The session: "Bring Your Own Movie Month"
Our annual session in which each of us in the class takes a turn sharing a movie of his choice.
Week 3: three television episodes
(Joe's pick)
Joe's big thing for Bring Your Own Movie Month is to make a whole program out of the evening. Whereas the rest of us each choose one movie to share, Joe has typically shown a movie along with a related episode or two from the realm of television. This year he left out the movie part and gave us three television episodes joined (he said) by a theme.
In "Werewolf" (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea -- S3E2), a crewman is bitten by a werewolf and becomes infected. In "The Werewolf" (Kolchak: The Nightstalker -- S1E5), Kolchak finds himself on a cruise ship. Instead of interviewing singles as planned, he's chasing down a werewolf. In "Maria" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents -- S7E3), a circus performer buys a monkey who turns out to be more than he expected.
It was clear to me what the connection was between the first two episodes Joe showed us, as they both involved werewolves. The connection to the Alfred Hitchcock episode was a little less clear. It could be that it starred Nita Talbot, who also starred in the Kolchak episode. The other possibility I can think of is that the plot involved a woman in a chimpanzee costume* which, I guess, is sort of like a man turning into a wolf.
Showing TV shows instead of a movie is, by definition, a risk. A movie, unless it's a sequel or an entry in an established franchise, is meant to be enjoyed on its own terms. With TV shows, the dynamic isn't the same; there are characters and context that are already established and not exposited. Which is not to say that TV episodes can't be enjoyed as self-contained units. These three shows were all from before the current age of arc-driven shows. You can't just sit and watch a random season 4 episode of Game of Thrones or Boardwalk Empire unless you have already seen all that leads up to it. By contrast, you can do that with Bewitched or The Six Million Dollar Man. You'll be missing some context, but those latter shows were written and presented for single-episode consumption. And so it was with the shows Joe showed us.
It's kind of hard for me to get into Voyage as a TV show. Perhaps if I had seen it as a kid I'd be into it -- sort of the way I'm into Star Trek** now. Or, maybe not. I saw Lost in Space (which, like Voyage, was an Irwin Allen vehicle) as a kid, and never really took to it. I could enjoy this episode for what it was, but not much more. Kolchak interested me more. As a miod-1970s series with cinema-like presentation, it fit into my comfort zone better. But my favorite of the three was clearly the the Hitchcock episode.
And I think that's because Hitchcock Presents was the most movie-like of the three. Hitchcock was primarily a movie director and that is reflected in his sensibilities. Further, Presents was an anthology show with no connection between episodes. So each episode was more like a mini-movie than a typical TV episode. I enjoyed that one episode to such a degree that I am tempted to buy the series on DVD. Maybe I'd just pay to stream it -- but if I did that, joe would feel a disturbance in the Force.
It was difficult to rate Joe's offerings. Perhaps I should have tried -- Joe even suggested that we could rate each of the three pieces or the whole. or both -- but I declined. Others went there and gave the everything very high marks. Sadly, I can't find the pad of paper on which I wrote the grades. Sorry.
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*They keep saying "monkey," but it's clearly a chimpanzee costume
**To be clear, I'm talking about the original series and, I guess the spinoffs through Enterprise.
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