Repeat Report: Summer 1964 (Part 2)

The second half of The Outer Limits' summer 1964 schedule started on 7/13/1964 with... well, nothing. The show was pre-empted that week, as it would be again a couple of months later. With two holes in the schedule, it's particularly mystifying that "The Special One" was aired not once, but twice... and those airings were only a month apart. Madness, I tells ya, madness!

7/13/64: N/A (no episode broadcast)

7/20/64: The Special One

7/27/64: ZZZZZ

8/03/64: Fun and Games

8/10/64: The Chameleon

8/17/64: The Special One

(2^nd airing!)

8/24/64: N/A (no episode broadcast)

8/31/64: The Architects of Fear

9/07/64: The Man With the Power

Repeat Report: Summer 1964 (Part 1)

Remember when television seasons ran for 30 weeks or more? When so many episodes were produced during the year that the summer rerun season wasn’t enough to repeat them all?  Those days appear to be long, long gone (do the networks even rerun stuff anymore?). These days a show starts a new season, runs for 13 weeks, and then vanishes until almost a year later (but gets a DVD/Blu-ray release before the next season starts). I miss the old days, when a show occupied a time slot year-round. Same day, same time, same channel… that’s where it lived; where you could always find it, new episode or not.

Fifty years ago tonight, The Outer Limits aired its very first repeat, launching an 18-week look back at its triumphant first season. We’ll address the first half here, and the other half… well, halfway through.

5/11/64: Specimen: Unknown

5/18/64: The Sixth Finger

5/25/64: The Man Who Was Never Born

6/01/64: Moonstone

6/08/64: O.B.I.T.

6/15/64: Nightmare

6/22/64: Corpus Earthling

6/29/64: It Crawled Out of the Woodwork

7/06/64: 

The Human Factor

The first batch of reruns is a mixed bag. It starts off on a seriously questionable foot with “Specimen: Unknown,” possibly the worst episode of the season (feel free to argue; I know many of you would rate “The Special One” beneath it, maybe “Production and Decay of Strange Particles” too). We do get mostly top-grade episodes throughout, though I’d argue that both “The Human Factor,” "Moonstone," and the aforementioned “Specimen: Unknown” should’ve been ignored in favor of episodes that weren't repeated at all. For your reading (dis)pleasure, here are the episodes that were never reprised:

The Galaxy Being

The Hundred Days of the Dragon

The Borderland

Tourist Attraction

The Zanti Misfits

The Mice

Controlled Experiment

Don’t Open Till Doomsday

The Invisibles

The Bellero Shield

The Children of Spider County

Second Chance

The Mutant

The Guests

A Feasibility Study

Production and Decay of Strange Particles

The Forms of Things Unknown

Kinda horrific, ain't it? I know not every worthwhile episode can be repeated, but there were certainly enough grade-A episodes to fill the entire summer without revisiting the lesser efforts

As you’ll see in a couple of months or so, the second half of the summer will include choices that are even more mystifying.