Tuesday, June 02, 2015
Forgotten TV: THRILLER
This show on from 1960-62 was quite frightening from what I remember. Here we find poor Patty McCormack again playing an evil child. These dramas were done well. And having Boris introduce them and attach his name to the show didn't hurt. He even acted in a few.
Here is the Thriller episode guide. Most of them can be found on you tube.
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I love the THRILLER series and have the dvd box set of all the episodes. In 2010 there was a great blog that covered all 67 shows: http://athrilleraday.blogspot.com
I see even after 4 years the blog is still getting comments.
I don't know why we can't have a show like this today. An anthology of horror would be great.
I need to look for this at some point; I don't think I've ever seen it.
My parents didn't want me to watch THRILLER (they thought it might give me Bad Dreams) but I managed to sneak a look whenever I could.
They scared the crap out of me, and a few scenes are still fresh in my mind, although they don't frighten me anymore.
Well, we can't have horror/suspense anthologies of the caliber of THRILLER, at least not too often, because too often the auteur theory is given full play in when it comes to anthology series these days...the director is everything, the script a rough draft at best. This really doesn't work in film, and even less in short film/television segments.
Such attempts as MASTERS OF HORROR, certainly the rather doomed to mediocrity HBO TALES FROM THE CRYPT, NBC's watered-down version of MOH known as FEAR ITSELF, and certainly the last, atrocious revival of THE TWILIGHT ZONE on UPN have all made scripts secondary at best, though a few episodes of MOH and FI managed to be at least somewhat effective. Such syndicated series as MONSTERS and TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE had higher batting averages in the 1980s and '90s, with lower budgets.
Aside from that fine Anchor Bay box, you can catch THRILLER in late nights on the MeTV network in the US...they run NIGHT GALLERY (that wildly uneven series), THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR and THRILLER weeknights. THRILLER had stronger and weaker episodes (many of the first season suspense episodes seem a bit slight), but it earned its reputation.
Actually, a very odd sort of fun can be had looking at the horrible re-editing Universal did for the syndicated repeats of NIGHT GALLERY...where that series was on NBC in 45-minute and other formats, but the syndie package was strictly made up of half-hours with 6-8 minutes out for commercials...so some 10-minute segments were bloated with random scraps of imagery and repetition of shots to make them "fit"...leaving a notional short piece utterly incoherent (such as the one-man segment with Arte Johnson as a damned dj: "The Flip Side of Satan"...one can see the original edits on Hulu.
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