#70s cult tv

[kekwcomics]

PETER WYNGARDE and KATE O'MARA

Photographed on the 17th March 1971.

Photo: Jack Kay

The pair co-starred in 'A Kiss for a Beautiful Killer', an episode of the television series 'Jason King'.

[eightiesfan]

Twilight zone

(source)

[chaoticdesertdweller]

"Bobby" from the 1977 television anthology "Dead of Night", directed by Dan Curtis.

[theersatzcowboy]

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh / Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (1971)

Giallo queen Edwige Fenech is a beautiful woman with unusual proclivities who flirts with danger — and finds herself far too close to it — in this stylish thriller from Sergio Martino, a true titan of the genre.

Director: Sergio Martino

Cinematographer: Emilio Foriscot

Starring: Edwige Fenech and George Hilton

[schlock-luster-video]

On May 13, 2017, Gargoyles was screened on Svengoolie.

Here's some new Bernie Casey art!

[clemsfilmdiary]

Satan's School for Girls (1973, David Lowell Rich)

6/12/24

[mikifoldi]

Divine and Nedra Volz - Ladies of the Wild West / digital paintings by Miki Foldi

[lifewithaview]

Barry Morse in Space: 1999 (1975–1977) Black Sun

S1E10

The moon is approaching a black hole. Professor Bergman is a able to rig up an energy shield around the moonbase, but Commander Koenig feels this is only a desperate measure and has an eagle with six personnel dispatched as the rest of the moonbase await certain death.

[cultfaction]

Cult Faction Podcast Ep. 80: 100 Years of the BBC (Part 2)

Cult Faction Podcast Ep. 80: 100 Years of the BBC (Part 2)

This week’s episode is the second part of our celebration of 100 years of the BBC aka the British Broadcasting Corporation. We look back all the BBC gave us in kids tv including Going Live, Saturday Super Store, The 8:15 From Manchester, Parallel 9, Swap Shop, Saturday Supertstore, Cheggers Plays Pop, Jackanory, Newsround, Record Breakers, The Children’s Film Foundation, Grange Hill, Degrassi…

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

The Radio Times magazine from the 29 July-04 August 2023 :)

THE SECOND COMING

How did Terry Pratchett and Neil gaiman overcome the small matter of Pratchett's death to make another series of their acclaimed divine comedy?

For all the dead authors in the world,” legendary comedy producer John Lloyd once said, “Terry Pratchett is the most alive.” And he’s right. Sir Terry is having an extremely busy 2023… for someone who died in 2015.

This week sees the release of Good Omens 2, the second series of Amazon’s fantasy comedy drama based on the cult novel Pratchett co-wrote with Neil Gaiman in the late 1980s. This will be followed in the autumn by a new spin-off book from Pratchett’s Discworld series, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, co-written by Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna and children’s author Gabrielle Kent. The same month, we’ll also get A Stroke of the Pen, a collection of “lost” short stories written by Sir Terry for local newspapers in the 70s and 80s and recently rediscovered. Clearly, while there are no more books coming from Pratchett – a hard drive containing all drafts and unpublished work was crushed by a vintage steamroller shortly after the author’s death, as per his specific wishes – people still want to visit his vivid and addictive worlds in new ways.

Good Omens 2 will be the first test of how this can work. The original book started life as a 5,000-word short story by Gaiman, titled William the Antichrist and envisioned as a bit of a mashup of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books and the 70s horror classic The Omen. What would happen, Gaiman had mused, if the spawn of Satan had been raised, not by a powerful American diplomat, but by an extremely normal couple in an idyllic English village, far from the influence of hellish forces? He’d sent the first draft to bestselling fantasy author Pratchett, a friend of many years, and then forgotten about it as he busied himself with continuing to write his massively popular comic books, including Violent Cases, Black Orchid and The Sandman, which became a Netflix series last year.

Pratchett loved the idea, offering to either buy the concept from Gaiman or co-write it. It was, as Gaiman later said, “like Michelangelo phoning and asking if you want to paint a ceiling” The pair worked on the book together from that point on, rewriting each other as they went and communicating via long phone calls and mailed floppy discs. “The actual mechanics worked like this: I would do a bit, then Neil would take it away and do a bit more and give it back to me,” Pratchett told Locus magazine in 1991. “We’d mess about with each other’s bits and pieces.”

