Wednesday, October 29, 2014

LITTLE BIG SCREEN: "THE LOVES OF FRANKENSTEIN"


In the 'Columbo' episode "Mind Over Mayhem", boy genius Stevie Spelberg really wanted to go to an R-rated horror movie at the drive-in - "The Loves Of Frankenstein".  The head of the Cybernetic Research Institute think tank, Professor Marshall Cayhill, saw that as the perfect opportunity to get Stevie out of the way so that he could establish his alibi for a murder he planned to commit.  That's why he had the institute's chief mechanic take Stevie to the drive-in.

I suggested to my fellow explorer of fictional universes, Caeric ArcLight, that he should create a poster for this movie, as he has done so in the past for other fictional movies.  (DVD boxes as well!)

And with seemingly little effort, he came up with this beauty:


All of the actors in this movie would be the televersions of their real-world counterparts, and so all of them would have experience in horror movies of a similar nature - "Vampire Lovers", "Lust For A Vampire", that sort of thing.  Plus they appeared as themselves in talk shows (I know, last resort), but some of them appeared on a game show called "Call My Bluff".  And game shows are always fair... um, game in Toobworld.

Personally I would have replaced them all with fictional TV characters - horror movie legend Loren Belasco with young American actresses Ann Marie, Cybill Sheridan, and introducing Sandy Stockton for the comic relief.  Pluys there would be a few leading ladies who had put in their time in Hollywood; some of whom may have been seeing their careers on the wane: Joyce Whitman, Jan Stewart, and former Queen of the Box Office Valerie Blake (probably in need of one more hit movie.)

At any rate, it's the type of movie title which is so generic for the genre that it should be cited often in other TV shows as an example of horror films.

I'm sure only a few years later it was already being dished up as late night fare by Count Floyd at that Mellonville, Ohio, TV station.

That's just my wish-craft, of course.....

SHOWS CITED:
  • 'Columbo'
  • 'Funny Face'
  • 'McCloud'
  • 'The Betty White Show'
  • 'That Girl'
  • 'Cybill'
  • 'SCTV'
  • 'It's Always Jan'
  • 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'
BCnU!

PS:
As an added bonus, Caeric named the movie studio "Cumberland", suggested by another 'Columbo' episode, "Requiem For A Falling Star".

1 comment:

ArcLight said...

With a little (okay, a lot) of research, I probably could've used folks just from COLUMBO eps.

Next time we'll work up a cast list.