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(originally appeared in Video Watchdog #89 [November 2002])[The Outer Limits: The Original Series, Vol. I (1963-64) MGM fumbled the Ruby Anniversary of The Outer Limits by a year and change, and choked a good save by releasing their 4-disc set of the series' complete first season on September 3rd, 2002 a not-so-superstitious thirteen days before the 39th anniversary of its premiere on ABC-TV in 1963 (September 16th). No matter, since no enthusiast of this classic would care to add days to the deathwatch-wait for DVD merely for the sake of symmetry; thus, what we have right now, in our fevered grasp, is an opportunity to scrutinize this milestone of televised sci-fi as it settles into middle age, even venerability, and a new excuse to take stock of its reputation. Old, is The Outer Limits; nearly as antique as the Second World War to many modern viewers who may be wondering at all the fuss. It was one of the last gasps of black-and-white anthology TV, no continuing characters, with barely enough episodes to amass a decent syndication package. (Broadcast once per week, the full series run of 49 hour-long segments barely lasts a year for syndicators; "stripped" [run on weekdays], it fills about two months.) Continuously in syndication ever since its network cancellation in early 1965, The Outer Limits, by the 21st Century, seemed reduced to clots of program fiber used to separate commercials on the Sci-Fi Channel, and to shill for a newer, (and vastly inferior) program bearing without honor the same name. Thanks to the FCC's smashing of the "15 minute ceiling" in 1997 (the maximum time allowed for commercials per broadcast hour, recently extended to 15 minutes, 44 seconds), Sci-Fi was compelled to trim eight minutes from each 52-minute episode in order to make the advertising math work. Prior to this were unedited runs on PBS in the 1970s, and the famous TNT Marathons of the 80s and 90s these latter standing as the best televised representation of the show in syndication to date: uncut, featuring customized commercial bumpers and supplemented by interview bytes with many of the principal players. From 1987-91, MGM/UA Home Video released all the episodes on VHS in assorted packaging variants, including double-episode tapes for Columbia House and the UK market. Four volumes of laserdiscs were issued 1991-95, containing about 80% of the series run, 40 episodes. Since then, DVDs of the show have been among MGM's most-requested catalogue items which means it must possess some quality to recommend its longevity. The Outer Limits became the pivotal monster show for entire generations of 60s and 70s fans due to being a creative anomaly, where production value fused with a unique weirdness and skewed POV to provide a phenomenon legitimately greater than the sum of its raw materiel. To others, it was an unsung treasure, a bridge from the snap-in-the-tail morals of The Twilight Zone to the derring-do of Star Trek. It targeted no specific audience (unlike the juvenilia of Irwin Allen's contemporaneous assortment of gimmick series like Lost In Space or The Time Tunnel) and offered as many terrors for adults as for kids a heady, hallucinogenic mix of cerebral paranoia, Gothic milieu, Expressionist rendering and gooshy critters from outer space or, in one case, straight out of a vacuum cleaner. To still others, The Outer Limits pointed the way and provided the inspiration for dozens of nascent filmmakers, many of whom grew up to enable our modern five-channel, CGI-slathered blockbuster entertainment machines. It is worth restating here that the 1963-era special effects, mocked today as falling far short of the plotting demands of the writing, demonstrate a peak of imaginative problem-solving far preferable to today's exemplars of fantastic film movies and TV shows where, conversely, the writing is no longer up to the level of the effects, and "willing suspension of disbelief" by audiences seems to have passed its spoilage date long ago. Which still begs the question: Whyfor The Outer Limits? Many "classic" memories of The Outer Limits are grounded in several instantly identifiable creatures or aliens, the most popular of these including "The Galaxy Being's" titular Andromedan, the big-brained, hyper-evolved homo superior portrayed by David McCallum in "The Sixth Finger," the crawly insect antagonists of "The Zanti Misfits," or the lava-complected time traveler played by Martin Landau in "The Man Who Was Never Born." All these are present and accounted for in the first season shows most importantly, they are now available for examination in the company of the other episodes made around them. The Outer Limits crew had to wrap one of these miniature feature films every seven days, which makes the quality control on view, plus the fast-forward innovations deployed to get each episode in the can on time and on target, all the more amazing. There were no recurring characters, sequels, or clip shows to take up production slack, yet the series displays an admirable continuity as a unified, 32-part whole through the ingredients that matter the most: acting, direction, writing, music, cinematography (before it was called that), editing, and the wild concoctions of Project Unlimited, possibly TV history's very first independent, all-purpose special effects shop. This is not like settling into a sofa to watch a season of The Sopranos or The Mary Tyler Moore Show all at once, familiar characters engaging in the routine of the human condition and providing the usual surprises according to a soap-operatic "arc." This is a puzzle-box wherein a hidden panel leads to a secret door which reveals yet another bizarre compartment. The show's tenor is not sequential, but like the spokes of a wheel whereas Twilight Zone dealt in ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, The Outer Limits most frequently engaged highly unusual people in the