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – to give it its full title –was published in 1990 to huge acclaim. It was one of, astonishingly, five Terry Pratchett novels to be published that year (he averaged two a year, including 41 Discworld novels and many other standalone works and collaborations).

It was also, clearly, extremely filmable, and studios came knocking — though getting it made took a while. rnvo decades on from its writing, four years after Pratchett's death from Alzheimer's disease aged 66, and after several doomed attempts to get a movie version off the ground, Good Omens finally made it to TV screens in 2019, scripted and show-run by Gaiman himself. "Terry was egging me on to make it into television. He knew he was dying, and he knew that I wouldn't start it without him," Gaiman revealed in a 2019 Radio Times interview. Amazon and the BBC co-produced with Pratchett's company Narrativia and Gaiman's Blank Corporation production studios, with Michael Sheen and David Tennant cast in the central roles of Aziraphale the angel and Crowley the demon. The show was a hit, not just with fans of its two creators, but with a whole new young audience, many of whom had no interest in Discworld or Sandman. Social media networks like Tumblr and TikTok were soon awash with cosplay, artwork and fan fiction. The original novel became, for the first time, a New York Times bestseller.

A follow up was, on one level, a no-brainer. The world Pratchett and Gaiman had created was vivid, funny and accessible, and Tennant and Sheen had found an intriguing romantic spark in their chemistry not present in the novel.

There was, however, a huge problem. There wasn't a second Good Omens book to base it on. But there was the ghost of an idea.

In 1989, after the book had been sold but before it had come out, the two authors had laid on fivin beds in a hotel room at a convention in Seattle and, jet-lagged and unable to sleep, plotted out, in some detail, what would happen in a sequel, provisionally titled 668, The II Neighbour of the Beast.

"It was a good one, too" Gaiman wrote in a 2021 blog. "We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published, Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD(TM) and there wasn't a good time."

Back in 1991, Pratchett elaborated, "We even know some of the main characters in it. But there's a huge difference between sitting there chatting away, saying, 'Hey, we could do this, we could do that,' and actually physically getting down and doing it all again." In 2019, Gaiman pillaged some of those ideas for Good Omens series one (for example, its final episode wasn't in the book at all), and had left enough threads dangling to give him an opening for a sequel. This is the well he's returned to for Good Omens 2, co-writing with comic John Finnemore - drafted in, presumably, to plug the gap left Pratchett's unparalleled comedic mind. No small task.

Projects like Good Omens 2 are an important proving ground for Pratchett's legacy: can the universes he conjured endure without their creator? And can they stay true to his spirit? Sir Terry was famously protective of his creations, and there have been remarkably few adaptations of his work considering how prolific he was. "What would be in it for me?" he asked in 2003. "Money? I've got money."

He wanted his work treated reverently and not butchered for the screen. It's why Good Omens and projects like Tiffany Aching's Guide to Being a Witch are made with trusted members of the inner circle like Neil Gaiman and Rhianna Pratchett at the helm. It's also why the author's estate, run by Pratchett's former assistant and business manager Rob Wilkins, keeps a tight rein on any licensed Pratchett material — it's a multi-million dollar media empire still run like a cottage industry.

And that's heartening. Anyone who saw BBC America's panned 2021 Pratchett adaptation The Watch will know how badly these things can go when a studio is allowed to run amok with the material without oversight. These stories deserve to be told, and these worlds deserve to be explored — properly. And there are, apparently, many plans afoot for more Pratchett on the screen. You can only hope that, somewhere, he'll be proud of the results.

After all, as he wrote himself, "No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."

While those ripples continue to spread, Sir Terry Pratchett remains very much alive. MARC BURROWS

DIVINE DUO

An angel and a demon walk into a pub... Michael Sheen and David Tennant on family, friendship and Morecambe & Wise

Outside it's cold winter's day and we're in a Scottish studio, somewhere between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But inside it's lunchtime in The Dirty Donkey pub in the heart of London, with both Michael Sheen and David Tennant surveying the scene appreciatively. "This is a great pub," says Sheen eagerly, while Tennant calls it "the best Soho there can be. A slightly heightened, immaculate, perfect, dreamy Soho."

