeing a black and white photo of all the creatures from the kiddie show, SIGMUND AND THE SEA MONSTERS, sitting on my desk. Written below this photo, in grease pencil, was the description “OUTER LIMITS MONSTERS.”

LB: God, I forgot about that.

GG: You also said the Zanti Misfits had “Sterling Holloway faces.”

LB: I don’t remember equating the Zanti Misfits to Sterling Holloway, but I trust I did. I know you really liked that episode. To me, it was just “talking ants” and I didn’t care for it.

GG: Not a problem. We used to spar over the “talking rocks” episode (“Corpus Earthling”), as well. I even stayed over your house in Piscataway NJ one weekend, so I could watch that particular show during a telecast on Channel 48 from Philadelphia.

LB: I remember. We also used to watch Jack Benny reruns on Channel 29.

GG: Absolutely! They hadn’t shown them on NY TV for years. And I couldn’t pull in the Philly stations from Brooklyn, not without a parabolic antenna. This is all wonderful memory lane stuff for me, Len. Thanks so much for the look-back.

LB: My pleasure, Mr. G. Yes, they were the good old days. The ‘60s were especially sweet. Elvis was still alive and recording #1 hits. And I was in my 20s… Ahhh! Hope some of these memories helped…

SUMMING UP:

There were two additional, officially licensed OUTER LIMITS trading card sets that appeared decades later. I edited/wrote one of these for Comic Images in the mid-‘90s. This set provided all the unit photography (b/w and color) from the original TV series, a Season One Episode Guide at last, along with a handful of Topps ’64 reprints… complete with my explanation of the altered storylines.

(click cards to enlarge)

A few years after this set hit the market, Rittenhouse jumped in with their own incarnation. They focused on a half-dozen or so episodes with fan-friendly actors; frame grabs and autographs (Shatner, Nimoy, etc.) were the selling points this time around. But to most pop historians, it’s the 1964 Bubbles Inc./Topps version that resonates to this day. They were indeed a significant part of the original OUTER LIMITS experience, and I for one was delighted to collect them as a kid – bogus storylines and all.

The Birth of "Fantastic Television"

2011-03-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

By Gary Gerani

A number of fans have asked about the “origin” of my trade paperback FANTASTIC TELEVISION, which was published back in 1977 by Harmony Books (a division of Crown Publishing). The earliest inspiration for FT started a full ten years earlier. Like most horror movie fans of the 1960s, I cherished Forry’s FAMOUS MONSTERS mag and the occasional issue of Calvin Beck’s CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN; these commercial publications kept our interest in fantasy cinema going during the cold years and provided, on occasion, some worthwhile coverage and criticism.

But it wasn’t until 1967 and Carlos Clarens’ AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE HORROR FILMS that everything in this specialized field seemed to evolve. This was the first honest-to-God BOOK about my favorite, mostly mistreated movie genre, putting the entire horror-science fiction-fantasy thing in perspective with intelligence and taste, while legitimatizing “cinefantastique” as a popular art form. So there I was, sitting on the floor with my 19” portable b/w TV on the rolling cart behind me, nose buried in Clarens’ groundbreaking work (a hardcover edition, purchased at 34th street’s Bookmasters), held by his smart words and cool photos. And sure enough, there was that life-changing statement staring right at me, in the foreword on page xv: “This rapport between spectator and spectacle is nonexistent in viewing television and, not gainsaying the relative excellence of THE OUTER LIMITS, THE ELEVENTH HOUR, or THE TWILIGHT ZONE, for this reason the mapping of that already considerable territory belongs elsewhere.”

Somehow, in some way, I knew then and there that I was destined to become “the mapper.”

In my late teens and early twenties, I wrote quite a bit for magazines, newspapers, fanzines, whatever venue happened to be available. One of my regular haunts was THE MONSTER TIMES, a bi-weekly tabloid published by Brill and Waldstein, who had designed FM in its later years. My first job for TMT was impersonating the Creature from the Black Lagoon in a fictional “autobiography” for their Issue #6 cover story. When STAR TREK’s syndicated revival hit big, I proposed a “special TV sci-fi issue” that would enable them to jump on the TREK bandwagon without paying a cent to Paramount, since other shows would be overviewed as well. First and foremost in my thoughts was THE OUTER LIMITS, which I felt was ready for a major pop cultural re-evaluation, the show being a darker, “thinking man’s” ST – and with outrageously photogenic creatures that appealed to profit-minded publishers. “Yeah! Yeah! Space monsters!” I can remember Larry Brill wailing. Yep, that’s what they were. And they sure helped me sell a number of OL articles back in the day.

So, a rough – VERY rough – prototype of FANTASTIC TELEVISION was born in 1973:

A few years later I used the above publication to convince Crown I could deliver a quality book on the same subject. I called it FANTASTIC TELEVISION, which was an outgrowth of an earlier title I’d been toying with, THE FANTASTIC ON TELEVISION. Crown was also anxious to profit from STAR TREK’s syndie resurgence, and that photograph/artifact collection of mine was pretty darned impressive. So, after a meeting arranged by my great friend Len Brown (who had just co-edited a Maxfield Parrish poster book for Harmony), we quickly made a deal. Eureka! Then again, as that tired old cliché goes, watch out what you wish for…

In no time, I became totally overwhelmed by this massive, seemingly endless project. Dealing with all the photos and a dozen or essays was bad enough, but those lousy episode guides! It was murder getting all that information, a hell of my own making. Sometimes I’d have to travel to obscure cities to pull credits off the screen during local telecasts. Harmony eventually brought Paul H. Schulman in to help me get the project finished – Paul was a psychiatrist-in-training, which puts the entire experience in perspective. I remember getting very, very annoyed when the promised color section was pulled at the last minute, and I was never nuts about designer Ken Sansone’s nonstop silhouetting. Still, my original concept for the book was pretty much followed: I wanted a SCREEN WORLD-like approach to the episode listings, with at least three small photos within TV tube shapes across the upper portion of the page. “Fine Tuning,” “The Full Picture,” the TV-movies and Kid Stuff sections, all were almost exactly as I planned them in a rough prototype I submitted on Day One.

Ultimately, FANTASTIC TELEVISION fared well for me at the bookstores and with most mainstream critics. It did, of course, have the built-in advantage of being the first tome on this colorful subject, which at least made it novel. Guess I’ll always be touched when a fan tells me how much he enjoyed tearing through a dog-eared copy way back when. Lord, that’s exactly how I felt about Clarens’ book: a very special, uniquely personal relationship that’s kind of hard to explain. Guess FT was mostly a case of me saying, “Stand up and be counted, true believers. We love these fantastic shows, and they’ve been ignored and misjudged for far too long. Let’s REVEL in all aspects of them, together!”

Yes, Virginia, there IS (or was) a hardcover edition of FANTASTIC TELEVISION. They were pretty rare, but did get into the marketplace.

The book bounced around for a number of years, then resurfaced in England during the early ‘90s with this fanciful cover (front and back). Pretty wild.

Will FANTASTIC TELEVISION ever return? A few years ago I would have said, “no way!,” but now… My publishing company Fantastic Press (I’m partnered with IDW) was actually created to capture the original FT essence, but with a 21st Century edge, providing a series of brand new trade paperbacks dealing with films, television, and the popular arts. Perhaps, coming full circle, I’ll re-visit the very specific genre that got me started in the book business 35 years ago. TOP 100 FANTASTIC TELEVISION SHOWS? Why the hell not!

Steve Chorney’s cover for TOP 100 SCI-FI MOVIES, from Fantastic Press, available in bookstores and on the web in late April/early May.

It's not over yet!

2011-03-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, perhaps just a little bit longer. Far be it for us to leave any OL stones unturned.

We've got a special Gary Gerani double-header on tap for today.

First up, at 8am, discover the origins of Gary's oft-discussed seminal work, Fantastic Television!

Then be sure to check back at 2pm this afternoon for his much anticipated write-up on the classic Topps Monsters of the Outer Limits trading cards.

We'll be back with our Series wrap-up article tomorrow!

Spotlight on "The Probe" and a Eulogy

2011-03-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

by Ted Rypel

Last Will and Testament

So it falls to me to be the last one out the door. Turn out the laser lights, flatline the sine wave—the party’s over. Here on the WACT blog, I get to do the final episode Spotlight—more like a footlight, a waning ember. Due to circumstances for which I have only myself to blame, I must be the out-of-Control Voice to convey the bad news:

O.B.I.T. And not the good first-season kind.

If you haven’t yet been to Mark and David Holcomb’s insightful, pioneering “OUTER LIMITS GUIDE” website, please do yourself a favor and head there directly. Their long-standing site offers splendid essays on only their consensus favorite episodes. But these are essential to a well-rounded sampling of the show’s best analyses. In the “Critical Guide to OL” section, their mission statement, Mark and David issue the following challenge:

“What, after all, is there to say about ‘The Probe’?”

“The Probe”

Well, Holcomb Brothers, in truth—touche: there’s not much to say of a salutary nature. Can we say that the story reads like Saturday morning juvie-SF fare? That the props and backdrop flats look pasted together with gaffer’s tape and ready to bequeath to the LAND OF THE GIANTS set? That the overall impression of the episode is like that daydream of your junior-high chemistry set come to life, manned by puppet people?

All those observations may apply. And they’re not salutary, to be sure. But even more somber is the fact that, however poor an episode it was, whatever insult it added to the injured covenant of artful SF/fantasy the show had once promised, it was still the Last Episode of THE OUTER LIMITS. There would be no more. Like that once precious pet that had to be put down because it was beyond recovery (maybe in this case, hit by a car driven by a network nabob), you had to mourn it in its sad, degenerative last stage of existence. It would never again amaze you with its acrobatic capering. It could only lie there—a drag on your emotional life, where once upon a time it had enhanced that life.

Now, there was something all wrong, something unjust, about seeing it on its last legs…

“The Probe” kicks off with a model plane flying through a staged hurricane—humorously engaging stuff that at least seems to promise dynamic movement, interesting direction. But then Peggy Ann Garner’s Mandy stands carefree under a stack of heavy crates in a bucking plane—uh-oh. The plane goes down in a fuming fog that supplies its own eerie noises (shades of Luminos!). And at once some bad acting under directionless directing by Felix Feist sets in. The life raft survivors, plainly unsold on Seeleg Lester’s swan-song script (from Sam Neuman’s idea), cast their eyes about hollowly and hold uncertain poses. Groping, perhaps, for an appropriate Stefano-esque dark psychological insight. Or even a simple emotion or motivation.

The downed crew’s raft runs aground on a “plastic” floor (at least they admitted it; but did James Cameron rip this off for THE ABYSS…hmmm?). “Je-HOSAPHAT!” Pilot Coberly (Ron Hayes) sensibly exclaims as their clothes are thoughtfully dried by a laundry mist. A snow-and-ice light beam freezes Dexter (William Stevens), who does his best “Chill Charlie” impression for a bit before being whisked away. The beam then does double duty as a scalpel that slices off a chunk of the raft: “Cold light?” We feel the chill—but not from any hopes for an eerie episode; rather, we’re catapulted back to “The Galaxy Being” and his milieu of “frozen static.” Ah, retrospect!

We’re introduced to clunky stage props that look to be suited to a kiddie-park fun-lab amusement. And then “Mikie” the Oversized Microbe makes his entrance, via the manipulations of Janos Prohaska inside of a sort of Luminoid pseudopod. We can’t make heads, tails or appendages out of it. We’re not sure what part grabs the thawed-out Dex and…does something to him that makes him disappear until the end. Or the unseen giant aliens do? It’s all in there somewhere.

Around this time the script cries, “No money!” as they discuss the plane crash that we’d have liked to see. And now begin the litany of unlikely suppositions that tell us what we’re supposed to be witnessing. Mandy stares with wide-eyed vapidity and Coberly strikes “What next?” stances as Mark Richman’s Jefferson Rome confidently spouts hyper-intuitive bullshit. He “recognizes” strange sounds and ID’s alien systems and machinery and gives us all a sure-footed guided tour of a complete anomaly that he blithely interprets as an alien scientific exploration probe: “I’ve never seen a telemetry system before…some part of it might be like this.”

Indeed. Well, we had seen THE OUTER LIMITS before, and NO part of it was much like this.

Possibly the best visual in the episode—a forced-perspective composite of live and miniature portions of the lab set, with the humans very small on the right—is compromised by the pronounced bouncing matte of the miniature’s lower right edge. Jeff Rome keeps helpfully explaining alien processes for us. Harry Lubin’s harp-and-strings “exploring” cue, along with his mock-Herrmann punctuations, establishes that Mikie is an ongoing menace.

Lots of phony blocking and stage movement ensue, as the humans stand around and engage in “What’ll we do?” chatter and the strangely reticent Mikie sporadically lurches at them with either his head or his butt. We see a display of cuneiform symbology that leads to nothing.

If there’s a L-OL moment that surges from the pack for special attention, it might be the scene of Mikie amorously attacking the raft before having a piece of itself sliced off. This grows into a second unconvincing threat.

Now the crew resort to the “map room,” for more fatuous guesswork and determined speculation about the probe’s agenda and itinerary. They “reason” that Venus must be its next destination. Terrible chunks of expository SF claptrap are tossed off here. Flashing lights are meant to dazzle our imaginations as Rome and Mandy determine that they’re dealing with “lights in four or five dimensions…we’ve just communicated with something!” Too bad it wasn’t the viewer.

Rome trips and is cuddled by Mikie before being easily pulled free. In pondering the microbe’s “deadly” attacks, they reason that flashing overhead lights are an “obvious” code directing them into THIS ISLAND EARTH tubes, where they’re sprayed, ostensibly with Mikie-repellent. Despite this, the wriggling microbe remains a tripping hazard, now feeling no more terrifying than skates on a sidewalk. And how can they tell they’ve been sprayed with something intended to protect them? “Take a whiff,” says Rome. They smell something. So do we.

Despite more “instant communication” babble from Rome, they’re clearly not getting through to their exploratory hosts. And now “motors” and “humming sounds” are muscling up for that speculated jaunt to Venus. Coberly plies their useless radio, while Rome and Mandy take yet another crack at the map room light-and-lever display.

You had to love, in the earnest ‘50s SF films, when someone would wrinkle their brow and invoke “Einstein’s equation.” And their interlocutor would pipe in, “Yes…of course—let’s see…E…equals MC2, right?” As if they’d not only just worked out the equation themselves but also somehow thereby reasoned a solution to the problem at hand. TOL was usually beyond such specious “knowledge”-dropping. But there it is—the advanced law of relativity with which Jeff and Mandy propose to communicate to the alien monitor, though it flashes a “one-two, one-two” code that forces Rome to admit, “I don’t get it!”

The all-purpose fog engulfs Coberly so that we can’t see what’s not happening to him. The increased “humming” sound the others react to cues us to ramp up our auto-suspense engines. Then Rome goes after Coberly and also gets befogged. And at this point we reach the reveal of the climactic solution that had escaped them all this time.

Cuneiform and mathematical equations and flashing codes all have their place, but for sheer grab-‘em-by-the-antennae communicational clarity, nothing beats good old human hysterics. Lubin’s ONE STEP BEYOND theme underscores Mandy’s impassioned soliloquy—in earnestly pleading colloquial English—begging the aliens to set them free before the probe takes off.

At first it appears she might have done no more than annoy them: the fog advances and she gets shafted—probed—light-beamed with a new ray. Then—deliverance! They’re all reunited on the raft, everyone from the plane crash alive and babbling about how they were directed out by the same light beam. A seaplane rescues them.

In the denouement they blankly watch the probe-—a Toho-style twirly craft, possibly rejected from THE MYSTERIANS—as it’s destroyed in a kaleidoscopic explosion of sparkles to keep it from contaminating any other worlds. Mandy’s coda—“I’d like to think we’d be as smart”—comes too late. The episode was already in the can.

In looking back on my assessment of “The Probe” in Fantastic Films #5, I see that I was generous enough to call this one “occasionally gripping.” Whoa. Maybe “gripping” in the sense of grasping at straws. But what I was probably airing here, in 1978, was a flashback to my profound sense of disappointment in January 1965; my forced withdrawal from THE OUTER LIMITS, a show that had become so important to me as a kid. There was a youthful sense of “Oh, well—it was turning kind of crappy anyway” amongst my early TOL brethren, I recall. A notion that the show had betrayed its compact, abandoned that promise of creepiness we had come to embrace.

