Around the dial

We're on to a new Hitchcock Project at bare-bones e-zine, as Jack looks at the output of Helen Nielsen, starting with the season five episode "Letter of Credit," with Robert Bray as a mysterious stranger in search of—what? You'll just have to watch and find out.

At Cult TV Blog, John continues his review of Hammer House of Horror with one of the series' most popular episodes, "The Two Faces of Evil," which makes very effective use of many horror tropes. It involves a hitchhiker, and you know that's always a promising start to a horror story.

David takes on the fad of retconning characters and events from classic television—in this case, it's the sexual preference of Scooby-Doo's Velma. Leaving the ideological aspects of this aside, it speaks to something I've criticized for a long time: our inability to view the past through anything other than a contemporary filter.

I've always enjoyed Michael Rennie; even so, there's a part of me that wishes his version of Harry Lime in the TV series The Third Man had been played by the original third man, Orson Welles. At Silver Scenes, we get a series that Welles did appear in, albeit as host only: Orson Welles' Great Mysteries. I suspect it was just the right amount of work for Welles.

Paul returns to the world of the telemovie at Drunk TV with his review of The U.F.O. Incident, "the marvelously creepy 1975 NBC made-for-TV sci-fi docudrama depicting real-life couple Betty and Barney Hill’s supposed 'alien abduction' in September, 1961." Did the abduction really happen? As always, you be the judge.

Finally, at A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence takes us back to The High Chaparral, the 1967-71 NBC Western that was revolutionary for its time, with Latinos making up 50% of the show's characters. It was a tough, gritty series, much more so than most of its Western contemporaries, and of course it had one of TV's great themes. It's a good note to end on, no pun intended. TV