intrusions of the mundane, "larger" world outside their experiments, research or predicaments. (A dossier on the show's moody, romanticist characters would probably read like a psychologist's case file on aberrant personality.) Perhaps this tonal and thematic consonance often allowing space for iconoclastic riffs from within the larger "identity" of the series is itself the formula or log-line that justifies release of the entire first season in one keepcase, during a time when, more and more, old television shows are resurrected to feed the DVD audience's insistence on "complete" multi-disc or special events repackaging. What's really striking about MGM's release of the complete first season is that it demonstrates how seamlessly the behind-the-scenes parts-of-the-whole melded and complemented each other to yield an episode-to-episode consistency, from the most popular classics to the oblique and cryptic segments; from the indelibly-remembered monsters, stories and situations to the forgettable or embarrassing desperation measures; from the most expensive single (non-pilot) segment ("Tourist Attraction," a real hound dog) to the cheapest bottle show ("Controlled Experiment," a simple delight). Every instance of the highs and lows navigated by the show's unique and unreplicable creative team can be examined here at will from Leslie Stevens' shining, technological sci-fi to Joseph Stefano's baroque, Old Dark House approach; from the brilliance of the Stefano/Hall/Oswald "troika" (responsible for 14 episodes, a third of the whole season) to the gem-like one-shots ("The Chameleon" is just one such standout); from the goofy monster ragouts like "Fun and Games" or "Second Chance" to the more grown-up fear factor of "Corpus Earthling" or "The Invisibles." # That said by way of artistic prologue, the only way to spin buyers up to speed is to do no less than provide a whirlwind of short takes on every episode in the set. Hum the music, and consider the first season of The Outer Limits as a symphony in three movements: 1: Breaking Ice and Finding Sealegs December, 1962 - August, 1963 In "The Galaxy Being," a solitary tinkerer (Cliff Robertson), working alone at his radio station, makes contact with a shimmering, mouthless being from Andromeda who is inadvertently transmitted to Earth via a jumped-up television apparatus and proceeds to (a) scare everybody because it looks like a monster, (b) scorch people who get too close, due to its incipient radiation, and (c) deliver a chastising speech urging Earthlings think outside the box, and not rush to judgement based on appearances. "Go to your homes," it says. "Go and give thought to the mysteries of the universe." Then, ending its own broadcast day, it "tunes" itself out of existence. The pilot version of this film, written and directed by Leslie Stevens, was the show that sold The Outer Limits to the network and clearly established Stevens' mission statement for his brainchild, summed up by the never-seen Control Voice (Vic Perrin) during teasers and tags for individual episodes as "the awe and mystery of the universe." Stevens' protagonist has a long speech concerning the value of lightning-strike discoveries made by small, independent, highly-motivated seekers over the slow and steady progress of corporate research echoing Stevens' own desire to become a versatile, mobile, self-sufficient producer. He christened his production company, Daystar, as "Hollywood's First Free-Independent," after sandbagging the Hollywood system with a fast-and-dirty feature film shot for around $60,000, Private Property (1960), which secured him a studio deal at 20th Century Fox to do more of the same. Daystar sortied into television as an excuse to keep most of its stock company of actors and crew together in a day-job sense; its first series, the Jack Lord rodeo show Stoney Burke (ABC 1962-63), corralled most of the talent that Stevens would bring to bear on The Outer Limits. Time and cinematic progress considered, "The Galaxy Being" remains a hell of a kickoff episode, featuring a benevolent, inquisitive alien presented via a cleverly-rendered optical effect (negative-reversal, which meant the Being played no scenes directly with any of the actors, nor they with it), and the notion (possibly a first for TV sci-fi) of a computer being used to decode an alien language. To the jaded present-day mindset, the overall impact of the episode, remote and strange, may be difficult to recapture, but the show bears repeat viewing, if solely for its astounding notion astounding to TV, anyway that aliens were not all bad. It is the Day the Earth Stood Still of television. Stevens' ambitious outlook immediately jumped the rails with the next episode produced, "The Borderland," which offers the same basic setup machine contact of an alternate dimension but drowned in a lot of pseudo-technological gobble and staffed with unappealing characters. It was his effort, as he said, "to go inside-out" and present a visual "trip." It ran over budget and failed to present the sort of monster presence to which ABC had cottoned as a series hook, although it raises more interesting questions about the confluence of the spiritual with the scientific than it bothers to answer. (Stevens alone directed the four episodes he wrote, in addition to stealth contributions to other segments, such as "The Man With the Power" and "Specimen: Unknown.") Next up was "The Human Factor," written by Time Machine alumnus David Duncan, about a brain-swap at an Arctic DEWLine station, with an ice-encrusted specter, "the Ghost of Private Gordon" (basically a delusion of one of the characters) tacked-on to a conventional, Twilight Zone-style treatment. It is a "C" episode with "A" production values, which marks the first substantial acting contribution by Sally Kellerman, a casting suggestion by Joseph Stefano, a writer and former Broadway cohort of Stevens who had made inroads on Hollywood with his