Here, a painting of the absent landlord — the late Terry Pratchett, co-creator, with Neil Gaiman, of the series' source novel — looms over punters. Around the corner is AZ Fell and Co Antiquarian and Unusual Books. It's the bookshop owned by Sheen's character, the angel Aziraphale, and the place to where Tennant's demon Crowley is inevitably drawn.

It's day 74 of an 80-day shoot for a series that no one, least of all the leading actors, ever thought would happen, due to the fact that Pratchett and Gaiman hadn't ever published any sequel to their 1990 fantasy satire. Tennant explains, "What we didn't know was that Neil and Terry had had plots and plans..."

Still, lots of good things are in Good Omens 2, which expands on the millennia-spanning multiverse of the first series. These include a surprisingly naked side of John Hamm, and roles for both Tennant's father-in-law (Peter Davison) and 21-year-old son Ty. At its heart, though, remains the brilliant banter between the two leading men — as Sheen puts it, "very Eric and Ernie !" — whose chemistry on the first series led to one of the more surprising saviours of lockdown telly.

Good Omens is back — but you've worked together a lot in the meantime. Was there a connective tissue between series one of Good Omens and Staged, your lockdown sitcom?

David: Only in as much as the first series went out, then a few months later, we were all locked in our houses. And because of the work we'd done on Good Omens, it occurred that we might do something else. I mean, Neil Gaiman takes full responsibility for Staged. Which, to some extent, he's probably right to do!

Michael: We've got to know each other through doing this. Our lives have gotten more entwined in all kinds of ways — we have children who've now become friends, and our families know each other.

There have been hints of a romantic storyline between the two characters. How much of an undercurrent is that in this series.

David: Nothing's explicit.

Michael: I felt from the very beginning that part of what would be interesting to explore is that Aziraphale is a character, a being, who just loves. How does that manifest itself in a very specific relationship with another being? Inevitably, as there is with everything in this story, there's a grey area. The fact that people see potentially a "romantic relationship", I thought that was interesting and something to explore.

There was a petition to have the first series banned because of its irreverent take on Christian tropes. Series two digs even more deeply into the Bible with the story of Job. How much of a badge of honour is it that the show riles the people who like to ban things?

David: It's not an irreligious show at all. It's actually very respectful of the structure of that sort of religious belief. The idea that it promotes Satanism [is nonsense]. None of the characters from hell are to be aspired to at all! They're a dreadful bunch of non-entities. People are very keen to be offended, aren't they? They're often looking for something to glom on to without possibly really examining what they think they're complaining about.

Michael, you're known as an activist, and you're in the middle of Making BBC drama The Way, which "taps into the social and political chaos of today's world". Is it important for you to use your plaform to discuss causes you believe in?

Michael: The Way is not a political tract, it's just set in the area that I come from. But it has to matter to you, doesn't it? More and more as I get older, [I find] it can be a real slog doing this stuff. You've got to enjoy it. And if it doesn't matter to you, then it's just going to be depressing.

David, Michael has declared himself a "not-for-profit" actor. Has he tried to persuade you to give up all your money too?

David: What an extraordinary question! One is always aware that one has a certain responsibility if one is fortunate and gets to do a job that often doesn't feel like a job. You want to do your bit whenever you can. But at the same time, I'm an actor. I'm not about to give that up to go into politics or anything. But I'll do what I can from where I live.

Well, your son and your father-in-law are also starring in this series. How about that, jobs for the boys!

David: I know! It was a delight to get to be on set with them. And certainly an unexpected one for me. Neil, on two occasions, got to bowl up to me and say, "Guess who we've cast?!"

How do you feel about your US peers going on strike?

David: It's happening because there are issues that need to be addressed. Nobody's doing this lightly. These are important issues, and they've got to be sorted out for the future of our industry. There's this idea that writers and actors are all living high on the hog. For huge swathes of our industry, that's just not the case. These people have got to be protected.