But there was no comfort in the cold fact, in the dead of that Midwestern winter, that the Great Bear had gone to final slumber, that on every Saturday night hence, only Jackie Gleason would be sending us “to the moon.” Yet never beyond.

Eulogy…unto ∞ Infinity ∞

We didn’t have to kill the messenger. It was broadcast to us D.O.A.

The love affair that had begun with “The Galaxy Being”–with “cool night air, cool music, and the cool lips of Gene ‘Buddy’ Maxwell on your fevered brow”–had ended with us being “Probed” by aliens. From “Please Stand By” to “Please Go Away.” The sine wave had turned to “solid static.” The headliners had engaged our passions, but by the end we were tuning in to a cool-down act: Ladies and gentlemen, the Stones have left the building. Now enjoy the timeless stylings of…the Standells?

So for a while we had intuited that we were observing a quiet death-watch, I think, though the news of the show’s cancellation arrived to the public abruptly. For the kids in my demographic, anyway, there were plenty of distractions to court our insatiable lust for pop culture. The Beatles and the British Invasion diverted many of us into musical aspirations. But if our ingrained taste for SF and fantasy grew with us, we were never far from the scene, and there was plenty of output in books and movies to capture our enthusiasm. If we had creative ambitions, we kept writing and drawing and filmmaking. We weathered Viet Nam and young adulthood and then formed nuclear families that absorbed some of our weird interests in their DNA, thus preserving our pernicious species.

Life went on, creative input poured into us from myriad sources, and the future overtook us. But we never forgot THE OUTER LIMITS. On the contrary, we shouted its praises from any dais that would grudgingly concede us space and time.

And then one day, like a time capsule, the WACT blog opened up, impelled by a combination of David J. Schow’s unflagging drive and John Scoleri and Peter Enfantino’s energetic curiosity about our fan culture; about how we’d respond to a new generation’s views of one of our sacred cows, and of how we’d defend our allegiance against cooler, time-altering assessment.

While not transforming the “listeners” into Thetans, or inducing the world to grow a sixth finger, I think we’ve acquitted ourselves pretty well in our own defense. And as a legacy we leave behind the forever viable WACT blog, an eloquent testament to our passion for this landmark TV series. We’ve sung the justifiable praises of Joseph Stefano and Leslie Stevens and a magnificent host of talented players before and behind the camera. Thanks to John and Peter, we have our Bifrost, our Trembling Way, which will remain open as a monumental archive to a show that could not only aspire to but also attain towering genius, at its best.

Go to David J. Schow’s Outer Limits Companion—much of which is thankfully reproduced here—for the wonderful “Beyond the Outer Limits” section that continues the career arcs of some of these esteemed production folks. Access and support the suggested sites on this blog’s menu, such as “The Holcombs’ OUTER LIMITS GUIDE.”

May the WACT blog stay active enough to forestall the tumbleweeds.

Don’t Close Till Doomsday.

And the episodes—keep watching the episodes—

As the Andromedan reminded us: “Microwaves…go on…to infinity.”

≈ END OF TRANSMISSION ≈

Ted Rypel is the author of the GONJI series of adventure-fantasy novels. He has also written about THE OUTER LIMITS for Fantastic Films magazine and in his own late-‘70s fanzine The Outer Limits: An Illustrated Review.

SPOTLIGHT ON: “THE PROBE”

2011-03-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

NOT!

by Davd J. Schow

Just like on the DVD sets, “The Probe” is stranded here on a Monday, isolated, bereft and foresworn. On disc, given the unwieldy mathematics of distributing 17 episodes over six disc sides, “The Probe” wound up all by its lonesome on Side Six … as if anyone would really make the effort to flip the disc over to witness this sad little death-fart of The Outer Limits.

As Brady assistant B. Ritchie Payne told me, “there are some episodes you would not want to spend a lonely evening looking at,” and “The Probe” richly fulfills this compact.

Besides, it’s the last episode, and WACT followers are already bailing … ditching this final class, because, who’s gonna know? It’s painful to admit that the best performance in this show is by a sweating Hungarian in a silver suit that looks like a big pile of rubber throwup.

JS & PE were not looking forward to doing “An Episode of The King Family-a-Day!” Feel their pain.

“The Probe” retains the science-fictional ability to stretch time. If you don’t believe that, just take a look, and feel your life ebbing away. What a far cry from “Nightmare,” also shot on nearly naked soundstages. How long ago that seems, now.

And the final Control Voice speech holds a lingering wisp of melancholy, yet it is hopeful, suggesting that the spark of The Outer Limits would not be stamped completely out. And it wasn’t. Perversely enough, for stations “stripping” the show in syndication, the idea suggested by the final CV speech would be fulfilled the very next week, when “The Galaxy Being” came around again on the rotation.

Regardless, “The Probe” brought some joy into my existence, as it allowed me to meet and hang out with the wonderful William (Bill) Boyett, whom I had always cherished as the snarky alien sports-car enthusiast and metalhead in The Hidden: “I want this car. I need the keys.”

“Thank you. ‘Bye.” Kaboom!

Check back later today for Ted Rypel's Spotlight on "The Probe."

The Probe

2011-03-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Production Order #17

Broadcast Order #17

Original Airdate: 01/16/65

Starring Mark Richman, Peggy Ann Garner, Ron Hayes.

Written by Seeleg Lester, story by Sam Neuman.
Directed by Felix E. Feist.

A flight crew ditches their aircraft after flying into the eye of a hurricane. They finds themselves in their life raft on board an unmanned Venus space probe. If they can avoid being eaten by Turdo's Venusian cousins, they might just figure out the key to a way out of this puzzle.

JS: Take away "The Galaxy Being" and you've got Mark Richman book-ending the series with episodes of similar caliber. Unfortunately, that is not a good thing.

PE: What a long strange trip it's been. We begin our final journey with a harrowing flight into the eye of a hurricane. Not a trip I'd like to take in a model airplane. I would have liked to have seen the crash that left the crew unbattered and unbleeding. Instead we get a "kill the action" scene later where three of the stars stand around and recount the awe and mystery of the crash landing into the sea. May I remind those of you out there who have never experienced being lost at sea that the safest thing to do when you're in a raft in the middle of the Pacific is to remain seated and not stand straight up.

JS: For anyone who did not appreciate the preceding episode's air force stock footage extravaganza, now you can see the alternative. I kept waiting for the 'pilot's' hand holding the wing of the model plane to enter the shot. I loved how that despite the wild ride the puppeteer had the plane on, the crew seemed to be enjoying the smoothest ride into a hurricane of their lives.

PE: Cobley seems genuinely perplexed that the raft is actually not on water but in a pup tent. "I can't understand it," he shrugs as if trying to figure out why his car won't start. But the artificial fog being pumped into the tent finally gets his attention: "Jeeee-Hoshaphat!"

JS: I want to know what happened to the "Jumpin..."?

PE: L-OL dialogue (after the crew has been "misted,"):

Rome: Okay, it's gone

Coberly: What's gone?

Rome: Whatever it was. It doesn't seem to have any effect though, does it?

Amanda (excitedly): Except I'm dry! Isn't that funny?

(a general chorus of "Yep, that's funny" and "Hey, I'm dry too!")

Amanda: What was it?

Coberly: A fog. A mist of some kind.

Rome (obviously stunned): With a drying action.

JS: And thus begins the, "I've got a crazy theory, and by golly, it happens to be true" development of the plot.

PE: I love the part when Dexter climbs in the raft to investigate the "cold light," realizes it's producing ice and then stays in the ray until he becomes a popsicle. That's what I'd do. The others stand to the side and shout warnings rather than coming to the aid of the dope.

JS: Think of the potential savings and increased production value had they hung onto the Chill Charlie prop.

PE: Cobley's exchange with Dexter is a hoot:

Rome: Dex, can you move your fingers now?

Dexter: They're st-st-st-starting to tingle. And my toes! (shouts) And my ears hurt!

Cobley: Another second or two in there and you woulda just froze to death.

Dexter: What made it do it? What made it freeze up so fast?

Cobley (points to the tower): That first light beam.

Dexter: Whole light?

Cobley: That wasn't all. You shoulda seen that second light beam come down and slice that raft in two like a knife (gestures cutting with a knife). And another light beam lift...lifted up that pipe and put it up in that hole there!

I wasn't sure if Cobley was explaining this to Dex or to us.

JS: I hope Dex, because I didn't buy it.

PE: And as we see the giant fake rubber vomit "scurry" across the floor towards Dex, there's my favorite rip-off music cue "The Children of the Hydra's Teeth." I can almost anticipate when this bit of music will come up now. Same goes for that rotten harp theme. Interesting that when the Vomit absorbed Dex, he spit out his jacket but not the rest of his clothes.

JS: The jacket clearly wasn't his size. I feel sorry for the poor bastard who had to climb into that ridiculous cousin-of-Turdo bear suit.

PE: L-OL dialogue abounds!

When we first get to see the "Incredible Shrinking Man" lab, a discussion between Rome, Cobley, and Amanda goes something like this:

Cobley (pointing at the piece of raft we all saw cut like a knife and sucked through the big hole near the ceiling): How did it get here? (Here I had to rewatch the scene where Cobley actually explains to Dex what happened to the raft in the first place just in case I was missing something)

Rome (obviously a hell of a lot smarter than Cobley): Maybe through the center post there (points up to where there might be a big sucking hole near the ceiling). Where the machinery is. And those light beams.

Amanda: But what for?

Rome: I think maybe to test it (how he deduced this, I'm still trying to figger out)

Amanda: To test it for what? Who's doing the testing? Where is everybody?

Rome (now pay attention here): The results of the testing...would be sent back...to where everybody might be!

Cobley (puts his hand on Rome's shoulder): Jeff, have you got some kind of theory about all this?

Rome: I'm getting one.

JS: I'm getting one, too. I think that if this Venus probe was exploded over the Eastern Seaboard and it rained down radioactive particles... we might just have the makings of a zombie apocalypse.

PE: A whole lot of wild deductions based on little to no information follows. Rome is either the smartest man ever born or he's full of shit but doesn't want the others to know:

Rome: That mist is a staining solution. The same as we do with microscope slides. This entire set-up is a gigantic testing station created by alien beings from the planet Xenon. Right now they're monitoring our breathing patterns in anticipation of invading Earth because Xenon's women are infertile and can no longer bear children. The bastards! I'm on to them! Here, Cobley, help me detach this bio-convertor. I can fashion a nuclear device and have us back home by supper. POLARITY REVERSE!!

JS: Had you been older than two, it sounds like you could have landed a job writing for Season 2.

PE: I'm finally (after 49 episodes) detecting a pattern: When in doubt (or when in debt) film a show where the cast does nothing much more than walk from one room to the next and talk talk talk. You can vary this formula when needed (example: film an episode where a couple runs from a car to a military base twenty times). And, when in doubt, use hieroglyphics to impress or amuse your audience.

JS: Had they only realized they had stumbled across the Venusian equivalent of an Indian casino. They might have won a few bucks playing Keno.

PE: Peggy Ann Garner has a "deer in the headlights" look about her all through the show. Understandable since she's in a stressful situation but most humans blink their eyes now and then. Her emotional soliloquy at the climax (wherein she spouts questions to an unseen force) brought to mind the great Hawaiian vacation episode of The Brady Bunch where Marsha questions the Tiki pole about boys at school and acne (At least they got Vincent Price. -JS). Amanda does get to christen our vomit "Mikey." Not a very regal name for an alien being. "I Defeated Mikey, the Vomit from Space" doesn't have the necessary ring to it, does it?

JS: Give the raft to Mikey. He won't eat it. He hates everything. Hey wait—he likes it! Hey Mikey! No really, Mikey... get off the raft... that's disgusting...

PE: Who knew that a scene of Alien Vomit humping the remains of a raft would be an effective shot? I do like the baby Krispy Kreme donut that dislodges from its side. As Amanda says a few times too many "It's fantastic!"

JS: Yes. When Cousin of Turdo isn't enough, we bring you—Turdito, the alien apple fritter!

PE: Richman has the same intense delivery he milked in "The Borderland" but, to be fair, he's given the same kind of crappy dialogue. And lots of it. He does grit his teeth and spout "We need to be understood!!" with fiery abandon.

JS: And oddly enough, his commitment to this role is one of the few points that makes this episode bearable (just like "The Borderland"). Did anyone happen to check his hands this time out? I was disappointed that amongst his monologues, he never quite got around to saying, "To be... or not to be..."

PE: And for sheer suspense, you can't beat when Copley and Rome are debating whether to make a run for the door before "Mikey" can get them, all while "Mikey" is sitting right in front of them. Copley makes an NBA juke to fake out "Mikey," and Rome and Amanda are able to run past. The choreography on this shot alone must have taxed the multi-hundred dollar budget. The rest of the budget was spent on that explosive climax. I'm fairly sure the spfx for the self-destruction of the spaceship was achieved by positioning a camera inside an oven as Projects Limited baked cupcakes.

JS: Again, condolences to the poor sap stuck inside that latex hell.

PE: Best scene would have to be the dry-cleaning of Amanda, Rome and Copley (I would have preferred Amanda in a t-shirt though). Giant beakers rise out of the floor, surrounding the trio (and do they coincidentally walk right to the spots or would the beakers grow around them no matter where they are?), bathing them with jets of water and then drying them with a heavenly mist ("Not bad," proclaims Amanda, "Not a famous French perfume, but not bad!"). The scene's eccentricity almost cries out "this is all a dream" (yeah, I know, the rest of it is pretty wacky as well) and cements the show for me, as the perfect companion piece to "Cry of Silence." I'd roll this one at one of my wild parties anytime. Absolute proof that Hollywood writers were using psychedelics long before the hippies were.

JS: Now that you mention it, what that scene needed was a little Strawberry Alarm Clock "Incense and Peppermints" with our three principles dancing in their respective tubes.

PE: Purists who still have "Gwyllim for President" posters or "Demon with a Glass Hand" action figures will cry "Oh, the humanity!" at the thought that this was the last trace of The Outer Limits on ABC in 1965. I look at it a different way. Though it was probably not its intent, "The Probe" made me laugh out loud and shout "What the fuck" several times at my TV set. Sometimes entertainment just needs to get your mind off tsunamis and foreclosures, no? I'd say "The Probe" is one of the more entertaining episodes I've seen this season.

To which, I'm sure, you'd say "'The Probe', my ass!"

JS RATING:

PE RATING:

David J. Schow on "The Probe" (Click on pages to enlarge):

While soaring above the Earth's greenery
Coberly found himself void of Earth scenery.
    Once eluding a fog,
    They played tag with a glob
In a probe-ship straight outta penury.

Its rooms were quite spotless and cleanest
As the probe, it ascended toward Venus.
    The cast declared, as they must,
    "When best eps discussed,
You know, for a fact, they won't mean us."

(Tim Lucas)

Be sure to come back later this morning for our last special Spotlight on "The Probe."

Next Up... Our Series Wrap-Up!

In The Outer Limits Tavern with David J. Schow

2011-03-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

THE OUTER LIMITS TAVERN:

David J. Schow
To The Outer Limits... and Beyond!

JDS: Peter and I showed up at the Outer Limits Tavern for Wet Megasoid Night, and made it past the weird looking guy at the bar fondling a coat hanger to find David in his private booth in the back (you won't be surprised to hear there's a plaque with his initials on the edge of the table). It's hot in L.A., so he's jettisoned the usual black leather and is nattily attired in big khaki shorts, a red Gingham short-sleeve, and waffle-stompers. We invited ourselves to sit down and cornered him with an endless parade of questions, some of which he agreed to answer on the record.

DJS: This is the last time I let Pete dress me. He forgot the novelty hat. To paraphrase Herzog, I loathe the feeling of air on my legs.

JS: According to the jacket flap copy on The Kill Riff, you were born in Marburg, Germany on July 13, 1955, and adopted by a US couple living in England.

DJS: See, that’s the fucking problem: When you’re starting in publishing and they ask for a bio and you don’t make it fascinating enough, they fill the gaps with statistics. Too late, you learn to leave all the boring minutiae off the capsule-bio, but by then the original has multiplied like a biowar toxin, infecting everything that comes later. Everyone has fantasized about what they’d say in an interview; how they’d answer those teen-magazine “likes and dislikes” lists, and now everybody is doing that via Facebook, and the drawback is that lists tend to “concretize” your personality into categories that come nowhere near expressing that personality.

