QUEEN BEE: a mystery worthy of Hitchcock

 

(I've been promising you a rose garden of triviality and fluff, but I rediscovered this post from years and years ago and wanted to re-post it.) 

Can I piece this together, or should I just leave it in its natural pieces?

Years ago, when the internet was still somewhat Jurassic and YouTube was all new to me, I kept trying to find something, anything, about an episode of a sci-fi TV show I saw in the '60s. Wasn't sure if it was Twilight Zone, Outer Limits or (my personal favorite, the one that scared the bejeezus out of me) One Step Beyond. 

I don't think I even saw the show, in fact. My much-older sister was reading a description of it out of TV Guide. "A woman doctor awakens to discover that she has become extremely obese." My sister said, "Oh, that sounds like me." I didn't even know it at the time, but she was pregnant and hiding it from the world, including me.

But that wisp of memory is ALL, I swear, that I had to go on.

I did find this on a message board, and thought: I think, I think she's talking about the same thing:

Does anybody remember an episode of Twilight Zone or Outer Limits about a Queen Bee? It isn't the one with the sexy queen bee trying to breed with a human male. This was about a woman who wakes up and discovers she is enormously fat because she is a queen bee and she is never allowed to do anything but breed and be fed. Program, episode and names of actors would be appreciated.

Update: Zzzzzzzz is the one about the sexy queen bee. I'm looking for the one about the morbidly obese queen bee.

Answers

Best Answer: Outer Limits: Zzzzzz 

Season 1 Episode 18 

Actors: Vic Perrin, Bob Johnson, Ben Wright, Robert Culp, Robert Duvall

It wasn't the Outer Limits, and I believe it was in black and white. I can see the actress, but I can't think of her name. She did a lot of stuff in the 60's and 70's. Sorry to be of no help. Good luck.

It wasn't Zzzzzz, I checked on YouTube. It wasn't even Twilight Zone or Outer Limits or any of those, I obsessively checked the synopsis on every single episode and watched the ones that were available, and no obese doctor. So I gave up. Every so often, every few years I mean, I'd take another half-hearted stab at it. THEN!

Then, just tonight, I found this - this description on IMDB, and bingo-bango.

The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (TV Series)

Consider Her Ways (1964)

Plot Summary

Dr. Jane Waterleigh wakes to find herself in an obese body, having just given birth to her fourth baby, and is called "Mother Orchis" and "Mother 417" by an all-female medical staff. The other Mothers, all of whom are corpulent and much larger than their helpers, the Servitors, tell Jane that there are no men, their only responsibility is to give birth, and Mothers neither read nor write.

Jane, however, remembers her past life as a physician and wife, so two policewomen try to arrest her for "reactionism." The Doctors refuse to surrender her, and send her to sick bay, then to Laura, the historian. Laura explains that all of the men died decades ago, when a Dr. Perrigan developed a virus to control the rat population, but the strain mutated, killing all male humans, but sparing females, who were immune.

Now only women survive, and they are sorted at birth into four classes--Doctors, Mothers, Servitors, and Workers--and raised in learning centers. When Laura tells Jane that she will now receive an hypnotic treatment, a drug-induced amnesia to remove all of her memory, she becomes hysterical, and returns to her earlier world. 

She is in the office of Dr. Hellyer, her boss and the Chief of Staff at her hospital, who reminds her that she volunteered to test a new narcotic, Sonadrin, which apparently took her to the fantastic matriarchal world from which she just escaped. She discovers that Dr. Perrigan is a real biologist, who is working on a myxomatosis strain to exterminate brown rats.

She meets Perrigan and tries to convince him to discontinue his project, but he refuses, so she shoots him, lights a fire using all of Perrigan's research notes, and burns down his laboratory. She is tried for murder, but refuses to plead insanity, and insists that her sacrifice is worthwhile, since she is saving humanity from a terrible future. 

Then her attorney, Max Wilding, tells her that Perrigan has a son, another Dr. Perrigan, who promises to complete his father's work.

OK THEN! Great episode, based on a short story by John Wyndham (which I now have to find!). I decided to post the entire (detailed) synopsis because it's so fascinatingly bizarre. It DOES have termite queen aspects to it (and dear GOD do not get me going on termite queens, those seething bags of - ). I do not have the video, and the only photos are these godawful grainy things I scrounged and blew up. There is a mere snippet from the ending on YouTube, from which I have made a few not-very-good gifs.

But it's gratifying to realize that from that tiny wisp of memory, I have been able to retrieve something this tangible. Hell of a good story, too - too bad I didn't watch it.