screenplays for Psycho and The Black Orchid as well as a number of TV dramas. Stevens signed on Stefano to run The Outer Limits on a day-to-day basis, and Stefano spent the first few episodes finding his sealegs as producer and determining what he wanted to express through the series. When the next show on the roster, "Tourist Attraction," ran similarly over budget, Stevens and Stefano re-brainstormed their goals versus their financing, looking for ways to distinguish each episode without mauling their bankbook. "Tourist Attraction" had signed costly stars (Ralph Meeker, Janet Blair), needed to fake the location for a whole Latin American dictatorship, and overshot the monster bar with a legion of full-body-suited, skin-diving sea creatures all for a one-hour prime time TV show whose dramatic content was, well, watery. Hired on as an unofficial special effects supervisor, genre veteran Byron Haskin (of War of the Worlds) was assigned to direct a script by Outer Limits newcomer Meyer Dolinsky, "The Architects of Fear" a watershed for the series whose value cannot be underestimated. The story of a scientist who volunteers to be surgically transformed into an alien "Thetan" invader in order to unite the Earth against a common fearful enemy featured a sharp performance from soon-to-be Outer Limits stalwart Robert Culp, crackling dialogue, engaging characters and a wallop of an Act Four climax, showcasing one of the most ambitious monster suits ever attempted for the small screen. It was such a successful grotesque that several affiliates censored its appearance. More importantly, the show was delivered on time and under budget. The Outer Limits had begun to find its real identity tight, dark melodramas buttressed by the moody camerawork of Conrad Hall (who had replaced the legendary Ted McCord on Stoney Burke), and utilizing deft character actors in place of bigger stars with higher price-tags. Stevens followed this up with "Controlled Experiment," a budget show shot in 4 1/2 days. Hearkening back to his Broadway roots frothy comedies such as The Champagne Complex and The Marriage-Go-Round he spun a whimsical tale about Martian investigators trying to fathom the quaint Earth custom of murder, buoyed considerably by the effervescent performances of Barry Morse and Carroll O'Connor. This calm comedy was virtually the only lighthearted note in the entire first season, and would probably be exploded into an entire series, today. Haskin next directed "The Hundred Days of the Dragon," a starkly-shot, moody political thriller that plays like a companion piece to The Manchurian Candidate, and whose sole flaw is that it has dated so badly in the wake of the John Kennedy assassination. Insidious Red Chinese scientists perfect a way of making human flesh "malleable in molecular arrangement," squash the physiognomy using a gruesome, pie-plate template, and successfully emplace a double agent into the US Presidency, in a story that was a first script sale by future Mission: Impossible co-writers Allan Balter and Robert Mintz. Casting director John Erman, imported from Twilight Zone, strip-mined the able British cast of The Greatest Story Ever Told, tinkering with their visas and quickly slotting them into The Outer Limits for guest appearances. One of the first of these was Donald Pleasence, star of "The Man With the Power," wherein a meek teacher gains via surgery an implant that actualizes his thoughts, with much the same result the Id Monster wreaked on Forbidden Planet. The episode looks much better than it actually is, and is an example of a story that might have fared better at a half-hour. Another problem, as with the previous two episodes: no real monster. ABC demanded more than "Dragon's" rubber faces or "Power's" indistinct (though pretty cool) energy cloud. Stefano's first script contribution to The Outer Limits was "A Feasibility Study," featuring the irresistible hook of the alien abduction of a six-block-square tract of Beverly Hills by an army of "Luminoids" (originally Venusians) who look like they are formed from petrified silver slag. Here was an episode that played as moral fable on the topic of slavery, whose Luminoid kidnappers offer fairly complex motivations and rationalizations for their crime, versus Earthling victims with big personal problems of their own, who unite to defeat the larger and more immediate danger in a climactic act of self-sacrifice. While a first-class episode, full of powerful and memorable images, the ABC censors saw the denouement as mass suicide which delayed its broadcast for nearly a year. (This was the show upon which Stefano based his oft-quoted "Canons" for potential Outer Limits writers.) Stefano also provided a steady berth for German director Gerd Oswald, who, along with Conrad Hall, formed a trio which encapsulated Stefano's more Gothic stylings when it came to his own scripts. Oswald's debut Outer Limits effort is merely adequate: "Specimen: Unknown," a tale of spore- and gas-spewing alien plants that overrun an orbital space station and are brought back by shuttlecraft to infect the Earth. "The only interesting thing about it was the end," said Oswald. "The rainwater destroying the plants like a word from God. Otherwise there wasn't much meat to it." While trapped in the idiom of 1950s sci-fi low-budgeters, baldly shoplifting the climax of Day of the Triffids, and padded to the rafters with stock footage from Men Into Space, the show does offer some interesting, pre-2001: A Space Odyssey views of orbital life under the sunlamp, a burial in space, and what may be the first use, on television, of the word "shuttlecraft" in reference to a surface-to-orbit transport. As of Oswald's debut, the elements for the Golden Age of The Outer Limits were all aligned. Stefano had a four-teleplay obligation to the series, but quickly realized he would have to do a lot more writing just to control the project's overall feel and express himself as producer. He knew he wanted the Hall/Oswald team to handle most of his own scripts, and sought out other writers of similar sensibilities. "The Architects of Fear" had shown the way with an admirable balance of Stevens' goals and Stefano's tastes ("hard science" meets "weird science," if you will), and now it was time, as Stefano said, "(to get) away with murder little kook groups making the films they really wanted to make. And those are the films we're still watching today." 