Comparatively speaking, maybe "The Italian Connection" wasn't so ridiculous after all! It's time for another Saturday Night Special in The Dungeon, and a Danke Grande to my Pal in Berlin Lord Litter for turning me on to this wild thing!
This was Season 4, Episode 2 of "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea," and it was called "The Deadly Dolls." I think it might just be one of the weirdest TV shows I've ever seen.
There's a puppet show going on to entertain the crew of the Seaview before it heads back out to sea!
The puppeteer is none other than Vincent Price as Professor Multiple!
The crew is really enjoying the stupid show a lot!
Professor Multiple claims these were the puppets in the show, and that he has just wiped off their makeup! Trust me, you're going to need a lot of imagination if you want this to seem real at all!
The Professor is supposed to disembark the ship, but he distracts the Captain, and sneaks away and hides!
For some reason, the faceless puppets have been dumped in this closet!
Wait a minute, that one puppet that looks like Admiral Nelson is really alive!
It just gets even weirder from here!
This is where it gets really strange. The faceless puppets have all turned into exact replicates of the crew members, and the real crew has been put to sleep. Even the Captain now has a double, but he hasn't been put to sleep yet!
Now if it wasn't weird enough just to see Vincent Price aboard the Seaview, how about seeing Vincent Price walking around with a puppet of Admiral Nelson on his shoulder? That's just a very odd image in my book!
The Professor was once a puppet too, and he and his whole team are from outer space, and are being controlled by one giant psychedelic light show machine!
The Admiral Nelson puppet is a mean little bastard, and he can just disappear and reappear in the blink of an eye. They can't shoot him because he's a puppet, and how can you kill something that is not alive? At least that's the story!
Here's the boss who is pulling all the strings in the background!
I mean seriously, WTF!?
This is sillier looking than "The Man With Two Heads!"
It's a good thing that the Seaview has a lot of air ducts the Captain can use to get away from these fools!
And having access to a flame thrower is a good deal too!
You can't shoot them, but you can burn them. You would think that dying was dying. If the damn thing wasn't alive then how does burning it up have any affect?
Credibility is not a factor here!
The doll's arm around Vincent's neck is the kicker!
This is just an image I don't think I could have even ever imagined on my own!
"What shall we do with them now?"
The Admiral says "Burn 'Em!"
The Seaview remains the boss of the ocean! Ain't no puppets gonna take over the world just yet. Maybe tomorrow, but for today, we're still safe!
If you would like to see this masterpiece of silliness yourself, "The Deadly Dolls" can be found at The Internet Archive (But it's a crappy copy that's cropped all weird), or on YouTube (But it has English sub-titles you can't turn off, even though it's in English), or I ended up watching it on Daily Motion, but there were more commercials than the original TV show had, and they didn't even add them where the original ads were placed.
Those are your three free choices, enjoy and have fun!!!
8 comments:
W!.. T!!.. F!!!
CometTV,which is aired just about everywhere these days, is currently running 3rd season VttBotS. I've seen some seriously weird shit that I'd forgotten as episodes.
Being a fan of many of the works of Irwin Allen (and having met him briefly, and being a secret fandom consultant to one of his regular staff members), I just can't go for most of the episodes of VOYAGE. Randall's "seriously weird shit" fits a lot of this series, also I'll add 'seriously boring shit' for most of the first season.
I'll be there to defend the B&W first season of Allen's LOST IN SPACE as a fine family show in the '60s, but I must skip all but a handful of episodes of the second and third seasons as just plain stupid, silly and childish. THE TIME TUNNEL was very impressive, and his most well-liked series by Mr. Allen himself, as well as by his actors and crew members. Only when they started the late series run of "silver skinned aliens and time travelers" nonsense did the show slip. But LAND OF THE GIANTS was, of the four 1960s Allen tv shows, the most consistently well-written, with eye-boggling optical effects and near-perfect oversized sets and props, making it his highest quality offering of his four sci-fi shows.
I'd like to have four credits like that.
Yeah, his stuff was very inspiring to me before I got out of puberty and into filmmaking.
My main inspirations as a kid were the first year of LOST IN SPACE (29 episodes) and the entire one season (30 episodes) of THE TIME TUNNEL. (LAND OF THE GIANTS and VOYAGE were sometimes hit-or-miss plot-wise, (i.e. one cool episode/one dumb episode/another cool one/then a so-so one, etc.) The main problem with VOYAGE was that out of the 110 or so episodes, only a few females appeared in the show. Was that phallic submarine Seaview a real "sausage party" or what?!? The VOYAGE episodes and much of TIME TUNNEL was written strictly to be played by robots. Very little characterization or humanity from the regular cast members at all. But...LAND OF THE GIANTS was the most sincere and genuinely well-written of Allen's shows on a human level, since the wonderful and mostly heartwarming first season of LOST IN SPACE. (This coming from a guy who just spent $125 on a 700-page slick color book on the career of Irwin Allen, full of storyboards, set designs, behind-the-scene goodies, and fantastic rare photos.)
Nowadays I'm mostly into Corman and of course my favorite filmmaker, Lupino! I have a lot more respect for Ida than Roger. Roger was just a businessman, while Ida was making social justice and human interest type films, and making little off of them.
VTTBOTS sometimes tried some character development and human interest drama in the first two seasons, but then settled into the "monster of the week" pattern.
Voyage and Lost In Space were both played fairly straight at first, but became increasingly silly and campy in the 1966-67 season. The same thing happened with The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, and The Avengers (I mean the British adventure series with Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg as MI5-type agents). Campy comedy was the fad, and the goofy (but smash hit) Batman TV show was a big influence.
Of course, the fad passed, and, by 1968, the trend was toward relatively realistic, character-driven drama. Which is why Land of the Giants was "the most sincere and well-written of Allen's shows on a human level."
If you don't mind watching the shows on your computer, then you can watch these any time you please.
https://archive.org/details/PDTV0266
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