BADDA-BOOM: There's got to be a rim shot to this. The actress in this episode was catching my mind at first - boy, she looked familiar (one of those!), until one of my Google image searches just sort of stuck her name in my face.

I remember her from Barney Miller! And many other things, of course - she had one of those long careers character actresses used to have.  And now that I think of it, my older sister - the pregnant one - (the termite queen, I mean) - used to watch The Alfred Hitchcock Hour all the time, and wouldn't be caught dead watching One Step Beyond. That sort of show was for the common rabble. Hitchcock was Art.

So I should've remembered. Eh?

POSTLY POST: So the next day, like ripping a bandaid off something barely healed, I began to look for some more. Can't leave it alone, it seems.

Enthralling as that story outline seemed, there were holes in it, and parts of it that didn't make much sense. This was the only other detailed synopsis I could find, from Wikipedia:

The story is mostly a first-person narrative. It begins with a woman (Jane Waterleigh) who has no memory of her past waking up and discovering that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own. After some confusing experiences Jane's memory gradually returns and she recalls that she was part of an experiment using a drug (chuinjuatin) to see if it enabled people to have out-of-body experiences. It seems that the drug has worked far better than anyone could have anticipated: Jane has been cast into the future. She also realises that she is in a society consisting entirely of women, organised into a strict system of castes, and that she is now a member of the mother caste. Jane's initial contacts have never even heard of men, and believe her to be delusional.

When it becomes clear to doctors who attend Jane that something strange has happened (since she can read and write, while the mother caste are illiterate) they arrange for her to be taken to meet an aged historian named Laura. It seems that Jane is in a society somewhat more than a century after her own time. Laura relates that not long after Jane's own time a Dr Perrigan carried out scientific experiments that unintentionally created a virus that killed all the men in the world, leaving only women. After a very difficult period of famine and breakdown, a small number of educated women, found mainly in the medical profession, took control and embarked on an urgent programme of research to enable women to reproduce without males. The women also decided to follow some advice from the Bible ("Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways") and created a caste-based society in which Jane has become a member of the Mother caste.

Laura does understand what Jane means when she talks of men. However, she is certain that they were oppressors of women and that the world is far better without them. Jane disagrees and feels the demise of men to be a terrible blow.

Distressed at the prospect of spending her life as a bloated producer of babies, expected to be unable to read, write or reason, Jane requests that she be administered a dose of chuinjuatin in the hope that she might return to her own time. It works, and once transported, Jane decides to stop Dr Perrigan at all costs. The story has an ambiguous ending, which may suggest that it is the narrator's own actions that will lead to the catastrophe she hopes to prevent, an example of the predestination paradox.

This is actually the synopsis of the original John Wyndham short story, though the Wiki entry says the Hitchcock adaptation was "fairly faithful" (though transplanted to the U. S. Note the word "programme" in the synopsis - even we Canadians don't use terms that antiquated and bulky).

But here's one more snippet: a review posted on a Hitchcock fan site. Gives a little more insight into this strange and twisted thing. This just makes me want to see it all the more, but I'd have to order it on DVD or something, along with 576 other episodes.

This was a weirdly disturbing episode...but NOT for the reasons presented. In the future, men are dead and the surviving woman have become a single-gender society, with classes and levels organized along the same lines as the Ants. A woman wakes with no memory of who she is...and finds she's a hugely obese, barely mobile woman named "Mother Orchis" who (as a mother) is genetically designed to have babies...and nothing else. She gradually remembers she has a husband (nobody even knows what a 'man' is), can read and write (something Mother Orchis can't do) and was in fact a doctor. The story's pretty facinating (involving mental projection and time travel) but the the whole "No woman is complete without her man!" message has an ugly ring to it. Still, I'm charmed by the effectiveness of the primitive fat-suits and the sight of those huge woman, reclining on couches and eating...being massaged by servants (drones) and existing in this strange society that survived the loss of the other gender and adapted.

(I have just one question. Wouldn't they still have male babies? Did they kill them all off, or what? Unless perhaps they cloned themselves, but that part of it is never explained.) 

POST-POST-POST-IT (LAST last postscript to this post!): OK, since I posted this thing a few years ago, the episode DID appear in full on YouTube. So you can watch it now, and make up your own mind about it. 