(DJS drains a Long Island Iced Tea and sighs the sigh of the damned, eyeing the exits. Pregnant silence.)

(John casually slips the teen magazine “likes and dislikes” questionnaire to the bottom of his stack of notes.)

(Pete begins to think this interview may turn out to be the equivalent of a Season Two episode)

JS: So what was home life like for little Davey Schow?

DJS: Okay, biography: I was a disgustingly happy kid until my mother died (age 7), which left me not sad so much as bewildered. I had to roll with that, my father’s grief, and my even more bewildered little brother, John, who luckily was so young that Mom’s death didn’t dent him as hard. Dad married a waitress (realizing a fantasy many people have had, I guess), and my life slid down into hell for the next ten formative years.

Later I discovered how badly my Dad’s situation had imploded. We went from having a huge house and lots of stuff to basically fleeing cross-country with a single carload of goods. I had an army of every toy robot ever made — Robot Commando, King Zor, Big Loo. All jettisoned. We went from having a typical 1960s “TV room” to having no TV at all. Even our pets got abandoned.

JS: At what point did your family return to the US?

Right after we hit California.
You have to guess which one is DJS.

DJS: We moved to Fort Worth, Texas before I kindergartened. Then Lexington and Paris, Kentucky for grades 1-3. People say, oh, military brat, but we didn’t start really moving around until after my Dad retired from the Air Force. Then it was off to Huntington Beach, California, where (because of the enrollment schedule) I stayed out of school for nearly a year prior to taking on the fourth grade.

So the year after my Mom died was the year Outer Limits premiered, and I was glued to that pilot, sitting six inches from the screen.

JS: Was there anything that set the stage for your embracing The Outer Limits as a precocious 8 year old? And most importantly, did it precede your exposure to The Creature From the Black Lagoon, or did the Gillman come first? Inquiring minds want to know!

DJS: I actually met the Mummy (Kharis version) first. I do remember sitting and watching TV when JFK’s assassination was announced. Weekends brought late-night reruns of Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents back-to-back, usually followed by a couple of monster movies, which followed through on Saturday.

Tim and Donna Lucas know that I was within reception range of Batty Hattie from Cincinatti, a witch-puppet monster host, and there was another local show I recall that did weekly horrors of the Shock Theatre package variety. I remember the theme song but not the host, and no, I will not hum it for you.

Upon arriving in Southern California, we eventually acquired an ancient, used TV in a cabinet the size of a refrigerator. It had a round screen, “O.B.I.T.”-style (I wish I still had that TV!). Turned it on and voila — the Million Dollar Movie, which that week was showing Gigantis: The Fire Monster a zillion times.

Here’s some background that’s not particularly relevant: We continued to move around constantly even within the same town, so that from the fifth grade through high school, I was never with the same group of people for more than a year. I had to turn inward and become self-reliant. “Family dinners” were an extremely rare occurrence in our house, and they never went well. By age 13, I had basically been written off as a bad egg and potential career criminal, but the anticipated “big fall” never happened. I had already started writing. My Dad brought back a Hermes portable typewriter from his Arctic duties and I basically kidnapped it. Stepmom even had me writing stern complaint letters to businesses and such because I worded them better. Aha — a skill!

We made it to Southern California just in time to collide headlong with the mid-Sixties culture-shift. One house we had was right next door to a place full of, um, interesting-looking people who had tie-dyed curtains, a zebra-striped van, and colored lightbulbs on the back porch instead of ordinary, sensible white lightbulbs. In the rental cottage behind them (parallel to our back yard) lived an older woman who made her own bizarre jewelry, read palms, wore outrageous, billowy, Wiccan-caftan kinda things, and drove a golf cart.

I thought: Hey, these people are doing what they want and they seem just fine.

With the coming of Stepmom, we acquired an older stepbrother — Leo, who at sixteen became the de facto “male presence” in the house, since by then Dad was spending most of the year in the Arctic on the DEWLine. Before he scored that gig, we were so broke we made our own toys out of cardboard — a much-maligned medium I still depend on today.

When I turned thirteen, the house filled up with women — the 22-year-old ex-wife of one of Stepmom’s other sons (who was doing prison time), her five-year-old daughter, and Stepmom’s final spawn, a 13-year-old teenage girl. Gasp. Such elaborate underwear had never been suspected! The good news was that the 13-year-old girl was such a delinquent that it took heat and eyes off me. Between age 17 and 18, I finally bailed.

JS: So would this be the point in time when you decided to let your hair down?

DJS: During all that time I became an ace shoplifter, got suspended for wearing an upside-down American flag on the back of my jacket, and nearly packed off to (1) Boys Town, (2) military school, and (3) a minimum-security prison. Last official haircut: 1972. I wanted to be a roadie for a rock band.

JS: Were your passions shared by any of your siblings? Or like so many of us were you the only one in the house bitten by the obsessive bug?

DJS: That brings me back to Leo. I can’t credit the man enough for influence and encouragement. He was into drawing and building things. Wiring up a TV so you could turn it on from the other side of the room, before remotes. Thanks to him I took a two-hour drafting lab in high school and got my first set of drafting tools — he bought me a T-square and a drawing board, and I swiped the compasses and such from the high school. I got to observe as he lived through the purgatory of his own high school mating rituals. He got me started building models. Leo eventually became an electrical engineer, so the credit is his, too, for getting me interested in electronics. My first application of this knowledge was to open up a TV set and figure out how to run wires from the speaker, splice them to a jack, and plug that into a tape recorder so I could make audio tapes of monster movies and yeah, Outer Limits episodes. With two decks, you could edit. But he was the perfect guy to ask, “If I wanted a thing to do this, how would you do it?” He always had an answer. But his interests were always practical, not fanciful — on the order of trade skills.

Plus, he put up with a ton of shit from me.

JS: You can't tell me there's not a mimeographed DJS TOL fanzine from the early sixties somewhere in your files. Do you have some skeleton in your closet you're prepared to share with your newfound cadre of fellow TOL enthusiasts?

DJS: Sure, just like Gene Simmons with CosmoStiletto, I wanted to replicate monster magazines … so I hand-drew them on notebook paper. The title of this endeavor shall remain a lost mystery. Having no access to or awareness of duplication resources, I figured if I wanted more than one copy, I’d have to draw it again — which I did. Every issue was hand-made. I made it to about five copies and then gave up. It was invaluable prep for a lifetime of drafting and redrafting. But I think, at the time, it was more a mirror of monster mags in general than The Outer Limits in particular.

JS: What did your Dad and siblings think of what you ended up doing for a career? Did they see it coming, or did you surprise them all?

DJS: Ultimately, yeah. At first, no. “Whatever I did” was not comprehensible to them as an actual “job.” That is, there was no proof that I didn’t just print stuff up myself or was otherwise faking it. There was no proof I actually earned money by making stuff up. It was too fanciful. Then I got to go to New York for the first-and-only Twilight Zone Magazine Dimension Awards. The awards ceremony got covered in USA Today, which showed up in my Dad’s mailbox all by itself. Independent verification!

But I also purposefully dropped out of touch with most of my family for the next two decades. I recently reconnected with Leo, after not seeing him for about thirty years. It’s better now than it was then.

JS: We're fortunate that your biography continues to fill in (see “Bloodstock” for some history on the college years in Arizona, and your sit down with Frentzen for the CFQ-era).

DJS: Yeah, but that skips the pertinent fact that I’m a college dropout. Long story.

JS: But going back further, did you know from your initial exposure that The Outer Limits was going to be a part of your life moving forward? Assuming there wasn't a long dormant period before you woke up one day and decided to take on the role of championing the series, when did you first start digging into your deeper research of the show? Or did you get clipped in the brain by a meteorite infused bullet that compelled you to search out Stefano and Stevens?

DJS: I think I ate the alien bullet because I can’t pinpoint when the “research gene” suddenly activated. You start amassing data, and after awhile the urge strikes to do something with it. There were a few episode guides floating around, and I started typing up my own lists — with no resources whatsoever. The list became a file, then several, then a drawer.

Then KZAZ Channel 11 in Tucson started a syndication run of the series, once a week, at 1:00 AM. I remember the clear sense of being presented with some kind of opportunity.

Two things happened right away:

Thanks to a buddy I got to go down to KZAZ and saw the actual film, on actual reels, unspooling on a telecine for broadcast. Next week’s episode was sitting right there on a shelf. Suddenly it wasn’t all just airwaves and antennae; this was tactile and present and real.

And right outta the clear blue, I decided to call Joe Stefano on the phone. It wasn’t even my phone; it was my landlady’s. She raised show greyhounds and let them shit all over her house. And Joe not only answered, but he talked to me for two hours, a complete stranger who had no idea I was sweating bullets amidst the eye-watering stench of dogshit, trying to figure out how to perpetuate this magical contact for another five minutes.

Simultaneously to this, Ted Bohus started making internegative dupes available on 16mm, and two friends both acquired early Betamax machines. A buddy at the University of Arizona campus theatre taught me to run projectors. There turned out to be an enormous enclave of private collectors in Tucson and Phoenix — people who were just in love with movies, and collected 35mm prints of anything and everything. They introduced me to the semi-private collectors market at about the same time I began to encounter people who actually worked on movies at film festivals and conventions. The snowball was rolling.

This all happened near the timeframe of “Bloodstock,” 1977-78.

PE: Approximately how many times have you seen these shows?

DJS: Hang on, Salome Jens is going to do her dance routine.

(Salome wiggles into the spotlight and gyrates around. It does not distract Pete from the thrust of his inquiry.)

PE: Ahem. Over here. We repeat: How many times have you seen these shows?

DJS: Dozens. Hundreds. Each. Remember when I was first writing about the series, I had no videotapes, nothing. I did have a complete library of audio tapes of the episodes, and I played them constantly as background. When I finally did get video (apart from syndicated reruns), I watched the episodes repeatedly. I’d watch for one “value” — music, say, or tracking a single actor — then watch again for a different value. In a Fahrenheit 451 sense, I could probably recite a lot of them, pretty much verbatim.

PE: So which is your favorite? Yeah, I'm putting you on the spot. You've gotta answer.

DJS: Personal favorite, “Nightmare.” Favorite for repeat watchability, “Fun and Games.” Favorite in spite of all contrary evidence, “The Mutant.”

PE: Conversely, which is the worst? How do you force yourself to sit down and watch "Cold Hands, Warm Heart" for the 20th time?

DJS: It depends on your vomit threshold. “Behold Eck!” is just a catastrophe, but its retarded awfulness is dissipated by some of the lame ducks surrounding it, like “Cold Hands.” By contrast, some of the early first season shows are pretty hard to endure repeatedly in the name of research — in particular, “The Borderland,” and “Tourist Attraction.” “Production and Decay of Strange Particles” is fascinating to watch, in the manner of a bullet train collision in slow-motion — everything is wrong with it, yet it still manages a creepy image or two.

PE: When you revisit them today, do you see the episodes in a new light or is just the same old thing?

DJS: In my position, you have to give every episode every chance. In the case of the book, it was a major victory that there was very little perceived bias or tone shift when the second season came along. At the same time, now even the people who made them are bitching about them more in the text, and their overall malaise speaks for itself. None of this explains why “Keeper of the Purple Twilight” or “The Invisible Enemy” remain such downright watchable episodes — they’re popcorn trifles. Plus, the more I heard the first season regime gripe about the second season, the more I wanted to give it every chance. Then you slam into “Behold, Eck!” again; as Gertrude Stein said, “there is no there there.”

PE: Have you radically changed your mind about any of the episodes?

DJS: The most dramatic sea change was “Don’t Open Till Doomsday.” I hated it based on very little evidence, then I saw it and I hated it even more because, like a bad movie reviewer, I was not looking at it with a critical eye so much as waiting for it to fulfill my preconceptions — you know, like someone who invents critical zingers and can’t not use them even if the thing being critiqued defies them. Then I got stuck writing about it at length for the book. Snappy one-liners wouldn’t serve. So I watched it repeatedly, looking for patterns or anything to grasp onto beyond easy, reactive snark. You can see the result of this in the book — it won me over. That’s a depth I don’t expect readers to attempt — why should they? — but maybe they’ll take my word for it.

PE: Picture an alternate reality. There is no Season One, just shows of the quality of Season Two. Are you still hooked?

DJS: No. Not enough foothold. Too brief to make a lasting impression. As I’ve said, if S1 followed S2, and I’d stuck with it … maybe.

PE: But then, do you still write that infernally out-of-print book? Do you still champion it in front of hundreds in a theater? Was it the "ambiance" of the show or was it the quality of certain episodes that led you down that path?

DJS: As with a lot of things, it depends on what flies through your “kid window” when it’s open at a certain age. Some cherished things from childhood are indefensible — we all have ‘em — and some are the sort of thing that make the so-called “grownups” around us shake their heads sadly, prescribe medication, and glibly state that we’ll never face adult responsibilities. Those people I pity (the few times I think about them) because they’ve never been touched or moved by something magical, nor are they likely to be as they ossify in their beliefs. They’ve lost the sense of wonder. Their recreation becomes complaining about everything, and how their life is a living hell, and oh-if-only. I hope never to become one of them. When the law doesn’t vindicate them, when the cops don’t save them, when God-or-whomever doesn’t straighten everything out for them, they spend their lives perpetually disappointed, and a lot of times you discover these are the people who peaked in high school and remember those days with misty yearning. I hated school — all school. I was completely anti-social. I couldn’t wait to get back to my room, my books, my cave. I suspect this happened to a lot of monster-magazine generation kids, which is one way monster mythology “became” our substitute for religion: Fixed times for worship (per TV Guide); knowledge of chapter-and-verse (our gospel); secret language (“melodrama” meant “monster movie”); vampire rules and werewolf rules you dutifully memorized whether they made any sense or not. Add outsider status, loner status, and a dash of Neitzsche.

All of which is a long-winded way of addressing the question. I don’t seek converts. What I want to do is present the reasons why I find something enriching, and hope the virus infects others on its own. The book is a tool for doing that, as are all the satellite concerns. Yes — ultimately it was the show’s overall ambience that nailed me. It was a “world” I would have preferred to live in, or at least next to. Others might find it darkly appealing, too. That’s why I keep sending back dispatches.

I don’t think anyone could have conceived, then, of the kind of give-and-take forum amply demonstrated by WACT.

PE: You mentioned reverting to your books—I assume you were an avid genre reader.

DJS: Nearly anything in paperback. I think I caught that disease thanks to horror anthologies I first obtained through Scholastic Press (a breach point, I suspect, for a lot of fans of that generation).

PE: Are there any missed opportunities for OL in terms of 1950s science fiction that it could have drawn stories from (Galaxy, F&SF, etc.). Have there been stories you've read (from the "old days") that immediately made you think "This would have been a great OL episode!"

DJS: Campbellian science fiction left me cold; still does. I was more taken by Bradbury and Sturgeon. Rocket jockeys and blaster fights and ships loaded with dull-ass military dorks — all male — was snooze-inducing. Give me Golden Apples of the Sun or “A Saucer of Loneliness.” By college-time, Harlan Ellison was on fire, and even at his most strident, he always urged that we be aware of the past; know the precedents, and I found that enormously heartening. The mid-60s/early-70s “New Wave” would have made great Outer Limits fodder. My high watermark for that would be Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside. I was also smitten by Fredric Brown’s The Lights in the Sky are Stars, because it was atypical of most of the rocket-jockey stuff, yet it was about a rocket jockey. I’m breaking character and re-reading a lot of A.E. Van Vogt now, because his widow, Lydia, lives two doors down the street from me, and she keeps giving me books.

Pete, while we’ve got you here all liquored up and pliable, do you remember how you and I first met?

(Pete rustles uncomfortably, mumbling.)

DJS: Pete, either come clean or you get a Wet Megasoid lap dance.

PE: If I recall correctly, I was carting you and (Oh jesus, which one of the Skippet brothers was it, the big guy with a beard) (That would be Craig Spector – JS) around some L.A. book stores. John and I were down from Redondo Beach, where we had just sewn up Dick Laymon to a big fat book contract (Yow, that was scary — the contract, not Dick). John and I had stopped at a comic convention the day before and I’d bought my (then-five-year-old) daughter a Rocketeer doll. You and Spector were having a gay old time in the back seat with the doll. I couldn’t give it to my innocent daughter after what you bozos had done to it. We popped by your little place down in Hollywood and I remember being very impressed that you had a copy of Universal Horrors by Tom Weaver.

