Prep For Halloween Day 3

Wyllis Cooper, creator of Quiet, Please

The brainchild of Wyllis Cooper, a man whom Harlan Ellison tried to get put on a U.S. postage stamp for his contribution to fantasy writing, the radio program Quiet, Please has garnered a reputation as one of the better written dark fantasy drama anthologies ever created.

There is one particularly popular episode called "The Thing On The Fourble Board," on which you can read comedian Patton Oswalt's and writer Harlan Ellison's thoughts (and further rejoinders), here. The show is also posted at said link in the form of a Youtube video.

You can also download it as an mp3 file here from archive.org.

I can honestly say that listening to it in bed one night a few years back did creep me out. Not to the extent that Ellison claims that it did an entire generation of the most prolific science fiction and fantasy writers of the 1950s and 60s, but, it certainly merits a listen.

Prep For Halloween Day 2

Welcome to day 2 of 44 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN! It's no secret to people who know me, that with few exceptions, my favorite television shows come from the 1960s. Yeah, of course I love Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Rockford Files, but the 60s had the best escapist entertainment as far as I'm concerned. Case in point: The Wild Wild West. 

The whole series (four seasons) is great. And while supernatural, or what would come to be known in the modern publishing parlance as "weird western" cropped up throughout its run, the second season of the show had a specifically supernatural bend to it. 

I give you, for today's viewing pleasure, the fourth episode of the second season: "The Night Of The Big Blast". What isn't to love about this? Ida Lupino as Dr. Faustina and her silent manservant Miklos have found a way to reanimate dead corpses and mold their visages into any identity they desire! Well...any identity they can make a life mask from. And they do just that with a corpse, stuffed with a bomb no less, in the image of Jim West (Robert Conrad) to blow up a meeting of the president's cabinet.

Just look at some of the screen grabs I took from this episode (all images copyright CBS Entertainment)!

Someone has uploaded it to Youtube as of the time of this post. If you are so inclined, it can be viewed here.