I picked up this DVD in a cardboard sleeve sometime in the distant past. I cannot tell you whether I paid a full dollar for it in a grocery store around the turn of the century when they carried little public domain collections on turnable racks or if I bought it at a garage sale, but it doesn’t have a sticker on it which might indicate it was wrapped in cellaphane when I got it. The sleeve was open, though. So, who knows? (And, probably, who cares? Although, gentle reader, these details are interesting to me, such as Did I have this in the video stacks for twenty years or only three?)
This disc contains three first-season episodes of the television series which ran from 1951-1953.
- “Frankenstein” retells, briefly, the tale of the movie version of Frankenstein. In his castle on an island on a lake, Dr. Frankenstein creates life. The monster, played by Lon Chaney, Jr., gets called ugly by a little boy who’s staying in the castle and becomes murderous. Bullets and a fall into the lake cannot stop him, but apparently electricity can. It’s a long book, but the story is more based on the movies more than the book.
- “The Cosmic Egg” tells the story of an antiques dealer who asks a professor to examine a crystal egg for which someone offered a high price; the professor eventually determines that it is an alien device for monitoring people on earth. Based on a story by H.G. Wells.
- “Appointment on Mars” tells the story of the three men who are first to Mars and hope to stake claims to minerals there. However, they start to get paranoid and turn on each other. The story stars a very young Leslie Nielsen, seemingly before his voice changed, and was written by Salvatore A. Lombino–Evan Hunter/Ed McBain.
The picture and sound quality are what you would expect from a seventy-five-year-old television show that was probably only incidentally taped and lapsed into public domain. Of course, it didn’t bother me because I have watched many such cheap transfers, both for television programs and for actual movies, some of which even had sound. So it’s no telling what kids today would make of them. Probably not enjoy them. But back in the old days, when television was starting to replace the radio, I bet the kids ate these up.
