When you finally saw the ending of the episode.. Years later. (Spoilers possible)

Cafe Society
1

Thanks to the magic of cable and DVD’s many old shows can be seen again. Sometimes, when you catch a missed episode from your youth, it can make you remember how peeved you were when the elements conspired to miss what happened then.

For me it was the old “My favorite Martian” show around 1975 (it was on the 60’s in the USA, but due to translation to Spanish and syndication, it was shown in Central America in the 70’s). Back then, I laughed and wondered how Tim and Uncle Martin could return from being stuck in the old west due to a time machine problem. The episode was Go West, Young Martian - Part 1

Coming out of school, I remember sitting down anxious to see the next episode, and there was a power outage…
Boy, my brother and me were pissed, I’m not sure if the episode was showed again, but I never saw the conclusion.

20 years later, in TV land, casually changing channels I finally saw the Go West, Young Martian - Part 2

It felt like a monkey you forgot that was there all those years finally coming off your back!! The curious thing was that I saw it in a different language as part one!Tim and Uncle Martin made it back, but with an unwilling stowaway Indian!

Any more curious tales of closure from your TV or movie watching history?

2

I saw the first of the three acts of Area 88 back in 1986 or so. I had it on tape…forever. I’d never managed to see the second and third acts.

The story is about a pilot who gets shanghai’d into a mercenary air force. He’s nearly suicidal with the thought of having to kill, but being a great pilot he is very good at it. All he has to do is kill enough people or last for three years and he can finally get to go home.

Of course, you KNOW how it’s going to end. Our Hero’s side is going to win the war and our hero will manage to make it back to his lady love and the dream job he had waiting for him.

So, fifteen years later or so I manage to get ahold of the second and third acts on VHS.

Let’s just say it’s worth watching, and I wasn’t correct about what was going to happen…

-Joe

3

I caught Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders on late night TV, but for some reason couldn’t stay to see the end. It was a fascinating film, based (although I didn’t know it then) on Robert H. van Gulik’s series of mysteries. One of those ABC Movies of the Week.
I didn’t see it again for ages. In those pre-cable, pre-VHS years it virtually vanished. I finally stumbled across a copy of the book, and learned the solution to the mystery.
Finally, many years later, as I was living in Salt Lake City, see that it’s to be on an independent station for Halloween. Probably they picked it up cheap, and think it’s a horror movie. I get a friend to tape it, since I have no VCR. So, a great many years later, I finally got to see the end.

A final kicker – I’m glad I got my friend to tape it. I’ve never seen it on the air anywhere else, ever again. AFAIK it’s still not available on VHS or DVD. and it should be. Great mystery. Would’ve been a great TV series (which is clearly what the Movie of the Week was a bid for), but ABC balked, probably at the price, and because they doubted interest in an all-Asian series. They gave the lead a cheap modern TV mystery show, which fizzled.

4

Mind if I hijack this a little bit to include comic books?

As a kid, I found my older brothers’ stash of Marvel comics. I put them all together and read them all. Some had incomplete story arcs, and it was 4-5 years after they were published that I found them, and there was no way to find back issues in the little hick town where we lived. The drug store put comics on spin racks, and didn’t really care if they were up-to-date.

One story arc of Fantastic Four (beginning with #68) had our heroes travel to Latveria to see what Dr. Doom was up to. They allowed themselves to get captured, sorta, so that they could possibly get Doom to gloat his secret ambitions to them. Doom, however, strapped them to these hypnosis machines to convince them they had lost their powers. They became docile, timid people who recoiled at the very mention of the word “violence.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Doom was working on his secret project, a squad of 8-foot 10-ton killer robots. He was having them shelled with mortars, blown up with high-powered explosives, etc, while gloating to his Nazi sidekick (whom he liberated from the Red Skull, ha ha) about how invincible they were. Then he unleashed them for the Ultimate Test: THE DESTRUCTION OF AN ENTIRE VILLAGE! The same village where the FF were being held! The issue ended with the 8-foot 10-ton killer robots overcoming Doom’s soldiers and making their way to the village, and in the last panel Reed Richards, in a dramatic close-up, says “It’s Doom’s Robots! AND THEY’RE CLOSING IN FOR THE ATTACK!!!”

Didn’t have the ones after that. For years I wondered how they got out of that predicament. Surely they survived, but how, I implored the powers that be, how?

A few years ago, I was visiting a friend in Charlotte NC, and we went down to his favorite comic book store, and I looked through their stuff. I found a trade paperback called “The Villainy of Doctor Doom.” I flipped through it and saw that they had the complete story arc! Yay! I was finally going to able to see how the story ended!

