SCI-FI SIXTIES STYLE

Well, after a few months of fitting them in and around the crinkly bits around the edges of my life, I finally ran out of original “Outer Limits” episodes to watch this weekend, having worked my way through all forty-nine of them, which puts me in a bit of a dilemma. What, precisely, should I work my way through next?

“The Outer Limits” had a two series (or perhaps one and a half series) run on American television in from 1964-1965 and has been, in all honesty, a bit of a slog to get through. I picked up the box set in an online “bargain bin” (or perhaps bucket) after rediscovering “The Twilight Zone” and working my way through the first three years of that.

“The Outer Limits” was kind of the bastard offspring of “The Twilight Zone” anyway and they live in a kind of  “matter/antimatter” relationship with each other in the sense that they almost balance each other out perfectly and you kind of get the feeling that you couldn’t have one without the other. Some people do tend to mix the shows up in their memories anyway, swearing blind that episodes from one show were actually from the other, which probably doesn’t matter all that much.

That said, on the whole I found “The Outer Limits” much more hard going than “Twilight Zone” has ever been. I thought it might be due to the longer episodes (usually about fifty minutes) slowing down the stories, but I popped a few of the longer “Twilight Zone” episodes into the player, the ones from the “aberration” fourth year when they were also stretched to the fifty minute format, and they fairly rattled along, so I can only put it down to the style of the show itself.

Ultimately it suffers slightly from having that feeling of being a bit of a hangover from the 1950s American “Sci-Fi” boom which brought us a slew of irradiated giant monsters being battled by worthy “scientist” types and assorted military men with the kinds of jutting jaws which you could cut bathroom tiles with. This generally means that it takes itself far too seriously and can come across as being rather “po-faced” as it tries very hard to be a serious drama with monsters made out of rubber and silver jumpsuits.

Usually, I would quite like that sort of thing, of course, but I will admit that more than once I’ve missed the middle of an episode because I was checking my phone or heading into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and rarely did I feel that I was missing something. Ah, well, it’s gone now and there’s a bit of a disc-viewing void which needs filling, otherwise I might have to return to one or two of the other projects that I’ve been procrastinating over.

There are still a couple of series of “Twilight Zone” but, because so far we’ve been watching those together, it does seem a trifle unfair to consider popping those into the player in the wee small hours when nothing is stirring not even a mouse, except for the great big spiders and one obsessive insomniac.

I might just return to series two of “The Invaders”, picking it up from where I stopped just over a year ago, when I had a sudden rush towards a couple of reduced price seasons of  “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” which kept me distracted for a while. I have, however, been fancying revisiting a selection of old original “Star Trek” episodes in recent weeks, perhaps not least because of the various “Outer Limits” links that there are with that series which reminded me of various plots and storylines which were done far better on the starship Enterprise back in the days when it had red domes on the front of its engines and all of its equipment was impressively chunky.

The more astute (or sad) amongst you will have realised that all of these shows have one thing in common, that they’re all American Sci-Fi shows made in the 1960s post-communist witch-hunt cold war era. Actually, that’s far more than just one thing that they have in common (I counted at least three) but I’m never one to let a bit of accuracy get in the way of a nicely honed sentence.

Suffice it to say that this was precisely the kind of stuff that was used to fill our early evening TV schedules when I was still a new potato, and I got exposed to an awful lot of it in the days before I learned to shave and, to be honest, I love every minute of it.

Even if, on occasions, it drives me back towards the kettle of freedom for just a few moments.