JS: Don’t forget Dave’s impression of ‘Tarantula’ Bill Nolan!

DJS: Hey — Bill Nolan just friended my Facebook page. That was actually my impression of Richard Christian Matheson’s impression, but I’m not sure ole Bill isn’t still trying to knife me. “I’ll cut you, Schow!”

JS: What I remember from that apartment was that he had a framed cover flat from the Ace/Berkley Outer Limits Companion hanging on the wall. That trip was also the first time we ate at what for years became our default DJS meet-up spot — the Hamburger Hamlet across from the Chinese Theater. My wife Vonna still has the signed Napkin we brought back for her from that trip!

DJS: I used to meet Bob Bloch there. He’d drive down in his fire-engine-red GTO convertible with the sheepskin seat covers — true story. I did the Jim Danforth interview for the Companion there. (Jim ate scrambled eggs swimming in tomato juice, with a diet root beer, which thought still binds my colon.) “Progress” finally killed that Hamlet dead. There’s only one of the chain left now, right on the cusp of Beverly Hills.

I’m pretty sure our first conversation had virtually nothing to do with The Outer Limits. Any thoughts about the blog forum becoming the next-generation version of what used-to-be DVD supplements?

PE: Judging by the results from both A-Thriller-A-Day and WACT, I’d say that you’ve got a good point. I am old school though and I’d much prefer to have it all down between covers. A third edition would look good on my shelf. Hell, a second edition would look good on my shelf right now!

DJS: A total word-count on WACT would be instructive. I bet it’s book-length.

JS: You're probably right. This is our 131st post, and to date there have been more than 2000 comments posted.

PE: Our WACT clubhouse members are so knowledgeable and, above all, giving and friendly. I’d like to see similar blogs out there. Anyone know of any? I’d like to think ours was the friendliest and most welcoming (even to those who would mock the mockers).

DJS: I’m sure there’s an earlier precedent on the internet somewhere, but not one that clicked the way this one did — it had focus, a clear mission, and a limited time in which to do it. It almost seems to me that A-Thriller-A-Day, cool as it was, was just a dry run for WACT — in the way that Friday the 13^th documentary (done by Andrew Kasch & Dan Farrands), His Name Was Jason, was just a preamble to their mega-blowout epic followup, Never Sleep Again (the 4-hour Nightmare on Elm Street doco), which by comparison was totally immersive.

Okay, John, your turn … except I know you know how you and I first met.

JS: Ah, but do you remember when we first spoke? That would have been sometime in 1989. I was working for B.Dalton in Northern California, and in touch with the manager of the Hollywood store, Sheldon McArthur. He actually put you on the phone with me one day — you must have been a fixture in that store — and I assume I blabbered on about being a huge fan.

DJS: Shelly, who most recently presided over the death of The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood (I miss it) was boundless in his enthusiasm for a writer that would actually talk to the staff at a store. He gave The Kill Riff and The Outer Limits Companion wall display space right behind the cash registers. Good man; stout champion.

JS: It was still a while before our paths crossed physically, although through connections I had made through publishing an in-store horror newsletter, an editor at Signet/NAL/Onyx asked if they could send me a few manuscripts to get my feedback. One of those was The Shaft. Despite my unreserved recommendation, they didn’t publish it. I think you told me years later that they had made a mass market offer as opposed to a hard/soft deal, which put my mind at ease as I was so concerned that I hadn’t sung its praises loudly enough.

We finally did meet on February 16, 1990, through complete dumb luck. I was flipping through TV Guide the day before, and I came across a listing for a local talk show on the next day, with a listed guest line-up of Clive Barker, Richard Christian Matheson, and I do believe David J. Schow (I need to dig up a copy of that TV Guide). I called the station, assuming that the shows were taped live before a studio audience ahead of time, and they confirmed that in fact that show was being taped the next day. They couldn’t guarantee us tickets, but said we could just show up and probably get in. Needless to say, I blew off my college classes that Friday to head up to the city with my wife-to-be for the chance to meet some of my favorite writers.

Barker, Schow, Matheson, Stanley, and Berger.

Clive was doing a signing for The Great and Secret Show right after the taping, but the rest of you guys (including the young “B” in KNB, Howard Berger) had some time before your return flight to LA so we met you and our Bay Area horror host, John Stanley, for lunch at your hotel. Since I had you all cornered I was able to get you to sign a bunch of books, including my copy of The Shaft manuscript. A pretty cool day for this 20-year old.

Of course, that was the first of many encounters through the years. Another particularly special memory was attending the first public preview screening of The Crow (at which time I officially forgave Jeff Conner of all outstanding debts when he escorted us past the line deep into the parking lot and right into the theater). The fact that the screening was documented in the first chapter of Conner's book on The Crow: City of Angels is the only reason you'll find that in my library. I recall you were sitting in the very back row, and had to be pleased with the reception the film got that night.

DJS: That screening was arranged for a World Horror Convention in Phoenix, and it was quite late at night. I remember (producer) Ed Pressman flew in for it. You couldn’t have asked for a better audience. (There was one prior screening, in New York, where Bai Ling was my “date,” but that was mostly an “industry” screening.) The back row was made up of me, Skipp, Spector, Ed Bryant, Richard Christian Matheson, Kathe Koja, and (I think) Doug Winter.

JS: Now that I’ve got my Japanese Blu Ray of the film, are we any closer to seeing a release of The Crow Chronicle? I’ve been waiting quite a few years to see that …

DJS: As long as (producer) Jeff Most is in the mix, no time soon. He went to war with Alex Proyas in 2000 over disc content, with the result that Alex and I were even deleted from the EPK footage! In addition to Crow Chronicle (behind the scenes footage I shot all through production), we had an audio commentary (me, Proyas, cinematographer Derek Wolski, production designer Alex McDowell, and art director Simon Murton) and a gallery of about 250 photos I also shot myself. All jettisoned, thanks to Jeff Most. Thanks again, Jeff! See ya!

JS: It must have been in the early days of eBay that I saw something online, for sale, “from the collection of the late David J. Schow.” I recall asking you about it, and heard the horror story of your storage locker in Arizona being sold out from under you. Do you recall what it was?

DJS: It had to have been sometime in the mid-1990s. My storage locker place in Tucson had a lot of management turnover. What happened was they got a new guy, a real buccaneer, who looked up the accounts, picked the six oldest ones, wrote up paperwork claiming the owners were dead, and sold off the contents. Shortly thereafter he fled (to be eaten, I hope, by desert predators). My whole earlier life was in that locker, which I had been cherry-picking, trip-by-trip, ever since I moved to Los Angeles. Apart from useless junk furniture, old clothes and outmoded kitchen stuff, I lost about 900 record albums, eight reels of 35mm trailers, several typewriters, tons of backstocked books, and the files of my earliest writing, which I’m sure was the first thing to go in the dumpster, along with scrapbooks of photos, personal letters from Whit Bissell and Bob Bloch and Robert Wise and every-damned-body … and my James Bond attaché case.

Plus old girlfriends, of course, stacked up like cordwood.

The item in question was a script I’d gotten from Ellis St. Joseph — “The Day the Zeroes Came,” for Time Tunnel, produced as “The Day the Sky Fell In.” You, John Scoleri, bought it and mailed it back to me. And that’s the only recovery from that lost locker I’ve ever been able to make.

But you know, it’s all just “stuff.” On one hand, yes — archive the past, and reconsider it from time to time to assess its personal value to you. The lasting stuff will persist or offer new revelations. On the other hand, don’t wallow hopelessly in the bygone, or run into the past to escape the here-and-now. I was thinking this as I was just reading David Holcomb’s piece on the Outer Limits comic books, where he expressed the misgivings of nostalgia becoming mistaken for “culture” over time. That’s a potential hazard of shallow recollect, and one reason I maintain a fairly eidetic memory which might seem overtly focused on the trivial. I am detail-oriented by nature, which accounts for my sprawling verbosity. I love words, their shapes and functions and eccentricities, and the thought of making a career out of them still has the power to thrill me. So Tweeting, or texting, for example, doesn’t hold much allure for me, yet I dare not ignore its influence on the evolution of language, because I don’t want to become some quaint antique when it comes to communicating.

(DJS gulps another LIIT as the room begins to skew and gravity begins to stutter. John and Pete examine their drinking vessels — have they been drugged?)

DJS: While we’re on the topic of chronic, depressing downers, are we inebriated enough to talk about the “new” Outer Limits now? I mean, if you were going to ask anyway …

JS: You seem to have few kind words for 90s Outer Limits revival, oft-referred to as The NOTer Limits. The prosecution would like to enter into evidence Exhibit A, Season One Episode "Corner of the Eye," written by one David (no J.) Schow.

One might reasonably assume your having a chance to write an Outer Limits episode would be a dream job. What can you tell us about that experience, and your thoughts on the episode itself?

DJS: This is potentially a very long and ugly answer.

I was basically pissed off from the pilot (“Sandkings”) onward. The producers cozened up to Joe Stefano and yammered long and loud about Joe’s legacy and all this passing-of-the-baton shit, when it was clear from the git they didn’t have the foggiest notion of what made The Outer Limits work, nor did they care. The new boss was not the same as the old boss. They way they flocked around Leslie Stevens for photo ops, and then deleted his name from the credits of his own show as soon as he died, sickens me.

But do you ignore the opportunity, just because you’re not in charge? No. Undaunted, I stormed them and, luckily, spun a one-liner that sounded credible. I didn’t have to audition; I’d been writing feature scripts for six years.

You know how The Outer Limits breaks down? Season One is all about “the awe and mystery of the universe.” Season Two fell back on “Man’s Endless Thirst for Knowledge.” And it quickly became apparent that the new guys in charge of the new iteration of the show were all about “He tampered in God’s domain” — and punishing seekers who risk big, which to me was the complete opposite of what Leslie and Joe had been talking about.

Then the new opening titles rolled, full of clocks and mannequins, and it became horrifyingly evident that what the new guard really wanted was “Twilight Zone with bears.”

That’s an oversimplification of a much more subtle decay. Right out of the gate there were some episodes with promise, because guys like Alan Brennert were writing them. That soon ended.

I wanted to write a show about a cop, a man who depends on visual evidence, who begins to “see” ordinary people as monsters — aliens — but only in his peripheral vision. He’s “defective,” like Paul Cameron in “Corpus Earthling.” And possibly crazy, until the monsters he sees begin to notice him noticing them.

The word came down: Change the cop to a priest.

Well, that brings “faith” into the equation and kind of undermines the whole idea, doesn’t it?

I did the “priest” rewrite anyway, per contract. It was a challenge to take that angle, dumb as it was, and try to make it work anyway. No matter. The script got manhandled by everybody with a producer credit and started coming back with all this other weird religious shit in it.

I submitted further ideas but the door had already slammed shut. The production company had these little breakdown sheets one was supposed to fill out for each episode; one of the last blanks was “What is the moral of this story?” These were actually shortform cheat sheets, so someone who didn’t have the time to actually read a script could nonetheless converse about it. Writers had to fill these things out for the (free) benefit of production know-nothings who couldn’t be bothered to find out for themselves.

Flash forward, and staff-written shows have become pandemic. There’s good to be had from a brain trust overseeing long, soap-operatic arcs … but the downside is you’d better like vanilla a whole lot, because no script is allowed individuality. Hence the genesis of the “showrunner,” and when the showrunner is not the person who created the show, watch out.

I’ve seen “Corner of the Eye” maybe one-and-a-half times. They didn’t even pay enough attention to the paperwork to include my middle initial in my screen credit — which is my professional credit. Thanks to fuckups like this one, databases now count me as two different people. And I get the blame for a mediocre episode because the TV hacks who ass-raped it remain secure in their invisibility as “team players.”

So what do we have? Yet another writer whining about his poor, bungholed script, boo-fucking-hoo. As they say, if you can’t live with it, don’t cash the check. The residuals being what they are, I should have kept my trap shut and written ten of them. The series probably wouldn’t suck any less, but it’s been packaged all over the world.

In my pique I publicly maligned a few people I shouldn’t have. The joke’s on me — one of them runs SyFy now.

My short story, “Seeing Things,” has absolutely nothing to do with any of the events just discussed.

And ultimately, I did get a decent script out of the deal, because the frustration factor caused me to write up a spec script that was my honest expression of what a “good, modern-day Outer Limits story” would look like. It promptly impressed no one. It needs The Outer Limits to validate it contextually.

Meanwhile, I watched the proposed Outer Limits feature chew up something like thirteen writers at Sony — just an enormous expenditure, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of half-assed fails. And it all goes on the head of the bill for the next try — another script has just been written for MGM. If they ever do shoot it, they’ll be a couple million in the hole before a single frame of film is exposed.

This is depressing, still. Only one thing can dispel this black cloud …

(DJS shouts toward the back: “Hey, Limboid! Get your ass out here for your big number!”)

(The Limbo Being from “The Premonition” waltzes into the spotlight, singing reggae-style)

Limbo, Limbo, de money’s all gone.

De Outer Limitz is no longer on.

Limbo, Jimbo, dey don’t give a shit;

De Limbo Bean will show his armpit.

Do de Limbo, and light up a match

De Limbo Bean run away like a bitch.

Spotty de Monster, he laff his ass off.

Dis Negative Bean only good for a larf.

Dewey Martin, he furrow his brow.

Dis show’s in de dumper, by-golly and-how.

Do de Limbo and drink up de rum.

De Asian hooker’s off shining her bum.

Continental, de Lincoln drove off;

De crew’s all bailing; nobody is left.

Mistah Oswald, he light up a smoke.

De Limbo Bean, he starts to a-choke.

“De Probe” be coming, you like it or not.

De blog-o-people, dey gone like a shot.

De show is dead and de money all gone.

Shot in the head like-a most of dis song.

Limbo, Limbo, and drink up de rum.

De Second Season is mostly damned dumb.

(A big vaudeville hook yanks the Limbo Being offstage.)

(DJS removes a black capsule —suicide pill — from his traycase and puts it in the center of the table, so everybody can think about it. As he does this, John notices the matte-black Sig Sauer P226 snugged into quick-draw combat scabbard. How he concealed this in the ensemble Pete gave him is anybody’s guess.)

JS: Your first published fiction was “In the Idiom of the Old School” (Galileo Magazine, July 1978). Clearly TOL has inspired your fiction work as well. Notably :

Reese in The Kill Riff...

“Stephen Grave's” Miami Vice novels...

NORCO in Internecine...

… and I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg (and bet there's enough for Pete Farris to build a drinking game around). While I know it's not your style to hand out an answer key, are there any other notable references throughout your career that you're willing to share with your fellow drinkers in the OL Tavern? Do you try to sneak in said references to your screenplays?

DJS: Right off the top of my head, the fake Navy guys, Brookman and Willowmore, in Bullets of Rain are named after the characters in “Nightmare.” Nine times out of nine, if characters are watching something on a TV set in most of my fiction, it’s an Outer Limits episode – although they’re often not specified as such; you have to know.

Screenplays, not so much, because producers go apoplectic if you stick them with something they have to license. A lot of tyro screenplays writers often add “specific songs to use” in their text. Almost never comes to pass; they quickly learn to skip that little indulgence.

JS: By way of TOL, you've written CD liner notes, text on toy boxes, nearly been called as an expert witness in a plagiarism trial, (and albeit unattributed) capsule summaries for DVD releases... Is this all part of your plans for world domination by way of TOL? Am I missing any key categories? You're not hawking Outer Limits Sake in Japan, are you?

DJS: I missed out on a consultancy for the Helene Curtis line of hair care products in 1989. Damn.

I spent a lot of time working on the Rittenhouse Archives trading card set, and another set in concert with our man, Gary Gerani. (Ask him about those!)

Showtime did a short Outer Limits doco in 1995 to pump the new series; of necessity, about 15 minutes of it dwelt on the original, and I appeared in that bit, thanks mostly to Steve Rubin. The following year I also helped some other producers launch an infomercial called The Outer Limits Phenomenon, which was basically a come-on to sell the videotapes, but featured interviews with Sally Kellerman, Cliff Robertson, Ed Asner and others, who “appeared” on-set by walking out of a big wall of static, in a nifty green-screen effect.

