Popular Culture 20100412: Bewitched

(10 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Bewitched was an extremely popular TeeVee show, beginning in the early 1960s.  It starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, the witch who fell in love with a mortal, Dick York as Darrin, the mortal who in turn fell in love with her, and the great actress Agnes Moorehead as Endora, Samantha’s mum.

Endora did not like Darrin very much.  She did not like mortals very much, and I think that that was part of the success of the show.  There was some tension there.

The supporting actors were pretty good, too, for such a silly show.  Agnes Kravets would always see them doing magick, but her husband, Abner, always just missed it, and thought that Agnes was daft.

There is a back story to that, and it has to do with the brilliant writer, producer, and director Rod Serling.  His seminal TeeVee show, The Twilight Zone, became real in 1959, as I recollect.  There have been many attempts to reproduce it, but it stands as, in my opinion, one of the highest highs that TeeVee ever found.

All three of the main stars in Bewitched had other roles in The Twilight Zone.  I shall leave it to the readers to identify the specific episodes, but I shall describe them.  That program was sort of a proving ground for new actors (I include both sexes in that term), and also a sort of a way for some old ones to retire with a bang.  Buster Keaton comes to mind, with one of the most wonderful installments ever.

Look at the folks who have been on that show, and I know that I am leaving out probably more than 90 per cent of them.  William Shatner, James Doohan, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Redford, Burgess Meridith, Mickey Rooney, Donna Douglas, Anne Francis, and many, many others.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about Bewitched, but you can be assured that a The Twilight Zone one will be here at some time.  In Bewitched, Darrin, a mortal, falls in love with a witch (not a Pagan, but one who can actually perform magick, and they marry.  

Darrin was played by Dick York, who in The Twilight Zone had the ability to hear other peoples’ thoughts because he stood a quarter dollar coin on edge when buying a newspaper.  That was a very good episode of TZ.

Samantha was in a TZ episode with a very young Charles Bronson that had to with after the nuclear holocaust, one of Serling’s favorite themes.  First eminences, it was implied that they became sort of Adam and Eve for the next generation.

Endora had not a speaking word, other than grunts and groans, after tiny little folks invaded her rustic home on another planet in her TZ episode.  It turned out that she was one hundred times taller than the “invaders”, finally shown to be US astronauts.

Bewitched was sort for fun, and used stop screen techniques for most of the “magick”.  They would stop the camera, then bring in or take out what was desired.  That is why it looked so choppy.  They also used very strong steel wire to move things from one place to another, with her hand command.  The wire was so thin that the old cameras in the day would not pick them up at all.  Modern HD would render that approach impossible, but it worked in 1963.

The stories were pretty much impossible, even if one accepts the concept of a real witch, but were funny for the most part.

I look forward to your thoughts about that show, and always say

Warmest regards,

Doc

Crossposted at Kos