Friday, July 4, 2008

"Room for one more, honey" weirdness

I just flipped to the marathon of The Twilight Zone that Sci-Fi is running and they're showing "Twenty Two", which should probably be called "Room for one more, honey" since that's the line that makes you go "Ohhhhh! That episode!"

But it looks wrong. The camera is shaky and the film quality--instead of the familiar graininess of cheap B&W late '50s shows, it looks like it was a soap shot on cheap-ass video.

If that's remastering, give me unremastered stuff any day. Also, don't touch "Maverick".

There are all kinds of weird video artifacts as well, like the tracking is off. Ick.

If Trooper York comes by, though, we have to ask if people in Brooklyn actually talk like that.

This episode (and another one I can't recall right now) was ripped of to spawn the Final Destination series.

6 comments:

  1. Six episodes of TTZ, including this one, were shot on video. It was an experiment as video tape was pretty new at the time. Rod Serling hated it.

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  2. So I'm just mis-remembering it?

    Dang, it was so obvious--but maybe it's obvious now on a large hi-def TV, where on the ol' 13-inch B&W I watched them on as a kid it wasn't....

    Thanks!

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  3. The old school Brooklyn accent is dying out as the old folks pass. The funny thing is that people in New Orleans have a very similar accent. The immigrant priest from County Kerry lent their brogue to both places. Of course now in Brooklyn we have a lot more influences, Russians from Brighton beach, Jamaicas and other Carib peoples in Crown Heights, the Hassidics in Bourough Park and the Mexicans who are spread all over have all had an effect on the newer Brooklyn patois.

    Rod Sterling and Paddy Chesevky were products of the old school so they wrote what they knew.

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  4. What gets me about the TZ is that it's never been duplicated. 50 years and countless attempts, and producing quality "fantasy" teleplays on a weekly basis seems to be out of our grasp.

    Big Chayevsky fan.

    Big fan of the Brooklyn accent, too. I suppose all the accents will go away eventually.

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  5. Not so much go away as change.

    Allright.

    The black influence is really strong if you are out in the world.

    That's the differance between Brooklyn and LA and places like Madison. The language lives and grows with new influences. Yo holmes.

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