Branded (in color)

Though I almost never watched them, I always loved the theme songs of Westerns in the '60s - The Virginian, Maverick, Death Valley Days, the incomparable Have Gun Will Travel, and this one - a novel in itself, an epic tale acted out every week which was usually better than the episode itself. Chuck Connors stood there, face as craggy and inscrutable as an Easter Island statue, while his medals and stripes and everything that comprised his identity as a soldier and a man was literally ripped off his body. It was a savage ritual which carried an awful whiff of ceremony, of celebrating failure and betrayal, or at least holding it up as an example to scare the others into obedience and submission. The aggressiveness, the casual brutality of it stays with you - and oh, the injustice! "All but one man died, down at Bitter Creek/And they say he ran away." It comes out in the fullness of time that he was protecting an officer and only pretended to run, or something, but that doesn't matter now.  It's one of the best  TV openings ever, and watching it again after all these years did not disappoint. 

And a couple more for good measure. 

Rare Behind The Scenes Star Trek Footage

What is so rare as an outtake on the Desilu lot? Spock smoking, maybe.

Haunted: the little girl in the woods

Of course. . . of course!

Mister Ed

Original name: Bamboo Harvester

Birth:

1949

El Monte

Los Angeles County

California, USA

Death:

Feb. 22, 1979

Burbank

Los Angeles County

California, USA

Animal Actor. Mister Ed, a Palomino horse officially named Bamboo Harvester, was a show and parade horse who was foaled in 1949 in El Monte, California. His parents were The Harvester (Sire), a Saddlebred owned by Edna and Jim Fagan; and Zetna, (Dam) who was sired by Antez, an Arabian imported from Poland. Bamboo Harvester was trained by Lester Hilton. Lester "Les" Hilton had been apprenticed under Will Rogers, and also worked with the mules in the "Francis the Talking Mule" movies. Due to old-age ailments, Bamboo Harvester was put to sleep in 1970. The producer of the Mister Ed series never would answer the question of how the horse's lips were made to move. There have been many theories over the years, including the use of peanut butter, but none have been authenticated. (bio by: Ronald Leon)

Cause of death: Euthanized

Burial:

Snodgrass Farm

Tahlequah

Cherokee County

Oklahoma, USA

Maintained by: Find A Grave

Record added: Jan 01, 2001

Find A Grave Memorial# 1551

This is a cobbling-together of a post I spent about four hours on this morning. Trying to fix the formatting, which I do for nearly every post, it suddenly disappeared.

ALL of it. It was just a blank.

I mean, no backup. Didn't even go into a recycle bin or anything.

I feel stabbed, ripped off and as if something has been snatched away from me (like four hours that I can never get back).  I don't know, all I can do to salvage this is put up some of the photos and whatever I remember of the text, though there were also three or four videos that were VERY hard to find, not to mention a gif that I can't recover.

Jesus.

Anyway, what I was GOING to say before the finished and polished post was ripped out of my hands, was something like this: as a little girl, I adored Mr. Ed, and I can see why. He was a character actor with a sweet face, and he was also a handsome palomino, a former parade horse, his shiny coat coming across well even in grainy black-and-white.

The show we saw on TV wasn't the original. There was a failed pilot starring the same horse, but a different Wilbur. This Wilbur was a clinker, and it didn't fly. But there was something about Ed. Network execs must have decided to give him another try.

(Now that I think of it, black lines kept appearing at the sides. Did that mean something? This version is awful, but I feel I must continue, damn it.)

Oh, what else? I wrote something about My Friend Flicka, a 1950s series which is now posted in its entirety on YouTube. At one point, I would have killed to see even one episode, but now I find I can't stomach Johnny Washbrook and the way he's always crying. He's a fairly good horseman, and the horse is beautiful (of course, of course!). But it was mainly that theme song I loved as a kid. It began with a little harp-stroke which isn't in most of the YouTube vids. It's cut off, probably because most people didn't notice it. But to me, it meant magic was about to begin. This video may or may not have it, because I don't remember which one I posted originally. Took me a while to find it, too.

There were others, National Velvet, Fury. . . Fury was, I have to admit, the best horse actor, and the handsomest of all. In fact, he was simply stunning. But the show involved a lot of shrill whistling and irritating yelling: "Fuuuuuuuuuu-reeeeeeeee!" . And NOWHERE in the YouTube videos does the announcer ever say, "Fury. The story of a horse. . . and the boy who loved him."It's probably something like "Play it again, Sam", a TV myth.

This is from one of those very old-format TV sites set up in about the year 2000:

But the true star of the show was Fury himself. Known as Highland Dale when he lived on a farm in Missouri, he was 18 months old when he was discovered by well-known movie horse trainer Ralph McCutcheon who first used him in “Return of Wildfire” in ‘48. Series producer Leon Fromkess hired McCutcheon to deliver a horse for the series. By this time, McCutcheon had changed the horse’s name to Beauty (often called Beaut) and had worked him in “Lone Star” (‘52), “Johnny Guitar” (‘54) and “Gypsy Colt” (‘54). He was cast as the black stallion in “Giant” (‘56); and several other shows after “Fury” ended.

