#kyba edit

[buzzdixonwriter]

From The Naked City To The Outer Limits Via Route 66

We’re gonna back into this one, so have some patience.

We’ll get there.

I’m watching a lot of old TV shows on Amazon Prime.  

Much to my delight, many (such as That Girl or The Prisoner,) are as fresh and as fun as when they first aired.

Others (looking at you, Andy Griffith Show) are better enjoyed as artifacts of their era.

A few (Perry Mason being the best example) actually take on a new resonance when seen with knowledge not available to audiences of that time.

I’m a huge fan of the original Outer Limits anthology series, with various episodes written by a wide variety of writers, including Harlan Ellison.

I’m also a huge fan of the Route 66 series, written primarily by Stirling Silliphant.  

And while I remember the old Naked City show, I very rarely watched it when it originally aired, and don’t think I ever saw it in re-runs.

But when I learned Route 66 started out as a backdoor pilot (i.e., a TV pilot filmed as an episode of an existing show) Silliphant wrote for Naked City, naturally I needed to track down that episode.

“Four Sweet Corners” turned out as less of a pilot than a proof of concept:  Two young men, drifters in modern America, travel from town to town in search of…something (even they don’t know what it is they’re really looking for, only that whatever they already found wasn’t it).  

Inspired =koff!= by Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, the show was supposed to be called The Searchers and star George Maharis and Bob Morris.

(Despite being well done and well received, “Four Sweet Corners” didn’t sell The Searchers and Morris’ tragic death from a cerebral hemorrhage a year later seemed to permanently put the kibosh on the idea…until Chevrolet told CBS they’d be interested in sponsoring a TV show so long as it prominently featured their redesigned Corvette and CBS asked Silliphant “Have you got anything like that?” and Silliphant said “Suuuure…there are these two guys traveling around America, driving from town to town in a brand new Chevy Corvette…” and the next thing you know Route 66 is on the air with Martin Milner sharing driving duties with Maharis [when health issues forced Maharis to drop out of the series, Glenn Corbett joined Milner as his new traveling companion].)

“Four Sweet Corners” and “Merdian”, Naked City’s own pilot episode, impressed me enough to want to watch more episodes of the show, and when I learned TV Guide once ranked "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" as one of the 100 best TV episodes of all time, that one came next.

…and when I watched it, I was immediately struck with a sense of déjà vu.

The story is simple but effective:   To protect the other, a father (James Dunn) and son (Robert Morse, in a characteristically theatrical yet also very dramatic and gripping performance) independently confess to murdering a night watchman (the real perp is Dustin Hoffman [!] in a proto-Ratso Rizzo role).  

The episode opens with a nightmare sequence in which Morse suffers through a surreal re-creation of the crime, skulking about boxes and tables and machinery in a warehouse, climbing through windows, killing a watchman who -- when turned over -- is revealed as faceless, shooting cardboard cutouts of police by using his pointed finger as a literal gun that fires actual bullets…

…and I went, “Holy shamolley, this is Harlan Ellison’s ‘Demon With A Glass Hand’ from The Outer Limits!”

Now, I am most emphatically not saying Ellison lifted plot or characters or dialog for his script, but sunuvagun, the same visuals are there even if “Demon With A Glass Hand” uses them in an entirely different context.

"Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" first aired June 7, 1961.

Ellison at that time edited Rogue magazine in Chicago.  Desperate to get out of a bad marriage and a bad career choice., he called in favors from friends in Hollywood and came to California in 1963 (his then wife, also wanting out of Chicago, came along and agreed to divorce him once they arrived).  

In 1963 Ellison quickly sold a script to ///Ripcord///, the rights to one of his short stories to Route 66, landed a staff writer gig on Burke’s Law, and saw his Hollywood career off and running.

Always a great respecter of writing in any format or media, Ellison doubtlessly knew who Silliphant was and doubtlessly saw many shows he wrote.  He tried cracking Route 66 with original ideas and, when those didn’t sell, adapted at least two of them into short stories that he placed elsewhere.

Never shy about reworking older material, Ellison derived his core concept for “Demon With A Glass Hand” from an unfinished novel he stalled out on.  The novel called for a much broader canvas than the one Ellison pitched to The Outer Limits for “Demon With A Glass Hand”.  He also melded into the episode  references to his Earth vs. Kyba war cycle, four loosely related short stories he published in the 1950s (he later expanded on the series with collaborators).

“Demon With A Glass Hand” takes place almost entirely inside the legendary Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles.  Directed by Byron Haskin, the special effects artist turned director most famous for the original War Of The Worlds,  it’s an uncharacteristically moody and stylized piece, matching the nightmare sequence of "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street".

In fairness, Alex March, the director of "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street", isn’t a noted stylist either.  A good journeyman TV director with a huge list of credits, his Naked City episodes are otherwise entirely consistent with his career.

"Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" was written by another capable journeyman, Sy Salkowitz. Like March, Salkowitz enjoyed a long and honorable career, albeit without anything that indicates a particular taste for the fantastic.