Michael: We have to be really careful that things don't slide back to the way they were pre the 1950s, when the stories that we told were all coming from one point of view and the stories of certain people, or communities within our society, weren't represented. There's a sense that now that's changed for ever and it'll never go back. But you worry when people can't afford to have the opportunities that other people have. We don't want the story that we tell about ourselves to be myopic. You want it to be as inclusive as possible

Staged series 3 recently broadcast. It felt like the show's last hurrah — or is there more mileage? Sheen and Tennant go on holiday?

David: That's the Christmas special! One Foot in the Algarve! On the Buses Go to Spain!

Michael: I don't think we were thinking beyond three, were we?

So is it time for a conscious uncoupling for you two — Eric and Ernie say goodbye?

David: Oh, never say never, will we?

Michael: And it's more Hinge and Bracket.

David: Maybe that's what we do next — The Hinge and Bracket Story. CRAIG McLEAN

[kekwcomics]

"Steve Austin becomes a suspect after series of burglaries that can only be accomplished with bionic strength are committed. As Austin begins to have vague memories of his encounter with Bigfoot, he is approached by Gillian, one of the alien travelers. She explains that one of her own, Nedlick, has formed a splinter group intend on world domination and is now using Sasquash to commit robberies in order to gain wealth." - Via The TV Archeologist.

Well, sure, that'll work. That's gotta be up there with whatever the plan was in Plan 9 From Outer Space...

[peachetteprice]

Obligatory something something... John Price bloody loves a good bargain.

You'd never catch him at Tesco without his rewards card, and on the occasion that you do, he's stressing about having left it at home and missing out on the 2-for-1 deal on Chicago Town pepperoni pizzas. His pockets are consistently lined with coupons for various shops (notably Sainsburys because they never stop spitting the damn things out, those wretched machines), and when he isn't pondering the efficacy of precision-tactical strategies in long-range combat within the Turkmenistan desert, he's forging lines into his own forehead wondering about how many packs of kitchen roll and toilet cleaner he needs to buy in order to fulfil the '£15' spending fee for 70 extra nectar points at the checkout.

The container he keeps his coupons in is highly organised, to the point of mental anguish whenever it gets knocked off the table beside the front door (which it inevitably does because him and his gear can hardly fit through the dooorway) and each slip of paper takes flight like a pupil's workbook pages at the end of the school year. You'd say he's doing too much, thinking too much, but there's a certain fear he's able to instill into you whenever there's less than a day to collect a certain reward, such as a half-price sack of clementines, enraptured by his own delusions of ultimate enhacement that force a great manaicism into his pleas, and you soon enough find yourself carting his coupon box around like its your second child.

'It's being efficient,' he reasons each time. 'Can't be wasting good money, love. We worked hard enough for it, didn't we?' And you can't fault the objective truth in it.

After no time at all: he's got you convinced.

Indicted you into the cult that is his money-saving mind. Soon enough he'll start rationing leftovers of cottage pie and freezing portions of chicken, rice and peas, turning off the main lights in the middle of day in favour of natural light, even if your living room is shrouded by the oak tree out the back and is but a pit of darkness until, conversely, its dark enough outside for the light of the table-side lamp, and switching off the oven, the TV, the microwave, the kettle and the coffee machine overnight (from the mains, of course), because 'it saves pennies', pennies that will eventually equal pounds in the long run, and he wants to make sure that each one of those British Stirling pounds of his goes towards configuring you and your daughter a better, more fulfilling, lavish lifestyle, should you go without a midnight snack, a bright morning, and a sane trip to Asda every once in a while.

Because that's the sort of man he is. That's it.

| Masterlist |

[xixovart]

argo2nauts music headcannons because this is too much

the misinformation some of you guys have spread regarding their music taste is insane/hj

(p.s: this is my take on this, if you disagree it’s alright!! it’s just fun and games :D)

(ps2: if any artist/band i mention is problematic please lmk!!)

percy - perseus jackson is a pretty intimidating skater kid with a resting bitch face who is covered head to toe in scars and has his ears pierced. where did the ‘high school musical/disney sitcom’ percy allegations come from. he likes led zeppelin (he canonically has a t shirt in toa if i can remember!!), childish gambino, d4vd, late night drive home, deftones, arctic monkeys, and chase atlantic.

