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« on: February 04, 2014, 05:21:13 AM »
Most made-for-TV two hour movies clocked in at 100 minutes back in 1977 - and I just checked one of the Leonard Maltin books and it indicates that's the running time. If your friend is correct on the running time of the MeTV version, then that would mean that 8 minutes are still missing. However, while I was watching I was conscious of the possibility that MeTV may have cut scenes to add commercials, but I have to say that if they did cut anything, the plot didn't suffer because (unlike, say the butchering of The Sixth Sense, where half the content of each ep was sacrificed to fit into Night Gallery's running time, turning the eps into incoherent messes) everything made perfect sense and seemed to flow smoothly.
I once videotaped this movie back in the mid-80s and I still have that copy. Unfortunately, though, I don't have a VCR to play the tape to see if I could possibly catch anything that may have been extra and/or missing in that version and/or if it had a running time longer than 92 minutes. But then I may have only saved Thayer's scenes because I often did things like that back then - and if I did, even if I did own a VCR, it wouldn't matter...
As an aside, Maltin says that Thayer was "ideally cast" and described the film as "above average." I couldn't agree more on both counts.