The Outer Limits is turning 50.... (1 Viewer)

[Nelson Au]

I’ve finally got to The Zanti Misfits, an episode I am far more familiar with. It seems like each episode looks better and better, though I know each episode’s video quality has been visually superb.

This is really a terrific episode and again, one I discovered the story concepts of in my early teens. It has that similar quality and twist ending that hooked me on Star Trek’s best episodes like Arena and Corbomite Maneuver. One of the best classics of this series.

I had forgotten this was filmed at Vasquez Rocks.

By the way, there is a sort of similarity to The Twilight Zone episode The Invaders in which a lonely woman similarly attacks these little beings that appear to be attacking her.

And I loved the final line of The Zanti Misfits.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

14. My two cents, continued: (Spoilers)

"The Zanti Misfits"

Is there a more iconic or memorable episode of The Outer Limits? I don't think so.

And what a fantastic premise: Earth = Guantanamo. Except with extreme prejudice, of course. "Practiced executioners," indeed.

It's almost impossible for me to describe this episode outside of the context of an 8 year-old boy seeing it for the first time in 1963...

...I was completely freaked out. I had nightmares for weeks. Which, of course, I loved. A good horror story was our Monster energy drink back then. It was an adrenaline fix for those of us addicted to a good scare for that satisfying jolt. Hey, we didn't take any drugs, there was no such thing as ADHA, and we didn't have Aderall.

Huge, crawling ants with human-like faces (and one with a Santa beard).... Who imagines messed up shit like that? I mean, we saw David Hedison's face on the head of a fly, but that didn't bother us so much because, after all, it was just Captain Lee Crane from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (unless you somehow saw The Fly originally in theaters many years before the television airings).

No, this was far creepier. No doubt the stop motion animation made the effect of the crawling ants even creepier. My son, when he was a pre-teen was always more freaked out by monsters in the stop motion animation films of Harry Harryhausen than the smooth motion of CGI-created creatures in more recent films. There was just something about that very unnatural motion that added to the other-worldliness of the effect.

Viewing this today in HD on a large screen the non-animated Zantis are even more obviously just lame-looking plush toys that couldn't scare anyone. But they were still used somewhat effectively, especially in the sequence of their shadows cast on the window all lowering down.

In fact, this time around, I noticed just how good Leonard Horn's directing was for this episode, which made it one of the best sustained action episodes of the series. I mean it was still thrilling this time around. The POV shots were extremely effective, jerky camera moves for chaotic moments, perfect cutaways on significant moments of dialogue ("They'll only get in over someone's dead body"... Cut to... here comes the sentry's dead body.)

The best shot for me is still the POV from inside the ship with the Zanti leg scratching on the window and Bruce Dern peering in, with the eerie buzzing and the translation recording playing over. It's just a perfect economical device for ramping up the anticipation and the creep factor of what's to come without even having to show the 'bear.'

The music is spot on perfect throughout. All the actors play their parts perfectly. I realize this time around just how brief a role Bruce Dern has in this but, come on, if you need to short cut the fact a character is a sleazebag criminal and you don't have much time to do it, is there a better sleazebag MVP?

I recently saw Olive Deering in the film Caged on TMC's fantastic Noir Alley showings, and she really grabs her spotlight here right after Janet Blair, playing another dysfunctional woman self-indentured to a sleazebag guy. Even as a kid I questioned why women always had to trip when being pursued by a monster that obviously couldn't catch them if they really hoofed it (and she does take her heels off). But let's give her full props for just going batshit delusional crazy with her mini-soliloquy after first being... bugged out. For the writer, Stefano, it's just not the most obvious choice of dialogue or reaction, which is why it is so effective for me.

Lastly, I'll admit that one highlight of my experiences living in Los Angeles was seeing an actual Zanti Misfit live in person (in insect?). And, if you're a fan of horror films or know about who might have collected such an item, you can probably guess where.... in Famous Monster of Filmland's publisher Forrest J. Ackerman's basement museum. Yes, the man actually had a museum of horror film and TV artifacts in the basement of the house he lived in with his wife in Los Feliz. And there, among items such as one of the original and molting King Kong miniature models used for animation, Phantom of the Opera masks, and Dracula capes... was a Zanti Misfit looking a bit sad and weathered at this point, but still stirring the memories of that first encounter back in 1963.

If this was the only terrific episode of The Outer Limits, it would have still been enough to cherish for sparking up some primo nightmare memories.

Surprisingly, when I showed this personal nightmare watershed episode to my own son around the same age of 8... he was not impressed. He couldn't believe I was ever even frightened by it. But when I showed him the very next episode, it scared him to the point where he couldn't even look at the screen and he had his own nightmares... for weeks. Mission accomplished!

