#52035 - 04/01/11 05:34 PM
70’s TV horror/sci-fi anthology?
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Tesseract
member
Registered: 02/08/11
Posts: 190
Loc: United States
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Recently the faint memories of an episode of some nearly forgotten, late night program have been resurfacing, but all internet searches have come up blank. Perhaps a 600C member can supply a title, or also recalls seeing this? Here’s what I still remember:
In the mid or late 1970s I watched as a kid an episode of what was probably a short lived horror / fantasy / science fiction anthology program. It would have been aired after prime time, on American network TV. What I still recall of the plot was about a young boy who begins receiving staticky, snowy messages from someone or some thing via the small black & white television in his bedroom. At first this entity is friendly to the boy, but after a while the TV person tells him to do something disagreeable, which the boy refuses. I think he tries to tell his parents, but they of course don’t believe him. As the boy continues to resist the TV person, in one scene the person/thing reaches out and electrocutes the kid’s pet hamster (or similar small animal), and at that moment the audience briefly sees a clearer image on the screen of what was probably an alien. I don’t remember why this TV alien would have been communicating with a small boy via television, or what exactly it wanted him to do, but the entity warned the kid if he didn’t follow instructions the TV person would reach out and kill him, and/or his family.
Does this strange television memory seem at all familiar to anyone?
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#52050 - 04/01/11 08:29 PM
Re: 70’s TV horror/sci-fi anthology?
[Re: Jake999]
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Tesseract
member
Registered: 02/08/11
Posts: 190
Loc: United States
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I had to double-check myself, to be certain “The Outer Limits” didn’t have a 70’s incarnation -- as most know, the original episodes ran in the early to mid 60’s, in B&W, and there was a new run from the mid 90’s thru early 2000’s (I’ve never seen any of these). I’m almost certain the program I described was in color, and from the 70’s. There are numerous episode guides on the web, including here:
http://epguides.com/OuterLimits_1963/
But I don’t have time at the moment to go through the summaries for the sake of being thorough.
I’m almost positive the show I’m trying to dredge up wasn’t from “Night Gallery”, and I know it wasn’t an installment of “Night Stalker”.
Pausing now, it seems as if I had seen at least a few other episodes of this mystery science fiction program, and another one was about a male protagonist who lived in some future dystopia and worked in something like the office of a government bureau where his and his co-workers’ jobs were punching small keypads on large, otherwise empty desks. I imagine the theme of the segment was along the lines of people in this future losing their humanity (perhaps a low budget borrowing from “THX-1138”).
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#52056 - 04/01/11 11:23 PM
Re: 70’s TV horror/sci-fi anthology?
[Re: Tesseract]
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Michael A.Aquino
stalker
Registered: 09/28/08
Posts: 2515
Loc: San Francisco, CA, USA
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... What I still recall of the plot was about a young boy who begins receiving staticky, snowy messages from someone or some thing via the small black & white television in his bedroom...
Are you sure you weren't watching a TV broadcast of the film Poltergeist?
_________________________
Michael A. Aquino
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#52058 - 04/01/11 11:35 PM
Re: 70’s TV horror/sci-fi anthology?
[Re: Michael A.Aquino]
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Tesseract
member
Registered: 02/08/11
Posts: 190
Loc: United States
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Heh, no, no. I’m positive it wasn’t that film, and the television program I’m thinking of was probably only half-an-hour long. Although, I was kind of hoping you might actually know what I was referring to, since I get the impression you’re a science fiction fan, and you’d have been around and aware in the 1970’s.
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#52080 - 04/02/11 02:06 PM
Re: 70’s TV horror/sci-fi anthology?
[Re: Tesseract]
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Michael A.Aquino
stalker
Registered: 09/28/08
Posts: 2515
Loc: San Francisco, CA, USA
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Heh, no, no. I’m positive it wasn’t that film, and the television program I’m thinking of was probably only half-an-hour long. Although, I was kind of hoping you might actually know what I was referring to, since I get the impression you’re a science fiction fan, and you’d have been around and aware in the 1970’s.
It was definitely not The Outer Limits, which was a '60s 1-hour show revived in the 1990s. And I know that its original series had no TV-monsters as you describe.
The 30-minute series sci-fi shows which come to mind are One Step Beyond, Science Fiction Theather, and ye olde Twilight Zone. But those all date back to the 1950s/60s, and I don't recall any TV-monsters in them [though I am not as certain as in the case of The Outer Limits, of which I was an addict].
_________________________
Michael A. Aquino
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#52119 - 04/03/11 01:43 AM
Re: 70’s TV horror/sci-fi anthology?
[Re: felixgarnet]
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Tesseract
member
Registered: 02/08/11
Posts: 190
Loc: United States
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Thanks for the lead, but after checking an online episode guide for “Tales of the Unexpected” none of the installments sounds anything like the two plots I’m thinking of.
It’s starting to seem slightly odd to me that with seemingly every obscure bit of media history cataloged and analyzed somewhere on the internet, I just can’t come up with a set of search key words that successfully leads me to this mystery sci-fi program...
[][][][][][][][][]
Edit: And now this very thread has made it up to page 3 of my “70's 80's science fiction television” Google search -- like some strange feedback loop or echo chamber.
Edited by Tesseract (04/03/11 02:02 AM)
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