fav song -

annabeth: this is a bit harder.. i think her music taste is either extremely varied or only listens to one album on repeat until her ears bleed. for my sanity i’m going with the former. i think she’d cry over boygenius and mitski (for obvious reasons) and i think she’d like sombr and famous 70/80s guys like queen, david bowie, ac/dc, the smiths ofc. and such. also mac demarco and phoebe bridgers!!!!”!?

fav song -

grover underwood - ADRIANNE LENKER!!!!!: THERE IS NOT A DOUBT IN MY MIND ABOUT IT. all of her songs suit him in one way or another. he needs to be seen more i love him to death. underrated man fr. also late night drive home, beach house, dream ivory, the smiths, queen, cas, WAVE TO EARTH!!!!!

fav song -

i know what youre thinking. “mali, will you ever shut up about this song?” answer is no. i will not.

piper mclean - CHAPPELL ROAN CHAPPELL ROAN IS HERRSSSS??? CASUAL? GOOD LUCK BABE???? HERS!!!! honorable mention: girl in red because don’t forget your roots. also madds buckley MAYBE? idk. also probably cas 🤷‍♀️

fav song -

nico - oh my beloved. he’d definitely listen to italian music when he misses bianca/maria but idk any italian artists so… for now we’re going with english music. and also very specific turkish song: m. by anil emre daldal because will. i’m thinking mitski, roar, mac demarco, OBVIOUSLY SUFJAN STEVENS??? cults, alex g, grimes, also very specifically: cupid by jack stauber? MAYBE conan gray… idk. and also definitely nirvana and guns n roses

fav song -

i heard this song while thinking of him and my heart SHATTERED guys do not make the same mistake i did.

hazel - i?? don’t know? really uhh… probably gracie abrams or adrianne lenker? phoebe bridgers, beach house?? soft rythm/music, deep/depressing lyrics. maybe tnbh but DEFINITELY current joys and adrianne lenker

(yes i made these first songs a rainbow on purpose (not rlly..) shut up i thought it’d be funny)

also this is her favorite song because it reminds her of nico and maybe marie, specifically the first lines!! (marceline [nico], is it just you and me in the wreckage of the world?)

frank zhang - MAC DEMARCO!! BEACH HOUSE!! TV GIRL!! CONAN GRAY!! MONTAN FISH!! GANG OF YOUTHS!! also his grandmother liked to listen to songs in mandarin and he likes remembering her so he constantly listens to 茉莉花 (Mòlìhuā) and uhh if you have any other old mandarin songs lmk :D!! and honorable mention: it almost worked by tv girl

fav song -

because it was his mother’s favorite song

jason grace - this is difficult.. like very. i don’t think he’d listen to music very much and it’s getting hard to not keep repeating artists. rmcm maybe? laufey, probably.. he listens to pretty much everything his friends to. he’s very flexible when it comes to music :)

fav song -

will solace - controversial maybe but i don’t think he’d like taylor swift very much.. no problem with her but i’d just like to see more variety in will’s music taste hcs. i think he’d love mac demarco (he’s been mentioned lke 8 times by now but he really is will’s favorite artist), tv girl, beach weather, the smiths, chappell roan, current joys, vacations, lemon demon, sufjan stevens, boygenius. conan gray, specifically summer child because it was written for him (i would know conan told me), and obviously the entirety of the mamma mia soundtrack. because it’s will.

fav song -

from the same album as nico because symbolism and that entire song is for them and tyem only (and also achicleos)

leo valdez - MY BELOVED!! very specifically the spanish part in stress relief (si puedes venir conmigo, amor, yo te enseño todo lo que hay. pq me tratas asi?? como no soy nadie ITS VALGRACE GUYS!!) uhh also chappell roan.. and your best american girl by mitski. and the smiths and queen and pavement. and lemon demon, the strokes, the cure.. maybe nirvana? and the front bottoms

fav song -

ok thats it im lagging so hard bye

[theersatzcowboy]

The Case of the Scorpion's Tail / La coda dello scorpione (1971)

Sergio Martino proves he’s on par with the greats of Italian genre filmmaking with this incredibly stylish thriller.

