From the original Serling post...
Things keep Kevin Baconing to Twilight Zone...
Indeed!!
Night Gallery (1970-1973)
"Night Gallery" connects to my weird-fiction rabbit hole!
Yep, Serling never did Lovecraft on Zone, but he did on "Night Gallery".
"Night Gallery" did "Pickman's Model" and "Cool Air" as straight ahead adaptations; and then for a goofy quickie humor skit, they did "Professor Peabody's Last Lecture" with Carl Reiner, where Reiner teaches a class on the Lovecraft mythos, and accidentally turns himself into an algae monster with one eyeball sticking out.
I looked up clips and photos, and that jogged my memory, and I remember the whole episodes now!
They were really good!
I wasn't on this Lovecraft quest then, so the mythos connections flew over my head at the time, but my memory filed them away anyway.
I just had to activate the right braincells, and there it all was.
I was Googling for "Lovecraft based humor" to find more things like Garth Merenghi, and the Reiner skit popped up, and then it traced back to the serious adaptations.
Another one where I stumbled backwards into treasure.
I brought up "Night Gallery" in my memorial for Ma, and I kinda hemmed and hawed about it, and it's my least favorite part of that post. But!! Now I know why! I was subconsciously trying to remember this stuff, but it got stuck!
Thank you, Ma! Thank you for "Night Gallery"! 😁❤
I'll retro-link this post into that one in the line "I'm glad she turned me on to it".
Indeed I am. Indeed I am.
I regret my brain's hard-drive retrieval was so chuggy and slowpoke, but better late than never.
4 comments:
On an unrelated note, the cast of The Wire seems cursed lately. James Ransone (the dumbass Ziggy Sobotka from season 2; he was also in "It: Chapter Two") committed suicide, and then Isiah Whitlock Jr. who played Clay Davis ("sheeeiiiiiit!") just died. The next Babylon 5/Twin Peaks?
Oh God, its been so long since I saw "The Wire" I dunno if I can remember anything. I remember pre-Thrones Littlefinger being in it. I remember Michael K. Williams. I remember the kids on the outdoor couch, and them getting a new couch in the last episode. Well, if those Lovecraft "Night Gallery" episodes were still in my head, "The Wire" is probably in there somewhere.
And yeah, I remember Joe Ransone more from "IT 2".
It's always at or near the top of "best TV shows ever" lists and I really think that if it weren't for the Internet it'd have even less of a fan base than it does. It was never any big ratings success either--I'm pretty sure that for all its acclaim everything else David Simon did was better in terms of getting ratings. I can't fault you for forgetting most of it--it crams about 15 years' worth of stuff into 5 seasons and even some of its most ardent fans have admitted that watching it always felt like homework.
Well, Michael B. Jordan (one of the first big deaths, in season 1) is doing well, at least...
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