2: The Hot Period September, 1963 -January, 1964 When The Outer Limits premiered on ABC in September of 1963, it was just completing production on two of its most famous and well-remembered episodes, now firing on all cylinders after an oddball, energetic debut. "The Sixth Finger" is undeniably another high watermark for the series. Said Stefano, of the teleplay by Ellis St. Joseph, "(It) was the first, and possibly the only script I read through and said immediately, film it. Now, you can't know what that means, when I felt the need to rewrite every script that came in." Under the smooth-as-glass direction of James Goldstone, David McCallum does a stellar turn as a Welsh miner hyper-evolved into the bulging-craniumed, pointy-eared superintellect of humankind's far future. The episode is compact, contained, and cost-conscious as well as a stupendous dramatic success, providing The Outer Limits with one of its most recognizable "bears" (the monster element), courtesy of state-of-the-art design by makeup artist John Chambers (who, later in the decade, would win a precedent-setting Academy Award for innovating the appliances for Planet of the Apes) which has probably inspired more ripoffs than any other Outer Limits creation. Lightning struck twice, and Conrad Hall pulled out all the cinematographical stops, for The Outer Limits' most famous "romantic fairytale," a powerful, downbeat "haircut" of Beauty and the Beast titled "The Man Who Was Never Born." Written by Anthony Lawrence and directed with painstaking care by Leonard Horn, Martin Landau actually donned daunting makeup (as had McCallum, before him) to portray Andro, a stunted mutant of the far future gifted with the chance to change the fate of all humankind by assassinating the mother of the scientist who will bring about future catastrophe. An impossible and forbidden love ensues between Andro (in hypnotically-augmented "normal" human guise) and his intended target, and his mission succeeds too well when he manages to "correct" the future, but thereby erases his own birth. Genuinely tragic, this episode also trumped The Outer Limits' preference for benign, sympathetic "monsters" by providing one that was not only well-read, but downright poetical in his misty-eyed view of the past, providing what is probably the single favorite episode of most fans of the series. Following the precedent of "Specimen: Unknown," "Moonstone" was a show set entirely in outer space, in which an opaque white sphere filled with intergalactic fugitives seeks sanctuary from their planet's tyrants on one of our moonbases. Past the visual effects and quirky aliens, the show is marginal, dated, cliched and conventional. The entire cast seems to have wandered in from some 1940s detective cheapie. Fans of Men Into Space are treated to more stock footage, including some nice long shots of lunar backdrops painted as murals by the immortal Chesley Bonestell. The Outer Limits went to court in "O.B.I.T," the second effort by writer Meyer Dolinsky and director Gerd Oswald, and the first of a tight trio of paranoia fables that helped distill just what this series was "about" to viewers who quickly became devotees. Here, Oswald and Conrad Hall gleefully filled the frame with dour, Expressionistic compositions that easily elevate Dolinsky's parable on surveillance above the usual, tiresome TV courtroom biz. This is a very "quotable" show thanks to the striking dialogue and first-rate performances, across the board. After spying comes imprisonment, and after "O.B.I.T." came "Nightmare," Joseph Stefano's first-broadcast script for the series. His tough, multi-layered, uncompromising story of human military prisoners subjected to mind games in an alien P.O.W. camp at first appears self-consciously shot from the proscenium arch, on nearly naked soundstages, but this surreal tilt is perfectly complimented by the complex, deep-dish dialogue, cool gargoyle aliens, and absolutely flawless ensemble acting by a cast that includes James Shigeta, Ed Nelson, John Anderson and a very young Martin Sheen. Then Robert Culp returned, at his sweating, white-eyed, paranoiac best in "Corpus Earthling," an in-name-only adaptation of the Louis Charbonneau novel made stronger and bleaker by Gerd Oswald's pronounced noir flavorings. Alien rocks "talk" inside of Culp's head and gradually drive him bonkers; oh, surrrre. Except that in this tightly-wrapped, disturbing drama, the plot is more upsetting than Culp can imagine, and the forces he fears really are out to get him. "It was frightening as opposed to scary," said Stefano. "It hit me in a way I never wanted our shows to hit people." Respite? Caesura? Not a chance. The next episode, another Stefano original directed by Leonard Horn, was one of those shows that simply branded itself into public memory: "The Zanti Misfits." After "The Sixth Finger," the prize for best-recalled Outer Limits monster has to go to the buggy titular nuisance, interstellar convicts who make a grab for escape on Earth, and carry the whole show. It's a disorganized story with a home-run moral and solid performances (except for the female lead). Bruce Dern, a holdover from Stoney Burke, waxes psychotic as Ben Garth, the first human to see, and get killed by, the Zantis which provided a rare use (for television) of stop-motion animation to motivate the alien antagonists. The Stefano/Hall/Oswald "troika" struck again in "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," or, "the