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The Outer Limits (ABC 1963 - 1965)
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Eadie
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 23, 2020 12:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My English teacher says it is from one of Charles Dickens' speeches.
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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2020 9:29 pm    Post subject: Thanks For Reply with quote

Thanks for asking your English teacher, Eadie.
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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 28, 2020 1:05 am    Post subject: My Previous Net Posts . . . Reply with quote

One of my previous pen names was, should I reveal it, like Forry did on the Music For Robots 33 & 1/3 rpm record album?

Well, I did post to one message board as Wade Norton, the Drifter of the "Guests" episode of OL.

Do any of you ALL SCI-FI members recall a message board named, Outer Limits Cafe?

I think that's the correct name.

That board later moved to another hosted site, but the old board stayed around for a long time after the move, and I lost contact with that particular group.
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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 24, 2020 4:07 am    Post subject: Fun With Acronyms Reply with quote

scotpens wrote:
The classic episode "O.B.I.T.", which deals with omnipresent surveillance, loss of privacy and addictive voyeurism, is more relevant now than when it was first shown more than 50 years ago. Except back then, it was considered science fiction!


As I've mentioned elsewhere, Outer Limits writers had a lot of fun with changing innocuous old sayings into very sinister sayings.

Along with the Control Voice, which as a joke on the idea that people could be controlled by subliminal voices on the soundtracks of television, the writers also had a lot of fun with acronyms. I've noted that often times acronyms are not chance occurrences of initials for words that form a word, but words that are chosen first and the letters of those words fixed to say things that form the word. OBIT is a really great acronym, the letters standing for Outer Band Individuated Teletracer.
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scotpens
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 25, 2020 12:01 am    Post subject: Re: Fun With Acronyms Reply with quote

filmdetective wrote:
I've noted that often times acronyms are not chance occurrences of initials for words that form a word, but words that are chosen first and the letters of those words fixed to say things that form the word.

That's what's known as a "backronym." Other examples include SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion; UNCLE (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement; and SHADO (Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation).*

*I kept the British spellings because it was a British show!
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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 25, 2020 2:36 am    Post subject: BARUMP-BUMP! Reply with quote

BARUMP-BUMP!

Scotpens, many thanks for adding a new word to my vocabulary.
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Pow
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 06, 2021 12:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

"O.B.I.T." was first broadcast on November 4, 1963. Written by Meyer Dolinsky and directed by Gerd Oswald.

"I'm very much in love with freedom," said Meyer Dolinsky. "But I'm also concerned that we do have restraints against extreme totalitarianism. The political focus of 'O.B.I.T.' is all mine; it's a reverse on the H.U.A.C (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) thing. These people, far from helping a free society, are really its worst enemy, in the sense they breed so much hostility and fear that they curiously accomplish the very thing they are trying to prevent. Witch-hunting is the wrong way to go about it."

Meyer's fears certainly reflects the former POTUS, 'Don the Con', and his followers to this day...not to mention the majority of the GOP.

This episode of the series was one of their more prescient ones ever produced.

We've all read articles and seen segments on television about just how intrusive the government of the U.S. is in regards to snooping on its citizens with today's state-of-the-art eavesdropping technology.

I recall seeing a news segment that revealed the operation called Eschalon(sp?) that involved the government listening into citizens private phone calls.

"People with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from OBIT" Lomax claims. Because we can trust those in power to do the right thing and never abuse their office?
Anyone care to take a close look at the history of any nation who makes such promises? It ain't pretty.

Originally, Dolinsky established the OBIT machines all across the globe in his script. In order to cut costs that concept was eliminated.

Dolinsky wrote that an X-ray type of camera that could see through buildings was to be the invasive machinery for this piece.

However, the network wanted to see a monstrous machine (the requisite 'Bear' that ABC insisted upon for each episode); and so one was created.

In this case I thought that the network wanting a fearsome looking contraption to spy on individuals was on the money.
The OBIT monitor & console are cool looking and make for a menacing presence.

The Wah Chang~sculpted OBIT mask would turn up in an episode of The Munsters (1964~1966) titled "If A Martian Answers" from January 21, 1965.

The OBIT console would later become the center of the worldwide communications network used by Mr. Waverly (Leo. G. Carroll) on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964~1968)

Ironically, esteemed actor and teacher Jeff Corey who played Byron Lomax was blacklisted in the 1950s. I'd love to have known what his thoughts were regarding the subject matter of this classic episode?
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Pow
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 24, 2021 11:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Outer Limits: The Official Companion by David J. Schow & Jeffrey Frentzen.


"The Architects of Fear" September 30, 1963, written by Meyer Dolinsky, Directed by Byron Haskin.

