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Star Trek: The Empath (1968)
Disastrous, painful episode.
It is said this episode was written by a fan of the original show. If so, she had little sense of both the message and the true potential of the series. Then again, the post-Roddenberry production team may have felt just cynical enough to have accepted this episode as just a sufficiently pale imitation of sharper and more - ha ha - empathetic - scripts to satisfy NBC and the series' sponsors... and to pad out the pathetic production schedule.
For an episode so lacking in originality and in substance, it is also creepily telling that both the episode's director and one of the two lead villains had both participated in an "Outer Limits" episode called "Nightmare" five years earlier which was all too similar to the whole fetid torture scenario of "The Empath." If this episode was not overall as desperately painful to watch as "Spock's Brain," it's only because the guest actors are LESS rotten and the plot holes are LESS glaring. But it's still extremely unpleasant viewing. I recommend turning the sound off and just watching Kathryn Hays making all the other actors look like Drama 101 morons.
Now... as regards the notion that the "minimalistic" black sets were done for "psychological effect," as has been contended since 1968... horse manure. The amateurish nature of this production assures that you can tell that the actors are traipsing around a dim soundstage looking only to hit their marks on the floor when the spotlights hit them. If you believe that the episode, with a budget cut to smithereens, was shooting for psychological effect, then you need also to believe that exactly the same "effect" was being sought by set designers on ALL the other fantasy and adventure series in 1968 which had also had their budgets slashed, including "Batman," "Lost In Space," and "Land of the Giants." So no, I don't buy it.
Next: The music of George Dunning. By this point in the series, viewers had become used to the overriding presence of cues by Fred Steiner, Alexander Courage, Gerald Fried, Alexander Courage, and Sol Kaplan. Dunning had a solid background in film scoring, although not particularly for sci-fi as far as I have seen. This was the second year of the show in which episodes with strong female leads were more or less automatically handed to Dunning and his spacey organs and perpetually swelling, love-scene style strings. Dunning's strength in these circumstances was in doing a lot with a little; he did not need full orchestrations to convey atmosphere, and I imagine this appealed to the producers of the uber-cheapie third season. (By the way, the third season had the fewest produced episodes of the three years, and had the smallest number of episodes with original music of the three years). Like or dislike the music Dunning wrote for the episode (including his tiny paraphrase of Gerald Fried's Vulcan theme in the last scene), at least it fared better than Steiner's and Courage's scores did, which were simply unable convincingly to convey the same strength and emotion with the vastly slashed orchestras they were allowed to work with in 1968. Face it, Dunning's score carries this episode, same as "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" and "Metamorphosis." Oh by the way, "...Beauty?" is another episode written by a series fan rather than by anyone with a background in screenplay writing, or even a clue.
Next: The torture. I am sorry, this was indefensible. Under no circumstances is the case convincingly made, in the script, that torture is necessary, or positive, or unavoidable. Instead, the three "good guys" seem only too ready to submit themselves to torture. It's disgusting, and it's over the top, and I question the credibility of NBC's Standards & Practices Department, which allowed it to be produced and aired. This is not a statement I make with the hindsight of the Bush Administration's masturbatory obsession with torture, because this episode has always given me the creeps. If prisoners identify so closely with their captors that they actually OFFER to be punished, does that not at the very least mean they're suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Other problems with this episode:
1) "The sandbats of Manarka IV"?? Are you kidding me?
2) In the scene in which Kirk is hanging from the chains and shot from the rear, a body double is clearly and clumsily used. Once the view switches to the front, Shatner is basically framed from the base of the neck up. It's clear why this was: 1968 was officially the "Captain Fatty" year.
3) Apparently, in the unremastered original, the producers were at one point so haplessly clumsy that they used a stock Enterprise flyover with the wrong color planet. Weak!
High Steaks (1962)
Low Budget Cartoon Ignonimy!
The whole Gene Deitch series... some of the comments that have made about them, like they were made in a third world country...
In truth, they WERE farmed out. Metro closed its animation studio in 1957, whereupon Hanna Barbera took about a year to retool their team to produce their legendary fodder for American television, including Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.
By 1960, Metro belatedly realized that they had made a telling financial blunder (even though the last handful of shorts by H-B for Metro were, to a one, pitiful) and contracted with Deitch to produce exactly one "season" of Tom and Jerry cartoons at a fraction of the budget they had earlier enjoyed.
In a move that presaged all the later cartoon outsourcing to Korea, Deitch farmed all the work out to a low budget studio in Czechoslovakia. The Czech people were known for their production of innovative and iconoclastic cartoons - and let us be clear, Deitch was an artistic genius. You can tell from his work from the post-War period forward (largely collected in a coffee table book by Fantagraphics years later). But this stuff... this stuff... disastrous.
