HAPPY HAPPY HAPPYBIRTHDAY
--Mark

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPYBIRTHDAY
--Mark

I saw the first episode of Dark Shadows when it originally aired in '66, while I was at my grandparents' house in Georgia. I was seven at the time, and I doubt I understood much of what was going on except there was a girl on a train going to a creepy place. When we came back home to Virginia, we found that the local ABC affiliate didn't run DS at all, and I think I threw a bigger fit than at any time since they cancelled my cartoons for JFK's funeral.

I found out later that Channel 13 out of Lynchburg, VA, carried DS, but you had to have cable to pick up the station; back then, hardly anyone had cable, but one of my best friends did. I took every opportunity to invite myself over to his place so we could watch DS, and I managed it just enough to know that I was missing something very special. And of course whenever we visited my grandparents in Georgia, come DS time in the afternoon, nobody else could get anywhere near the TV.

We finally got cable at home in late '69, just as the Leviathans story was beginning. At the time, my only knowlege of the show was based on sporadic viewing, so I had no idea how the story racked up compared to all that had come before. As far as I was concerned, this was Dark Shadows, it was scary, and I was in heaven. (To this day, I still have a special fondness for the Leviathans story because that's where I really began with the show in earnest.)

Then the unthinkable happened. They went to parallel time and locked Barnabas in his coffin.

Good God, here I was finally able to watch DS every day, and what do they do but take Barnabas away. I can't count the number of times I raised my fist to the heavens and told anyone who would listen that if they didn't bring Barnabas back, I was gonna QUIT WATCHING DARK SHADOWS!

OK, so he came back, I kept watching the show, and all was well. Then of course, 1971 rolled around.... Oh, what a sad boy. On the Monday after DS's final episode, I tuned in, as I'm sure many young'uns did, certain the cancellation was a late April Fool's Day joke, or some horrible mistake. But it wasn't.

In '76, the reruns of DS started up, and I was again in seventh heaven, until my younger brother started pitching a fit that he wanted to watch Gilligan's Island on the TV downstairs (which was the only one that would pick up DS), never mind that it was in black and white and the black and white TV UPSTAIRS picked up Gilligan's Island just fine. Of course, Mom had no inkling of the profound gravity of the goings on at Collinwood, and so she made us alternate afternoons watching our shows. Therefore, I missed every other episode of DS until Gilligan moved to another time slot.

I repaid my brother by setting fire to all his GI Joes (and a few other toys I decided he had outgrown). But having gained so much maturity since those days, every now and then I look on Ebay, find old toys like those of his I destroyed, buy them, and send them to him -- along with a can of lighter fluid and matches so he can, after all these years, have the pleasure of burning them himself.

Tell me I'm not a really good brother.

--Mark

Thanks, Misty. It'd be great fun to continue with the premise, although I rarely have the time to work on things like this just for the sheer enjoyment of it. But I somehow managed to get Labyrinth done; maybe one of these days I'll be able to fit in another Dark Shadows project.

--Mark

One of the most frightening stories, to me, was in the first episode (not the pilot, the first episode of the new series) in which Carl Betz, formerly of The Donna Reed Show  and Judd for the Defense, plays a doctor who, through hypnotism, can cause a subject to display all the symptoms of any disease.

That episode is called "The Dead Man," based on a story by Fritz Leiber, one of my favorite horror/fantasy writers. Night Gallery had its share of weaklings, but its best episodes are about as scary as anything I remember from my youth. The episode with Grayson and Agnes Moorehead (aptly titled "Certain Shadows on the Wall") gave me a severe case of the creeps when I first saw it in junior high. Many Night Gallery episodes were based on classic horror fiction by H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Basil Copper, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, and others, with varying degrees of success.

There is one episode in particular I'm hoping to catch again one of these days; it's called "There Are No More McBanes," starring Joel Grey, and I haven't seen it since it first aired in the 70s. But there's an image of a demonic creature breaking in through a window, where all you can see are its glowing eyes and claws, that stands out with disturbing clarity.

The show runs on Plex here, but at 5:00 a.m. Friday mornings. Wish they'd put it back to a more normal time.... This is why God made VCRs, I guess, but remembering to set it is a whole nuther story.

--Mark

Either way, when my sister pointed it out to me in the paper it pretty much creeped me out!  Call me Crazy Jenny  but whatever the case, I'm always up for a good ghost story!

I love ghostly stuff myself; it gives me a good case of the willies (hey, that's funny). However, with all the tools to doctor photos nowadays, even a total novice can create images that look like things they're not. Photographic evidence is no longer evidence at all, and given the human propensity to inflate, distort, or dispense with the truth, I tend to be skeptical of anything of this nature that I don't experience myself. And alas, I've never experienced anything that I can't truthfully write off to a natural occurrence, even if I haven't quite understood it right at that moment.

But when it comes to such things "out there"... I want to believe, as it says on Agent Mulder's poster.

--Mark

Quote from: Raineypark on December 21, 2003, 02:54:11 AM

had more than my share of the egg nog...

Ooh, SHARE!!!

You took the word right out of my beak.

Actually.... I told the missus the other day that we needed some egg nog. She asked how much. I said lots. She bought five gallons. It might last a day or two.

--Mark

[shadow=red,left,300]HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY[/shadow][/color]
BIRTHDAY
--Mark