Is this the day? Is this the beginning of the end? There is no time to wonder, no time to ask, "Why is this happening, why is it finally happening?" There is only time for fear, for the piercing pain of panic. Do we pray? Or do we merely run now, and pray later? Will there be a later? Or is this the day?

Plot Synopsis: An idealistic coterie of scientists resolves to unify the warring nations of Earth by providing a common enemy to unite against, an extraterrestrial scarecrow that will land a spaceship while the United Nations is in session, and confront the General Assembly, laser pistol in hand.

They draw lots, where one of them will undergo a radical surgical procedure that will transform him into "a perfect inhabitant of the planet Theta."

The Outer Limits problems with budget hassles and lackluster scripts were both squashed for the first time by "Architects of Fear," a compelling episode that showcased many of the elements that became icons of the program's unique identity.

Despite its obvious plot contrivances, the show is frankly unforgettable, with convincing, straight-arrow performances and dead tough dialogue. It features what is probably the most ambitious monster suit ever attempted for TV, a creation that caused not only a deluge of fan mail, but an unexpected bout with home-town censorship.

Producer/writer Joseph Stefano wanted strongly to make shows that looked like short feature films instead of run-of-the-mill TV, and with "Architects of Fear" both he and The Outer Limits began to hit their stride.

The strengths of "Architects" are tied into human dilemmas: Allen Leighton's (Robert Culp) devotion to scientific ideals versus his genuinely sensitive relationship with his wife, Yvette (Geraldine Brooks); project head Gainer's tight-lipped, almost fanatic dedication versus his obvious for the ordeal Allen, his friend, must endure; the cadre of scientists, regular guys all, capable of the best intentions, yet victimized by screwups and poor insight. To try and unite the world, they destroy the already perfect union of two people. Instead of bettering the world, they kill one of the small good things left in it. Allen's transformation is an attempt by a group of technologically-advanced geniuses to redress the global nuclear threat made possible by their own scientific predecessors. They assume a massive responsibility for humankind, and then blow it. But even their hideous miscalculation is treated with a rare degree of compassion by the story.

Hungarian stuntman & acrobat Janos Prohaska was brought in by episode director Haskin to portray the alien.

Prohaska's specialties included playing apes in circuses and on TV (he later became the popular Cookie Bear on The Andy Williams Show), and building monster costumes that defied the man-in-a-suit look in his Santa Monica workshop.
"Everyone at Projects Unlimited worked on that costume," said Jim Danforth, "and I think Byron Haskin designed it." The enormous headpiece was sculpted by Wah Chang.

Sidebar: Project Unlimited, Inc. was the first true special effects company and it designed and developed The Outer Limits visually unique aliens, executed model animation and optical trickery, and served as a catch-all special effects pool that participated in each of the series' forty-nine episodes.

The company heads were Wah Ming Chang & Gene Warren, along with Tim Baar, the "gang boss" who assembled the group in 1958. Chang would play a significant role in Star Trek: TOS where he designed the tricorder & communicator.

Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque. It will have been at least a lesson---a lesson at last to be learned.

Sidebar: We all keep on mentioning just how relevant the theme of episodes of The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, or Star Trek remain even decades later. And that's the scary part, isn't it? If these ideas are still just as significant in the 21st century as they were in the 20th century, we are still in deep trouble, aren't we?

The alien Thetan is still an impressive monster suit. So scary that several regional ABC affiliates at the time of the airing would black out the scenes of the alien.

In spite of Meyer Dolinsky's marvelous script there are several unanswered questions for the audience.

How did Earth come by the small alien Thetan exactly? Did we go to the planet & capture it? Where is Theata located and how did we manage to have a spaceship that could travel that far in outer space?

The Thetan-fake comes to Earth in a space ship. It looks like it could have been an Earth vessel. Why would Thetans have designed a spaceship just like ours? It takes an army of experts at NASA & enormous resources to launch a spaceship off the Earth. Just how did this small group of scientists manage to achieve such an incredible feat by themselves? Once the ship crashed the experts would examine its technology and realize it was not from some highly advanced alien civilization.
Did the scientists design the working laser gun? It certainly wasn't something our technology was capable of at that time.

The script never truly addresses any of these obstacles, it never gives us any real details to this astounding charade as to how such a small group of scientists could have realistically pulled any of this off.

Yet, it is a powerful episode from the human themes it addresses and remains one of my favorite TOL episodes.
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Krel
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 25, 2021 5:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pow wrote:
Sidebar: We all keep on mentioning just how relevant the theme of episodes of The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, or Star Trek remain even decades later. And that's the scary part, isn't it? If these ideas are still just as significant in the 21st century as they were in the 20th century, we are still in deep trouble, aren't we?