The crown jewel was getting to host the Outer Limits tribute at the Paley Museum in 2000. Me onstage with Joe Stefano, Connie Hall, Martin Landau, Bob Justman and Lou Morheim. Joe and Connie and Bob are all gone, now, but for one moment in time, there we were, together.

JS: Turning to your other obsess— um, interests. I personally think the Creature From the Black Lagoon is the single-best monster costume to come out of the 50s. What is it about him that clicked with you, and why have we not seen a similar level of output (ie a book-length work) on that topic from DJS?

DJS: Here’s the supreme irony: Back when I was doing tie-ins for Universal Licensing, I asked if I could use the Creature for a novel. They said: “Hell, if you can sell such a book, we’ll give you permission.” (Thereby demonstrating how little they thought of its potential as revenue stream, then.)

The book never came to pass, but it did allow me to set the bones for the first Creature remake I proposed, if ever I needed one.

Just during the past year, I have been asked to write an introduction for a reprint of the 1954 John Russell Fearn novelization, and to participate in a big book about Creature collectibles.

Why the Gill Man? Like many kids, I read Roy Chapman Andrews’ book All About Dinosaurs and wanted to be a paleontologist. I was already a monster kid. Dinosaurs were like monsters, but real. The Creature was like a dinosaur and monster combined. How could I resist?

JS: Robert Bloch was another writer you clearly had great admiration for, and that you got to know quite well. When did you initially cross paths with his work, and how did come to meet him?

DJS: I had corresponded with Bob and we met at a convention in 1982. Of course, Bob was present in nearly every anthology I’d read for the previous decade. And he was just so generous with his time and attention. Then I met Elly Bloch. Rarely had I seen two people so much in love, for so long.

JS: I'm sure you're tired of the questions about being caught in the middle as friends and fans of both of these men's work — but as someone who knew Joe Stefano AND Robert Bloch, can you lay to rest the claims of bad blood between the two men regarding Psycho?

DJS: It’s even stranger because they both struck me on exactly the same frequency: Joe and Marilyn Stefano, together, reminded me a lot of Bob and Elly Bloch, yet I could rarely mention one to the other because of the old battles.

It instantly reminded me of another old battle: The fan-generated “conflict” over who “really” played the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Ricou Browning or Ben Chapman. And when you looked into it, it turned out that most of the volatile nit-pickery was the result of know-nothing publicists getting the facts wrong back in the 1950s.

Similarly, picture the following scenario: A know-nothing newspaper interviewer asks Bob if he wrote Psycho. The answer is yes. Another know-nothing video interviewer asks Joe if he wrote Psycho, and again the answer is yes. And in all the ensuing time, none of the know-nothings bother to specify the difference between the work of the two men, and they could have done it very concisely:

Robert Bloch wrote the novel on which the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho is based. Joseph Stefano wrote the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho, based on the novel by Robert Bloch.

Seems simple, right?

But for the lack of specificity, both men are now continually seeing articles and interviews where it appears each is claiming sole credit for the other’s work, and credit is a very big deal in Hollywood. Whammo — conflict. The cumulative effect pushed the two men away from each other, over time, which was a shame, because I keep thinking they might have hooked up to do a TV show together. Stefano’s fever-dreams leavened by Bloch’s gallows levity. It would have been something to behold.

And it’s the kind of wild hair that never went away. Just when each guy thought, oh, let it die, already, here came another interview, another article, perpetuating a disparity that was the fault of neither man.

Yet when Stefano won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Psycho in 1960, it was Bob Bloch who presented it to him. In a 1990 interview with Steve Biodrowski, Stefano said, “I wish Bloch still had the rights to Psycho, because (Psycho) II and III wouldn’t have turned out so badly.”

JS: Your infatuation with Dr. Pepper (and the many would be imitators) also extends back to at least 1978. Is that a fair way to describe it? Would fascination, or fetish, be more appropriate? And do you know of anyone with a larger collection of Dr. Pepper imitation cans than you?

DJS: See, that’s more bullshit from old lists, old bios. It never dies. Thank you for perpetuating it, you unfeeling beast.

I was never not a Dr Pepper kid. (No period, purists take note.)

High-fructose corn syrup simultaneously saved and ruined the soft drink industry in the 1970s. Remember the “new Coke?” It was all a dodge to mask the transition to HFCS. Now I can get “real” Dr Pepper from the Dublin plant in Texas, made with real cane sugar. I wondered why the taste went “off,” years ago. I opened a Dublin DP and noticed the difference right away.

Here’s the largest collection of fake DP containers I know of:

http://fakedrpepper.wordpress.com/

JS: Those who haven't nosed around your website may not be aware that your Dad was a tail-gunner on a B-24 Liberator that got shot down over Germany during WWII. The pilot, Keith Schuyler, wrote a book about it — Elusive Horizons — which you were involved in getting reissued in the early 90s. How did that come about?

DJS: In the early 1990s, publishers were making noise about doing books to commemorate the 50^th Anniversary of WWII, and I called an editor I knew at Avon to make him aware of Keith’s book. Done deal. Keith had also written a followup volume about his years in the POW camp and afterward, called Horizons Limited, but it was never published. We tried, but no.

The notable thing (to me) about Keith’s crew was that all of them survived into the 1990s. They’re all gone now, and Keith was the last to go — he died about two years ago. A nice man, a friend-never-met, who always sent holiday cards warmly inscribed. Tragically, he saw all three of his sons die before him; by suicide, murder, and a terminal illness.

JS: The Outer Limits Companion is clearly the ultimate resource when it comes to documenting the history of the series, to the point that I'm not aware of another volume on the subject (not also written by you). Considering how many books have followed Marc Zicree's indispensable Twilight Zone Companion, you have to take some pride in kowing that you have written the (evolving if not) final word on The Outer Limits.

DJS: Yeah, until another book comes along to nitpick mine to death. Marc can tell you that seems to be exactly the charter of subsequent volumes on The Twilight Zone, which is a much bigger target in the cultural zeitgeist than The Outer Limits. To establish their own foothold, they denigrate Marc’s achievement, when in fact those subsequent books would not have been possible at all without the precedent of Marc’s. Tim Lucas has said he’d welcome a book that dealt with The Outer Limits more critically. So would I, but that next step has partially been achieved, I think, by many of the thoughtful commentaries on WACT.

JS: And to have done the book in time so that many of the principles were still around to see and appreciate it must have been nice. Are you able to step back and appreciate the achievement?

DJS: I love my Outer Limits book. I got to go back to the well and “fix” the original edition an inch at a time. It’s not perfect — what really is? — but is exactly what I envisioned the first time around; even Harlan Ellison called to say how much he admired the sheer achievement. You know how fans say they’ll go to the book to look up some small datum and wind up re-reading entire sections? That still happens to me, too. It happened a lot during the course of WACT. And remember — every note, every correction, every splinter of addenda, all goes into the Big Binder Version I maintain, just in case we get a shot at a third edition.

JS: You've been involved in other projects that have spawned their own huge cult followings (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Freddy, and most notably, The Crow). How does it feel to know that there are kids out there just as excited about stuff you’re doing as you probably were about The Outer Limits, etc.?

DJS: Latter Day Horror Icon Alert: I never got to write a classic Universal monster rally, but I did get to write for most of the Eighties lions of horror — Freddy Krueger, Jason, Leatherface. Many of the studio executives I meet with now saw The Crow when they were eleven — perfect timing! Guys like Brian Keene generously credit me and others for pushing him down the slippery slope of a writing career by impressing his young self with our splatterpunk selves. As Doug Winter told me, it’s surpassingly weird to be considered some kind of “elder statesman” when, as far as we’re concerned, we’re nowhere near “done” yet.

During the Writers Guild strike in 2007-08 I found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with the new blood, people like Scott Kosar, Steve Susco, Adam Gierasch, Jace Anderson, E.L. Katz, Adam Green, James Wan, Joe Lynch, Hans Rodionoff … and Dave Parker and I had just done Hills Run Red, to compete with all of them. They were uniformly welcoming and open; no “camps.”

DJS with Father Adam and Monsignor Scott during the "exorcism" of Warner Brothers.

A gang of horror writers picketing the home office of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers all on our own, before the Guild even did (the graybeard second from right is David Seltzer, who wrote THE OMEN)

Simultaneously, I had gotten to work with two genre legends, Larry Cohen and Tom Holland, on Masters of Horror. Same attitude.

One arm reaches into the past, the other into the future. It’s a nice balance.

JS: For a number of years, the call was repeatedly "when will we get another novel?" Now that you've inundated your readers with several in comparatively rapid succession (Bullets of Rain, Rock Breaks, Scissors Cut, Gun Work, Gabriel Hunt Among the Killers of Men), have you been getting a lot of "when do we get a new short story" questions? Which is a roundabout way of asking what's next from DJS?

DJS: My buddy F. Paul Wilson announced several years back that he was “retiring” from the biz of writing short stories, and I can see why.

Short stories at their best are a perfect, gemlike distillation of writing; highly-polished, potent, concentrated, and impactful. But you can’t get any traction writing them, no matter how good they are. Gone are the days when Playboy would champion a modern fantasist, or when the Saturday Evening Post would ballyhoo a new short story by Ray Bradbury.

Once you’ve written a certain amount of them — and I’ve written and published about a hundred — every request that comes for a new story is basically asking for an old story; that you repeat some trick you’ve already done. Another one like that. When you’ve already done “that.”

On the other hand, I sell a lot of reprints — particularly to those many, recent, phone-book-sized zombie anthologies. I’ve re-sold and continue to re-sell about 4/5ths of my total story output. But at its best, it still doesn’t keep the lights on.

Plus the short story market, as once idealized, is gone now. You’d think the short attention span of modern readers would permit a sort of sputtering resurgence of the form, and indeed this is being attempted across various digital platforms.

But they require a lot of work, in return for scant visibility and minimal return. People seem to want their fiction by the pound, and think you’re not really a writer unless you’ve written real, solid, self-contained books — that is, novels.

Novels cumulate into a row of spines. Amass enough spines, and you’ve got a “body of work.” Short stories have a much harder time accomplishing that. And I’ve seen far too many writers bloat short story ideas out into top-heavy, padded novels, usually out of simple fiscal necessity. They just waste everybody’s time, and make you feel vaguely mugged after you’ve plowed through them.

Irony, again: Short story writers dream about that “first novel.” Novelists really want to sell movie rights. Moviemakers, when you nail them down, see “writing a novel” as a form of artistic legitimacy somehow “purer” than films. Yet expanded short stories make better movies than most condensed novels. Nobody is happy!

The only solution is to become proficient in all the forms.

I clicked back into novel mode about ten years ago, with Bullets of Rain. The deal for the followup book fell apart (at HarperCollins) and I was left with an “orphaned” manuscript. I spent the next few years bellyaching about the publishing industry — now they put you through the same abuse as a movie studio, with the exception they don’t pay you as well for the stress. Charles Ardai came along with Hard Case Crime and I wrote Gun Work for him strictly as a pulpy lark, and shazam — writing was suddenly fun again. Charles sneaked the manuscript of Gun Work to some editors, who got all hot and bothered, and called: “Do you have anything ELSE like this?!” Abracadabra — a two-book deal at St. Martins/Thomas Dunne, with (I must say) astonishing speed, for the publishing industry. The first book was already done; it was my “orphan” from 2004, and it became Internecine. The next book is in copyedit right now — Upgunned. Beyond that, there’s another multi-book deal I can’t talk about yet.

And I still manage a few short stories, mostly to keep that knife sharp, and load the gun for another collection of them despite a massive slowdown of short fiction production. Occasionally I can be enticed. I had two come out last year: “A Gunfight,” in Joe Lansdale’s Retro Pulp 2, and “Denker’s Book,” in S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraftian throwdown, Black Wings. I’ve got another commitment to Lansdale in the wings, plus one to an original anthology my British champion Stephen Jones is putting together.

(The bartender, who looks a lot like Larry Pennel, calls out last-call.)

JS: We had better wrap up before we get tossed out. Any final words as we end our 49-episode tour of duty with WACT?

DJS: I hope interested parties will delve into WACT front-to-back, because we double-stuffed a lot of content into two months and change. I can’t see Batman becoming nearly this all-consuming.

JS: I don’t expect Batman will be a repository for scholarly commentary in the way TOL has been. We hope to rise above snarkiness once and awhile, and are also looking forward to taking on something much lighter—think of it as a junk food blog. Of course there is the risk we'll overdose and become violently ill before we're through.

DJS: Kinda like Morgan Spurlock?

JS: Right. As for WACT, at the outset I was truly concerned (as we dragged you in kicking and screaming) about besmirching your reputation in the annals of TOL history. You certainly gave the endeavor legitimacy, and so I'm beyond thrilled that the community rose to the occasion, and that we're leaving behind a legacy we can all be proud of.

DJS: Rondo Award fodder, definitely.

PE: Yeah, I'm gonna miss this ride but I'm also not. That second season (albeit we were warned) was a drag and I'd find myself wandering mentally (and I think it showed in a few of the last batch of blog posts), and physically, in some cases. When it's all said and done, it was fun but what was more fun was the camaraderie. I'd seen some of these folks on the CHFB but hadn't really gotten to know them. I feel like we all made quick friends. There was none of that shit that I thought would happen when we got really snarky and offended someone's memories.

DJS: Just for completeness’ sake, I wish Jeff Frentzen could have written at least one Spotlight, or that Steve Streeter (progenitor of the The Outer Limits Newsletter) had checked in more. Or Loren Heisey, who’s quietly been maintaining an Outer Limits new-and-old site since the 1990s. Or Brendan Dawes, who founded the first such site I’d ever seen.

That said, I am immeasurably glad to see the Holcomb Brothers here, and Ted Rypel, contributing so massively. None of us are in touch this much under normal circumstances, and that goes for the two Larrys (Blamire and Rapchak) as well. I guess the time was right. There are blogs, and rarely there are salons of inquiry and intellect, good humor and bad taste, a greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts synergy.

Plus, I got to meet the astounding “Lisa,” who provided a wealth of contacts and data that could someday lead to actual Outer Limits supplements, as well as many of-like-mind followers whose existence proves I wasn’t just making some of this stuff up all along.

You don’t often get such a win-win, all ‘round.

PE: I'll second John's emotion that without you, David, this thing would have been 10% the fun it ended up being.

Batman may not be in the same league as Outer Limits and Thriller but it may just be the "vacation" I need before we tackle something "serious" again (dream blogs: Combat!, Homicide, and Naked City). I hope you'll check in now and then.

DJS: All right, troops — let’s blow this popsicle stand before Pennell-boy flexes at us again.

Mutations! Giants! Monsters from Another Planet: The Outer Limits Comic Books

2011-03-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

by David C. Holcomb

At some point fairly early in the life of We Are Controlling Transmission, I realized that I’ve moved on from The Outer Limits. It’s not a lack of love or respect: the show is a genuine classic, something typically brilliant and persistently unique. Its construction, explicated with intelligence, grace, and diligence by David J. Schow, reflects a hugely admirable and equally exhausting multi-player, hyper-creative mania in the face of bottom-line inertia. Individual episodes reflect the brilliance, or they don’t but abide fully somehow. Monsters crash through the woods intentionally or inadvertently (sometimes both); hearts are opened and minds expanded, and hearts are crushed and minds do evil; the stories shake and indulge you. Above all, The Outer Limits embraces the truths of being human – the beautiful ones, the ugly and stupid ones – with care but never blindness. This stays with me: it always will. I’m grateful for it. And I’m grateful to John Scoleri and Peter Enfantino for sustaining attention to the heady excellence that is this series; as blog hosts and viewing companions, they’ve remained balanced, funny, and usefully iconoclastic throughout.

Still, I’ve seen the episodes dozens of times now, and I’m a middle-aged man who is uncomfortable with nostalgia – keen to focus on what is here and now in both the world at large and in the fantasy-based visual arts reflecting it. To the former, which so memorably inspired Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano in their day, it looks like bad news: we may be, like Professor Mathers’ evolution booth in Cathy’s sentimentalist hands, moving backward instead of forward. To the latter, better news: as examples, Ron Moore’s anti-nostalgic Battlestar Galactica reboot and Russell T. Davies’ cunningly transgressive Torchwood: Children of Earth are two recent television shows reminiscent of The Outer Limits in style and themes addressed; adding power, both are admirably sovereign and modern as well. In movies, Gaspar Noé’s eviscerating soul meander Enter the Void and Lars von Trier’s ball-crusher Anticristo tread the same simultaneously heartsick and upsetting ground as the series, and with equal visual aplomb and nerve. All isn’t lost, then – we may collectively go to hell in a handbasket, but we’ll have good cinema with us as we do so. If Stefano would most certainly not approve, at least he might dig the irony, and maybe the justice. Stevens would likely be looking up at the stars all the way down and miss the nastiness of the descent. Good call.

