Hacker Cinema
Tales from the Crypt
1989 · TV series · 7 seasons
Created by William M. Gaines, Steven Dodd
ComedyMysteryScience FictionFantasy
Cadaverous scream legend the Crypt Keeper is your macabre host for these forays of fright and fun based on the classic E.C. Comics tales from back in the day. So shamble up to the bar and pick your poison. Will it be an insane Santa on a personal slay ride? Honeymooners out to fulfill the "til death do we part" vow ASAP?
1 positive5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
A book doesn’t, and Foundation makes excellent use of every inch of the novel as a medium to explore itself, but the commenter above was specifically referring to what made the book difficult to adapt into a television series. And while Malick et all can def do “rumination on a theme” as a feature film, an ongoing tv series requires the audience to invest and keep coming back week after week, episode after episode.
Generally that takes the form of characters who experience things — ideally growing or changing in response, although many genres and formats don’t require that part. It’s unnecessary since part of the medium of television, unlike the novel, is people putting on a show to entertain you which is different from reading, an inherently more-individual experience. Part of what TV is selling is a group of people to hang out with every week. Generally.
Which is not to say always — shows like Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt proved the anthology format has a wide audience. But they had the advantage of a brand new paradigm each week, which creates a relationship with the show itself (but even TZ allowed the audience Serling).
Foundation def be done as anthology style episodes with some crossovers/overlap, but again practical realities make it difficult to guarantee narratively-necessary access to actors due to contract and scheduling factors, and you have the issue of both too big for standard structure and “not big enough” for a true anthology at its core. Not saying it couldn’t work it’d just be more difficult, which is not a quality that makes studios likely to invest.
There was an episode of Tales From the Crypt with this plot. To seduce a young attractive woman, an old rich man gives more and more money to trade his old features with those of a good looking bodybuilder. Of course, it ends with him being good looking and poor and her marrying the guy he swapped places with while everyone laughs at him.
There was a Tales from the Crypt episode about this. It's been a long time, but they played a prank on a guy where they somehow knocked him out and temporarily paralyzed him. When he came around they pretended like they were about to do an autopsy on him, knowing that he could hear them. Then I think one of the pranksters had a heart attack and died and they really did an autopsy on him, except it turned out that consciousness did continue after death and the scene ended as he started screaming (in his mind - somehow they got across to the audience that you were hearing his thoughts) as the started cutting in.
Reminds me of a story from Tales from the Crypt, about a super-plant, an episode with Stephen King...
HBO Now is so weird. I subscribed for a couple of months to watch Game of Thrones and Westworld. I figured I might as well check out the rest of the service too. HBO has many decades of original content right? There should be tons of stuff to watch on there, but I could find barely anything. It was just a light crust of the most current shows, whatever movies they were currently licensing, and a few crumbs from the back catalog.
I ended up dropping the subscription because I'd watched everything interesting on the service in no time flat. I could have been watching Tales from the Crypt for months, but it wasn't available at all. Where is the Rey Bradbury theater? Shows I'd heard about growing up but only got to see briefly in a hotel room on a trip. For a service nearly twice as expensive as Netflix they made seemingly no effort to keep me engaged.
> I can go back now and watch every episode of every HBO show.
Really?! Can you watch ``Tales from the Crypt'' or ``The Kids in the Hall''?
Can you really watch _every_ episode of _every_ HBO show in the following list?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_HBO#Past_programming