Other commenters here have gone over the malevolent violence of the "owner" character in this series, and the bargain basement schlocky music, and the ghastly, soulless drawings that truly took character animation back a full 30 years. However, there is one moment in "High Steaks" which has confused me for a long, long time.
In a sequence where Tom goes fleeing out of the yard (the grill might be burning on his tail or something), Jerry follows him as far as a street corner, then stops. Then a telephone is heard to ring.
This is the WTF moment of the whole cartoon. It has no context. I am more or less convinced that a phone rang during the recording session for the rinky-dink music, and it was just left in there. It's sort of like when Ringo Starr, drunk and stumbling, knocked over some gear during a recording session for the "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack, and the sound was left in for all eternity.
It's been said - and not without accuracy - that the Chuck Jones T&J's of 1964-66/7 were no great shakes, that they looked brilliant on screen but had none of the soul of the HB originals. Chuck Jones himself was on record agreeing with this assertion. Personally I do disagree but only for the few shorts in which Jones, Michael Maltese, and composer Eugene Poddany collaborated - the results are classic Jones and wonderful to behold. But even the lamest entries in the series Jones produced show cohesiveness, attention to quality and detail, and the ability to build a story out of a series of chase gags.
With little if any exception, the Deitch T&Js show none of these qualities. The only thing WORSE than these, are the T&Js that H-B themselves produced for TV years later in which - for the sake of Standards & Practices - Tom and Jerry are toothless, dimensionless friends in which Jerry sports a disastrous red bow-tie for no reason. Years later, this was lampooned in "The Simpsons" in the episode where Itchy and Scratchy succumb to PC pressure and "share, and share, and share and share and share."
The Extraordinary Seaman (1969)
Extraordinarily unsatisfying viewing for none and null
Despite the producers attempts to make a film with some semblance of a budget and cinemascope and bright, pretty colors, the film just seems to be an extraordinary cheat on all levels. Unlike "M*A*S*H," also from 1969 but from 20th Century Fox, "The Extraordinary Seaman" clearly uses stock newsreels as a cheap crutch and as a substitute for advancing action - and when that wasn't enough, they further padded its meager 80 minute running time by manipulating the footage. The attempt throughout to blur the line between newsreels and the film's own footage is clumsily handled. For contrast, try the way this same line was more deftly and more trippily blurred by Richard Lester in 1967's "How I Won the War" with John Lennon. As others here have observed, the breaking of this film into six named "parts" was a pointless exercise. Hell, it didn't work any better when "Frasier" did it on TV years later, did it? Major comedic talents - in particular Mickey Rooney and Jack Carter - are simply wasted in subservient roles, and are allowed to disappear before the film's ignominious conclusion. The casting of the secondary leads, Alda and Dunaway, was just really strange, considering that neither actor projects any kind of romantic vitality. (I would insert that Alda has clearly never developed as an actor, and from that day to this - and as many have observed - he just plays himself in role after role, and merely runs his lines without adding either depth or nuance to characterizations.) I'd say it was astounding how Paddy Chayefsky used Dunaway's reputation as an on screen ice-bitch to monumental advantage in 1976's "Network," with perhaps the most hilarious sex scene ever filmed: the one with William Holden in which she never stops yammering about work for a second. In "The Extraordinary Seaman," there's no clear reason why her character is even there. In fact, the only actor who projects any warmth or depth is David Niven, who makes it all look easy as befits a grand actor of his caliber. However, the role he makes look easy is itself a stupid cheat - a gimmick role that I feel most people in the audience would have figured out long before Alda's character did, due to their 1960's training with twist-ending TV shows such as "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits." Niven's ever-refilling bottle is the only decent throwaway gag in the entire proceedings, and thankfully John Frankenheimer displayed the judicious restraint to keep the gag from filling the center of the frame as a hack director might have. Alda's character made sure to point each! and! every! other! facet! of Niven's character's quirks to the audience... several times. Even his attempt at mutiny and his repeated man overboard gags are ineptly handled. As a further "goof," one reaction shot of Alda in full face (Part V or VI) is quite clearly reversed and is as painfully obvious as some shots of William Shatner you find in the miserable last year of "Star Trek" in which the same thing was repeatedly done. And by the way, didn't some of those overturned trees in the run-aground sequence look awfully fake? Before TCM ran this film, I had never even heard of it, and now it's clear I know why. It never should have been made.