As noted above, the parallels between "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" and “Demon With A Glass Hand” are striking.  Much of The Outler Limits episode takes place in the upper storage area of the Bradbury Building, a space almost indistinguishable from the warehouse featured in Naked City’s episode.  One of the Kyba aliens, slain while hunting Robert Culp’s character, has no distinguishable features, same as the murdered watchman in "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street".  Robert Morse uses his hand as a weapon, literally firing it as a gun, and Culp’s eponymous glass hand is a super-computer that guides him in his battle against his Kyba pursuers.  The warehouse sequences in "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" are both literally and figuratively nightmarish whether they reflect Morse’s dream or replay the actual crime; the entirety of “Demon With A Glass hand” is filled with stark black an white photography, ominous shadows, bizarre angles and stagings.

Ellison is no longer with us to ask, but he was never the type to borrow / lift / reference / steal the work of another unless he obtained permission first.

I’m guessing he saw "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" in 1961 and liked it, but in chaos of the three years between seeing it and pitching to The Outer Limits the vivid details that originally attracted him slipped from his conscious mind.

When he pitched to The Outer Limits he sought to maximize his chances by crafting a dramatic story filled with “awe and mystery” that could be filmed economically on a small budget.

Once he literally locked his characters into a single location, he began pulling ideas in from all directions:  His abandoned novel, his Earth vs. Kyba stories, even a few visual prompts from The Naked City that he probably no longer recalled watching.

Just as two composers using the same notes come up with wildly different melodies, so Ellison and the creators working on Naked City came up with two wholly different reasons for the same imagery.

They’re fascinating to watch in tandem, and thanks to the modern marvels of technology, now we can.

  © Buzz Dixon

#Naked City #Outer Limits #Route 66 #Harlan Ellison #Stirling Silliphant #Demon With A Glass Hand #television #media #old time TV #writing #sci-fi

[fantroll-purgatory]

Chromia

@time-is-still-a-waste

First: Beforus!

Name: Chromia Kybayze. Chromia, comes from the word chrome, that sometimes is associated with time (Her main theme), and is also a type of metal. Kybayze, is a more fancy way of her original name (being Kyba).

Chromia has more than 6 letters, so we’ll have to find a way to chop that down. Khroma, maybe? Kybayze has the same problem on top of not having a meaning. What if we used Kyanol instead? Kyanol is an alternate name for Aniline, one of the first things used in the creating of pigments, plastics, and dyes, and a common feature in oldtimey alchemy, the predecessor of Chemistry. 

Khroma Kyanol also has alliteration AND both chrome and aniline are used in leather, so I think it’s good. 

Age: 9 sweeps.

Strife Specibus: Pistolkind! She mostly wields flintlock pistols, to fit with her steampunky theme! She also occasionally wields various varieties of handcrafted potions. Her most commonly used one, is a potion of a chemical akin to greek fire. Incredibly hard to put out.

If you wanted to like, magically combine these two under one strife specibus, you could say like… Sulfurkind. Since Gunpowder uses sulfur and it’s speculated that there’s sulfur in Greek fire? It gives her a really flexible modus- if something’s sulfury, she can put it to use.

Fetch Modus: Stop-clock! To obtain her items, Chromia will have to stop the watch at a certain point, to obtain her items. Each item can be stored on a particular time (ie. She’d store a book at 3am). When she wants to obtain it, she starts the timer, and stops it when the seconds goes past that particular time.

Nice!

Blood color: She’s a Bronze Blood! However, she has also sometimes been seen as an Indigo.

Symbol and meaning: Due to her being a time player, and a derse,she’d be a Tauries! 

Trolltag: ancientAnatomy

That’s interesting, but if you want to go with a steampunk theme it’s kind of off base… Maybe industrialAlchedemic? Industrial being a reference to the industrial steam-powered era that dominates the steampunk aesthetic, and Alchedemic being a combination of Alchemic and Academic. 

Quirk: She doesn’t change any of her letters, however, she does add her signature goggles to her emoticons, in the form of a B. ie B:) and also has a tendency to refer to people by colours, that she associates them with.

I like that! Simple quirks are good n refreshing.

Special Abilities (if any): She has no particular abilities, except the ones granted to her by her God Tier.

Brownbloods are said to have a sorta natural connection with animals, but we’ll say hers is very, very, very weak. Animals just like… like her slightly more than average.

Lusus: Chromia’s lusus, is quite an interesting one. She has a  large bookworm. They both get on quite well, and Chromia has been known to curl up with her worm.. mother.. thing. She has, however, dressed her Lusus up a bit with a few of her own items. Who ever saw a giant bookworm in a bowtie?

Personality: Chromia, is for lack of a better term, eccentric. She has a slight case of hoarding, and collects any and every interesting thing she comes across. Often coming off as quite cold and rude, to most she is often avoided. However, this is quite far from the truth, as she is just quite bad at socializing. She often tries to get people to be her “test subjects” just so she can have somebody to talk to. When people get to know her, she has quite a sarcastic personality, but is more than willing to put herself in harms way to save someone. When it comes to people she dislikes, she hides it well, until they are vulnerable, and then she strikes.