one about the vacuum cleaner monster." A good example of an "average" first season show, it also exemplified how a superficial, science fiction premise could springboard into a catalogue of Old Dark House horror effects to provide a flip-side version of "The Man With the Power's" energy cloud there, stately; here, a berserk chaos of Lovecraftian proportion, overseen by a mad scientist with a thick German accent, who commands a research force of the recently resurrected dead. Project Unlimited really went to town creating the outrageous alien menace of "The Mice," a textbook example of an Outer Limits gone loopy in rewrite. A gelatinous jellyfish biped which spearheads a foggily-conceived Earth invasion plot, the critter overwhelms every aspect of the episode except for Henry Silva's marvelous turn as convict Chino Rivera. By now, Stefano's contractual agreement to write four episodes (the same number that Leslie Stevens wrote and directed himself) was completely out the window. Of his original four, "Nightmare" was broadcast and "A Feasibility Study" was held back. A two-parter prefiguring Fantastic Voyage, titled "Small Wonder," was shelved, and another, "The Cats," was scuttled, with elements being interpolated into his rewrite of "Corpus Earthling." His mid-season scripts, generally rush jobs like "The Zanti Misfits" or "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," seem cryptic and irresolute for the very real justification of his 20-hour workdays, and the more fanciful explanation, by Stefano, that "I didn't do treatments or outlines. I just made them up as I went along, according to a vision in my head not a step-by-step formula, but more like a dream." While he knew he could count on the sheer style of the Hall/Oswald axis to ease some of his scripts over plot points rendered opaque by lack of time, for others he had to "turn off" his concerns as producer in order to firm up and redraft his own teleplays, in more the fashion to which he was accustomed when he had the luxury of time. Hence, "The Invisibles," a new tale of paranoia especially noteworthy for all the secret agent "business" it posited, years in advance of TV's spy boom. The protocol of code names, message drops and double identities serves as a frame for a plot to subvert key figures in government and industry by infecting them with alien parasites. It is splendidly chilling, and exciting to watch, by turns gruesome and intense. Whenever Outer Limits monsters were not portrayed by stuntmen (for size or agility) or the lead actors, they were generally played by William O. Douglas, Jr., son of the then-Supreme Court Justice and a mime who had trained under Marcel Marceau (Douglas was the Galaxy Being in the premiere show). In "The Invisibles" we get a glimpse of him in human form as one of the dregs-of-society that the Invisibles recruit to do their dirty work. A hard-hitting story of America's power structure in the throes of corruption, it is another peak for The Outer Limits. Then came the unfortunately-titled "ZZZZZ," the series' legendary "bee girl" episode, and Meyer Dolinsky's least accomplished teleplay. Its prime asset is the thickly sensuous presence of Joanna Frank, as a queen bee transformed to human with the mission of overrunning our society; its biggest drawback is a preachy and ridiculous climax. Stefano then unleashed his most cryptic episode ever, "Don't Open Till Doomsday," an almost impenetrably-veneered parable about sexual fear featuring classic film star Miriam Hopkins as the terrifying Mrs. Kry, enslaved to a monster that reaches near-giddy heights of absurdity (it looks like a pile of shit with one glaring eye). The story is complex and superficially nonsensical, saving all its marbles for the last act, and getting there is none of the fun. It comes off a bit like studying Shakespeare unless you're prepared to dig, and dig deeply, don't bother. Then Stefano gave Shakespeare a "haircut" with "The Bellero Shield," reinterpreting Macbeth into an extrapolation of the lessons learned in previous episodes and applying them to maximum Gothic effect to yield another best-of-series classic. Stagey and broadly dramatic, with a small budget and bare-minimum cast, it presents the fate of another accidentally-intercepted visitor from the stars who falls victim to the grasping and greedy humans surrounding it, making it the Stefano side of the coin Stevens had presented in "The Galaxy Being." The "Bifrost" alien played by John Hoyt is the series' most benevolent, and betrayed, being. The balance of the ensemble Martin Landau, Sally Kellerman, Chita Rivera and Neil Hamilton is first-rate, in this rich, gooey tapestry of all the strengths of The Outer Limits. At which point, ABC requested a pilot, from Stefano, of a new series that would extol the Old Dark House values he most treasured in storytelling. His response, templated on The Outer Limits, was The Unknown wherein a pair of "fancy" murderesses finds themselves under the stewardship of an old, blind butler in a house where time seems to bend, thereby making the resurrection of their victim a very real threat. Having done a "dry run" of similar material in "The Bellero Shield," Stefano tackled Shakespeare, Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, film noir and German Expressionism all at once with another perfect five-star cast (David McCallum, Barbara Rush, Vera Miles, Scott Marlowe and Sir Cedric Hardwicke). Directed by Oswald and shot by Hall, it has the look of a miniature art film shot in ten days. Plans for Stefano's ambitious new series collapsed and the film was re-edited with a science fiction hook, and held back to be presented as "The Forms of Things Unknown" (title also from Shakespeare), the final episode of the first season. No single hour of television ever looked like this before, and your film education is incomplete if you haven't seen it at least once. Not one of the "best," but certainly an essential Outer Limits episode. The Unknown, originally to have been directed by Stefano, represented a breaking point for the increasingly dissatisfied ABC network. But there was still the balance of a TV season (32 episodes, in those halcyon days) to fulfill. As of The Unknown, several key players were subtracted from the mix. John Erman ceased his casting duties to pursue a directorial career (he had directed "Nightmare"). Conrad Hall left to work on features, and was replaced by Kenneth Peach. The per-show budget was cut and one shooting day was dropped from each new episode. Several classics were still in the offing, but the look of The Outer Limits had begun its inevitable downward curve. 