Alas, it was a case of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby not really having a plan for the FF’s victory. They just pulled something out their asses. At the beginning of the third issue, the FF get their powers back all of the sudden, and engage teh bots. One of the 8-foot 10-ton killer robots grabs Mr. Fantastic by the legs. Mr. F stretches to the top of one of the village water towers. Within milliseconds, he deduces that the tower was where Doom conventiently kept his security devices, so he pushed a couple buttons (while the 8-foot 10-ton killer robot should have been mangling his legs) and flung teh bots into the BOTTOMLESS LAKE! They all sunk because they were too heavy to swim. Yes, the village was built next to a bottomless lake.

Then Reed ripped out the machine, reprogrammed it to control the robots, and Doom got mad, so he set them off the bomb. His Nazi sidekick said “Master, what of your loyal sunjects” Doom replied “MY SUBJECTS! I FORGOT!” Yep, he forgot he had people living in the village he had previously instructed his 8-foot 10-ton killer robots to destroy.

But Sue Storm (who had been house shopping back in the US) showed up in the nick of time and put a force field around the village, and saved everybody.

In the next issue, the FF decide to go into Doom’s castle to capture him. He sets off a trap door that Mrs. Fantastic and Crystal fall through (wow, what a remarkable feat of architectural engineering to predict precisely where those two women would be standing in the future!), so Mr. F, the Thing and the Human Torch had to figure out how to get through Doom’s defenses to get in by themselves.

The trapdoor the girls fell through deposited them in Doom’s dining hall, where he had a feast set up for them. He was so polite, he wowed them with his noble-bred courtesy and generosity. After dinner, he played the piano for them, his original composition of course. Little beknowest to the girls, it was actually a MULTIDEATH MACHINE OF DOOM with a little viewing monitor so he could see exactly where the rest of the FF were going.

They found their way to Doom’s art hall, where he had the world’s greatest collection of art and sculpture, and saw his Nazi assistant brandishing a flame gun (why he couldn’t just use his pistol, nobody knows) at the curator who happened to a mole spying on Doom. The Nazi sidekick said “My Nazi training has served me well! I discovered who you really are and now I shall put an end to your spying!” The curator said “You would burn all these priceless pieces of art just to destroy me?” The Nazi sidekick replied “What care I for art?” and pointed the flame gun at him. Doom saw all this going on in his monitor, got pissed, and directed the rays of the MULTIDEATH MACHINE OF DOOM to the Nazi sidekick, killing him instantly. Nobody was going to threaten his art like that.

Then he allowed the FF to go free. The end.

5

I have those issues. They’re typical of the 4-5 issue story arcs that Lee and Kirby were doing near the end of Kirby’s time there. Grandiose ideas, great artwork by Kirby, and if you thought about it too much, it didn’t make any sense. I loved them anyway.

This arc was, I’m convinced, inspired by Patrick McGoohan’s series The Prisoner - the FF is trapped in a gilded cage by Doom – the gourmet meals are part of the gilding.

The previous arc was( again, I’m convinced) by the Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action” – The Thing is kidnapped by Skrulls who act like 1920s-30s gangsters and trained as a gladiator.

6

I also liked that movie! I also saw it in Spanish; I will have to search for the original English version.

I was surprised to find that the foreword of the movie was true: Judge Dee was a real person:

http://www.jadedragon.com/archives/nov98/bookrevu.html

7

Rosemary’s Baby. When I was 11 or 12, I watched most of this movie with my great-grammy. Just before the end, however, we ended up leaving the house. While in high school a few years later, I found the book in the school library and read how it ended. Finally, about four years ago I finally got to see the end of the movie.

And I was pissed! I wasted two hours rewatching what I’d already seen only to find out that they never show the damn baby! In the book they tell you what he looked like, with yellow eyes, a tail and “pearly little claws” and the movie doesn’t show you him at all, dammit! I think I hate this movie, now.

8

oh boy. i’m thirty now and there were two shows i missed in elementary school that i’m still peeved about lol

first, you may recall that the old batman series always had a cliffhanger show followed the next week by a continuation episode. i saw an episode in which batman and robin are trapped in giant snow cones at the end. the next week when the resolution was supposed to air my parents forced me to go to some sort of gymnastics class. even years later when the show was in syndication i never managed to catch the episode i missed.

one december i was visiting my grandparents and some sort of smurf christmas special was going to air. but it interfered with some news show that my granpa watched and he vetoed my tv usage. never got to see that show either.

9

i guess the OP is supposed to be episodes you did end up seeing. When I was little I remember catching part of a show that took place on a spaceship, on a public tv station and the two characters were talking about the word google. years later i was watching the original BBC hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and this scene appeared! i had this sense that i had caughta cool show but i had no idea how right i was til i caught it in full years later and after reading the book.