I’ve been watching Night Gallery on MeTV. I loved this show when I was a kid, watching it on my little nine-inch Hitachi portable B&W TV. Now…
I find it kind of cheesy. I remember the ‘scary’ parts, and had completely forgotten the funny sketches. The scary stories aren’t very scary, and I want to insert a ‘WAH-wah!’ horn at the punchlines of the funny ones. The quality of the productions is pretty bad, even by early-1970s standards. The paintings are as bad as I remember them.
Still, I can’t stop watching. The stories are taken from some of the great authors. Even if they are poorly done, it’s a good jog to the memory.
This was the final recycling of the Twilight Zone model, given a spin by basing the stories on the paintings. (A few come up in Hollywood auctions from time to time and not only are they pretty bad on any artistic level, but are disintegrating as well.)
The only one I remember in detail is the girl, on vacation at the family cabin somewhere, who falls in love with a swamp monster. She returns the next summer to pick up where they left off, and the only point of discussion the next day was WOW did her boobs get big.
I rather liked some of them :). Often the creepiest part of the show. These days it is rather hard to find the originals or even the few posters they did of them.
Ah, the episodes I was thinking of is S2:E7, Brenda (preceded by the segment Midnight Never Ends). I had always thought the girl was someone famous, but it’s midlister Laurie Prange.
I started watching this series a year or two ago. The plots were so predictable, and the writing so poor, I found it embarrassing to watch. I can’t believe Rod Serling had anything to do with it. The best of them were on a level with the very worst of Twilight Zone.
I recorded a few episodes after I got my first DVR (back when the novelty of the thing caused be to record anything that sounded at least remotely interesting). I really wasn’t impressed…most of the episodes I saw had a very heavy emphasis on psychic woo dressed up as serious science.
I read a book about this show, although I’ve never seen it. One episode starred Joan Crawford and she was annoyed that she was going to be directed by some “kid” director–it may have been his first TV show episode.
I have been having the same experience with the 1980s version of Twilight Zone. I really enjoyed that show when it was on, but re-watching now, it seems very dated (though I still think some of the episodes are quite clever). It’s still a fun show, just not as edgy as it seemed back then.
Of course, this happens with a lot of things. The stories in Harlan Ellison’s *Dangerous Visions *collections seemed very avant-garde and edgy back in the 1960s, but now seem very routine (though still good stories in most cases).
There are a couple interesting episodes that I really like - The Sins of the Fathers with Richard Thomas, and Silent Snow, Secret Snow which has a great soundtrack and was narrated by Orson Welles. For the latter, they slightly changed the ending, but it’s actually quite deep.
I remember watching the show as a kid, mostly for the short funny clips. Now it’s fun to see the silly 1970’s clothes and hairstyles.