Here's what's really weird about this show: a poet, Ogden Nash, and an author, Ilka Chase, were not considered too highbrow for a game show, and were recognized by the mass audience. Try that today!
Apparently the Emmy Awards once featured a beauty queen. The 1956 contenders first below, then the 1957 queen.
December 31, 1957. Lovely Rochelle Greenblatt, 21 year old receptionist at McCadden Studios, Hollywood, was chosen 'Miss Cinderemmy' tonight (Dec. 31) and presented at midnight to the entire television industry at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences New Year's Eve Ball staged at Beverly Hilton. She was crowned as queen of the ball by actor Ronnie Burns, son of comedy star, George Burns, who coincidentally owns and operates McCadden Studios.
For $40, Urban Outfitters is offering a mystery 5-pack of VHS tapes, which means they send you 5 VHS tapes of their choosing. Though, at least, you get to choose the genre (horror, romance, etc.).
I guess that's one way to get rid of their inventory of old VHS tapes that, evidently, people aren't otherwise buying.
The premise of this proposed 1978 TV series doesn't sound that bad, but only one pilot episode was ever made. NBC decided not to pick up the full show. Description from ioffer.com:
Scientist Simon Shane (Hindle) is working on a project which will create human clones of himself. Years of failed experiments with his mentor (Bellamy) at his side have yielded breakthroughs but not a successful final product though one is set to be unleashed within days. With his mentor kidnapped and a mysterious new party having presented itself with designs on the project which are suspicious at best, Simon accelerates the project and clones himself a dozen times maintaining a telepathic link with each of his fully grown "children" each of whom is an exact replica of him with all of his memories and capabilities.
Unfortunately, the full pilot episode isn't available anywhere online. A clip is all that YouTube has.
TANGENT: What do you think of science fiction expanding into all of the different media? We have the records, tapes, comic books, television, etc. plus the books.
POHL: I think that the other media are peripheral. I get involved in them from time to time. I’m making a record and I have a contract to do the pilot script – and the treatment – for a new television series. It’s called “The Clone Master” at the moment. It’s not an anthology series, it’s a series series. They trapped me into it by promising me that it would be an anthology series. Now, this is one that I generated. The producer asked me for some suggestions and I told him that it should be an anthology series and ultimately badgered me down to where I am now. The process is one of badgering down. You get into television and you find there are twenty-five people who are being paid to criticize what you do and they all have to justify their salaries. It’s no fun, I don’t like doing it. I do like it in the sense that I like experimenting on my own in areas that I haven’t done before.
A male version of Charlie's Angels that never made it past a 1980 pilot episode. From Wikipedia:
ABC attempted to create a spin-off of Charlie's Angels in 1980 called Toni's Boys. The backdoor pilot aired near the end of season four, simply titled "Toni's Boys" (season 4, episode 23). The concept was essentially a sex reversal of Charlie's Angels, and starred Barbara Stanwyck as Antonia "Toni" Blake, a wealthy widow and friend of Charlie's who ran a detective agency. The agency was staffed by three good looking male detectives—Cotton Harper (Stephen Shortridge), Matt Parrish (Bruce Bauer), and Bob Sorensen (Bob Seagren)—who took direction from Toni, and solved crimes in a manner similar to the Angels. The show was not picked up as a regular series for the following season.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.