Rod Serling once wrote that no matter how far in the future, no matter how far man travels, man will still be man.

I haven't seen the episode in years, but I believe that the small Thetan was a monkey or small ape that they had had engineered.

David.
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Pow
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 28, 2021 7:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

From The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, "A Feasibility Study" April 13, 1964
Written by Joseph Stefano.

Synopsis: Residents of a six-block section of Midgard Drive in Beverly Hills have been transported to the planet Luminos.The alien known as the Authority explains to the humans that they are going to test the Earthlings' hardiness as potential slave labor, since a "hot organism in the genes" has rendered the Luminoids "doomed and immobile." The Authority reasons that the "vain flesh-men" of Earth would prefer slavery to being infected by the touch of the Luminoids. and become ugly, motionless rocks like the aliens.
If this test case can work, the Luminoids will then kidnap the remainder of Earth's population.

This is a thinly-veiled antislavery diatribe and the most humanitarian script of the series.

Sidebar: I always found this episode to be deeply poignant and powerful and one of TOL finest hours.

It is so good that when TOL was rebooted for television in 1995 they selected 4 episodes from the original series to redo and this was one of them.
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 28, 2021 9:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
Rod Serling once wrote that no matter how far in the future, no matter how far man travels, man will still be man.

This is EXACTLY why Science Fiction is such an important facet of literature and culture!

One of the best writers of Sci-Fi, Ray Bradbury, wrote about PEOPLE in "science" speculative situations. Every one of his stories focused on the MAN in story.

Robert Heinlien also focused on the MAN in the story. His characters were portraits of the post war American culture. His spacemen crews were transplanted G.I Joes and Navel crewmen in spaceships!

The best Science Fiction is about Man and his place in the Universe.

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 29, 2021 12:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

You are SO right, Gordo! Very Happy

Famed author Larry Niven's stories work really hard to present accurate science — so much so in fact that my old friend Jim Peavy (whose art is featured in an ASF gallery) has criticized Niven's writing as being too much like science lectures instead of science fiction.



__


And frankly, Niven chooses not to develop his characters as fully as the author's you named. Niven doesn't spend a lot of time on a character's backstory or his inner thoughts.

So, every reader has to decide which authors write in a manner that interest them the most, based on what the author spends his time writing about.

For the record (and a little bragging on my part), I worked hard to blend characterization and hard science in my novel, The Wishbone Express.

Several of you kind folks have read it, and I hope you feel I was successful in balancing the two considerations. Cool

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Pow
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 09, 2022 9:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

TOL had quite a number of wonderful scripts written by highly talented writers.

So I always found it curious that when Star Trek: TOS premiered only a year after TOL's cancellation that Gene Roddenberry used few writers from TOL for ST:TOS.

Harlan Ellison wrote 2, now considered classic scripts, for TOL; he wrote one script for Trek, also considered a classic.

There may have been a couple of other writers who wrote for TOL that also wrote for Trek. But not many.

TOL creators & writers Leslie Stevens & Joseph Stefano never wrote for Trek.

I would have thought that given the quality that TOL stories generally had that Roddenberry would have sought out the script writers for TOL for Star Trek. I think the same applies to few Twilight Zone writers ever writing for Trek. Richard Matheson who wrote for Zone did one script for Trek.

Rod Serling never wrote for Trek but perhaps his fee was more than the Trek budget allowed at the time.

And of course perhaps for reasons unknown to us these writers for Zone & Limits did not want to write for Trek. Maybe Gene didn't want them either for his own reasons.
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Pow
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 15, 2022 1:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Outer Limits: The Official Companion.

"Demon With a Glass Hand," October 17, 1964.

Synopsis: Circa 2964, Earth is conquered in 19 days by an alien race called the Kyben. The world's entire population vanishes overnight, after loosing a retaliation in the form of a radioactive plague that will render the Earth uninhabitable by the invaders.

The agent of humankind's salvation is a vigorous, enigmatic, white-clad man named Trent, who escapes into the past — 1964 — through a Kyben "time mirror."

He possesses a prosthetic computer hand that "holds all knowledge," but the Kyben have three lobes — glass fingers — of the device, and they chase Trent into the past because they need the completed hand to tell them where the seventy billion people of Earth have hidden, and how to defeat the plague.

Trent, in turn, needs the lobes to enable the glass hand to reveal more of his own identity and purpose, which are blanks to him.

Winner of the Writer's Guild for Outstanding Script in the category of Television Anthology for the 1964-65 season, "Demon With a Glass Hand" was a definite high point for The Outer Limits.

