
Out of the Unknown
1965 · TV series · 50 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Irene Shubik
Out of the Unknown is a British television science fiction anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and broadcast on BBC2 in four series between 1965 and 1971. Each episode was a dramatisation of a science fiction short story; some were created for the series, but most were adaptations of already published stories. The first three years were exclusively science fiction, but that genre was abandoned in the final year in favour of horror and fantasy. A number of episodes were wiped during the early 1970s, as was standard procedure at the time.
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3 comments on Hacker News
For another glimpse at the feared future of mass production and consumption watch the "Out of the Unknown" series 1 episode "The Midas Plague" from 1965:
https://archive.org/details/come-buttercup-come-daisy
It's episode 12 in the zip file. A lot of the stories for the series came from well known science fiction writers of the time. All four years of the series are on the Internet Archive. The Midas Plague is a comedy, some of the other episodes are truly frightening.
The TV series of Logan's Run and Planet of the Apes are reasonably obscure because they weren't too popular (I've got hold of both them, by the way).
Some other titles to pique your interest:
1981 BBC version of The Day of the Triffids
1979 Tales of the Unexpected (not scifi really)
1979 Sapphire & Steel (with the most annoying introduction - they are not elements!)
1979 Quatermass series
1979 The Omega Factor
1978 Blake's 7 (should not really count as obscure due to the impact the series had)
1977 The Fantastic Journey
1977 Children of the Stones
1977 Beasts (anthology series by Nigel Kneale)
1975 Sky
1975 The Invisible Man (really cheesy, featuring David McCallum)
1975 The Changes
1974 Zodiac
1973 The Tomorrow People
1970 Timeslip
1969 The Owl Service
1968 The Champions
1966 The Time Tunnel
1966 Mission: Impossible
1965 Out of the Unknown
1960 The Strange World of Gurney Slade
1958 Quatermass and the Pit mini-series
1955 Quatermass II
The Beeb made the story into an episode of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Unknown] aired on Oct 6, 1966. Was once online somewhere (having no luck today.)
Every time I hear of Machine Stops, I think of Bradbury story "There Will Come Soft Rains" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)] For me both of these fellas capture something of the H.G. Wells atmosphere, tinged with sadness.