Change Up For the New Year
YouTube is a great place, I have been watching tons of old movies like Law of the Jungle with Mantan Moreland, The Crooked Circle with Zasu Pitts, The Last Alarm with Warren Hull, The Phantom Express with J. Farrell MacDonald, etc, etc. But one of the greatest things I have located is the entire run of Cliffhangers!, a show I was fanatical about back in the day (1979).
Cliffhangers! was a midseason replacement show that featured three continuing stories that all ended in a cliffhanger every week and you had to watch the next epsiode to see what happened. An interesting concept to bring back the excitement and fun of the old serials for modern audiences (thank you George Lucas for inspiring the idea with Star Wars), but it had several problems. The biggest was that all three episodes were started in mid adventure, one started with Chapter 2, one with Chapter 3 and one was already on Chapter 6 in the premiere episode. Another problem and one that led to it’s demise was the expense of doing three complete film productions to fill only one hour of programming, which made it almost impossible for the network to just break even with the show. Low ratings caused the show to be cancelled before the last epsiode was broadcast, so American audiences never knew how two of the stories ended (the final episode was broadcast overseas, dammit!), although two of them were later edited into TV movies and popped up now and then on late night TV.
Jump ahead over thirty years and I am surfing around YouTube, watching serial trailers, when I came upon a Cliffhangers! segment, some searching uncovered the entire run of the show divvied up into individual segments that followed the order the episodes were run (thank you very much SailorsDreamHouse) and spent an entire weekend catching up on all of the episodes I had missed the first time around. (Yes, I know, I have no life.) And I noticed an interesting similarity with the final episodes, all three ended with the main villain getting away. Some research showed that the original idea had been if the show was a success, the segments would have been spun off into full length shows (ironically today all three could have succeeded on their own as fantastic shows with continuing story arcs are almost the norm.)
So of course I decided to feature the show for the first three months of the new year. In the original run the order of the individual segements would rotate so a different adventure would start off the show each week. I have decided to go with the order of how I remember the first episode I caught running. so January will highlight The Curse of Dracula, where the great grandson of Van Helsing tracks down the vampire king in modern day LA. February will be The Secret Empire, a western in which an 1800’s lawman uncovers a futuristic underground city (any similarity to The Phantom Empire is purely “coincidental”, but since the Gene Autry serial is in the pubic domain, the point is probably moot anyway. Finally March will get into Stop Susan Williams, a Perils of Pauline style mystery where a journalist uncovers a vast conspiracy while investigating her brother’s murder.
So, I’ll see you back here in a couple of weeks.
