ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

Boy oh boy, the monster in this episode is so badly done that there are no kids young enough to be the least bit frightened by it.

Whenever I see a movie or TV episode with a monster which is designed as badly as this, I can’t help wondering how a doodling amateur artist like me could sketch creatures like the ones below while he was taking phone orders for JCPennyey back in the the 1990s!

And I drew them on the back of the discarded printer paper they threw away in the phone center where I worked!






Yes, yes, I know . . . the budgets for series in the sixties couldn't have produced good FX with elaborate designs like these. The technical process just didn't exist yet.

But the sad fact is, if a series can't do the FX needed to impress the audience, then they damn well ought do a story that doesn't require such elaborate special effects!

In other words, if you can't do a story right . . . don't DO the damn thing!

Guys, if the monster’s clumsy rubber suit wasn’t laughable enough in this episode, most of the “action” scenes were composed of those slow-motion “fight scenes” under water which always bore the hell out of audiences — especially when the only audio we got were those constant “bubbling sounds”.





The so-called story involves a ruthless South American dictator who doesn’t want the body of the supposedly dead Rubber-Suit-asaurus to be taken from his country, because he thinks he can use it a tourist attraction!

I swear to God, folks, if that thing came back to life and could sing opera, it couldn’t sell six tickets a week to a performance of Madam Butterfly!

Even when I was a snot-nosed kid in the 1950s, I knew poor quality when I saw it. That's why this sea-going turkey is a big disappointment for a guy who recently realized that he'd seriously misjudged The Outer Limits when he watched it back in the 1960s.

All Sci-Fi member Pow — with whom I chat on the phone frequently — warned me that even a good series like The Outer Limits has a few “clunkers”.

Well, he was not wrong. This episode is like a bad story from a series that never had a good one. My advice, folks, is to skip this soggy excuse for a sea monster story so that your good opinion of The Outer Limits won’t drown in the stupidity!
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[scotpens]

It's definitely not one of the better episodes. There's supposed to be a whole breeding population of these creatures, but the budget only allowed for three monster suits. I read somewhere that the suits became so waterlogged that the stuntmen had to struggle to keep from sinking.

Also, the story gets so muddled that the Control Voice (Vic Perrin) makes two appearances in the middle of the episode, just to explain what the hell is going on!

[Pow]

"Tourist Attraction" December 23, 1963. Written by Dean Riesner. Directed by Laslo Benedek.
Guest stars: Ralph Meeker, Janet Blair, Jay Novello, Henry Silva, Henry Delgado (Later changed to Henry Darrow, best known for his role of Manolito Montoya on the NBC western TV series The High Chaparral, 1967~1971).

" 'Tourist Attraction' was the closest we ever came to those kinds of schlocky sci-fi movies that overran the 1950," said Joseph Stefano. Stefano had expressed an interest in doing an Outer Limits with a political slant, and at the time public notice was very much on Dominican despot Raphael Trujillo, who had just died. Riesner took the Trujillo slant and merged it with his recent reading on John Lilly's famous research into dolphin intelligence, thus yielding the show's main attraction --- the corps of dinosauric, skindiving sea monsters who use a sophisticated form of sonic communication, like dolphins, and were prehistoric in origin.

"The material I'd written was mediocre," says Riesner. "I blame certain shortcomings the show had on the fact that I wrote in many special effects aspects that gave the production people difficulty." Stefano rewrote the script to simplify it and make it less costly. "They didn't have to change it too much to make it awful," Riesner maintains.

The manufacture of the full-body amphibian suits was the largest single Outer Limits job handed to Project Unlimited, and Byron Haskin and Wah Chang collaborated on the design. Once the suits were completed, Production Manager Lin Parsons met the stunt crew at his home to test-dunk the costumes in his swimming pool. "We put in little bags of lead shot for negative buoyancy," he said. "And the hump on the back of the suit was for a scuba tank." When the suits absorbed enough water to sink properly, a new problem arose. "They'd get waterlogged, like a sponge," said 1st AD Robert Justman. "So they became incredibly heavy, and hard to move around in." The time to put these costumes together was not sufficient to safeguard against certain factors --- like the divers literally bursting through the suits after being submerged.

"Tourist Attraction" achieved the dubious distinction of being the most expensive Outer Limits episode yet produced.

[Bud Brewster]

[Pow]

And conversely, episodes that were designed in order to save money can result in some of the finest stories.

Arguably, Outer Limits' best-written show, "Nightmare" is a tour de force of ensemble acting that illustrates just how resourceful the program's cast and crew could be when squeezed by the limitations of time and budget.
The Outer Limits: The Official Companion.

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

Agreed!

And it was one of the stories which was remade on the remake of this great series.

I loved the new version when I watched it on DVD box set, and I also enjoyed it when I saw it during my recent rediscover of the original series.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[scotpens]

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

This version of the Creature suit is absolutely awesome!


_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)