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#classic television
emeraldexplorer2 · 1 day
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Peggy Lipton
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sparklejamesysparkle · 5 months
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Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) spills a love potion all over a policeman (Ted Henning) in front of her talking cat Reinfield (voiced by John Paragon) in the pilot episode of The Elvira Show in 1993. Directed by Peter Bonerz and co-starring Katherine Helmond as Elvira's Aunt Minerva, the series was initially picked up for a full season by CBS and then abruptly dropped when the network's then president was hospitalized and his interim replacement, the head of sports broadcasting, deemed Peterson's double entendre brand of humor "too racy" and sexually suggestive. When the decision was announced, a number of executives walked out of the meeting in protest and one actually quit on the spot, furious to have lost the show. The two new series selected to fill the time-slot allocated for The Elvira Show were both flops and cancelled after only a few episodes. The entire unaired pilot for The Elvira Show can be found on YouTube by searching the show's title.
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cinematicfinatic · 3 months
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Elizabeth Montgomery
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stone-cold-groove · 6 months
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Mary Tyler Moore. The Dick Van Dyke Show - 1966.
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spirk-trek · 2 months
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"McCoy has given me his medical evaluation of your condition. He says you're going to die unless something is done. What? Is it something only your planet can do for you? Spock! You've been called the best first officer in the fleet. That's an enormous asset to me. If I have to lose that first officer, I want to know why."
S2E1: Amok Time ⋆.˚ ✧ · ˚⊹ ·
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inthedarktrees · 1 year
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Emma Peel as the “Queen of Sin” 
Diana Rigg, “A Touch of Brimstone,” The Avengers, 1965
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Iconic Golden Girls Things (as voted by you!)
#7: Wishing I had Blanche's self-confidence (4.5%)
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chaptertwo-thepacnw · 4 months
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1971
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mylittlevintageworld · 5 months
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Elizabeth Montgomery
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the-cricket-chirps · 4 months
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Smithsonian Museum collection, photo by Eric Long
Original Mr. Spock (Star Trek) ear tips
ca. 1966
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emeraldexplorer2 · 2 days
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Edwina Beth "Edy" Williams (American television and film actress), 1970's
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sparklejamesysparkle · 3 months
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🎇Happy New Year from Miss Piggy!🎇
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lonesomedreamer · 7 months
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Now that we’ve been able to orbit Venus, we’re a lot closer to our ultimate goal, Mars—the next stage of Project Vulcan.
WILLIAM SHATNER as Colonel Jeff Martin in The Outer Limits: “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” (1964)
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Yvonne de Carlo
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fibula-rasa · 6 months
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Cosplay the Classics: Elizabeth Montgomery in “Two”
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“Two” first aired on 15 September 1961 and is the first episode of the third season of The Twilight Zone. Sadly, “Two” is the only episode that features Elizabeth Montgomery.
Montgomery was nearly ten years into her professional career in 1961. She had already carved out a solid resume in television, appearing prolifically on anthology and episodic shows and occasionally stretched her legs on the New York stage. Samantha Stephens was still three years away when Montgomery took her voyage through The Twilight Zone.
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In its five seasons, The Twilight Zone was a crossroads of up-and-coming and well-established performers. “Two” paired the rising star Montgomery with Charles Bronson, who had a decade more acting experience in TV and film than Montgomery. Though Bronson was the more established star, “Two” is Montgomery’s showcase.
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Read on below the jump!
“Two” relies on minimal dialogue throughout and notably Montgomery only has a single line spoken. The role relies almost entirely on Montgomery’s action/reaction, expression, and styling. The episode begins on Montgomery as The Woman wandering an abandoned city. The first nine minutes of the episode pass with no dialogue, with context given by visual elements and Serling’s opening narration. The entire episode takes place on a small section of city street (at the old Hal Roach studios, conveniently already in disrepair). 
We learn through newspapers and magazines that this city is in The Man’s homeland, invaded by The Woman’s nation’s army. Signs of the city’s long five-year abandonment are everywhere, including full skeletons left where they fell. (The macabre element of skeletons is used sparingly across the Twilight Zone and usually in circumstances less grounded in reality than “Two,” such as “Long Live Walter Jameson” and “Queen of the Nile.”) As The Man mulls over his first encounter with The Woman a dove flies up behind him as a symbol of his genuine desire for peace. Through a variety of posters and advertisements, we learn that The Man’s homeland had a culture heavily invested in war.