That story next.

 

[Nelson Au]

I had heard about Ackerman’s collection. But I didn’t know that much about it. I hope the fans were able to preserve his house and stop the efforts to turn it into a parking lot. I’m more familiar with Bob Burns whose got quite a collection of sci-fi film and TV artifacts as well.

I had listened to one of the audio commentaries for Zanti and I didn’t know Olive Deering was Alfred Ryder’s sister! I could see the resemblance.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

The museum was only open when he was home, so "Forry" always met you at the door, which was pretty cool. And he had every comic book known to man in that basement, from all the ECs, through Marvel Silver Age on floor-to-ceiling shelves with narrow aisles. It was the ultimate fan collector's home.

 

[Flashgear]

Wayne, I envy your access to the inner sanctum of the Ackermansion, and meeting the man himself. And an original cast Zanti too! I would have been likewise thrilled had I myself had that honor. Luckily, I did meet Ray Harryhausen among our adolescent Pantheon of Heroes. But Forry would have been right up there with him! I too turned 8 years old within a week of the original airdate for The Zanti Misfits, and was also terrified and mesmerized by that episode and others. Projects Unlimited did justice to the stop motion effects process, even only in brief but terrifying glimpses...Even though I damn well knew what to expect from those devils behind The Outer Limits...what with O.B.I.T., Corpus Earthling etc., already playing mayhem with my delicate fright filled imagination...

Did anyone else here address their Famous Monsters of Filmland fan letters like this?

Forry Ackerman
c/o The Ackermansion,
Horrorwood, Karloffornia.

Apparently, the U.S. Postal Service had no problems with letters thus addressed finding their way to Forry!

Some hilarious publicity photos...Dern and Deering were obviously having fun with this...

This is, purportedly, one of the original prop Zanti...obviously looking the worse for wear after 50+ years...(Google Images).

 

[JohnHopper]

I’ve finally got to The Zanti Misfits, an episode I am far more familiar with. It seems like each episode looks better and better, though I know each episode’s video quality has been visually superb.

This is really a terrific episode and again, one I discovered the story concepts of in my early teens. It has that similar quality and twist ending that hooked me on Star Trek’s best episodes like Arena and Corbomite Maneuver. One of the best classics of this series.

I had forgotten this was filmed at Vasquez Rocks.

By the way, there is a sort of similarity to The Twilight Zone episode The Invaders in which a lonely woman similarly attacks these little beings that appear to be attacking her.

And I loved the final line of The Zanti Misfits.

Funny, I never liked either "The Invaders" (TZ) nor "The Zanti Misfits" (TOL).
Only Jerry Goldsmith's score for "The Invaders" (TZ) and the opening narration for "The Zanti Misfits" (TOL)
are worthwhile, in my opinion.
The common denominator of these two teleplays is that they rely on toy props: tin can robots and ants.

I always enjoyed and favored television dramas related to characters first.

 

[Sadsack]

Funny, I never liked either "The Invaders" (TZ) nor "The Zanti Misfits" (TOL).

I had to keep my eyes closed after the General warned about "broken hearts" in the ZANTI episode. I'd hate to see that!

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

So right in the middle of the new Incredibles 2 film there's a big shout out to The Outer Limits with the control voice opening playing on a television set in the background. Obviously, we can count director/writer Brad Bird as a big fan. The theater I was in with my son and wife was packed to the rafters, but it was like a secret code hello moment to those extremely few of us who actually knew what this was, and it actually fits in quite timely with the plot/theme of the film.

 

[Sam Favate]

So right in the middle of the new Incredibles 2 film there's a big shout out to The Outer Limits with the control voice opening playing on a television set in the background. Obviously, we can count director/writer Brad Bird as a big fan. The theater I was in with my son and wife was packed to the rafters, but it was like a secret code hello moment to those extremely few of us who actually knew what this was, and it actually fits in quite timely with the plot/theme of the film.

Yes, I smiled when I saw that. I turned to my wife, sitting two kids away, and gave her a big thumbs up, since she knows I am a fan and have been watching the new blu-rays.

 

[Richard Gallagher]

The Season One Blu-ray set is now $44.98 during Kino's current sale.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

15. Two centiments, continued: (Spoilers)

"The Mice"

Aside from Henry Silva's very entertaining performance, not much to talk about on this episode, so I will replay a blog I wrote about it several years ago.

