(Through Chester, I managed to learn a pretty good irish accent!) ![]() A few months after this episode aired, my baby brother received as a birthday present one Chester O’Chimp, which gave boys the opportunity to pull the string and talk to their toys. Mattel made the doll “Chatty Cathy” from 1959 – 1965 (covering the entire run of the Zone), and my girl cousins had it. This might be the first episode of TZ that I ever saw. “Living Doll” (idea by Charles Beaumont – who received sole credit! – but written by Jerry Sohl original broadcast 11/1/63) ![]() Cliff Robertson taps beautifully into the myth of the impersonator who identifies too strongly with his alter ego, and the teleplay explores the damage done to an actor’s ego when he gives his creation all the best lines (a problem exacerbated by too much drink). Still, whether you want to look at this as a character study in madness or as a horror story about a monster residing in a “brash stick of kindling,” it is well directed by Abner Biberman who would go on to direct several more episodes. With “The Dummy” Rod Serling wants to have it both ways, and I can’t help thinking that this choice lessens the overall effectiveness of the episode. Perhaps the twist here is not that unexpected, but what I love about it is that it is also in no way supernatural. Finally, she gets up the nerve to write Max Collodi a letter professing her devotion to his work, and he, in turn, invites her to visit him. She buys tickets to every one of his performances and sits raptly staring at the dashing form of Tom Conway. Twelve years later, Alfred Hitchcock Presents played an entirely different trick: “The Glass Eye” tells the story of a lonely Victorian spinster (Jessica Tandy) who falls in love with a ventriloquist who appears in a traveling variety show. Bates truly exists in Psycho indeed, the ending of both tales is pretty much the same. Is Hugo really alive or just a manifestation of Frere’s madness? That’s like asking if Mrs. The best sequence in the 1945 British thriller Dead of Night involves Michael Redgrave as Maxwell Frere, whose dummy Hugo threatens to leave him and work with an American ventriloquist. The idea of a malevolent ventriloquist’s dummy is nothing new. “The Dummy” (written by Rod Serling, based on an unpublished story by Lee Polk original broadcast 5/4/62) well, that is sadly a tale as old as time. And while in one of them, the real monster turns out to be – yes – the human being. Two of them are from the somewhat derided final season of TZ, proving that there was still great stuff to be had in the old series yet. The three episodes we were assigned this week are all classic monster episodes. The climactic moment where the son thrusts a mushroom sandwich at his father and growls menacingly, “You’re hungry, Dad. ![]() ![]() I bring all this up because this week our teacher Elliot Lavine had monsters on the brain and even gave us as an extra a fun episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “Special Delivery,” based on the Ray Bradbury short story, “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!” It’s a very Twilight Zone-type episode, although I would say the acting is much broader here, and it avoids the body horror of the above examples while still managing to deliver some great “Body-Snatcher” chills. And the mushroom monsters? Well, they’ve been around forever, too, going back at least to 1907 and William Hope Hodgson’s terrifying short story, “The Voice in the Night.” This was adapted in 1963 by Japanese filmmaker Ishiro Honda into Matango, aka Attack of the Mushroom People, a very bleak and gross horror movie that was nearly banned because the people turning into mushrooms looked like A-bomb victims. The real monsters are the healthy humans, a trope we all saw in The Walking Dead (well, you all saw it maybe I like zombies about as much as I like mutant fungi) and in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. I bring this up because the horror contained in The Last of Us is nothing new. I’m really looking forward to watching that one – never in a million years!!!!!!!!!! I don’t like gore, I don’t like gross-out imagery and, for some reason, I have a strong aversion to stories about plagues. I understand that the big water-cooler show these days is HBO’s The Last of Us, about a horrible plague that sweeps the globe, turning everyone into giant mushrooms.
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