"If you lived at Collinwood" and "Primary Prop" -- what fun topics! People have
really been busy here over the weekend!
And the "Another View of Trask" and "Changed Joshua" threads had such terrific, intelligent discussions, I only wish I had something to add to them ...
* * * *
Now to the point of my thread. A couple of weeks ago, Luciaphil identified the movie "The Thing That Couldn't Die" as the source for the Head of Judah Zachary in the 1840 storyline. I was so excited by this news, and also greatful, since I had been trying to track down several legends of talking heads that I thought might have been the inspiration for this aspect of my favorite DS storyline. Reading a description of this movie convinced me that it was indeed the inspiration of the Judah Zachary character.
The chances of ever seeing the movie, though, seemed somewhat slim. It is not available on video.
Then, late last night I was glancing over my local TV schedule and something caught my eye. Listed at 4:30 A.M. on AMC were the words: "Thing That ..."
"Thing That ..." No more information than that. I didn't have a TV guide and I have no computer at home to do any further checking. It was already midnight and I had no resource except my Leonard Maltin movie guide. I flipped through that to see what movies began with the words "Thing That ... ." To my excitement, the only listing was for "The Thing that couldn't Die." I couldn't believe it. Here, in less than two weeks time, we've had movies that directly inspired DS: "The Uninvited" and now "The Thing that Couldn't Die." And there was also the Vincent Price version of "The Pit and the Pendulum," and as I mentioned in the Poe thread, "The Tomb of Ligeia" is also scheduled to air soon on AMC. Is it something in the air?
So I set my VCR for 4:30 A.M., too tired to set my alarm and manually tape the movie.
So what happened when I rewound the tape this morning? I discovered that the movie had already been in progress when my tape began recording.
Checking AMC's website after work today, I see that the movie actually began airing at 4:20 A.M. I am missing the first 10 minutes of the movie!!! What's more, AMC doesn't have it on their schedule for any upcoming showings. (I have been waiting four years for either AMC or TCM to re-air "The House of the Seven Gables," which I only caught a few minutes of at the time, and they've yet to do so.)
I have spent the entire workday with this nagging at me. It seemed too good to be true that this essential-to-DS movie would happen to air at all, and now that it has, I'm missing the first chunk of it. I know some people wouldn't be as upset by this as I am, but this really has gotten me down. Why does AMC do such a stupid thing as starting a movie at 20 minutes after the hour? And why couldn't my *@&%$#! TV listing have shown the
correct starting time? To me, it's almost worthless to tape something if you don't get it all on tape.
At least I'll be able to see most of it, which is more than I had before.
Still, this has really been upsetting.
Maybe the situation is worse because I also missed taping two other programs that I would really have wanted to have over the weekend. And it was frustrating not to have more information that I could access.
Thanks for listening ...