She has a slightly.. mad professor aesthetic going on, and has been known to mildly intimidate people by cackling at random times. This does, unfortunately get her in quite a fair bit of trouble, as cackling during serious conversations is not good for anyones health. Chromia enjoys being referred to as “Professor”, despite not really being a teacher. Or a professor of anything.

Lastly, Chromia has a very particular flaw. She has a deep fear of failing. She has a tendency to absorb herself into her work, and strive for the very best, despite knowing she’ll never get there. She’ll never let people know of this, of course, and covers her own self doubt by making herself sound smarter, using fancy terms to seem more important.

I love this… Though with the steampunk aesthetic, there’s definitely some stuff you could lean into to beef up some of these things. Like her being really fascinating by the past instead of looking around herself and at the people in her life. Fixating on her interests and her aesthetic and her performative self instead of being open and engaging with others- as you said with her being bad at communicating and trying to make excuses to talk. 

Also being fascinated by OLD questions- since she’s steampunk, I feel like alchemy is something she needs on top of Chemistry. Fixative on those age old questions, how do we cure disease? How do we extend a lifetime? Part of the Time condition is that these characters either need to learn to fight or are Always Fighting. Always struggling against Something. For her, she’s fighting against failure, aaand in some ways probably against time. The ultimate failure would be to die before you publish your works, before you get over that hurdle, before you even have a Chance to make it, so trying to tackle those old alchemic questions becomes really fascinating for a character who fears Not Succeeding. 

Interests: She has a deep love, and almost obsession with science. Specifically, Chemistry. She also loves reading and writing her own stories. She has been known to make her own characters, and often gets overly attached to them. 

I Love That. If she’s steampunk you ought to make her like steam-based tech a lot too. I know that’s under science technically speaking, but it’s of Particular Note. OH man could I recommend her hive being a thermal airship? 

Since Brownbloods are known for their love of creature comforts, maybe you could have her be sneakily into fashion, too? It’s not Scientific and Professional, so she doesn’t like to explicitly acknowledge it, but we can get it out there in her Look.

Maybe she could also like a few more niche things. Like Rube Goldberg Machines. And fiction about automatons (If only because when I hear steampunk the first thing I think is Steam Powered Giraffes). 

Title: She’s a Witch of Time! 

The active changer of Time… I think that suits so well all of what I talked about above. She’s someone who wants to actively change things, wants to change the timeline, change the state. She’ll change the course of history if she can! Her inverse would be Seer of Space and Space is Heavily associated with science, so her having a good ol’ understanding of the scientific nature of the universe will help her in changing the flow of time.

Land: I can’t think of one!

Land of Cogs and Rewind

A giant web of interconnected cities floats above the molten planet, harnessing the heat below to keep the clockwork buildings suspended in the sky. But the machinery’s been ticking for too long and it’s starting to creak. Something goes wrong. The head below gets hotter and suddenly all the pipes burst. The city falls out of the sky, towards the lava, and before everyone can fall in… everything resets. Khroma is back where she started. This happens every 24 hours. The planet is stuck in a loop of destruction and Khroma has to figure out how to save the planet, save the consorts, and set everything on a better timeline’s path.

Dream Planet: She’s a Derse dreamer! Due to her constant urge to change the world around her, Derse just seems to fit her the best. She’s never pleased with what she has, and always strives to make all of her tests just a step better. To prove herself.

Appearance: Chromia, is a very tall for her blood caste. She has adapted an almost steampunky style over the years, often wearing a long bronze tailcoat, kneehigh cog covered boots and a pair of copper tinted goggles. She has quite long black hair, that’s quite messy due to her not brushing it much. Chromia also has a tendency to wear bronze lipstick, when around other people. She wears her blood colour with pride. 

Design!: 

Goggles: I edited them from BurningQuantumCola’s base! I put some silver detailing and a cog design on as well. 

Horns&Hair: I used horns in the shape of the symbol and tried to make her hair nice and wild like you wanted. 

Face: I edited her eyes from Kanaya’s, but made them narrower and more smirky as well as giving her curled up eyelashes. I gave her brown mascara, of course, for that bronze pride. Her lips are also brown and she is smirky and toothy. 

Outfit: Okay, so there’s not quite an overcoat, but I gave her a white shirt with her symbol on it and a nice overalls skirt in bronze with lots of silver buttons. I thought it carried nice steampunk vibes and also made her look a bit like a fun high school science teacher. 

Boots: I edited them from Horrus’ shoes! Black boots with some leather detail, silver gears and some buckle guards!

She’s a whole lot of fun. Thank you for sharing!

-CD

#time-is-still-a-waste #chromia kybayze #khroma kyanol #chromia #kybayze #khroma #kyanol #bronzeblood #brownblood #review #redesign #cd review #submission