That old black (& white) magic



Whenever I hear someone say they can’t watch a black & white movie or television show, I cringe … with pity. No student, lover or fan of cinema ignores the 50 plus years of artistry and lighting evolution that went into perfecting the black & white image on film … before color became the common palette. And all that brilliant contrast of light and dark went the way of that gold dust blowing away into the wind at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.





Citizen Kane. The Third Man. The Maltese Falcon. Casablanca. Strangers On a Train. Night of the Hunter. I’m sure you have favorites. And it wasn’t the lack of technology that made these classics black & white. Color was around long before Dorothy landed on the Yellow Brick Road in 1939. In these and many other films, it was often the artistic choice of the director or cinematographer.

Many directors more recently have tried to recapture that look. Peter Bogdonavich with The Last Picture Show in 1971. Robert Rodriguez with Sin City in 2007. And even Hitchcock revisited it as late as 1960 with Psycho. The very translation of the classic style of Film Noir is Film “Black.” Black as night. Full of inky black and veiled gray shadows, in alleys and across faces. There’s just nothing quite like it in color.

Especially for horror.

I wondered if my young son would ever watch black & white, let alone come to appreciate the Gothic style horror lighting so perfected in black & white long before his time and even long before mine.

Several years ago, when my son was seven years old, he collected Yu-Gi-Oh bubble gum cards that included ‘monster’ cards. They reminded me of cards I collected as a kid from a science fiction horror TV anthology series in the early 1960’s called The Outer Limits. Each week a disembodied ‘control voice’ took over your television set and introduced a Gothic-style horror or science fiction story with new characters, and featuring at least one new monster.

Because this was 1963 and most television sets could only play black & white, the show was filmed and broadcast in black & white. But this was the ‘perfected’ black & white shot by a master cinematographer (Conrad Hall), who would later go on to win Academy Awards. I was only about eight years old when the show first aired and I remember that it scared me out of my wits. I went to bed every Monday (or Friday) night with nightmares, and yet I couldn’t wait until the next week to have some new ones. Perhaps this was the beginning of an adrenaline addiction. I just know I wanted to be scared silly, and The Outer Limits never failed to do the job.

So I retrieved the treasured deck of monster cards I had collected back in 1963 to show my son. Each card featured a hideous creature from one of the episodes. There was the bug-eyed alien with the razor sharp boomerang from “Fun and Games;” the shimmering, negative image radioactive man from “The Galaxy Being;” and the one that gave me the worst nightmares of all … the over-sized crawling ants with human-like faces known as “The Zanti Misfits.” In this episode, these insect monsters crawled out of their spacecraft atop a military post headquarters in a deserted Western town named “Morgue” and attacked everyone in sight. I couldn’t sleep for weeks.

I went straight to my DVD box collection of the original series and put the episode on to show “The Zanti Misfits” in action.
My son took one look at the rather primitive animation of the ants crawling out of their cheap, tin-looking aircraft and immediately scoffed in ridicule, “That’s not scary.”

I was crushed. What could be more terrifying than loudly buzzing, over-sized ants with human-like faces crawling up your leg and biting you with poisonous teeth?

I cued up another episode called, “The Mice,” that featured what appeared to be a man on two legs covered from head to waist with a huge blob of snot-like gelatinous material with two protruding, claw-like hands. It was obviously a man in a costume fitted with a huge glob of fake jelly slapped on top.

He watched this ‘Jelly Man’ picking up lake scum with its claws and stuffing it in what appeared to be a slit-like mouth. He watched the Jelly Man running through a forest back to a laboratory. He watched the Jelly Man use its claws to attack and kill one of the workers in the laboratory where the creature had first been transported to Earth. And he watched as they eventually captured and sent it back to the planet it came from in the same transporter. And that was it. No major reactions from my son. But somehow he couldn’t take his eyes off of the Jelly Man until he had seen its final moment on screen.

That same night he insisted his mom come and lay down with him in his bed when he prepared to go to sleep. He told her to leave the closet light on. And when he finally and fitfully fell to sleep, his mother came out to the living room with a sour look that and scolded me for scaring him with the ‘Jelly Man.’ She went to bed mad as hell. And, as soon as the bedroom door slammed closed, I found myself grinning from ear to ear.

An old black & white TV show that had scared me as a kid more than 40 years ago could still scare a kid today.

It may have been the ‘Jelly Man’ and not the human-faced crawling ants with poisonous teeth, but it still counted. That old black & white mojo still worked.

I shouldn’t be proud about scaring my son with this stuff, but when he so easily scoffed at one of my most powerful childhood fears with, “That’s not scary,” well, I couldn’t help but feel glibly vindicated. And so I grinned.

