Classic Science Fiction Channel Update

This morning I added ten new films to the channel – three giant creature movies – The Deadly Mantis, Tarantula (with Leo G Carrol) and the original version of King Kong, a couple of classics in Lost Horizon and King Solomon’s Mines (Challenger is an SF/F hero as far as I’m concerned), a couple of B movie standards – The Mole People and It, the Terror From Beyond Space, an historical classic in the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and two headliners – Dr. Strangelove and Soylent Green, both appropriately apocolyptic.

Last week I added some 11 movies and three television series; three of those films are (or were, depends on your frame of reference) headliners – The Day of the Triffids, Earth vs the Flying Saucers and When Worlds Collide. Rounding those offerings out are several B flicks – notably The Monolith Monsters and Quatermass, and the three tv shows – Space: Above and Beyond, Captain Scarlet (1st season) and Fireball XL5 – which was, surprisingly, not nearly as bad as I had expected it to be on re-watching. No technobabble in evidence, straight-forward action and pretty darned good dialogue.

I’ll be re-watching me some Charleton Heston in Soylent Green. Actually, I’ll be waiting for the scenes with Edward G. in them – he turned in a very fine performance for the last film he’d ever make – a film that brought Heston and Robinson back together well after appearing in The Ten Commandments.

In the meantime: Skiffy Tube announces that they’e spun off SciFi Wire and SciFi Weekly into their own web-slot, but apparently their powers of predicting the future are a bit off – all I get at the new site is a log in panel. Maybe later today their ‘January 5th’ prediction will come true.

And today is my first day of quitting cigarettes. If I suddenly start sounding like I have a major case of Tourette’s Syndrome, you’ll know why.