The Prisoner

Cheese is the thing that really envelops the anxiety, that envelops the fear.

It's like the escape orb thing from The Prisoner.

You know what I'm talking about? Anyway, that's me, but I will tell you what emotion is shining through, and that is enthusiasm.

enthusiasm for today's episode because my guest this week is david reese and if you don't know who david is i'm going to read you his bio right now originally from chapel hill north carolina cartoonist and humorous david reese first gained acclaim during the bush years with his comic strip get your war on which perfectly captured the insanity of the times In 2010, David started the satirical artisanal pencil sharpening service and followed that up with the book How to Sharpen Pencils.

the second story.

And also the nineteen eighties release of The Prisoner on VHS, like the second tape for that.

So I just bought a fuckload of that shit, and I was over the moon.

I, I have one Doctor Who fact.

I have to go

with The Prisoner from the 1960s, from the late 1960s, which is so influential on so many different things from Lost to Twin Peaks to Babylon 5, which Baz, I know you're a big fan of.

and talk about a lot, but it's just everywhere in terms of British and American television particularly.

And it is so singular and unique to the 1960s and storytelling, but also to culture.

And it's one of the weirdest things I think anyone's ever made, you know, that Patrick McGowan particularly spearheaded at that time.

And it's creepy and intelligent and strange.

And I just can't recommend that enough to people if you haven't seen The Prisoner, because I think it's truly unique.

For shows that were supposed to be one season, tell me there's a better show than It's a Sin.

Swashbuckler films were big in the silent era, where the sword fighting and stunts provided plenty of dialogue-free spectacle, and they continued on through the 30s and 40s thanks to big-name stars like Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, who specialized in exactly this kind of flashy, visually dazzling material.

But by the 1950s, films like The Crimson Pirate and The Prisoner of Zenda were beginning to fall out of fashion in favor of science fiction movies and westerns, and arguably the truest sign that they were fading fast was the swashbuckler parody The Court Jester, starring the late great Danny Kaye.

Alland himself would transition to sci-fi horror only a year later with 1953's It Came From Outer Space, and he'd continue in that vein for some time with movies like This Island Earth, Tarantula, The Mole People, The Deadly Mantis, and The Space Children, as well as the three Creature from the Black Lagoon movies.

That's not to say that swashbucklers went away, though, and lead actor Richard Green gives us a telling picture of exactly where they disappeared to.

That ran for five years and 144 episodes, and more importantly, it became an extremely profitable export that thoroughly filled the niche Hollywood swashbucklers once occupied.

British studios could simply produce that kind of material cheaper and more authentically due to their ready supply of classically trained actors, and they also produced the extremely popular The Adventures of Sir Lancelot in this era as well.

Eventually, they shifted to hop onto the lucrative James Bond ripoff market with The Saint, Danger Man, and The Prisoner, among others, but I digress.

Doing Robin Hood made Green so wealthy he rarely had to work again, and although he appeared in a couple of Fu Manchu movies opposite the late Christopher Lee, his appearances on screen became fewer and further between.

Yeah, discover everyone.

In case you guys haven't seen my t-shirt today, this is my Unmutual t-shirt, which was the phrase that was used in the TV show The Prisoner to describe...

Number six, they wouldn't say that he was a high quality resistant.

The technical term for what number six was, was a was a high quality resistor.

I mean, we've seen the Stepford Wives.

We've seen the classic British show, The Prisoner.

We've seen The Twilight Zone.

It's a familiar trope.