And a week later he was still insisting on sleeping with the lights on in the closet and secretly talking about the ‘Jelly Man’ to his mom (but never admitting his fear to dad, of course). I apologize to him to this day. I’m deeply sorry.

But wait until he sees the episode with the space rocks that come alive and cover your face with smothering black goo.

-- A. Wayne Carter

(Crayon drawing I did around age 14)

 

[JohnHopper]

I have a soft spot for "The Mice".


“A disease that walks like a man, strikes and kills. And for no reason.”
—Dr. Thomas Kellander (Michael Higgins)

This is a good ‘guinea pig’ episode and the episode title (“The Mice”) encapsulate it very well. Find the most beautiful and poetic opening narration of the entire series: “In dreams, some of us walk the stars...”. This convict/monster-oriented episode has got a good pace with outrageous and intense sequences and tackles many themes: sound (“We were experimenting with THE... motion of sound... to make contact with the planet Chromo”, said Dr. Thomas Kellander), and, of course, radio transmission combined with alien contact as in the pilot “The Galaxy Being” and “The Zanti Misfits”. Sound seems to be the link of actor Henry Silva (Cf. “Tourist Attraction”) to The Outer Limits world. The main character who volunteers as a guinea pig (“So up! Go the mice!”, said Rivera), as in “The Sixth Finger” or “The Chameleon”, to enter a booth is in the line of anti-social Mike Benson from “Fun and Games”, especially when Chino Rivera says: “This is the only ring that I wanna fight”; moreover, both characters are connected to teleportation or ‘electroportation’. “The Mice” shares one plot element with “The Zanti Misfits”, an alien race sends a criminal on Earth and this psychopath scout happens to be the exact psychological counterpart of Chino Rivera: “Everybody looks like a monster to somebody.” The murder scene is typical of Joseph Stefano (also see “The Forms of Things Unknown”) when the Chromoite killer strangles and drowns his victim (Dr. Richardson) in the lake of the Center (accompanied with a martial theme and the noise produced by the alien: an insect sound and the clicking of its claws; this music piece is a kind of a bleak outgrowth of the Enoch Gates’ theme from Hero’s Island). The appearence of the Chromoite is interesting too: a hybrid and repulsive monster (see the Greek Mythology) with some cerebral matter which melt as a jellyfish’s head and the claws of crab as hands; and its way to eat his dusgusting food who floats. The character of Chino describes it as “a garbage eater”.

“In dreams, some of us walk the stars...”
—The Control Voice.

Thanks to both John Elizalde and John Caper, Jr., the sound effects for the transmitter, the teleportation (jolts of electricity) and the alien (which produces a drone blended with a distorted hideous grunt) are powerful and eerie. The insect reference is made by Dr. Richarson when he says that he creates a “compound of several common insecticides” to destroy the Chromoite’s food which he defines as “scum”. One shot anticipates one from Leslie Stevens’ Incubus when Chino Rivera falls down to the meadow: it is an extreme close-up of him, seen in low angle, and made with a wide angle lens. Conrad Hall uses a lot of hand-held camera shots to emphasize the action and fashions a nice chiaroscuro lab’s mood, especially when Chino Rivera reads a book above the mice’s cage. Dominic Frontiere’s composition is an outgrowth from “Nightmare”. Music Supervisor John Elizalde recycles the mechanical sound of the “O.B.I.T.” machine and he will re-use pieces from this score in “The Mutant” and “Second Chance”. This is the second travel plot, after “The Borderland”, in which we cannot see the actual alien surrounding but late season episodes (“The Mutant”, “Fun and Games”) will hardly satisfy the curiosity owing to the lack of original and quaint visions, except “A Feasibility Study”. The best scene remains: the Chromoite goes bezerk and creates a mess when it materializes inside the lab. Meanwhile, Chino tries to escape from the lab, walks through the long dark corridor (as in “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork”), steps in the bedroom and finally is pushed back (as in “The Sixth Finger”) by a force field—this is the first episode that shows an “electronic” force field but, here, used to protect the center from informations leaks and to keep Chino from running away.

Notes: Henry Silva already appears in “Tourist Attraction” and Dabney Coleman in “Specimen: Unknown” and “Wolf 359”. Hugh Langtry is the Chromoite and Robert Johnson is the (distorted) Chromo Transmission Voice: “Transmission point Chromo. Subject stable. Sequence commences. Initiate systems... Transmission accomplishes.”

TV Analogy: the basic plot of using Earth as an energy source for calories will be expanded in an episode of Doctor Who with Jon Pertwee entitled “The Claws of Axos”.

