Apart from the DVDs, I'm not a collector, so my interest in all of it is purely academic.

If fans purchase the merchandise, even when the quality is crap, there is no incentive for MPI to strive to improve the product. 

G.

Is there some unknown rule that ALL the DS merchandise offered by MPI has to be gutwrenchingly tacky?

They've done a wonderful job with the DVDs, on the whole; now perhaps they should think about "re-branding" (shudder) their merchandising dept.

G.

Just to chime in that I LOVED the re-styling of the sets and look in PT 1970.  Quentin's orange jacket WAS a major faux-pas but did underline the character's emotional instability.  Alexalique's Peter Max dress puts me into a trance on the DVDs!

G.

The idea that a supernatural being always has to choose an anagram of her (or his) name in her new "incarnation" dates back to J. Sheridan Le Fanu's classic 1860s novella, Carmilla.  Carmilla has had other lives as Millarca and Mircalla, if memory serves.  The author of Rosemary's Baby very cleverly recycled this idea in that nove and, of course, in the popular film which was making headlines in 1968 when these shows were written.

This episode includes one of my all time favorite DS lines:  "Danielle Roget was perhaps the most EEE-vil woman the Eighteenth Century ever produced!"  There's something so deliciously camp and over-the-top in that line.  And of course, Thayer delivered it with superb aplomb!

G.

Wow, I wonder whether some families wiill be suing for residual psychic damage suffered from view that "toxic shock" orange monstrosity!

I mean, this pretty much blows Janet Jackson's breast RIGHT out of the water!

I am LOL over Magnus' comment about the ABC dumpster.  Maybe somebody rescued one of Cassandra's wigs and those awful sweaters they made poor Julia wear over her first months from there...

G.

I think Eltridge was Sam (or somebody) having a bit of fun with that luscious bit of Lovecraftiana, eldritch.  The bit with the letter-set that comes up in an episode or two comes straight out of Rosemary's Baby.  "The name is an anagram!!"  (I saw a theatrical screening of RB recently and was amused to note something I had never remarked upon before--in the world of the Witches of RB, 1966 is Year One!)

I've always thought that Erica was a drag queen who had fairly recently decided to go 24/7.  Check out the movie The Queen from 1967 to get the period context for transgender culture of the late 1960s.  Erica seems just a bit less "real" than Christen Jorgenson, the first public transsexual who was on a lot of talk shows in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Things were a lot different back then than is the case in today's trans world.

Since Leona is a spirit who has become embodied for just a few hours through an rite of Black Magic, it makes a weird kind of sense to me to cast someone who was still in something of an in-between state in terms of gender.  Even if Erica was female-born, she had an edge that made her VERY compelling in the role of Leona.  I know whenever I screen this episode, I can't take my eyes off Leona whenever she's on camera.

cheers, G.

Well, sometimes unlikely as it seems, you're not reaching.  A fun example is in the Dan Curtis ca. 1974 TV movie The Great Ice Rip-off (Grayson was in the cast, so there's already two DS connections there), there's a scene where the characters are having coffee in a diner, and you can hear the popular 45 rpm version of "Shadows of the night" playing on the diner radio (of course, Bob Cobert did the score for the movie).

G.