None of this is tangibly connected to my possession of the Dell comic books loosely (excessively loosely) based on the Daystar/Villa di Stefano show. I own the entire run of eighteen issues – without a doubt partly out of nostalgia, but also rooted in a fascination with accidental art, the kind that happens despite itself and only as seemingly disposable things get old. At one point these artifacts qualified as an investment, when pop culture fetishists such as me could afford to trade comic books for serious money. They’re still worth a bit: in these plutocratically-induced hard times, probably about a month’s car payment. But nothing serious: that they are not. Maybe that’s why I keep them around during these too-serious times. Someday I suppose I’ll move on from them as well, and I confess my hope that a good reason to do so comes along soon.

In any case, here they are – cue Frontiere’s grabby, pulsing intro: from the inner mind… to the outer limits.

The Boy Who Saved the World!

Any attempt at likening the comic books to the television series is a fool’s errand – these read like the result of a head-on collision between low-budget 1950s bugshow drive-in fare and Boys’ Life magazine. Still, the allure of both remains intact in the aftermath: the content, while bitterly divorced from Stevens’ and Stefano’s show, retains the anesthetic properties of lamebrain fantasy and the charm of playing under the streetlight on a summer night. In other words, not grand hoopla but a kick in their own right – as an entity, not consistently reflected in any single feature or issue; still, the big bold letters of the series’ opening and the funny proprietary touch of the Daystar logo loitering in the corner draws the viewer into becoming the reader. The charms are relative and the rewards may be narrow, but it says so right on the covers: The Outer Limits.

Dell Comics was in flux at the time of the release of this TV-based title, part of their anchor ‘licensed material’ line along with such other oddities as brainless kiddy adaptations of Roger Corman’s Poe films and entirely superfluous renderings of Hanna-Barbera cartoons (The Flintstones never really called for transliteration to cheap paper stock). Cut loose from big Western Publishing in 1962, Dell fractured, resulting in eleven years of gradual decline and admirable but ultimately foolhardy experimentation. Case in point: attempting to cast classic Universal movie monsters as superheroes, a baffling oops. Eventually splintering into Gold Key Comics – where adequately-drawn versions of Rod Serling and Boris Karloff found long-term homes – the stalwart Dell became a shadow of its former self, ultimately passing in 1973. Gold Key became Whitman, essentially a publishing house for children’s comics titles, itself dying in the mid-1980s.

What Strange Creature Is This?

The Outer Limits was published early in this entropic process, surviving the worst but the decay showed: if there is any similarity to the show, it’s in the fact that there appears to be analogous first and second ‘seasons’ to the comic, driven to an apparent extent by faltering commitment and finally by utter cheapness of intent and execution. Sound familiar? Early issues (one through six) featured painted covers; though they varied in content from enjoyably goofy to genuinely interesting and childishly threatening, all were unique and memorable. Inside, writer Paul S. Newman and artist Jack Sparling, both lifelong comic book worker bees, conveyed the necessities with a comforting competence that aimed true at its intended audience: boys, somewhere between their last bedwetting and their first shame-faced self-gratification session – generally speaking, the everlasting time-space of the comic book, though there appears to be about a forty-year continuation of this cycle in modern times (trust me).

From issue seven to sixteen, the decline showed. It wasn’t rapid – the middle period of the run has a lot of charm, including issue ten, in some ways an elaborately-plotted high point: creatures from ancient mythology are discovered deep within the earth by the requisite rugged adventurer and his saucy babe companion. The mythic spawn turn out to be refugees from outer space (yes, a spoiler), and raucousness ensues. When my brother Mark and I were about eleven years old, we found this issue in the cast-off box of a musty comic book shop in Grants Pass, Oregon, a high point of our funky early 1970s summer. This goes some distance in explaining my allegiance to the issue and the tale, very probably more than its actual quality. Whatever the case, it remains a genuine hoot.

Is Anyone Safe?

Likely fighting a lack of the safer confines of either character-driven or multi-story comic books as much as any other deficit, Dell’s The Outer Limits tried to adapt with issue twelve forward, which featured a collection of unrelated shorter tales and the second-worst cover of the entire run. Revisiting the notion of accidental art, this period also produced one of the most enjoyably silly issues and covers with number fifteen, which flirted openly with Marvel/DC monster-comic territory (my other comics fetish, by the way). Collaborators Newman and Sparling both went on to contribute to the two big publishers – where both had also started their comic work in the late 1930s.

A stumbling finale spanned three issues, with inertia-ridden number sixteen presenting the least appealing work of the entire span, from front to back cover. This gave way to reprints of the first two issues re-numbered as seventeen and eighteen; the covers were, wisely, also reprinted versions of the pleasing originals. In this, the whole endeavor faded out like the series: a drained, draining lack of effort and dedication representing a weak capstone to something better. You can almost sense Ben Brady and ABC Television behind it somewhere.

The Plan to Fool the World!

Charm is relative, as I mentioned. Dragging these odd remnants out drives that point home. Corpus earthling, bagged and tagged: stiffening, yellowed leftovers from other times and obsolete media. Have you seen modern comics? They’re a different breed than Dell, sharper in story, art, and paper stock and about as warm as that sounds. Have you watched television lately?

Makes you nostalgic.

Never Mind Where It Came From: References

Dell Comics, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Comics

The Comic Book Database: The Outer Limits: http://www.comicbookdb.com/title.php?ID=19020

Comic Vine: The Outer Limits: http://www.comicvine.com/the-outer-limits/49-2184/

Images used under copyleft fair use policy, and with love.

The Titles of The Outer Limits

2011-03-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

by John Scoleri

As you might imagine, we followed a regular process when creating our daily reviews. One of the many elements being the capturing of OL title cards. You very likely haven't given this much thought, but as it's been part of our routine for the past 49 episodes, I thought I'd share some trivial minutia with you—things you probably wouldn't notice unless you've spent a lot of time dealing with very specific details of each and every episode over a condensed period (which means I don't think anything covered here hasn't already been processed by The Brain of Colonel Schow).

For our "Next Up..." title cards, you might have noticed that I always used an capture with the sine wave present behind the title. For the main review title cards, in all but one case, I grabbed a screencap of the title against the black background. All except for one episode—which became a thorn in my side—as there was no point at which the title card for "The Borderland" did not include the sine wave behind it. Hence it's appearance on the main review title card. Betcha you were all as unnerved by that as I was.

A few episodes into Season Two, beginning with "The Invisible Enemy," most multi-line title cards were now right or left justified instead of being centered. "Behold, Eck!" was right justified on two lines, however "Wolf 359" was presented on a single line. "Counterweight" used a lighter weight font (presumably to ensure it fit on your 13" B&W TV's safe-area). ""I, Robot"" was officially titled in quotes on the title card, although you'll note that we brazenly referred to it as "I, Robot" throughout our review. I cheated on "The Inheritors" for our main review, digitally adding the Part II below the Part I. Do take note that "The" and "Inheritors" are on separate lines, with "The" indented to be aligned with "Part I/II" below). And then there's "The Probe," which is in a class to itself amongst OL title cards (and episodes, I hear).

So there you have it. Why am I sharing this useless trivia, you ask? Well, it gives the obsessives one more reason to revisit all 48* of our episode reviews on WACT. And I needed to get it out of my system.

As you might expect, after the last few months we can use a vacation. But first, we've got an appointment with "The Probe"...

*In the unlikely event that you don't know why we only have 48 reviews for the 49 episode series, I'm sure it will come to you after you've re-read all our reviews.

Amazon Celebrates the pending completion of WACT!

2011-03-11T19:40:00.000-08:00

If you've been holding off on buying the complete series on DVD, wait no longer.

Our good friends at Amazon have chosen to celebrate the wrap-up of our commemorative viewing of The Outer Limits by placing the complete series set on sale for the super-low price of only $27.49!

And if you already have a copy, what a great gift to give a friend along with a URL to the site! Or what the heck, buy it and enjoy "The Duplicate, Man"!

Thanks to Kyle for the tip!

The Premonition

2011-03-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

Production Order #16

Broadcast Order #16

Original Airdate:01/09/65

Starring Dewey Martin, Mary Murphy, Emma Tyson.

Written by Samuel Roeca, story by Ib Melchior.
Directed by Gerd Oswald.

After test pilot Jim Darcy (Martin) crashes his X-15 in the desert, he and his wife (Murphy) are trapped in a world apparently frozen in time. Or is it?

PE: Let me just comment on the opening. Most of the OL openings have something fantastical or ominous: a murder, an alien with a big head walking through a gate in the desert, spaceships that can pull u-turns on a dime, Yoko Ono recording a song you can sing. What does this have? Two and a half minutes of stock Air Force footage of jets and pilots. The last shot before we go to "There is nothing wrong..." is a jet firing a missile. Key ominous music. A let down to be sure.

JS: That 'missile' is Darcy's X-15 rocket. I actually enjoyed the ample selection of stock footage (with stock music, I'm sure -PE) of the X-15. I only wish that they hadn't cut in the handful of studio shots that could pass for an actor sitting on the toilet. Worse yet is when the canted angle levels out when the voice-over calls for the pilot to start leveling out. Considering the flight suit and helmet, they should have stuck with stock footage. For the trivia buffs out there, all three actual X-15's can be seen amongst the various shots used. There are some nice videos on YouTube for the aviation/space fans out there (unfortunately many with embedding disabled). Here's a nice general history on the X-15 era:

PE: Really bad music alert! Larry B.'s theremin mixed with music box tunes. Are they still paying someone to score this series? Who's minding the fort? (Don't forget the wailing of La Llorona as Linda drives out to meet her hubby? -JS) And speaking of stock footage, let's not forget the shot of a coyote chasing a rabbit across the plains and bird of prey swooping in for the kill borrowed from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. There are times when the footage of Jim's aircraft is so badly edited together, you have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on. Is he landing? Is he flying sideways? All is safe though, as he lands amid props left over from "Cry of Silence." Where's that coyote?

JS: I want to know what kind of parent leaves their kid off at day care that cages them like animals?

PE: L-OL scenes: Like an Esther Williams musical, on cue the air traffic guys swivel in their seats to watch the action on the monitor. I expected the three of them to shout "There's No Business Like Show Business..."

JS: It appears that one of them had, as evidenced when they walk into the control room to find one of the men mid-song...

PE: As if seeing frozen soldiers, coyotes and jackrabbits wasn't enough to fray poor Linda's nerves, the sight of a hawk sends the poor girl over the edge. Jim finally has to take matters in his own hands (for Linda's sake) and wallop her one. I like her sass but it's nice to remember how real men solved domestic road bumps back in the 60s. Guys get arrested for that crap now.

JS: But it takes a special bond to have a sympathy crash when your spouse noses their aircraft into the dirt.

PE: I love the very professional countdown-o-meter they've got taped to the wall. Multi-billion dollar space program but $1.49 equipment.

JS: I'm just glad they opted to use stock cockpit control footage. I can only imagine the broomhandle controls the Projects Unlimited team might have assembled for Jim.

PE: Dig that run across the desert in the sweltering heat. Jim might be a macho test pilot but he runs like Barbara Rush in "The Forms of Things Unknown." A little hitch in his gitty-up, I assume. It's a shame there was no bus line running along that route (oh, but the bus would be frozen you say? what if the bus were caught in Jim's sonic boom as well?).

JS: I give them credit for raising the possibility that the characters were dead (and, in doing so, confirming that wasn't the gimmick). I think that might have made for a more interesting conclusion, particularly if they were joined by their flattened daughter.

PE: Acting is uniformly dreadful this time out. Frankie Avalon was off with Annette, I assume, so all that OL could afford was Dewey Martin (The Thing From Another World). Martin looks off in the distance a lot with astonishment and says things like "C'mon, let's go to Mission Control, maybe we'll find the answers there." and "There's got to be a logical explanation, Linda" while looking at an entirely frozen world. He's Bobby DeNiro though, compared to Mary Murphy, who does little more than scream at each new frozen sight, squishes her head between her hands, and say "Oh Jim, what's happened to the world?"

JS: I didn't have too much of a problem with the performances until they got to their long soliloquies. Then it was extremely grating.

PE: So, Jim's sonic boom caught his wife's car in its wake but not any of the local wildlife? I buy that.

JS: In all fairness, they managed to crash the fastest manned rocket and a car within 20 feet of one another without killing the operators of each. It was clearly a localized phenomenon.

PE: The still of little Janey on her bike shows evidence of a one-fanged vampire on the loose.

JS: I found this to be an interesting exercise, unique in that it was the couple sharing this experience so often relegated to a solitary character. The real missed opportunity came through the creepy introduction of Casper, the not-so-friendly ghost. He provided some very creepy visuals, and an interesting dimension to the story. I couldn't wait to find out more about how he came to be.

PE: Highlight of the show would have to be Ghosty's speech. For once, one of those long, rambling OL speeches about time vortexes and space continuums makes sense and is very effective, delivered rather creepily I hasten to add.

JS: Too bad that plot thread wasn't deemed worthy of tying off. Still, a marked improvement over the last two episodes.

JS RATING:

PE RATING:

David J. Schow on "The Premonition" (Click on pages to enlarge):

by Larry R and Ted R.

Darcy's flight didn't go real well,
Limbo Dude lives in surreal Hell.
Had Jim not stopped that truck,
Janie'd be out of luck--
They'd be scraping her from the wheel-well.

Next Up, the final episode...

Spotlight on "The Brain of Colonel Barham"

2011-03-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

by Tom Weaver

Recent media announcements that the Earth's population will hit seven billion later in 2011 pave the way for a brief discussion of "The Brain of Colonel Barham," The Outer Limits' brain-in-a-jar "ship in a bottle."

What is a "ship in a bottle"? Veteran screenwriter Ken Kolb taught me that that was Inside Hollywood's way of referring to a TV series episode that cuts every corner in order to rein in escalating production costs. If a few episodes of your series have gone over-budget, quickly throw together a "ship in a bottle" episode and get back on track. On (say) Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, this would take the form of a story in which Capt. Crane finds the Seaview inexplicably deserted, and he wanders up and down endless corridors just to use up running time. On (say) The Wild Wild West, it'd be one where Jim and Artie ride into a ghost town, following strange noises from empty saloon to empty hotel to (etc. etc.). On (say) The Fugitive, it'd be one where Kimble and Insp. Gerard are trapped in a nearly airless mine by a cave-in, and sit on the ground and weakly converse for 40 of the 50 minutes. On The Outer Limits, it's a Donovan's Brain ripoff with all action confined to just a couple of nearly adjoining rooms at a scientific base.

"Colonel Barham" has more of the flavor of a typical 1950s sci-fi movie ultra-cheapie than any other Outer Limits. The premise is that, to ease overcrowding on Earth, Man must start migrating to other planets--and, for no reason that's made evident, America's engaged in a race with Guess Who to be the first across that interplanetary finish line. A computer aboard an unmanned probe spaceship cannot possibly cope with unexpected emergencies, so scientists are turning to Colonel Barham (Anthony Eisley), an astronaut with a terminal illness that has demoted him from rocket ranger to wheelchair jockey. His general (Douglas Kennedy) asks him if he wouldn't mind checking out of Life's Hotel a few months early, so that his still-living brain can be extracted and put in command of the mission. It's asking a bit much, and yet the general doesn’t bother to drop his snarly schtick even during the conversation in question:

BARHAM (sardonic, snotty): Tell me something, general, how would I do [after I'm just a brain] with pretty girls?

GENERAL (a bit contemptuous): How you doin' NOW?

