Revisit: The Second Hundred Years

Tor.com's recent review of The Curiosity, a literary novel by Stephen P. Kiernan, reminded me of an old television sitcom from the 1960's that had a similar starting premise, The Second Hundred Years.

image from ctva.biz

TSHY starred Monte Markham in a dual role, both as Luke, an Alaskan Gold Rush prospector buried and frozen in a 1900 avalanche, only to be found and revived in 1967, and his nearly-identical grandson Ken, an uptight banker. Luke's own son Edwin was played by senior-citizen actor Arthur O'Connell; at the start of the series Edwin is considering moving to a retirement home until Luke is discovered.

I recall that Markham was a "bright" actor, with charisma enough to play the outgoing Luke and acting chops enough to play the restrained Ken. Arthur O'Connell was a well-regarded character actor, who brought a respectable amount of dignity to a comedic role. The scripts were silly but fun, and occasionally got a little bit deeper into how what was essentially time-traveling would affect someone from the past, and how present-day people would be affected by him in turn.

(A few years after this show, Markham's career took a big hit when, in a spectacular example of miscasting, he was cast as the title character in The New Adventures of Perry Mason. This was not that many years after the original Perry Mason series had ended, and the American public still identified the character of Mason with Raymond Burr's slow-moving, grim-faced portrayal. The slim, energetic Markham's presentation flopped big-time, badly enough that the series is still remembered as one of the worst remakes ever. Markham rarely played lead roles again, though he appeared in character roles fairly frequently.)

TSHY only lasted one season, despite its two stand-out actors. With proper casting, I could see this one being revived for a modern-day version.

The pilot episode can be seen (in 3 parts) on YouTube. Not available on Netflix, or much anywhere else, alas. (There's one online DVD vendor that claims to have the full season available, but there have been a significant amount of complaints about undelivered orders and lack of response.)

Those Darn Gorillas!

Back in my misspent youth, when comics were brain-rotting, life-ruining reading material (My Mom said so; she wouldn't lie to me, would she?), I read a lot of comics.  (Explains quite a bit, doesn't it?)  One of my favorite comics was STRANGE ADVENTURES, a science-fiction anthology-type comic.  Besides the more usual types of science fiction, with space aliens, shrinking serums, invisibility rays, giant monsters and the usual ilk, SA had... gorillas.  Quite a lot of gorillas, actually.

 

For whatever reason, writers for SA really loved gorillas.  Or maybe they were just scared of gorillas. 

 

Gorillas might also have been intended as a stand-in for Communists.  Communists were friggin everywhere back in the 50's and 60's.  (That monster in your closet when you were a little kid?  Commie.)  You couldn't actually see very many Communists, but you knew they were there, somewhere, plotting.

 

Back to gorillas.  Gorillas in STRANGE ADVENTURES might seem, at first, to be a mixed bag of unrelated and different stories, but once you realize that there was an extended story arc being told non-sequentially, you can see the entire far-reaching saga of Gorilla Vs. Human:

 

 

 

Our first mistake is giving gorillas familiarity with human thought processes.

 

This and That -- links, etc.

Some interestings things I've seen around the Internet:

Doc Savage Fantasy Covers -- These have apparently been around for a few years, but I hadn't seen them before.  Kev Wilson mashed up real Doc Savage paperback covers to produce "what-if" adventures mixing doc with  some classic (and some not so classic) characters.  Such as this one:

Ju-Jutsu Suffragettes -- kicking ass for equality

Terminator Typist -- past and future meet

Over the years I've seen lots of exterior photos of Gaudi's famous La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, but today's the first time I've seen one of the inside ceiling.  Striking and strange.

Nazi Bunnies of Buchenwald -- the Wisconsin Historical Society, of all websites, relates the boggling story of how the Nazi SS raised well-fed, well-housed Angora rabbits at Aushwitz and other concentration camps, simultaneous with starving and working to death thousands of human prisoners.

Tobor On Television -- Way back in my misspent youth, I spent many a Saturday morning watching the weekly "Creature Feature",  showing (mostly bad) horror and science fiction movies.  One I had fond memories of was Tobor the Great, wherein a young boy fought bad guys with his 9-foot tall robot.  I always remembered Tobor as pretty cool-looking, better than Robbie or Gort; looking at pictures of Tobor again some fifty years on, ehh, not so much.  What I didn't know until now was that there was an attempt to spin-off Tobor into a television series, HERE COMES TOBOR; the unsold pilot is available for viewing on archive.org.  (Also on YouTube.)

Stephen King Reviews Joyce Carol Oates' THE ACCURSED -- Here's a snippet of the review:

Annabel Slade (lovely, modest, corseted) is abducted by a demon lover named Axson Mayte in full view of a standing-room-only church congregation mere seconds after her marriage to dashing Dabney Bayard. She’s spirited away to the Bog Kingdom, a terrible wasteland where she is subjected to the Unspeakable (van Dyck loves that word) and then made to clean the filthy lower levels of the castle with her fellow abductees, who have been reduced to the state of half-human zombies. She escapes and returns home, dirty and barely sane, just in time to die giving birth to something both Unspeakable and Ambiguous (perhaps a snake, perhaps an infant with its innards on the outards).

I don't know about you, but reading that (and it's only about a small part of the sprawling novel) makes me sad that Edward Gorey isn't still alive to produce illustrations for Oates' novel.

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