Director: Sergio Martino

Cinematographer: Emilio Foriscot

Starring: Anita Strindberg, George Hilton, and Ida Galli

[theboombutton]

I've just started reading Dungeon Meshi and I had to share some context for a Japanese-culture joke that I actually got for once!

When I was in college, there was a little independent theater that mostly showed foreign & independent films, plus midnight cult classics, monster movie Mondays, and a monthly? amateur short film festival that was also a gong show*. I didn't make near enough use of this theater and I regret that to this day, but one of the movies I did see there on a Monster Movie Monday was Matango.

Spoilers for Matango below, if it wasn't obvious.

Matango (1963) is a Japanese monster movie by director Ishiro Honda, who you're most likely to know as the director of Godzilla (1954). Matango is generally considered his darkest film. Also, weirdly, I've heard a rumor it might be a major inspiration for Gilligan's Island? And I can kinda see it?

Anyway, it's about a group of people who are shipwrecked on an island full of radioactive fungus. Everybody's pretty leery about eating them, because the shipwreckees found an older shipwreck, including a ship's log from its (now-absent) survivors saying the mushrooms cause hallucinations - but they're running low on food so eventually some of them say y'know what, fuck it.

The mushrooms turn out to be not only hallucinogenic, but also addictive and infectious - you can tell how long someone's been eating mushrooms based on their level of mushroom disfigurement. The mushroom eaters hunt down the holdouts and force them to eat the mushrooms too. Only one dude escapes the island, and in the last shot of the film we see - dun dun DUN! - even though he got away without eating any mushrooms, he still got infected and is turning into a mushroom person.

So the implication is that the travelogue guy ate from a Matango-style walking mushroom, and got transformed into one himself for his trouble. And because it's a funny side page instead of main comic continuity, Marcille understands the implication and is freaked out by this.

What's funnier to me, though, is Laios's nonchalance. You just know that if he understood the cultural reference, he would be fucking drooling at the thought of a monster he could both eat and turn into.

Dumb asides about that independent theater's film festival below the cut.

* The Gong Show was a 70s TV talent show where if someone's act sucked, they'd ring a big gong to cut them off. In the case of this short film festival, there was a 2 or 3 minute grace period, after which one of the organizers shone a light on the gong. Once the light was on the gong, the audience was allowed and indeed encouraged to shout "gong!" if they weren't enjoying the current film; if there was enough shouting, the host would ring the gong and the film would be cut off. From a creator's perspective I imagine this must have been humiliating; but from an audience and I suppose business perspective, it was crucial to keeping the event fun and well-attended. Very few people would have paid 5 bucks to spend their Friday night screening a bunch of poorly-paced, masturbatory student films. Instead, the threat of the gong encouraged locals to make short funny videos that would have done numbers on Tiktok if it had been around at the time. (An example I still remember 15 years later: shots of someone's hands assembling a cheese sandwich while Duel of the Fates plays. Cut to show the guy throwing the sandwich into the air, just as the music is climaxing. The guy is in jedi robes, activates his lightsaber, and swings at the sandwich. Cut to the sandwich falling back onto the plate, cut in half, grilled from the slice out. The guy picks up one of the halves and takes a bite. End of film.)

I only saw the audience not be ruthless about gonging a boring film once. An out-of-towner entered a short about a woman losing her child during the Holocaust. Not depicting an actual series of events, you understand - just symbolic shots of stars of david and swastikas and a woman and her child frolicking in a field and then DRAMATIC SLOW-MO on a shot of her spinning around and then gasp! The clothes are empty!

During the intro (every entrant gave one before their film was shown), she mentioned that it had won some other local film festivals, but she didn't think it was going to play as well here. I get the impression she hadn't realized this was a festival attended by normal-ass people, and was rather embarrassed about how poorly hers was going to go over. But, nobody wanted to be the first one to boo a film about the Holocaust, and so everyone patiently waited through her maudlin piece of crap film. (When your film is already dragging, for the love of god, don't add slo-mo .)

[schlock-luster-video]

On November 15, 1990, The Night Digger premiered on German television.

Here's some new art inspired by the cult classic!