If they were both TV shows, and if they were real at all. Both memories might be conflated because I was young.
Some kind of suspense/crime solving show. As I remember, although my memory may be faulty, each episode had some kind of special effect, and the tag scene showed how the effect was done. Like there was a lightning storm in one episode, and the tag scene showed how a rain machine and a Lightning Strikes[sup]TM[/sup] work. In another, characters were playing billiards, and the tag showed how the billiard table was rigged so shots would go in or not as necessary. In this case, it’s possible that there was no such show. It could be that I saw a TV special devoted to explaining SFX, and I conflated that with some show my parents watched; Mission Impossible or something. But it could be a show that had a very short run. It was in the early 1970s that I saw whatever I saw.
A space-themed show. Saw it in 1978 or 1979. Absolutely not Star Trek. At the end of the show (movie?) a woman was going to go on a lone mission. She overhears two other characters fretting about the possibility that she might not return and might not survive. Her response: “If I die in space, it would be fitting. I was born there.” Maybe Lost in Space in a later season. Maybe Space: 1999; maybe a (TV?) movie. But I’m sure I saw that scene, whatever it was in.
1)This is such an incredibly long shot it’s probably not the case, but I’d swear I saw Mr Rogers do a small bit once with Foley artists and they showed how they made thunder by waving a piece of sheet metal back and forth. Maybe it wasn’t Mr Rogers, but I do remember that piece of metal. I also seem to remember breaking a stalk of celery to simulate breaking bones.
2)I don’t remember that at all and I seem to say this a lot, but is there a chance it was a rerun of of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone? Between those two, obviously, it sounds more like Twilight Zone.
Number 1 makes me think of Banacek. Could that be it? It always involved an impossible-to-believe theft, often done with the aid of complicated special effects.
The only episode of that I recall was the theft of a multi-ton stone statue the day after it was installed. Locked room, statue gone, just the torched-off mounting bolts, no way anyone could have gotten a crane back in to remove it…
Banacek figured it out from a videotape of the installation. The weight gauge on the installing crane showed the crate to be far too light - just the mass of the base alone. The artist, who hadn’t wanted to sell the piece, had created a hollow rubber replica coated with rough gray paint. Stab the figure, collapse it to a little bundle, clean up the debris, and poof a heavy statue had disappeared. Don’t know if any others were so cleverly constructed.
*Columbo *often ended with him telling the murderer in flashback form how the crime had been committed and the murderer’s vital clue. Could you be thinking of one of those episodes?
Forgive me for suggesting the obvious, but Alien was released in 1979.
