"Suspense" was a TV show that was on the air from 1949 to 1954 and starred such dignitaries as Boris Karloff, Leslie Nielsen, Ray Walston, Jackie Cooper, Henry Hull, Jack Palance, and so many more, including tonight's shining star, Bela Lugosi!
Welcome to a Wobbly Wretched Wednesday in The Dungeon! Our sponsor tonight is Auto-Lite, the makers of fine spark plugs then and now!
If you care to read the original short story, and you should, because it only takes a couple of minutes, and thanks to some very fine people, you can find it right here!
Romney (Sheena: Queen Of The Jungle, Screaming Mimi) Brent aka Romulo Larralde, is Count Montressor, and he's here to tell the authorities that there has been a murder.
The star of the show is Dungeon perennial favourite Mr. Bela Lugosi!
Our motto is: "If it's gotta Bela in it, then you gotta watch it!" It's just that simple!
The credits read...."By Edgar Allen Poe," but the story is a very loose interpretation. The basic story line is there though, but if you want to get picky, the original story was called "The Cask Of Amontillado," not "A Cask........"
Bela is a Nazi soldier named General Fortunato, and he seems to be really enjoying that glass of wine! Whether he's a maniac or a vampire it doesn't matter, because watching Bela any time is just like hanging out with a good friend!
For a Nazi General, Bela looks like he's having a good time here, so how about some music to celebrate the end of a war, and a fantastic tune from a good friend of mine, the one, the only, Glen Armstrong! Let's hear it for
Bela says, I'm warning you, don't listen to that polka song or you will end up just like how Edgar Allen wrote: "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
When I was a senior in high school, I had to take a speech class, and compete in speech tournaments. You could debate, but I chose to do a dramatic interpretation for one tournament, a reading of "The Cask Of Amontillado!" I didn't get to use notes, and had to memorize the whole thing. Needless to say, I ended up in whatever's after last place, and on the bus ride back home, an idiot friend of mine tried smoking a cigarette in the back of the bus thinking he wouldn't get caught. If you guessed that they were my cigarettes, and I got in more trouble than him, you'd be correct! “Et tu, Cesare?” Now go back and read the original story with a little more appreciation!
3 comments:
The days of early, live TV were pretty amazing. Shows like SUSPENSE, LIGHTS OUT, and TALES OF TOMORROW did a wonderful job telling great stories with superb actors, in very limited productions.
Just goes to show that you don't really need green screens, CGI effects, or spectacular production values to tell a fine story that entertains and even carries a message. A good lesson for today's young filmmakers...and a few oldsters (like moi) as well. ;)
I miss these old anthology series. Some really excellent work done on them, and it's great fun to see visualizations of some of sf, fantasy and horror that I read as short stories.
The whole list of 40+ episodes of the sci-fi anthology TALES OF TOMORROW is stashed on the Internet Archive www.archive.org :)
Cut and paste this link:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=tales+of+tomorrow&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22movies%22&page=1
Post a Comment