BUTT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Last night Your Humble Narrator happened to watch an episode of The Twilight Zone that begins with Joe Maross and Claude Akins as astronauts who have made an emergency landing on a distant and seemingly barren planet...

After the opening teaser, we pan over to Rod Serling, natty as ever in his Eagle or Kuppenheimer suit. He delivers his intro with a cig in his hand.

I couldn't help but wonder if Rod mysteriously left the crushed-out smoke in the sands of that desert world, a cosmic ashtray for nicotine-addicted denizens of...the Twilight Zone.

RIP EMC

RIP to Donna Douglas, passed on at 82. It’s hard to get my head around the idea that the sweet, gorgeous, guileless, critter-loving Elly May Clampett from perhaps the funniest American TV comedy of all time, The Beverly Hillbillies, is departed. It’s harder, almost, to get my head around the idea that she was 82 years old.

In her honor, this week’s monster is…

Monster-of-the-Week: …Donna Douglas, in probably her second-best-known TV role, in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder.” She’s monstrous, in her own eyes, because after reconstructive surgery she emerges from her bandages looking like this…

…but in the strange alternative reality world where she lives, people are supposed to look like this…

Here’s a picture of a doll—sorry, I mean an action figure—of this guy, given to me by a kind friend a few years back...

OIL BE SEEING YOU

Su-PRIZE, Su-PRIZE, Su-PRIZE! Gomer Pyle, USMC, himself, Jim Nabors has gotten married, at 82, to his partner of 38 years. Mazel tov.

Tomorrow is Phoenix First Friday art walk for February; this month’s festivities include a screening of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange at Phoenix Art Museum. So...

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s do a gallery-oriented ghoul, specifically the title character of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” as realized in the ‘70s TV anthology series Night Gallery. Here’s how the eldritch sitter for haunted artist Pickman (Bradford Dillman) appeared in the Tom Wright painting that introduces the episode:

And here he is in the episode, played by costume designer Janos Prohaska, also known as the Horta and the Mugato on Star Trek, and the giant spider on Gilligan’s Island:

The show—one of the better Lovecraft adaptations available, believe it or not—may be viewed in its entirety, here.