Tag Archives: fairy tale

Episode 801/802: You’re a Crook, Captain Hook

July 1969, Sam Hall, , ,

“Where would you go, with all that power in your suitcase?”

Once upon a time, there was a television show called Dark Shadows, and I swear to God it is getting crazier every day. We have now entered the phase of the show where absolutely anything is on the table.

For example: a man who collects magical artifacts is visiting a wolf man and a gypsy witch in their haunted house, when suddenly they rip off his hand and discover that he’s actually a mad god from a fairy tale kingdom that nobody knows how to spell. And then the conversation starts to get a little weird.

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Episode 799: When Halloween Decorations Ruled the World

July 1969, Sam Hall, , , , , , ,

“You told me that hand was the most magical hand in the world!”

There are moments in life when you have to step back and ask yourself: How did I get here? For example, Grayson Hall. She moved to New York City to pursue an acting career when she was 19 years old. She studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She was in a Broadway revival of Six Characters in Search of an Author. She was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her work in The Night of the Iguana. She’s done Pinter and Shaw and Chekhov.

And today she’s on network television at 4:00 in the afternoon, blacked up like a Universal Monsters gypsy, and she’s locked in a life-or-death struggle with Halloween Express.

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Episode 316: The Big Bad

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , ,

“Maybe, maybe! What assurance have I with maybe?”

Okay, it’s Monday, which means that it’s time to check in with our lunatic premise of the week. Unfortunately, the current scenario is so far outside the limits of normal televisual narrative that a thumbnail summary just sounds hopelessly tangled.

Here, I’ll show you. All last week, young David was trapped inside the secret room in the Collins mausoleum. He was brought there by a mysterious little girl named Sarah, who he doesn’t realize is the ghost of one of his 18th-century ancestors. She showed him the trick of getting into the secret room, so that he would see the empty coffin where Barnabas, who David doesn’t realize is a) Sarah’s big brother and b) a vampire, was chained up for 170-odd years until c) Willie let him out.

But Sarah didn’t show David how to get out of the secret room, so he was trapped for a week, until she suddenly turned up again and showed him the hidden door mechanism. As David left the mausoleum on Friday, he ran straight into Barnabas.

Now Barnabas thinks that David knows that he’s a vampire, but he doesn’t, although David does know that Barnabas thinks that David knows more than he’s saying that he knows, which he does. There, that’s you all up to date.

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Episode 238: Unreal Estate

May 1967, Ron Sproat, , , , , ,

“You can’t just walk into a place!”

It’s shaping up to be a pretty dull evening at Collinwood. Liz is sitting at a desk fussing with business papers, and Carolyn is assembling a moody jigsaw puzzle. Things liven up a bit when Vicki gets the evening paper, with the headline “LOCAL GIRL MYSTEROUSLY DISAPPEARS”. It’s bad news, obviously, but at least it gives them something to talk about.

Liz tells Carolyn and Vicki that she doesn’t want them walking around alone at night, until they find out what happened to Maggie. Liz gets up and goes to another room, and literally fifteen seconds later, the girls decide to go out and get some fresh air. What can you do with people like that?

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