On building a twonky in the familiar shape of a contemporary TV set, the engineer disappears back into the future, leaving the twonky behind to cause havoc. What is a ‘twonky’, you ask? In Lewis Padgett’s original short story, twonkies are mysterious, sentient devices of the future, constructed by engineers, one of whom has fallen backwards through time to 1942. A few years later, Oboler’s liberal values and his burgeoning hatred for television found a meeting place in a story first published in the September 1942 edition of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, ‘The Twonky’. Oboler expanded on his values on moving to film, with his directorial debut Strange Holiday (1945) telling the story of an unsuspecting small US town falling to foreign tyranny. Amid the spooks and chills of Lights Out, Oboler would slip in an episode establishing the virtues of democracy over fascism or communism, and the apparent ease through which agents could infiltrate American defenses. One man angry at this state of affairs was the latter-day writer and producer of Lights Out, Arch Oboler.Ī vehement anti-fascist, Oboler often used his radio dramas as benevolent propaganda for the American way of life. Radio became home to music and chat, with the soaps, dramas and thrillers left to the ‘picture box’. As with many other radio shows of the time, Lights Out emigrated to television, running for three years on NBC from 1949. Around 1950, an evening’s radio schedule looked much like a TV schedule, a mix of comedy, drama, light entertainment, and suspense shows like Lights Out, a kind of gorier audio Twilight Zone that ran on and off on both NBS and CBS’s radio networks between 19. From a 1930s scientific novelty, television developed into the ascendant medium, having already overhauled radio, changing it forever. One early exception came with Murder By Television (1935), a stultifying and stagy whodunnit starring Bela Lugosi, wherein the inventor of a new process allowing TV pictures to be beamed around the world is murdered by the villain making a phone call in the next room, the combined waves creating a death ray, which apparently is a thing that can happen. For the most part, Hollywood dealt with television by feigning ignorance of its existence. The early 1950s were a transitional time in the relationship between television and film. Lynn, Gloria BlondellĪs we grow older, it’s easy to forget our childhood fears, when objects ordinary to an adult take on sinister qualities, inexplicable and unreasonable, beyond a child’s ability to articulate: the gnarled tree near grandma’s house the alarming silhouette of an otherwise loved cuddly toy the patterned wallpaper in uncle’s sitting room that twists into facial features if you squint that old TV set in the attic, with its grey, dead eye, waiting to draw you into eternal black-and-whiteness, to enact endless forgotten TV shows…
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