[Musical stinger]

What no one seems to mind, or even notice, is that Barham is a philanderer and an egotist whose bitter rants are tinged with madness. A psychologist (Grant Williams) begins to have his doubts but is overruled; the operation is performed and now, in a scene that should have had Curt Siodmak phoning his lawyer, we see the titular brain in a large pulsating-with-light jar, while nearby stands a speaker (with spinning radar antenna atop) through which he talks; no Outer Limits Bear was ever such a bore. Somehow, we aren't trusted to learn how, Barham can now send out bolts of electricity (represented by the most rudimentary sort of visual effect). He can also impose his will on any visitor, making that person--at least briefly--his zombie-like slave. In short, everything—BUT EVERYTHING—begins to happen just as you knew it would. Once it becomes clear that Barham's Brain represents a danger, you also know that it doesn't stand a chance. What "monster," movie OR TV, was ever more helpless than a deranged brain in a jar in a little room on a military base?

Watching "Colonel Barham," the diehard horror hound of course thinks first of Donovan's Brain but it's actually more like a previous variation on that Siodmak yarn, the 1958 Paramount feature The Colossus of New York. There as here, the scientist (Ross Martin) who ends up Just A Brain is working to ease the problems of world overpopulation. Following a close encounter with a speeding truck, his gray matter is placed in a giant caped robot which (yes) now develops a contemptuous attitude toward mankind, can control minds and emit a death ray.

"Colonel Barham" skimps on the imagination and on thrills and on sets, and on just about everything else; but for allegiant fans of '50s sci-fi cheapies, 50 minutes is just the right investment in time to make in a Donovan's Brain takeoff with an extremely Monster Kid-friendly cast: Shrinking Man Williams, Kennedy (from Invaders from Mars, The Amazing Transparent Man, etc.), Peter Hansen (When Worlds Collide), Paul Lukather (Dinosaurus!), Martin Kosleck (nufsed!) and, best of all, Anthony Eisley, usually a self-effacing, joking sci-fi leading man (The Wasp Woman, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters), but here doing a standout job of establishing the bitterness, egotism and the streak of cruelty in Colonel Barham.

It hasn’t got an original idea in its brain, but it does have that cast and it's got pace--a livelier pace, in fact, than many Outer Limits episodes that are in all other ways better. So I've always liked "The Brain of Colonel Barham" a bit more than I probably should.

Tom Weaver has interviewed pert near everyone who ever made a horror flick and he's been kind enough to share the chats with us in 20 books with titles such as I Talked With a Zombie, Earth vs. the Sci-Fi Filmmakers, and Double Feature Creature Attack. He is also co-author, with Michael Brunas and John Brunas, of Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films 1931-1946, a book that should be on every genre fan's shelf. His latest is the forthcoming I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Filmmakers. Tom has also lent his voice and knowledge to the audio commentaries for several genre films including The Wolf Man, It Came From Outer Space, Fiend Without a Face, and our personal favorite, The Creature From the Black Lagoon. In his spare time Tom is our fact checker. Tom is currently working on five books for release in 2011, which puts a lot of pressure on John and I. Now we'll have to learn the difference between John Carradine and Keith Carradine.

The Brain of Colonel Barham

2011-03-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

Production Order #15

Broadcast Order #15

Original Airdate: 1/2/65

Starring Grant Williams, Elizabeth Perry, Anthony Eisley.

Written by Robert C. Dennis, story by Sidney Ellis.
Directed by Charles F. Haas.

Terminally ill astronaut Barham (Eisley) volunteers to have his brain extracted from his cranium so it can make the long journey to Mars and beyond.

PE: The Donovan's Brain of Colonel Barham From Planet Arous.

JS: After a promising start featuring a rocketship blasting across the sky en route to a lovely alien landscape painting (albeit one flown by a drunk-PE), we're treated to an episode that plays out in a few similar looking rooms on good old Earth.

PE:That's a pretty pathetic brain in a jar. Are you seriously going to tell me that Projects Limited couldn't whip up a brain that looks like a brain? (ah, technology displays the likes of which we haven't seen since Season One! -JS) .Looks more like the Ham of Colonel Barham (when they let you see it that is). Which segues rather well into my judgment of the acting...

JS: I was surprised Grant (Shrinking Man) Williams was almost unrecognizable to me as Major McKinnon.

PE: Lots of genre vets here: Martin Kosleck, Grant Williams, Douglas Kennedy, and Anthony Eisley all saw creature battle at one time or another in their careers (I'll let genre expert Tom Weaver fill in the parentheticals for you in this afternoon's spotlight). Wesley Addy (as Dr. Rahm) could have stepped right out of the witness box of The Verdict where he played a smarmy, pretentious doctor just as he does here.

JS: And no amount of vets could help make this a winning episode.

PE: Fake laser beams from the brain alert! And, while I'm on the subject, can someone tell me why exactly a de-bodied brain can spit out electricity? The scientists never seemed to question the phenomena so should I?

JS: The boiled brain has an enlarged pineal gland that acts as both a channeling receptor and laser cannon. Without that, it would just be dead tissue in a mason jar. How boring would that be?

PE: L-OL dialogue: Dr. Rahm (Addy) informs the big brain that it's getting overheated and the stylus is "off the chart."

Rahm: Just quiet down!

Barham's Brain (delivered in a robotic monotone): Don't talk to me like that doctor I gave you an order I expect you to carry it out immediately!

Rahm gets zapped by the brain and in the next scene, when Jennifer and Major Locke pass the possessed Dr. Rahm in the hall, she tries to engage in a conversation with Rahm:

Jennifer: Oh, I'm on my way to your office, doctor, I'm going to... (to Locke) what's the matter with him?

Locke: He's a scientist, Mrs. Barham. They walk around in a daze most of the time.

JS: As did I, following this episode.

PE: Just a few hours after the husband she loves more than life itself is de-brained, Jennifer 's hitting on Major MacKinnon.

JS: Can you blame her? This was one of TOL's few forays into a less than perfect marriage portrayal.

PE: Sounds like Harry Lubin has been raping and pillaging the Universal-International village again. Bum-buuuumm! Much to-do is made of how to dispose of the all-powerful brain at the climax. A well-placed fastball would do the trick. I'm still trying to figure out how the lab caught fire with one rifle bullet (and then put itself out within a matter of seconds).

JS: One more reason why the boiled brain has to have some form of range attack. If you could just walk up to it, pick it up and flush it down the toilet, it wouldn't really matter how powerful said brain was, right?

JS RATING:

PE RATING:

David J. Schow on "The Brain of Colonel Barham" (Click on pages to enlarge):

From The Outer Limits Companion, Copyright © David J. Schow, 1986, 1998. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission and by special arrangement with the author.

Be sure to check back later today for Tom Weaver's Spotlight on "The Brain of Colonel Barham."

Next Up...

Spotlight on "The Duplicate Man"

2011-03-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

by Mark Holcomb

True story: A week from the day I happened to read Clifford Simak's short story "Goodnight, Mr. James" for the first time, I also happened to catch "The Duplicate Man" on cable TV in the small hours of the morning, also for the first time.

This was in the mid-'70s, when cable was brand new (at least in rural southern Oregon), and one of the channels in our four-station package rotated feeds on a seemingly random basis. It was never certain what this channel would run at any given time—the four-hour block of programming from a Chicago station that lasted until 3 a.m. one Monday morning, and which included a 1 a.m. screening of The Outer Limits, would end at 11 p.m Sunday night the following week, and wrestling or hillbilly concerts or religious shows would drone on until daybreak instead. It was a frustrating crap shoot.

It was also kind of exciting. Syndicated showings of The Outer Limits had slowed to a trickle by then, and were spotty at best in Oregon anyway, so even the dim hope of catching an episode provided a thrill to thrill-deprived monster kids recently transplanted from Los Angeles to a backwater logging burg in the middle of nowhere. I'd generally take my chances, then, and struggle to stay awake past midnight, sneak out of bed long after everybody else in the house was asleep, and keep the television set's volume low enough so that no one was woken up (this meant sitting three feet from the box at most). I got lucky twice over that week—alone, as it turned out; David was already sawing logs, and I didn't have the heart to wake him. Sorry again, brother.

But imagine my sleep-deprived surprise when Simak's tale of an unwitting clone's battle with "psychotic" extraterrestrial contraband turned up on our all-time favorite television show, every episode of which I thought I'd long since committed to memory. I still don't know how I'd missed "The Duplicate Man" up until then when I could practically recite the dialogue from "The Premonition" by heart (and against my will), but somehow I had. No matter—thanks to a statistically unlikely coincidence and a lucky break from the fickle gods of cable TV, my unusual introduction to this episode gave it a permanent place of honor in my private Outer Limits canon.

Beyond this personal connection, "Duplicate" holds up beautifully in almost every way, and shines almost as brightly as its thematic kin "Demon with a Glass Hand" among second season episodes. It's arguably the best execution of Ben Brady's botched mission to adapt works of science fiction literature to the small screen, although Simak's story, first published in a 1951 issue of Horace Gold's Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, is a streamlined one-hander—or one hand and a claw—that required significant fleshing out from screenwriter Robert Dennis. "Goodnight" did feature a bona fide monster on the prowl to toss ABC's way, the telepathic puudly, "a clever and deadly killing machine which directed its rapacity and its cunning against every living thing that was not a puudly," but even that turned out to be too little, too late.

As DJS notes, "The Duplicate Man" is also the series' most notable attempt to situate a story in something other than the present. Its futuristic flourishes—video phones and flying-saucer-shaped houses; collarless mens suits and knotless ties; jet-age school-kid getups; souped-up jetcars; tricked-out sidearms; coin-operated orgasmatrons (just seeing if you're paying attention)—serve little purpose beyond propping up the central conceit of a society in which advanced cloning is the norm, but they're impressively consistent and a fun diversion from the exposition-heavy, occasionally repetitious narrative. They also help remove the episode even further from the martini-and-barbecue milieu favored in season two, although the Jameses opulent swimming pool and patio are heavily featured. (To be fair, the season turned its back on bougieland pretty early on, right after "Wolf 359.")

"Duplicate" is also the optimal showcase for Dennis's skill at adaptation. He has both more and less to work with here than the dull, kid-friendly antics of Adam Link offered, and opens up Simak's stripped-down bug hunt to feature both the real James and supply him with a wife (he's a bachelor in the story) while also remaining faithful to his source. Even better, Dennis turns James's dilemma into an existential crisis worthy of the The Outer Limits' first season. For those who favor the darker tone and more layered, character-driven inclinations of Joseph Stefano and crew (WACToids, you know who you are), "The Duplicate Man" is a welcome throwback. Henderson James is a complex, divided man burdened with the classically Stefanoesque traits of self-loathing, moral enervation, and a marriage that's gone as sour as last month's milk. But like other Stefano protags he's not quite past redemption, and the hope of reawakening held out by "Duplicate" makes it more deserving of being called "Second Chance" than the episode that actually bears that title.

There's a moment when this is made plain. Shortly before heading off for the climactic showdown, one of the Hendersons says, "A man has to be responsible for what he does." This simple statement, like the episode's ambiguous coda—possibly the most poignant since "The Architects of Fear"—recalls and effectively distills The Outer Limits's first-season ethos. And while watching the series from start to finish in production order for WACT purposes (OK, I cheated and skipped a few) has made me less of a second-season bigot than I used to be, "The Duplicate Man" reminds me of how much I miss the tough-love humanism that characterized Stefano's tenure. Brady tried hard, but his version just lacks teeth.

I guess that's as good a segue into a discussion of the episode's monster as any. Frankly, despite the obvious haste taken in getting the suit and mask assembled, the megasoid works for me. (Dennis changed the species' name to something harder-edged and more lethal sounding, but he also admirably worked "puudly" into the teleplay early on.) Never described in the story, Project Unlimited made the creature big, ugly, and crude, which is about what you'd expect from "the most bloodthirsty, hate-filled thing yet found in the Galaxy." It's also dotted with unsightly fleshy lumps that may well be meant as manifestations of its delicate condition. Even its quavering, John Fiedler-like voice adds an eerie, alien quality to the beast, although I would've liked to hear more of that and less of its chronic growling; I half-expected the thing to yelp when the Hendersons blasted it with their alterna-revolvers.

Other details work to give "Duplicate" some of that long-lost OL magic, including the resurgence of Helosian eyewear in its opening scene. Kenneth Peach acquits himself well in another dark-hued episode, a surprising amount of which takes place at night, and Gerd Oswald supplies the necessary mournful tone in his final exemplary Outer Limits assignment. The cast is also solid, although half-space mom/half-OL babe Constance Towers's Laura James succumbs to season two's aimless-housefrau syndrome and isn't given much to do until her wrenching climactic reconciliation with Henderson. Some of the supporting players really stand out, too. Sean McClory is fine as the boozing, megasoid-scarred Emmet, but he basically plays the same character no matter what he's in (see the 1968 Dean Martin western Bandolero! for proof); Ivy Bethune as the duplicate bureau official and Alan Gifford as the zoological garden guide, however, are memorable in their too-fleeting appearances. The only serious aesthetic drawback to "The Duplicate Man" is Harry Lubin's score. While we do get a second opportunity to hear the complex, haunting melody first used when Trent is resurrected in "Demon" (twice, and all the way through this time), the episode's other cues are cartoonish, grating and, by this point, gruelingly familiar. Somebody should've swiped the guy's theremin.

Even this is easy to overlook, though, considering that the episode is such a success so shockingly close to the sad, apathetic finale of The Outer Limits. "The Duplicate Man" never lets me down, and somehow never fails to be accompanied by a strange coincidence or two: Not only was Simak's story originally published 60 years ago this very month, but get a load of the year on that plaque hanging in the zoological gardens in the opening scene:

Timing really is everything.

Anyway, before I relinquish the pulpit and take my wife to Mexico for a belated honeymoon (we'll be on the lookout for Jonas Temple), here's what I learned from participating in WACT:

● Re-watching The Outer Limits in the virtual company a bunch of people I respect and admire is a lot more fun than watching it alone, even if we don't see eye to eye and they suspect I'm full of shit, and especially since this is probably the last time I'll watch quite a few of the episodes. (You couldn't pay me to re-watch some of them.) Thanks, everybody -- I understand better why I love this show because of your insights.

● The Outer Limits resists nostalgia, and in some cases openly critiques it ("Don't Open Till Doomsday," "The Guests," and, yeah, "The Duplicate Man"). So while it's fun to recall who and where we were when we first watched it, as my reverie above amply proves, it's most rewarding to experience the series for its timeless qualities. That is, to see it in right-now time, not way-back-when time...

● While The Outer Limits borrows from and flirts with and mimics several film and literary (and television) genres, when it's going full-tilt -- like in "The Invisibles," "The Zanti Misfits," "ZZZZZ" (you knew I'd work that one in somehow), "O.B.I.T.", and so on -- it's a genre unto itself.

● Despite its explicit and implicit humanism, The Outer Limits taps into a vein of pessimism and outright misanthropy that has yet to be outdone on network or even cable television. How big a vein? Biggest vein you ever saw. (Take that, WACT stooges.)

● Finally, The Outer Limits is art, and art belongs to us all.

All right, I've written enough to hang myself a dozen times over, but that's how this show affects me. No apologies, but a big, big thank-you to John and Peter for hosting this blog; it can't have been easy and I'm pretty sure it wasn't always fun, but they made it look like both the whole way through. Nice work, guys. And thanks, as ever, to Herr Schow, whose stubborn refusal to let The Outer Limits die expands all humans. Keep it up.

End of transmission.

Mark Holcomb writes about movies, television, books, and general pop-cultural ephemera for The Village Voice, The Believer, Time Out New York, Salon, and whoever else will have him. He first watched The Outer Limits in its original run as a highly impressionable, temperamentally morbid three year old, and hasn't been able to shake it since (not that he's tried). He and his twin brother, David, indulged their fascination with the series back in the pre-blog '90s, and their efforts live on here courtesy of David J. Schow.

HOT WHEELS, CHEMOSPHERES & CHROMOITES

2011-03-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

by David J. Schow

Future cars! “The Duplicate Man” is the only Outer Limits to feature them, since the space-sled got cut out of “The Man Who Was Never Born.”

First up is Henderson James’ stylin’ set of wheels, with not one, but two phones on the dashboard. The car is a landmark George Barris custom dubbed the 1963 Buick “Villa Riviera,” originally built for use in the movie For Those Who Think Young with Frank Sinatra. Wildcat engine, half-landau top conversion, brushed stainless steel trim, extended hood, fenders, and fins … and the taillights from a Nash Rambler, installed upside-down. In its original white paintjob, it was also featured in an episode of Perry Mason.