"Originally, I wrote 'Demon' as a cross-country chase, my homage to North by Northwest," said writer Harlan Ellison.
"The real problem with the plot was physical; it was a chase in a linear fashion. And like a bolt out of the blue, I thought, 'Why can't it be a chase in a vertical fashion?'

All I had to do was figure out a way to keep the characters in a contained space. It was a very important lesson to me: You could make the action more intense by enclosing it, and providing no escape."

The site chosen for the office complex in which Trent is trapped due to a Kyben force bubble surrounding it was Los Angeles' famous Bradbury Building.

"I came to think of that building as a character in the script,"said Ellison.

Harlan wrote the lead female role of Consuelo Losada as a black woman and was told no by the ABC network. He then asked the network if she could be Puerto Rican. Again the answer was no.
Finally, she wound up as some sort of nameless Middle European, and they gave her a blonde wig.

But actress Arline Martel played it as Chicana.

"The Consuelo character was endlessly rewritten," said Robert Culp (Trent), "to bow to pressure to make her less overtly ethnic."

"Ellison wrote the Trent part for Robert Culp, and wouldn't hear of anyone else playing it.

"I would rate 'Demon' pretty high in terms of fidelity to what I wrote," said Ellison.

Sidebar: That last quote by Harlan is high praise indeed for TOL. Harlan has had quite a history of battling networks and producers to have his name removed from a particular television episode he wrote for various SF series because he was so outraged and angry at how his original story had been rewritten.
Voyage tot he Bottom of the Sea, Star Trek, and Logan's Run were all TV series where he fought to have his name removed from the episode because he loathed how it had been altered.
He walked off The Starlost, a TV show he created, because of his disgust over the way the series was being mishandled.

Demon is a compelling hour of TOL, and it is rated as one of the finest episodes ever produced by the show.

And as much as I love this episode, there are questions regarding the story that I have.

*SPOILERS*

Interesting that the invading aliens only required 19 days to subdue the Earth. Now Earth has the technology to create a lifelike android; 70 billion humans have been transcribed onto a coil within the robot's body for safekeeping; and the robot is able to endure (mechanically) centuries before restoring the human population.

Wouldn't all this indicate that Earth is a highly sophisticated planet capable of fighting off the Kyben? I suppose we could simply have two civilizations that possess phenomenal tech, but one is light years ahead of the other for the sake of the plot.

Trent is physically much more powerful and agile than a human. Yet, he has no other offensive/defensive weaponry built into him. He doesn't even carry a hand weapon from his era.

The alien Kybens are required to wear an amulet around their neck which anchors them in time. If this amulet is taken away from them they are ripped from their present timeline and returned ahead into the future from whence they hailed.
Whenever Trent encounters the Kyben he snatches the amulet from their neck and poof they're gone.

Why don't the Kyben better secure their amulet anchors on them? Even under their shirt would be a better spot.

And why don't the Kypen have any high-tech weaponry at all in order to capture Trent?

Why exactly does Trent, who easily passes for a human being, have a robotic hand? It looks cool & all, but couldn't the builders have constructed a lifelike hand?

Seventy billion humans are being carried by Trent on a coil within him. How can the Earth — even in 2964 — possibly support that number of humans on it?

Make no mistake though, this episode is highly imaginative as well as suspenseful, and it features a fine cast.

Robert Culp (The Greatest American Hero), Arline Martel (ST:TOS "Amok Time"), and Abraham Sofaer (ST:TOS episodes "Charlie X," & "Specter of the Gun") as the Kyben leader Arch, are all marvelous in their respective roles.

The set for the Kyben Time Mirror remains impressive and mysterious looking even today.

Unfortunately the Kybens themselves don't fare very well regarding their alien make-up. The actors have heavy white face make-up on their faces, dark rings under their eyes, and what appears to be shower caps for their heads.

It is substandard looking and was even for 1964.

Of course the show was limited by its tight budgets and shooting schedule. Ellison remarked that his Kyben aliens reminded him of raccoons.

This fantastic episode would be a prime example as to why they should remaster the special/visual effects for TOL, as was done for the 1966 Star Trek TV series.

A remastered version could give us the force bubble enveloping the building, a more flexible & complex glass hand, aliens that would truly look alien. These are just some of the improvements visually they could use to enhance this classic episode.

Some consider Demon as the greatest Outer Limits episode ever produced. Many feel that "The City On the Edge of Forever' to be the greatest Star Trek episode ever made.

Both written by the masterful Harlan Ellison.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 15, 2022 4:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Bless my soul, I have yet to see this episode of The Outer Limits, even after all these years! Sad

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