Can't find where I got this info, but Highland Dale was an American Saddlebred, long and rangy compared to the rather dinky Ed. Flicka was somewhere in the middle. William Shatner breeds Saddlebreds. Lesson for the day.

Elizabeth Taylor on Highland Dale/Fury was a sight to behold. His size can be gauged by how tiny she looks on him, almost like a girl. She was a magnificent horsewoman who did not need a double, not even in National Velvet when she was 13. I've tried to make a gif of my favorite scene from Giant, very poorly cropped for some reason (to avoid a letterbox effect, no doubt).

And that's all I can salvage of this post. I'm sorry, but I'll bet I feel a whole lot worse about it than you do.

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Hoolihan & Big Chuck - Certain Ethnic Six Dollar Man

Probably better than most H & BC sketches, in that it has a broad silent-comedy kind of feel to it - oh hell, ain't it just hilarious when all his body parts fly off? Yes, it IS! You can't show that sort of stuff any more, or if you do, you can't laugh at it. So laugh!

Best monsters from The Outer Limits

As a kid, the only thing that scared the shit out of me worse than The Twilight Zone was The Outer Limits.

The Outer Limits was way better, is why. It had monsters, lots of them. The Twilight Zone had Philosophy. It had Rod Serling making pronouncements on the emptiness of life in the 20th century, the blinding pace of progress, the depersonalization of society, and all those things nobody had a clue about back then.

This show had monsters in the basement with really ugly legs. It had terrified women hiding in the shadows. The way this chick is acting, that creature is probably her husband who swallowed a nuclear bomb and got a little bent out of shape. Radiation was a very big thing back then.

Sometimes we laughed at the monsters. I think we laughed at this one, or laughed at the guy holding it on to his own face to make it look really scary and dangerous while this pile of poo or whatever it is pulsates in the corner. This guy obviously had it coming, because he was a Mad Scientist cooking up some sort of goo to make himself invincible.

It just goes on and on while he holds this thing on his face and the poo pulsates.

There are always actors on these shows who look familiar. This guy was in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, wasn't he? He couldn't be, he'd be 156 years old by then. But he looks like him.

I love the reactions of people to the monsters. This is what makes the show so good. The edging away, the terror, the screams. Big tough men, construction workers and wrestlers, start to shriek like little girls.

Here we have a monster montage. The guy in the hard hat is truly terrifying.

This is some years before Nimoy got his big break. I have no idea about the headgear, if he's in space or just some sci-fi beekeeper.

And here's his best bud, who had no qualms about taking jobs for bitter rivals like Outer Limits and Twilight Zone. A job's a job, right, Bill? This also applies to the Loblaws commercials he made in Toronto between the demise of Star Trek and the rise of T. J. Hooker. Better than living out of your truck, like you did for a while, eh, Bill?

This is one of my all-time favorites. It looks sort of like a leaf-shaped cookie cutter. I've never seen anything less scary in my life, and yet, it has the power to blow papers all over the office.

I really wanted to make gifs of that classic opening: "There is nothing wrong with your television set." This REALLY scared me as a kid because my brother Arthur told me it was true: they did control the horizontal; they did control the vertical. I was paralyzed with terror and stuck to my chair, so I never could test the theory. The opening lasted about a minute and a half, so wasn't a good candidate for giffing. Just try to imagine a theramin playing the theme song.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

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Branded!

Just stumbled on this while wasting time and not writing (my fave activity, it seems - writing is for the birds, I'm done with it anyway). It's one of the better themes of '60s TV: a mini-Western in 2 1/2 minutes. Back then, a theme/intro lasted long enough to tell a story, to let it unfold. Whoever directed this was a genius - the stark black-and-white images, one after the other - the drums, the broken sword, the stripped buttons and braid. And Chuck Connors, my God, who remembered this face, he is a GOD! It's not craggy so much as enigmatic, mojo-loaded in its sere stillness like some Easter Island statue about to be toppled. Western heroes were known for not emoting, and he's so good at it that it flips over and becomes its opposite. I did watch a few of these, but I was ten years old, for God's sake, and what did I know of exile? Since then I came to know it by name, I ate that dust over and over again and had my gold braid torn off by any number of varieties of shame. I walked in that desert and went eye-to-eye with snakes and hallucinated with Moses and searched for water in the rock. It changes you, such exile. You never find your way back. Not entirely. That's just not the way it happens.

