Word: tv
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...problem in doing such programs is the cost. Elaborate special effects are too expensive for most TV series, and the tackiness can show. Superboy, for example, is an engaging adventure series based on the comic book, but the TV hero's cheesy superantics come straight from Woolworth's. Low-rent special effects have also turned War of the Worlds -- an update of the H.G. Wells novel and 1953 movie -- into a dreary stalemate. Last season the evil aliens seemed to do little but abduct unsuspecting earthlings and transform them Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style into blank-eyed automatons...
Friday the 13th bears even less resemblance to the infamous, inexhaustible series of slasher films for which it is named. The TV version is another anthology show, its stories linked by an antique shop whose objects were cursed and sold to unsuspecting customers. Each week three continuing characters try to retrieve one of the objects before it wreaks its supernatural havoc. That serviceable premise provides the excuse for segments that range from old horror chestnuts (the ventriloquist controlled by his dummy) to spooky original tales (two abused children lure playmates into an evil playhouse...
...13th's worst sin is an obsession with clunky, overexplanatory dialogue laying out the supernatural ground rules ("Demons can only rise or return on a full moon -- that's why the spectral energy is gathering ^ . . ."). But the show delivers a stronger dose of pure horror than anything else on TV. In the season's two-hour premiere episode, Lucifer tried to take over a convent in France. Before the overstuffed plot spun out of control, there were some startling set pieces: a possessed nun literally climbing the walls and patients in a mental ward going wild and murdering the staff...
...Japan for a reported $2 million (or 284 million yen) from the Fujisankei Communications Group. Jimmy Carter was in Nashville instructing listeners on how he wrote his books. Richard Nixon huffed off yet again to China after disconnecting his AT&T phone service because the company was sponsoring the TV version of The Final Days, last weekend's account of the end of Watergate and Nixon's presidency. Gerald Ford was at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, of all places, addressing a conference called "Farewell to the Chief," a discussion of life after the White House. Expenses...
...weapons of modern warfare, none is more venerable than radar. The seemingly magical technology that enables planes, ships and artillery units to spot the enemy from afar has made the difference between defeat and victory in many a battle. In a Nova TV episode called Echoes of War, which was shown on the Public Broadcasting System last week, radar was hailed as the military's unsung hero of World War II. As physicist I.I. Rabi once recalled, "Maybe we could have won it without the atomic bomb . . . but without radar we could have lost...