When the president and vice president spent election afternoon out hunting together, I couldn't help but think about Dick Cheney. wouldn't the coroner think it strange that part of the possible assassin's finger had no bone or fingernail? And stretching out the original Selby's finger after the replacement. Whenever we got a close-up, it looked like Blackmer simply bent back his finger. The detail of Selby's missing finger was cool, but inconsistent. The newspaper photo of Selby with a Native American, both wearing the stereotypical headdresses, was weird as well as racially insensitive. Phillip Pine also played Colonel Green in the Star Trek episode, " The Savage Curtain." I kept thinking that I knew the actor who played Ted, and I did. No one ever said the word "China" but it was obvious which country's dictator was behind the plot. It was obvious that they were simply using a bust and modeling clay, but I thought the way the face got smushed was somewhat effective. Ditto with how they demonstrated what the drug would do. It's too bad the mask looked so simple, like an oblong mixing bowl, although the lack of airholes was mildly disturbing. Really, the only genuine science fictiony stuff in this episode was the "plastic surgery" drug and the accompanying metal mask. Science fiction details, effects and photography It was a nice little tribute to thinking a dangerous situation through instead of reacting impulsively, something our current president seems incapable of doing. I also thought it was interesting that Ted, about to become president, decided not to declare war in retaliation. While Sidney Blackmer did pretty well as Bill Selby and his double, I thought the more interesting performance was by Phillip Pine as Ted Pearson, the vice president, who figured out what was going on after his own double fluffed the replacement, and who worked out a rational way to expose the fake president without appearing to be a lunatic.
#STARGATE A HUNDRED DAYS MOVIE#
I remember a scene much like that but freakier in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a movie that came out in 1956 and had to have inspired the writer. Even so, it made complete sense that Selby's grown daughter Carol, and Ted, the vice president who was apparently a close friend and not just a barely tolerated political ally, noticed small differences in Selby. Selby was an "eligible bachelor" (I assume he was a widower) so there was no wife to notice intimate physical differences.
#STARGATE A HUNDRED DAYS SKIN#
No guards at all? Unrealistic, even for 1963.īut I thought they did a good job, especially so far back then, in addressing the massive amount of detail that would be involved in creating a believable double: body size, skin coloration, the mimicking of the voice, the "plastic surgery" used to change not only the face but also the fingerprints, and the key point of attempting to expose Selby's double using dental x-rays. Not to mention that I was also thrown completely out of any suspension of belief by a president and vice president so readily accessible to anyone right off the street.
No monster of the week on an Outer Limits episode? Seriously? The tinkling faux-Asian musical score made me cringe, and so did the fact that when post-replacement Selby was alone and trying to look villainous, Sidney Blackmer squinted his eyes. I didn't remember this episode from my youth, and found it disappointing. I did some reading about early television show episodes that were pulled, and the earliest might have been "The Ricardos Visit Cuba," a 1956 I Love Lucy episode that aired only once and was then pulled. If they'd planned to air it later than they did, it might have been the very first episode of anything pulled because of a real life event. president and aired two months before the Kennedy assassination.
It was also eerily prescient in that it featured the murder of a U.S. While the pilot episode tasted a lot like The Day the Earth Stood Still, "The Hundred Days of the Dragon" was sort of like The Manchurian Candidate had a love baby with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A United States presidential candidate is replaced by an evil double, and things do not go well.
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