With so many episodes, so many themes, so many incarnations, and so much continuing influence over the pop-culture zone, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone is ripe for deep analysis, which is why there has been so much of it. Editors Ron Riekki and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., are now dragging in even more by compiling eighteen new essays by various writers in their book The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone: Essays on the Television and Film Franchise.
In 1960, director John Moxey arguably outdid Hammer with his own atmosphere-rich Gothic horror. In contrast to Hammer's vibrant colors, Moxey opted for high-contrast black and white and deep focus photography to tell his tale of a burned witch who reappears in the present to lure a young woman to her sacrificial death. Much has been made of the structural similarities between Moxey's City of the Dead and Hitchcock's Psycho, but Moxey's story is purely supernatural and his film much more stylized. It's also a lot more fun than the grim and realistic Psycho.
Even if his music wasn't so extraordinarily inventive and alluring, even if he wasn't one of the very few pop artists who actually deserves the crown "genius," Prince would still be noteworthy for his Herculean productivity. The guy never stopped making music, and whether he was among the top stars of his time or more of a "legacy artist," he never slowed down. So we're left with lots and lots and lots of Prince music, and his estate keeps on finding new ways to scrape the archives.
The Film Detective issued a blu-ray of The Bat in 2015, and though Crane Wilbur's comedic 1959 old dark house flick, based on a play by Mary Roberts Rinehart, remained a complete delight, the disc was not without issues. While I did note in my review that it was a vast improvement over the myriad DVD editions of this public domain picture, I also noted the myriad "specs and thin scratches" that invade the image regularly and the disc's crackly audio. It was also a pretty bare bones package.
Because it didn't spawn an endless series of sequels and spin-offs, because its tie-in merchandise didn't dig itself into the ongoing pop-cultural consciousness with complete success, it's easy to forget what a phenomenon E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was upon its release in 1982. It outgrossed Steven Spielberg's own previous blockbusters and his buddy George Lucas's Star Wars films (which, needless to say, had no issues in the sequel, spin-off, or merch departments). "E.T. phone home" became a catch phrase of "May the force be with you" or "Where's the beef?" ubiquity. Most kids didn't completely kit out their bedrooms with E.T. stuff the way they did with Star Wars toys, posters, and bed sheets, but most of us had an E.T. doll or two. I know I did.
That The Beatles changed the world is as widely known as how there's this fiery thingy in the sky called "the sun." The most obvious offshoot of the international success of four British lads was all the English groups that went global in their wake: not just critical dah-lings like the Stones, Who, Kinks, and Animals, but also cuddlier fave raves like Herman's Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, and Petula Clark. But the influence went deeper, farther, and weirder than that, as shaggy, buck-toothed, often incongruously posh British characters began invading American sitcoms, comics, dopey beach movies, cartoons, bath products, and pretty much everything else an ad-man could imagine. The British Invasion was a siege fought and won in the record shops, but its aftershocks rattled everything everywhere.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was such a tremendous (and underserved) critical and commercial flop that former golden boy David Lynch had a hard time following it up. Waiting for inspiration, he read a single line in a novel by Wild at Heart-scribe Barry Gifford that finally set off that old lightbulb above his quiff, and he knew he wanted to make a movie called Lost Highway and he wanted Gifford to co-write it.
ABBA should have been the squarest thing in the seventies pop universe: four toothpaste ads from Sweden singing gleamingly cheerful or earnestly distraught songs tailored for the top ten. Yet even the coolest of the cool wouldn't deny the quality of Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus's songs and production or the flawless and emotive harmonies of Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Elvis and the Attractions couldn't stop listening to them on the tour bus and consciously paid tribute to their style on songs such as "Oliver's Army". Pete Townshend praised their songcraft. A decade later, Nirvana not only made ABBA their own tour bus soundtrack, but also actually took an ABBA cover band on tour with them. Starstruck fandom or smirking irony? It was the nineties, so who could tell the difference?
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