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Collage of the war-related paraphernalia in “Two”
All of that is solid storytelling, but Montgomery’s acting adds an extra something. When The Woman first encounters The Man, Montgomery performs hair-trigger reactivity. Despite The Woman’s dire situation—a stranded foreigner in a decimated country with seemingly no chance to ever return home—her reluctance to trust The Man is significant. Pairing Montgomery’s wordless portrayal of these responses with the jingoistic quality of The Man’s homeland and the notable length of time that the city has been abandoned makes me feel that her feelings might not be a simple holdover of wartime hostility on her part but potentially extended trauma. Perhaps The Woman had previous awful experiences with other straggling remnants of The Man’s military, who may not have been as ready as The Man to give up wartime attitudes in spite of the war clearly being over.
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The Woman is understandably acting like a cornered animal. As the episode progresses, The Man tries to be as calculated as possible in communicating to The Woman that he doesn’t want a fight through his actions, turning his back to her, and not retaliating the third time she launches an attack on him. Montgomery, in turn, does a great job of drawing out the cornered animal characterization—alternating between curiosity, hope, mistrust, and open hostility. Montgomery’s characterization gives the role the added dimension that saves the episode from feeling too much like an overly simple fable.
Unfortunately, it’s in executing the fabular aspect of the story where “Two” falters. The opening narration by Serling specifies: 
“It’s been five years since a human being walked these streets. This is the first day of the sixth year as man used to measure time.  “The time: perhaps a hundred years from now, or sooner, or perhaps it’s already happened two-million years ago. The place: The signposts are in English so that we may read them more easily, but the place is The Twilight Zone.”
It’s established here that the location is meant to be a stand-in for any city in any country, and that the use of English is merely a storytelling convenience. So, even though “Two” is intended as a Cold-War era anti-war statement, they are intentionally distancing the fiction from the contemporary real-world conflict. To create further distance from a contemporary place/time, they establish that the rifles are laser guns.
But, then, that one line that Montgomery speaks in “Two,” seventeen minutes in, is “Prekrasny” or “прекрасны,” a Russian word for beautiful or pretty. This pretty much grinds to a halt the concept that this is a cautionary fable and not a vision of a dark future where the Soviet Union and the United States moved to open warfare. While I’ll admit that the conventions used to establish “Two” as a fable are cheeky and a little on the corny side, the episode itself would have been stronger without the suggestion that The Woman is Russian.
I’m not sure who made the call to use a Russian word. I wonder if perhaps Serling wrote his introduction and he had a different read on the story than its writer, Montgomery Pittman. Maybe Pittman intended “Two” to be more of a dark premonition with a twist of optimism and Serling thought of it more as a fable and the two approaches hampered each other in the final product? This is pure speculation on my part of course, but it’s a black mark on what I think could have been an even better episode than it is.
Regardless, I think “Two” is a strong episode and a fine example of a Serling-esque story written by someone brought on to lighten the load of Serling, who worked himself to the bone on Twilight Zone. I also appreciate Pittman’s confidence to rely so heavily on visual storytelling techniques, taking into account that the high quality at which we watch the show now does not reflect the quality home viewers would have had in 1961. It reflects both Serling and the producers belief that viewers would be fully engaged in watching the show as it aired rather than just passively having it on in the family room while unwinding after dinner. 
Elizabeth Montgomery’s performance heightens the whole affair considerably. That’s no shade on Charles Bronson, in fact I think the monologuing he’s given could have come off as unbearably hokey if delivered by a lesser actor.
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If you can believe it, this is my very first time cosplaying The Twilight Zone! (Though I did play Rod Serling in a set of sketches in high school. I was as weird as a teenager as I am an adult, okay?) If you didn’t already know, I run another blog called Twilight Zone in Close-ups, examining the powerful use of close-up shots on the show by testing out how much of each episode’s story can be communicated solely by its close-up shots.
☕ Buy me a coffee! ☕
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