Weird-ass old TV show gifs

Yes, I remember Tom Ewell, who could forget, he was in that movie with Marilyn Monroe, Some Like it Hot, wasn't it, or no, it was The Seven-Year Itch I think. But this is a way weird-ass show because, uh, The Tom EWELL show? Who'd a known.

I don't have dates for these, but I suspect they're 1958 - 1962-ish, because in that era most sitcoms began with stylish but very primitive animation. This one reminds me just a little bit of a later gem, My World and Welcome To It, loosely based on the works of James Thurber. William Windom, I think. I'll never forget his turn, or turns, on Star Trek, sweating and freaking out. Or was it someone else?

You can't tell me there was actually a show by this name on TV. Looks like a failed pilot, or something that maybe lasted a season. Then again. O. K. Crackerby! with Burl Ives was a real show, and it knocked me over to realize it. Notice how they cleverly combined "cracker barrel" (folksy wisdom) with "cracker" (po' white trash, which he was supposed to be in the show, and probably was in real life).

This reminds me so much of another '60s sitcom intro  I giffed, that also showed a couple driving home and doing zany things, but now I can't remember either of their names. Peter and Mary ring no bells either.

Love that station wagon. 

I've heard of My Sister Eileen, but not as a TV show, and the intro is so bizarre and '60s that I just had to include it. 

I don't know why this doesn't say The Weird Brothers. It looks like three Swiss guys, bellringers or something, with bells for hats. A kindergartner using left-handed scissors could have made better cutouts than these, that's all I can say. I said weird-ass, and I gave you weird-ass.

William Windom's finest hour in The Doomsday Machine. 

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Captain Kangaroo: the lost tapes

Hurray, hurrah: welcome to hell!

It wasn't good, my childhood. Few and far between were the real joys, and this wasn't one of them. But we sort of watched the show anyway. I must have kept watching it right up until high school, because I distinctly remember my seatmate Patty sending up the "hurray, hurrah" theme song with "c'mon and take a hm-hm" (meaning, presumably, a dump).

This whole genre is creepy and sick, a big man controlling a little man of childlike proportions, making him say things, making him DO things he would not normally say or do because he is nothing but a chunk of molded particle-board adorned with bits of plastic.

I couldn't escape Edgar Bergen altogether (and for those who are too young to remember - in other words, everybody - he was Candice Bergen's Dad and an old vaudeville entertainer, a ventriloquist who performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in his dotage). He appeared mostly on the radio with his dummy Charlie McCarthy, a smart-ass hunk of particle board famous for parrying with W. C. Fields. But think of it: a ventriloquist on the radio? Isn't that sort of like tap-dancing on the radio, or doing card tricks? What the fuck was THAT all about?

When he showed up on Ed Sullivan, it was plain he wasn't even trying to avoid moving his lips. He didn't even talk out of the side of his mouth, and no one cared. None of this business of drinking a glass of water while Charlie sang Vesti la Guibba.

I might have posted some of these photos before, who knows. They are hideous. The things that children had to endure in the name of entertainment is awful to contemplate, but the thing is, this stuff used to be really popular! A form of it still exists in weirder circles, like on TLC's My Strange Obsession.

Such an extreme form of the black arts lends itself to movie treatments and episodes of the Twilight Zone. The dummy talks all by himself, blows up the theatre, etc. or cuts his master's throat. For some reason Gary Oldman did a whole buncha gifs pretending he was a ventriloquist's dummy, so I thought, why not, even if he doesn't really look like one.

 

Gahhhhh!

My question is: if Gary Oldman really is playing a ventriloquist's dummy here, where is the ventriloquist? Who has his hand shoved up his back, who is yanking his string? Who throws him into the trunk at the end of the day and locks it? Who takes home all the earnings, not even sparing his dummy a few crumbs of sawdust?

The dummy exceeds even the doll in spiritual significance/menace, because he says things (lots of things, not like Chatty Cathy), carries on conversations, and seems to have a will of his own. This must go back to something very ancient, like the Very Ancient Creepy Ventriloquist's Dummy Ritual That Scared Everybody Shitless. But people came anyway, and paid good money.

 

This is my personal favorite: the Dying Dummy, his nurse at the ready with a horse syringe. The grin on his face reveals his delirium, if not his masochism. How can a dummy die if he isn't even alive in the first place? Doesn't this smack of zombie ritual and voodoo? THIS is children's entertainment?

Hurray?. . . Hurrah? I think we're in hell.