3: Endgame January - March, 1964 Filmed by secondary crew elements during production of The Unknown, "The Children of Spider County" outwardly had a lot to recommend it: a followup teleplay by Anthony Lawrence, who wrote "The Man Who Was Never Born," and the return of director Leonard Horn, who had helmed both that episode and "The Zanti Misfits." Kent Smith, late of "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," returned to play the human incarnation of an alien from the planet Eros, returned to Earth to claim his half-breed son. Sufficiently wild, was the mandibled alien by Project Unlimited (played by William O. Douglas, Jr. in a business suit). But this time, the ingredients did not jell, and the story spends so much time chasing its own tail that viewing is ultimately a frustrating experience, further marred by a misfired conclusion. Also shot during the making of The Unknown was The Outer Limits' red-headed stepchild, its most handicapped, but lovable offspring, "The Mutant," originally from an idea by Ellis St. Joseph of "The Sixth Finger." An attempt to tell a reasonably linear story of a man who mutates into a monster on an isolated colony planet, and terrorizes the other members of his expedition in order not to be alone, filtered through a total of seven writers. To its credit, the plot bullets right along, pole-vaulting over its own holes instead of plummeting into them, and Warren Oates manages a bit of pathos under a misconceived makeup that buried him behind huge bug-eyes, earning him the nickname of "the Fried Egg Monster." The off-the-wall premise of an amusement park flying saucer ride actually taking wing toward the stars resulted in "Second Chance," a pulp adventure show with one ear turned back toward the worst, schlocky definitions of sci-fi. Simon Oakland portrays a visitor from the planet Empyria, sent to Earth to recruit locals with "the least to lose" to help Empyria avert a cosmic catastrophe; Oakland wins out over his ridiculous, birdy mask to credibly portray the noble and somewhat flamboyant alien. Apparently a lot of people saw this episode as kids, and the shot of the saucer ascending away from the amusement park achieves the sort of memorable grandeur that children don't soon forget. An "E" ticket attraction with "C" production values. One Outer Limits episode virtually everyone has seen, at one time or another, is "Fun and Games," with its indelible image of a pissed off monster hurling a sawtooth-bladed boomerang. It's an economical, fun episode. Nick Adams is really quite good as the ex-boxer compelled to defend the entire Earth, and the alien Senator (voiced by Daystar accountant Robert Johnson) is just a hoot mocking, cunning, full of dark humor and vague sadism. This is an episode you can watch over and over again and never tire of. Imagine a Thriller episode at its best, with an Outer Limits bogey attached, and you've got "The Guests," written by Thriller mainstay Donald Sanford. Neither directed by Oswald nor shot by Hall, "The Guests" demonstrated that others could rise to the classic Outer Limits standard when properly inspired. A dreamlike tale of people who never age in a house where time has been frozen by a malevolent alien experimenter (the top half of the costume from "The Mice," here used to better effect), and the delusional people who remain in the house rather than confront the world outside their dream, "The Guests" is elaborately textured, poignant and potent, melancholy and stately, and a great example of a story that could have found a home nowhere else. Leslie Stevens' final episode as writer-director was "Production and Decay of Strange Particles," as long-winded and technically opaque as its title, an end-of-season "desperation measure" (according to Stevens) that plays like a Giant Golden Book on quantum physics gone utterly dingo. The "particles" are bits of matter that come up from the center of a cyclotron, engorge the radiation suits of disintegrated power plant workers with crackling energy, and link together in an ant-like chain of command whose goal has something to do with anti-matter, other dimensions, and frying the planet with a radioactive implosion. The atomic zombies are neat, but at an hour, the show is saggy and redundant, exacerbated by unengaging characters. Look fast for Leonard Nimoy in a bit part. "The Special One" was a rare venture by The Outer Limits smack into the home of a "normal" 1960s family, whose bright son is culled as invasion fodder by a Nazi-like tutor from the planet Xenon. As with "Don't Open Till Doomsday," there's a subtext buried here (about the effects of television on those who view it), but it's interred so deeply that the vague sitcom feel of the whole show (including the casting, as Mom, of Marion Ross, later of Happy Days) never fails to muddy the water or dispel the suspense. Stockbroker Richard Ney (who authored the best-seller The Wall Street Jungle in 1970) is grand fun, playing the tutor as though Klaatu's little brother had turned rotten apple. The final show to be produced for the first season was "The Chameleon," written by Robert Towne (back when he was still acting as "Edward Wain" in a number of early Roger Corman films) and directed