 

[JohnHopper]

TV Analogy: the basic plot of using Earth as an energy source for calories will be expanded in an episode of Doctor Who with Jon Pertwee entitled “The Claws of Axos”.

 

[Sam Favate]

Sad news going around this afternoon that Harlan Ellison has died.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

RIP Harlan. You gave us some good ones.

 

[Flashgear]

For a guy who called himself "hardcore unemployable", Harlan Ellison did pretty well. I love this quote attributed to him, "My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my life professionally, keeping the soup boiling...I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell".

And on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder: "I think revenge is a very terrific good thing for everybody".

An obit written by a friend about Harlan Ellison from the perspective of his Cleveland origins...
https://www.cleveland.com/tv-blog/i..._cleveland_dead_at_84.html#incart_river_index

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

16. Two centiments, continued: (Spoilers)

"Controlled Experiment"

All of a sudden after being invaded by Zantis and Chromites, we get this endearing trifle of a comedic episode.

And it's entirely welcome.

No doubt I was entirely disappointed seeing this as a kid waiting for the 'bear' during the first showing in 1963, but it has earned its loopy (or multiple loopy) appeal upon subsequent viewings.

Among the pleasures:

Barry Morse, the relentlessly morose pursuer on The Fugitive, finally getting to stretch his light-hearted comedic muscles playing the inquisitive Martian observer conducting the experiment on Earthly murder, and soon to be caffeine and nicotine addict. His enjoyment chewing up this material with a gusto comes through the screen like, well, a good jolt of caffeine.

Caroll O'Connor also lightens up in a bemused and whimsical way as a fellow Martian in a warmly tolerant of Earthlings role as far away from his later incarnation as grumpy Archie Bunker as you can get. He's practically Santa Claus here, watching Earthlings kiss with a quietly delighted expression. This role really goes to show his range when you consider that, at around the same time, he was being typecast in features as the cigar-chomping, order-barking, clueless General or commander in such features as Kelly's Heroes and, not to long after, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (Archie was still six years away).

Grace Lee Whitney. This was actually the first time I viewed this episode where I realized that was... Yeoman Rand Grace Lee Whitney from Star Trek. How could I have missed that before? What a difference a hairdo makes.

The re-winds and replays and slow-mos get a bit over-repetitious after a while, but it was most fun to watch the sequences where the subject actors had to pretend to be moving in slow motion while Morse and O'Connor flitted about them with their recording and monitoring gear. Not such an easy thing to do. Victim actor Robert Fortier was quite good at it, especially maintaining those agog boggle-eyed expressions.

I also forgot the plot point where, by not killing her boyfriend, the two get married, have a kid who grows up to become an unhinged megalomaniac who becomes a dictator who ultimately causes the destruction of Planet Earth and a threat to the entire galaxy. Today, I might hazard a guess what their heretofore undisclosed last name might be. And shades of a continuing theme from "The Man Who Was Never Born."

I also love that the control voice at the end recognizes that this dark future might not exactly have been averted with the man surviving the gunshot thanks to the cigarette case, but urging us to basically... 'live for today,' anyway.

We got it, Vic, loud and clear. No rewind necessary.

 

[Sadsack]

I know it's mostly a comical episode with a message to stop analyzing and enjoy life, so I suppose I shouldnt point this out, but there's a contradiction in the story. The Martians seem to have some emotions, but don't understand human emotions and why we can be homicidal - hence the reason for their experiment. Yet the Martian computer extrapolates a grim future - a prediction which can only come from being programmed with an understanding of human emotions.

So the premise changes from humans being unpredictable to totally predictable. But the latter can only occur if you understand all motives to solve any human equation.
And wouldn't it have made more sense, given the message to enjoy life, that the Martians have a toke and a beer? A butt and coffee will only make them more hyper.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

To each his poison, or 'medication.' (Psychologists have postulated that the fourth basic human drive is to self-medicate).* The fifth might be to try to assign or find logic to the already illogical.


*But yes, put me down in the toke and beer column instead of the coffee and cigarette one (although originally both coffee and cigarettes were advertised as ways to settle nerves and calm down!?)

 

[Nelson Au]

Sad news about Harlan Ellison. I only knew him from his TV work. I did see him once at a Star Trek convention a long time ago and he was the consummate showman giving a compelling talk. You couldn’t not pay attention. He didn’t even talk about Star Trek as far as I can recall. He was probably still mad at Roddenberry then as his hair had not gone all grey yet.

Too bad the second season of OL on blu ray is not out yet as I would have watched Demon without a doubt. Will do the next best thing and watch City on the Edge of Forever.