I would like to find the titles of some stories that impressed me when I was a kid.
Number 1: a short story from a middle school English class.
An unemployed drifter is sitting in a shabby hotel room, contemplating his poverty in particular, and the unfairness of life in general. He finds himself in possession of a seemingly magical device. It is a box with a button on top. When you push the button, and wish for something, it appears.
It has a label, warning that unauthorized people should not use it, but the protagonist ignores the warning, and starts wishing for stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Mansions, flashy clothes, fancy cars, gourmet meals, immortality, etc.
Periodically, the rightful owners of the box try to repossess it. He has several escapes, but eventually they catch him. He finds himself in an office. The manager explains how the box works. It transports things through time and space, but it does not create them out of thin air. If you wish for a meal, someone has to cook it. If you wish for a mansion, someone has to build it. And you have to pay them for their labor.
Our protagonist has run up a very large tab. He has no money of his own, and he doesn’t really have any marketable skills, so he has no way of paying the bill. The manager says that he can work off the debt, and offers him a job in a quarry. (There is plenty of work for stone-cutters. Someone is always wishing for a mansion.) He will get room and board, and a modest wage.
“But at that rate, it will take centuries to pay this off! I’ll never live that long!”
“Didn’t you wish for immortality?”
“Yes, but–”
“Well, then, that won’t be a problem. Time to get to work.”
As he begins his first day in the quarry, the protagonist thinks about all the things he wished for, and their prices. One item he can’t quite remember. So he asks one of his fellow inmates.
“How much did immortality cost?”
“Oh, they give that away free.”
Number 2: a show on late-night TV, sometime in the early to mid 1970s.
Somewhere in suburbia, two groups of aliens are running around, trying to kill each other. They are disguised as humans, but when they put on a special pair of sunglasses, they can see each others’ true forms. (No, it was not They Live. This was at least a decade earlier.) Each group represents a different interplanetary government. Whichever group survives, their government will get to control Earth.
The last of the good aliens befriends an earthwoman. She helps him kill all of the bad aliens. Then she shoots him in the back. As he lays dying, he puts on the sunglasses, and discovers that she, too, is an alien. She represents a third government, that wants Earth to stay neutral in this cosmic Cold War.
He dies, she walks off into the sunset, and Earth stays free, blissfully ignorant of how close we came to getting colonized. As he dies, the sunglasses drop from his hand and fall to the ground. The camera moves downward to ground level, looking through the sunglasses, and in the last shot of the movie, the audience finally gets to see what the aliens look like. (But, since my parents TV had such shoddy reception, I still don’t know. I remember a vaguely human-shaped swirl of lights, but that might have been snow on the picture tube.)
Number 3: a low-budget Hong Kong martial arts movie.
The hero and the villain were both pretty generic. I don’t remember anything about them. But I do remember two of the villain’s henchmen.
One dressed in red, and had fire-related magical powers. The other dressed in blue, and had water-related magical powers. This being a very low-budget movie, their powers were somewhat limited.
The red guy would transform into a ball of fire and fly through the air. Then he would transform back to human, and have a conventional martial arts fight. The blue guy would transform into water. He would lurk beneath the surface of a river or lake, and ambush people who approached the edge of the water.
The red guy was very macho and aggressive, and seemed perpetually angry. The blue guy was rather campy and swishy, and constantly made sexually suggestive wisecracks.
Number 4: a movie or TV show which I saw on TV sometime in the mid to late 1970s.
A jet fighter plane has made an emergency landing in the desert. A woman driving on the highway sees the crash, and stops to help. The pilot and the woman travel to a nearby town, where they discover that time is out of joint.
The man and the woman move normally, but time seems to have stopped for the rest of the world. They see old men sitting on a porch, their rocking chairs frozen in mid-rock. They see children standing like mannequins, their ball floating in midair. Eventually, they realize that time is not completely frozen. The people around them are moving, very gradually. Ever so slowly, clocks are creeping forward.
The man and the woman return to the desert. Hovering in midair, above and behind the crash site, they see another airplane, its pilot visible through the canopy. It is himself, a few seconds before the crash. Out on the highway, behind the woman’s car, is another car, its driver visible through the windshield. It is herself, a few seconds before the crash. Like the rest of the world, their doppelgangers are almost frozen, but gradually creeping forward.
As I recall, the man climbed back into the cockpit of his plane. The woman got back into her car. They decided to simply sit there, and wait for the rest of the universe to catch up with them. But I didn’t get to see the end of the show, so I don’t know what happened then.