by Gerd Oswald. Written cost-consciously for a small cast and presenting aliens in Stefano's "sympathetic and sophisticated" mold, it offers an action-oriented plot buffered with subtexts on the dual themes of loss of identity and deception of appearance. Agent Louis Mace (Robert Duvall) volunteers to be transformed into an alien in order to infiltrate a crashed flying saucer. He undergoes a change of character from his assassin's roots and winds up going home with the aliens, where he will be welcome, where he will, at last, "belong." This is another of The Outer Limits' most watchable shows, from its endearing and benevolent aliens, to Duvall's tour-de-force performance. (Syndication re-ordered the sequence and biased toward week-to-week strengths; should viewers care to re-experience the program in its original broadcast/syndication order starting with "The Galaxy Being," followed by "The Hundred Days of the Dragon", with "The Architects of Fear" third, and so on, ending with "The Forms of Things Unknown" that's how the episodes have been presented in this set.) # Apart from what seems to be the main "mission statement" of The Outer Limits that monsters are frequently less monstrous than the humans they encounter an overview of the first season in one vast gulp can also emphasize the "extraordinary people in ordinary situations" dichotomy that makes the program more a negative-reversal and less a mirror image of Twilight Zone. The universe of The Outer Limits has little truck with the real world-at-large, isolating its dramas into the outback of private research labs, off-the-beaten-path small towns, Old Dark Houses and the silent shelter of space. Emotional violence is visited with dark and savage frequency while actual physical violence that staple of TV narrative is laid back to an almost surprising extreme. Past a smatter of stock-issue screaming heroines and deployments of military firepower, guns are in evidence in many shows, but are rarely fired, and even more rarely fatal. When a plot does resort to firearms, a single gunshot is often the hub on which the entire story revolves, as in "Nightmare," "Controlled Experiment," or "The Bellero Shield," and several shows severely inconvenience themselves by the sheer absence of available weaponry (never moreso than in "The Mutant"). Apart from the usual star suspects Robert Culp, Martin Landau, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Sally Kellerman, Vera Miles, Barbara Rush, David McCallum, with the inevitable invocations of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, plus anyone who was ever nominated for an Oscar since then The Outer Limits maintained a keen interest in resurrecting many "lost" or little-used character actors, lending the show a population of faces that abetted its "look," which was unlike any other series on television. Sir Cedric Hardwicke's final film performance was for "The Forms of Things Unknown" (he replaced Peter Lorre and Joseph Schildkraut, both of whom died before they could be cast!). Stefano requested and got, as he put it, "people who were not working much in movies or TV anymore; people with fabulous faces, types and styles, like Sidney Blackmer, or Neil Hamilton, or George MacReady with his great scar." In "Don't Open Till Doomsday" we find the last hurrah of Miriam Hopkins (most memorable in the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) in the company of sci-fi stalwart John Hoyt. The other dramatis personae on view include Walter Burke, Philip Abbott, Vaughn Taylor, Nellie Burt, Henry Brandon, Ruth Roman and Alex Nicol, Warren Oates, Betsy Jones-Moreland, a post-blacklist Jeff Corey, Harry Towne, Russell Johnson, Tim O'Connor, John Anderson, and Mimsy Farmer logging an early job ("Second Chance") prior to becoming an art-house movie icon in Barbet Schroeder's Pink Floyd-scored, 1969 trip into psychedelia and drug addiction, More. Oscar-winning cinematographer Conrad Hall called The Outer Limits "a school for the development of my craft," and in many of these episodes you can see him working all the angles in the company of his camera operator, another then-nascent luminary named William Fraker. Some of composer Dominic Frontiere's superlative music for the show, still his best work in any medium, is available separately on CD as The Outer Limits (GNP/Crescendo 8032) with a Volume Two expected shortly. MGM has released the boxed set with zero fanfare, strictly as a no-frills item engineered toward wringing new income from old inventory. (At least the four laserdisc sets had more thoughtful packaging design.) The four double-sided discs (Region 1, fullscreen [standard 1.33:1], closed-captioned) break down to four episodes per side, and reportedly the source elements used were the same as the masters for the videocassette releases. (Compare this to the overkill approach used by Rittenhouse Archives, which paid $1000 per print to strike new 35mm positives of nine episodes, just so they could pull images of crystal clarity for their 2002 trading card set!). There is a slight if noticeable chiaroscuro problem here: Many but not all of the VHS releases (from what was then called MGM/UA Home Video, now co-opted into "MGM DVD") were mastered from syndication prints "brightened" for TV broadcast. Some of these (like "O.B.I.T." or "ZZZZZ") benefit greatly from the amplified contrast wrought on all their DVD counterparts. Some suffer from being rendered even darker, boosting the grain and emphasizing to a distracting degree the plasmic "swim" effect often seen on projected film (this is a particular problem on "The Architects of Fear," which actually looks better in its VHS incarnation). It also makes some prints (like "Nightmare") appear "dusty," when what you're really seeing is the background texture of the unspooling film itself, brought up from invisibility by the relentless overkill of digital processing (along with many black scratches, hitherto