Then it was repainted, according to the book Barris Kustoms of the 1960s (MBI Publishing, 2002), with “35 coats of translucent Cherry with Fire Frost Pearl, and given a Congo Pearl white alligator-hide vinyl top.” The interior featured white leather trimmed with walnut panels, a four-speaker stereo music system, a tiny (removable) Sony television, and a two-line phone hookup with Candy Red and White Pearl headpieces. (Both these photos are from the book, which also features the Villa Riviera on the cover.)

The briefly-seen police vehicle is a Ford Mercury concept car from 1955, called the D-528. An abundance of background on it can be found here.

Information on the Chemosphere House (designed by world-famous architect John Lautner) can be found all over the internet. Start here.

As previously discovered (or realized) on this very site, the “Imwarf” in the space zoo is a clever retrofit of the top half of the Chromoite from “The Mice.” Here’s Wah Chang’s sketch of it, spotted hanging in the Project Unlimited shop in 1964 by Bob Burns.

And those Megasoid claws? Recycled from the Calco Galaxy aliens in “Fun and Games.”

SPACE GUNS!

2011-03-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

by David J. Schow

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but Captain Emmet appears to have a very rockin’ SPACE GUN COLLECTION in his Chemosphere pad.

It’s only visible in one shot – when the real Henderson enters Emmet’s. It’s not visible when the clone does the same thing, earlier. Henderson (the real one) slumps in a chair that’s right below the frame holding the guns, but we don’t see them in that shot, either, since Gerd Oswald shot Emmet’s interior as an A-B-C arc without reverse angles.

The more astute among you may have already noticed that “The Duplicate Man” takes place this year – 2011. Or that both Henderson and his clone are wearing Qarlo’s futuristic wristwatch from “Soldier.”

But can anybody ID the guns? The bottom one is too large to be the “laser pistol” from “The Bellero Shield,” and the top one sure looks like a blaster from Forbidden Planet. Maybe. Possibly.

And if this is the world of 2011 … I WANT MY MEGASOID.

And if you wish to see how much more ridiculous Mr. Gasoid became on Bewitched and Lost in Space … go here.

The Duplicate Man

2011-03-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Production Order #14

Broadcast Order #13

Original Airdate: 12/19/64

Starring Ron Randell, Constance Towers, Mike Lane.

Written by Robert C. Dennis, story by Clifford D. Simak.
Directed by Gerd Oswald.

Henderson James (Randell) has lost his pet Megasoid. Fortunately, it's ovulating and has more than killing in mind. To track down the creature, Henderson is forced to "duplicate" himself. Mayhem, laughs, and lots of mistaken identity follow.

PE: ... and we're back. To the same old crap. Too much to ask for that we might have two good episodes in a row.

JS: Technically we did get two good ones in a row... they were just parts of the same episode. A three-episode stretch was definitely out of the question.

PE: Evidently, in the year 2025, phones will have screens, office buildings will have disco balls during business hours, cars will look just like 1960s models (but sound like the Batmobile) but, perhaps most startling, women will dress like princesses with capes.

JS: As for those videophones, did you notice how people have apparently regressed from the early days of Skype and FaceTime, not even bothering to look into the camera anymore.

PE: Seriously, the worst monster outfit ever created for television. A six foot abominable snowman with claws and a Minah beak who walks with a slouch. And a tail (can't forget that tail). Looks more like something Mister Rodgers would welcome to his neighborhood than a creature designed to frighten TV audiences. At least he has perfect diction. Oddly, he only speaks once. Did saner minds prevail? Obviously not, since the show still aired.

JS: And with that my new vote for worst Outer Limits alien voice goes to... The Megasoid!

PE: L-OL dialogue alert!

Laura (to her husband James, after finding out he'd duped himself): What right did you have to take creation into your own hands? Oh, what a mess you've gotten yourself into!

PE: All the homes in this futuristic episode look 1960s-contemporary save that of Basil Jerichau (Steven Jeray), our Megasoid-hating bounty hunter/smuggler. Basil's house is furnished in modern-day frump.

JS: But is that a house... or a spaceship! Too bad they didn't have that location for the end of "The Inheritors."

PE: The performances are awful across the board. Randell is wooden even when he's not supposed to be. Towers is set decorating. Jeray is not given much to do with his one-note Captain Ahab portrayal.

JS: I normally appreciate the way filmmakers use subtle touches in set dressing and costuming to sell things as being set in the future. But an untucked tie and a pair of panties stretched over your head do not the future make. I hope.

PE: Maybe it's just me but I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on when the Megasoid ambushes Basil. He pats the man on his back quite a bit, picks him up and slams him to the canvass. There's a full-Nelson and an eight count and then a close-up of one of the talons running along the man's body and that piercing, annoying, jarring "music" (dun-duuuuuuuuuuun!), telling me something important is happening. Is my baked potato ready?

JS: Do you think Gerd's direction to Mike Lane (the man in the Megasoid suit) was to go 90% monkey, 10% bird? That's my guess, which would match the make-up of the costume, anyway.

PE: This dopey piece of crap reminded me very much of some of the dopey crap I read in the 1950s digest, Super Science Fiction. SSF specialized in stories like "I Caught the Megasoid from Cygnus IV." Those stories were dopey but ultra-fun reads. This is not fun.

JS: For what it's worth, the next episode has to be better, right? Like in Card Sharks? Is it higher than "The Duplicate Man"? We can't lose... unless it's a tie... Gulp.

JS RATING:

PE RATING:

David J. Schow on "The Duplicate Man" (Click on pages to enlarge):

THE DUPLICATE MAN

An extraterrestrial Puudly,
An Imwarf (his alien buddly),
Mr. James was annoyed
By a big Megasoid
What critter, I ask, was more studly?

David J. Schow returns at noon with HOT WHEELS, CHEMOSPHERES & CHROMOITES.

Be sure to check back later this afternoon for Mark Holcomb's Spotlight on "The Duplicate Man."

Next Up...

Spotlight on "The Inheritors"

2011-03-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

by Gary Gerani

INTRODUCTION:

All it takes is a few minutes for “The Inheritors” to assert itself as a Most Important Episode – two, actually, which automatically gives this story a special place in the OL pantheon of greats. Distantly a TV pilot about the government’s “Department of Science” and its ongoing efforts to investigate perplexing enigmas, it sidestepped two rock solid S2 directives: self-consciously “average” protagonists, and a need as old as the series itself, a scary-looking bear to hold viewer attention. Instead, director James Goldstone (“The Sixth Finger,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) and three talented writers present us with a modern (early ‘60s) mystery thriller of the most cerebral order, an FBI-style action film with very little action, a heartfelt love story without a single female in the (lead) cast. How did such an oddity occur, and why? Because smart people wanted to tell a smart story for the sheer creative satisfaction of it, and fortunately, these people had power. There is very little to exploit in “The Inheritors”; even then the backdoor pilot possibilities must have seemed remote. But it’s as close as one will ever get to a genuine labor of love by seasoned television pros “who ought to know better.” Whatever that special dedication to this story is, we feel it instantly; never have I experienced a more self-assured presentation of dramatic material, especially in the science fiction genre. Fortunately for everyone, “The Inheritors” winds up being every bit as good as its creators think it is.

THE INHERITORS - PART ONE

TEASER:

An OL episode beginning in the battlefield? And in Viet Nam? Most unusual, and a striking way to get the show off to a breathless start. Lt. Minns (Steve Ihnat) is shot, and soon we’re in a hospital, with lead character Adam Ballard (Bob Duvall – what a face!) watching in awe (via shaky dolly) as two brainwave patterns – two brains – are detected in the lieutenant’s head. Da-da-da-daaaaaa!!! exclaims Harry Lubin.

ACT 1:

Here’s where we are introduced to the regulars of “Century 21,” the unsold pilot concept that was reworked by Seeleg Lester into this OL two-parter. We watch Assistant Secretary of Science Ballard (Duvall) briefing his boss Mr. Branch (Ted de Corsia) and ultimately Prof. Whitsett (William Wintersale) on the four inexplicable brainiacs in their midst, all shot in the same theater of war (“These men should’ve died but didn’t”). The “honeycombed symmetry” of the strange ore found within them is given a good amount of screen time, with the filmmakers clearly relishing the step-by-step scientific procedural. It’s interesting to compare Ballard’s report with a similar scene in Season One’s “Children of Spider County”; “The Inheritors” offers a dryer, more subtle science fiction concept, perfectly in keeping with the ultra-straight, by-the-book tone Goldstone cleanly establishes. Indeed, Ballard is straightness personified, vigilant to the point of being robotic and obsessive at times. “The Inheritors” is indirectly about this character’s personal arc, putting him roughly in the same moral position as Henry Brandon’s General Crawford in “The Chameleon” by tale’s end. Ballard ultimately finds his precious humanity, but until then, he’s a man on the move, plunging himself into ‘Nam battlefield peril without a second thought. And how cool is it to see James (“Nightmare”) Shigeta leading him through harm’s way to the place of that “great fire in the sky”: a meteor crater (off screen, due to budget – but Lubin’s music and Duvall’s expression turn it into an evocative scene). Meanwhile, in an encounter that anticipates a similar exchange between Kirk and Gary Mitchell in Goldstone’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Ballard questions friendly, low-key hospital-bound Minns… and is startled by the magnitude of his newly-improved IQ.

ACT 2:

As the secret federal investigation continues and Ballard’s worries increase, Minns uses low-voltage telepathic power (another shaky push-in to a close-up, with both a nurse and a guard) to escape the hospital. He soon becomes a Wall Street sensation, parlaying 500 dollars into a small fortune. This money is promptly sent to his three “afflicted” brethren, and it’s clear that some mysterious, potentially dangerous project is underway. It’s here where FBI (or FBS) Agent Harris (Donald Harron) joins the investigation. Like Duvall, actor Harron has a great face – he seems like a typical fed, but by tale’s end, a simple gesture will reveal his conversion from relentless tracker to inherent humanist. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Stories from business associates about how “decent” these brain mutants are reach Ballard’s ears. He notes this all-important detail, but also points out, with a sly yet worried half-smile, that bankers shouldn’t “gamble”.

ACT 3:

We’re in Wichita, site of the soon-to-be-built alien spaceship. Here we meet young Hadley, a grunt turned biochemist supreme. He has a significant exchange with greedy Dabbs Greer, the guy who rented him the facility, and uses telepathy to force his cooperation – or else (Hadley will talk about this morally questionable act later in the story, when the alien’s motives are questioned). Ballard and company close-in, but Hadley’s now disappeared, last seen up the Amazon searching for a rare herb. Next, we’re in Stockhom, where Conover’s miraculous new alloy (stronger than steel, lighter than wood, with pieces fused together on a molecular level) astounds Ballard. Conover himself senses the investigator’s presence, and avoids a direct confrontation. Instead, the conflicted project member turns up in a church, gently asking God for guidance. “(What I’m doing) can’t be wrong… can it, God?” With all the tight procedural hunting going on and the unearthly enigma growing, this gentle, intimate moment winds up being a standout.

ACT 4:

Ballard tracks high-strung, earthy and ultra-frustrated Robert Renaldo (played magnificently by James Frawley) to Tokyo, and their exchange is both exciting and revelatory (“I beat gravity – the pull of the Earth!”). It’s ultimately costly to Ballard, who loses two weeks after a necessary psychic “attack” from Renaldo, a man with a stated dislike for authority who despises what he’s being compelled to do, but, like the others, simply can’t help himself. Ultimately, Ballard reunites with Harris for a planned confrontation with Minns, but only after the lieutenant has a brief, meaningful scene with a dying little boy named Johnny. Here, for the first time, we get a tantalizing clue as to what this mega-mystery is all about…and we realize it involves afflicted children. From enigmatic innocence we head toward potential violence, as Minns arrives at his apartment, knowing full well that men with guns and very specific orders are waiting for him…

THE INHERITORS - PART TWO

TEASER/ACT I:

We back up for some investigating within Minns’ apartment (a brief scene cut when “The Inheritors” was re-worked slightly into a “feature” for VHS release), just before the lieutenant enters and escapes capture with a kind of sad resignation of his overall situation. A brief recap brings viewers up to date, with Harris checking out that data found in Minns’ apartment. And now we are treated to two of the brain mutants – dignified Conover and emotional Renaldo -- discussing their perplexing dilemma with great fear and concern. Conover has disturbing visions of “children being tortured,” of “retarded” kids and other horrors… certainly a compelling way to end Act 1. Interestingly, we are given enough information to fear the consequences of their unstoppable “project”,” yet we somehow sense that all of what we’ve been experiencing just simply can’t be malevolent. Can it, God?

ACT 2:

Harris’ research leads Ballard to various handicapped children, pretty much following Minns’ path. There are a couple of remarkable scenes here, as the lieutenant interacts with both the kids and the adults in their life. He cries, thinking about what will happen to these innocent, helpless ones – but is this because the Project is evil, and he feels guilty as sin because of his part in it? Goldstone wisely introduces this element at just the right juncture of his story, keeping the suspense going and justifying Ballard’s desperate anger (“Does it matter if it may be heinous?” he shouts to the now assembled Three in Wichita, as only Bob Duvall can). But Renaldo’s Barrier keeps them at bay, because, as Robert emphatically points out, “NOTHING can stop the project!”

ACT 3:

The kids are finally brought along by Minns, even as the spaceship (cheaply done because of the limited OL budget, but strangely acceptable as a “no frills,” anti-Hollywood creation) is being prepped for use. His emotions reaching fever pitch, yet still focused on vigilant purpose, a desperate Ballard tries to play the Three against each other, with some success, subtly turning them against the lieutenant. “Turn the barrier off,” Conover finally says to Renaldo, who’s about to do just that…

ACT 4:

“We’ve reached a crossroads,” Minns tells everyone present, and the Great Reveal is finally upon us, profound thoughts forming in this man’s mind seconds before he even speaks them. Indeed, this is what we as an audience have been waiting over an hour and a half to hear, and the revelatory “speech” does not disappoint. With the loveliest piece of music Harry Lubin ever wrote underscoring his poetic yet simple words, Minns explains how an all-but divine alien race was doomed to extinction. But rather than disappear completely, they sent their RNA into the void of outer space, hoping against hope that events would follow “much as they have followed” on Earth. The afflicted children, unloved on this world, are ultimately The Inheritors of the show’s title, just as Minns and his mutant brethren have been all along. These “hopeless ones” will find genuine happiness on another world… they will be whole at last. While impressed with these benevolent motives, Ballard still balks at the abduction, until Minns plays his final, winning card: “Then take them home, Mr. Ballard,” he says gently, asking Renaldo to turn off the barrier. As a mystified Ballard and Harris enter the spaceship, they are amazed to see all of the afflicted children perfectly normal – the atmosphere in this craft is exactly like that of the distant planet. A by-the-book attack dog for most of the story, Agent Harris removes his hat, inspired to the point of being dumbfounded. And here’s the kicker: if Ballard does indeed take the kids home, they will revert… and one of them, little Johnny Subiron, will die of a rare blood disease.

Of course, Ballard changes his mind, and this is monumental. How can the man do otherwise and call himself a decent human being? Leaving this choice to him was a brilliant, ingenious move, by Minns, Goldstone and the screenwriters. All four of the alien-brained adults will accompany the kids, of their own free will, just as Minns predicted; they were post-deceased Angels of Mercy anyway, no longer belonging to this world. They truly belong in a symbolic heaven, a place of beauty and hope, just like the children. And as we pull away and Ken Peach’s camera tilts upward, it’s clear their sacred journey will be successful.

SUMMATION:

Anyone who has doubts that S2 OL produced some brilliant and memorable shows just has to screen this extraordinary two-parter. As mentioned, “The Inheritors” amounts to an unexpected labor of love, both in terms of the plotline and the dedication of the various filmmakers/writers involved. There are times when the show seems to be pushing the envelope of greatness, almost as if declaring “it doesn’t get much better than this, folks!” Defying a pitiful budget and what was clearly the end of OUTER LIMITS for all intent and purposes, it realizes everything Ben Brady was hoping to accomplish with his “take” on the series, and then some. A wonderful science fiction story filled with captivating twists and an ensemble of committed actors to die for, “The Inheritors” is nothing less than a two-of-a-kind-classic. Thanks, James Goldstone and company, for enriching my life with your art.