He is reviewing a film he has already seen, but hasn’t seen since childhood. He enthusiastically responded to contributing an entry into this special run of AMADs. He’s famous for his PHANTASM films as well as the ‘80s gem BEASTMASTER and, more recently, the great indie horror comedy BUBBA HO-TEP.
#The twonky short story movie#
The only real credibility issue is that the script never logically establishes how football coach Billy Lynn would know anything about the world it came from (any such questions are dismissed in a line where he tells Hans Conreid he would know if he read science-fiction).Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s Special Tribute A Movie A Day entry, the fifth of six total, this time from Don Coscarelli, who not only one of my favorite filmmakers, but one of my favorite people.
#The twonky short story tv#
The concept is a fairly throwaway one but I was surprised how much Arch Oboler makes good science-fiction out of it – employing a rationale involving a robot time travelled back from a totalitarian future where it is used for domestic control and that it is a shapechanger that has adapted to the surroundings by taking on the form of a tv set. The film gets good mileage out of simply winding such a milquetoast individual up and turning every aspect of his existence against him. Hans Conreid – a former member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater troupe who had a busy year in 1953 where he also voiced Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953) and played the villainous title role in The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (1953) – is an able comic foil. The effects would have been fairly clever for the day and still look reasonable. The Twonky is an appealing creation – an ambulatory tv set that scuttles about like a crab, changing Hans Conreid’s records, doing his dishes, lighting his cigarettes, zapping anybody who threatens it. Nobody then or since has anything good to say about it. These were both grounds that Arch Oboler had made his own so the opportunity to dig a knife in may well have been one that he relished. For several years, tv stole audiences away from cinemas and in particular radio. In the film version however, The Twonky becomes a tv set and Arch Oboler has swung the premise around to become a satire on television, which was very much a newly arrived medium in 1953, having only begun commercially in the US in 1947 and spreading to most of the country by 1949.
I have not been able to track down a copy of the original Kuttner/Moore story for comparison. Via their various pseudonyms, Kuttner and Moore have also inspired the stories for the films Timescape (1992) and The Last Mimzy (2007). The two were celebrated writers in the science-fiction pulp magazines of the era, where Kuttner in particular became adept in humorous science-fiction, especially the hilarious Professor Gallagher stories collected in Robots Have No Tails (1952). Moore (although oddly the ‘based on’ credit on the film attributes the author of the story as Kuttner only). Lewis Padgett was the pseudonym used by the husband and wife writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Oboler based the film here on the short story The Twonky (1942) by Lewis Padgett. Perhaps the most influential of Oboler’s films in retrospect was the non-genre hit of the African adventure Bwana Devil (1952), which was the very first feature film made in 3D. These include the split personality film Bewitched (1945) Five (1951), the very first depiction of nuclear war and its aftermath on the screen and the alien invasion film The Bubble (1966). Oboler made a total of seven films as director, most of which fall into genre territory. He made his directorial debut with Strange Holiday (1945) wherein a man returns from a holiday to find the US overtaken by fascists. From the name he made there, Oboler began to expand out onto film, beginning with the script for the thriller Escape (1940).
#The twonky short story series#
Arch Oboler (1909-87) gained a significant name for his work on radio, beginning as producer/writer/principal creative force on the famous horror anthology series Lights Out (1934-57).
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