invisible, in "The Children of Spider County," to cite another case). The picture is also framed tighter on DVD than on the VHS library, which results in some loss of information on the top and sides, less so on the bottom (the intimate angles in "The Man Who Was Never Born" take a beating in this regard). Keeping in mind that the concern of most TV production at the time was to keep images as brightly lit as possible, and everything in the center of your screen, these drawbacks are minimal, with the worst casualties being sporadic over-contrast (as if you had hit the SHARPNESS button one too many times in PhotoShop), or the occasional loss of the top of someone's head in close-up. It is worth noting only because it demonstrates how the value of lighting and composition expressed in The Outer Limits made it even more of an aberration in the landscape of 1960s broadcast TV. Allowing for variant film stocks and the dirtiness inherent in process shots or stock footage used back then, the prints on view here possess most of the same flaws as their videocassette counterparts (i.e., mild speckles and scratches in the same places), but overall they are relatively crisp. There are very slight edge problems, most often on the left side of frame sometimes a "bowed border," sometimes a fluttering effect resembling a light leak. Thankfully, the original monaural sound tracks have not been messed over to accommodate five-track home theatre systems, but they have been bumped up to Dolby Digital 1.0 mono, from the "hi-fi" mix used on the videotape release. The "scene selection" onscreen menus are both decorative and useful. Each episode is provided with its own page with a featured creature or actor in the upper left, and five chapter stops per show. Some are maddeningly arbitrary; others fall on the act breaks (the fade-in/fade-outs where commercials originally appeared). The chapter stops are amusingly captioned. Less attractive is the main menu page, with its cheesy massage of the Control Voice speech (i.e., "There is nothing wrong with your DVD player ") rendered not by Vic Perrin or a simulacrum, but by something that sounds like a robot using a Mister Microphone, broadcasting from the bottom of a swimming pool. It is illegible and annoying, especially since it pops up on each disc of the set. The main menu page and the keepcase illustration are minimally-designed, non-evocative of the series, and just plain dull. A 12-page booklet provides even less information than did the video sleeves, with cast listings pared down to bare minimum and episode synopses (based on key passages taken from The Outer Limits Companion without attribution) scarified and breathlessly battered with exclamation points until they are hilariously tone-deaf. Some character names are misspelled (such as "Layton" for "Leighton" in "The Architects of Fear") and some plot details, wrongly assumed such as Gwyllm Griffiths' "increased physical strength" in "The Sixth Finger," or the reference to Andro in "The Man Who Was Never Born" as "ghoulish." While the booklet cover reiterates the boring keepcase art, its back cover is a pointless jumble of irrelevant ingredients that unintentionally resembles a highschool notebook graffito of a scary face. No need to cajole MGM to similarly release The Outer Limits' second season (more properly a half-season, 17 episodes under a different production regime); the time-tested status of the entire series virtually mandates its completion, at least until another, more pristine format comes along to render DVD obsolete. Further classics and curiosities await in this back third: the futurism-on-a-budget evocation of Clifford Simak's short story, "Goodnight, Mr. James" as "The Duplicate Man;" the sand-sharks of the 1964 Hallowe'en episode, "The Invisible Enemy;" the monster-less lyricism of the series' sole two-parter, "The Inheritors;" the unforgettable Harlan Ellison double bill of "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand." Besides, if they weren't going to release the second season, then why is this collection subtitled "Volume One?" Perhaps the "bit budget" for a Volume Two set might allow for a few special features or supplements conspicuously absent in the Season One box, and there's a lot to draw from: two complete alternate versions of two episodes (the Please Stand By pilot version of "The Galaxy Being," and The Unknown pilot cut of "The Forms of Things Unknown"); ABC's elliptical commercials, designed to promote The Outer Limits without necessarily showing the monsters (plus a New Year's, 1999 commercial that kicks off with Vic Perrin's Control Voice speech as an entrée to what was then called the New Millennium); the interview segments done by TNT for the numerous Marathons (many featuring actors or crew now deceased); the hysterical Penn & Teller bumpers done for a 1993 TNT Marathon; Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner reminiscing, between clips, for Science Fiction: A Journey into the Unknown, a 1994 retrospective by the Museum of Radio & Television; or Joe Bob Briggs' mordant commentary for an April, 1999 double bill broadcast of "Cold Hands, Warm Heart" and "I, Robot." There are also two documentaries (done under the auspices of promoting the Showtime version of the series, yet of necessity dwelling on the original, therefore featuring another gang of interviews with principal actors) Beyond the Outer Limits (1995, written by Susan O'Meara for Showtime Networks) and The Outer Limits Phenomenon (1996), an infomercial for VHS subscriptions (produced by Erin Perry for INFINNITY Productions). Forget extras, specials, goodies and perks anyway. The suggested retail price for this set boils down to $2.50 per episode (and who pays full retail these days?), and that's a bargain in any language for devotees who have waited long enough to see this landmark program on DVD. At last. |
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