Here’s the rundown:

10 AM Desert Justice w/ Hoyt Axton
12 PM The Gunmen (Currently in a 5 way tie for 3rd best grabs in the catalog!)
2 PM The Spanish Grant w/ Sebastian Cabot
4 PM The Stranger Ultra-Angry Lorne!
6 PM The Abduction Circus people. ‘Nuf sed.
8 PM Death at Dawn Ben is going to be hung.
10 PM Day of Reckoning Kahn tries to kill Adama. More or less.
12 AM Escape to Ponderosa

Note this is being run a little differently than most of our special events. Episodes start at the given time, and run until either they’re done or the next start time. Gaps will be filled in with ‘regularly scheduled’ material.

The second one is Gateways to the Mind, with animation by Chuck Jones. It also features 10 seconds of clown footage so disturbing that every time I tried to save it to send to YouTube, my editor crashed. [Update 1/4/8: I was finally able to upload it. Do not view with your eyes open.] Since these each weighed in at around 50 minutes to begin with and produced so many grabs they’d have run for at least twice that, I’ve actually split them up into two parts each, that will run separately. But I’ve also added both films to the catalog, so you can request showings in their entirety via the links above.

On the “IS Playhouse” front, the big addition is that after adding the soon to run “Escape to Ponderosa” (Bonanza episode 35), I’ve run out of new Bonanzas to add to the rotation for the moment. So, I’ve taken this occasion to double its presence by dumping seven episodes that haven’t been capped in a while into the playhouse rotation. I’ve tried to trim most of these to a more reasonable number of grabs than on previous runs, which should hopefully make the Bonanza haters out there a little happier about the addition. My impression is that maybe 25% of you really enjoy capping this show, another 25% don’t enjoy it, and the rest of you are just happy to be here (to coin a phrase).

The episodes I’ve just put back into play include appearances from Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo Montalban, and Jack Elam. The “new” episode, Escape to Ponderosa features a fine performance by Joe Maross, who appeared in over 100 TV shows and movies during the course of his career. However, if he’s remembered by anybody under the age of 40 or so (particularly msties) it’s usually for just one of those roles, particularly one line, on The Twilight Zone. He’s the guy who said “I’m the god!” in The Little People (episode 93). Anyway, my aim is to keep Bonanza at around its present level of 5% of the Playhouse grabs by dumping episodes back into rotation as I add new grabs from other sources. Of course, that means it will probably take another year or so to get the 10 episodes I have laying fallow on my HD back into the mix, so I may have to run them for Lorne’s birthday or add them to the request catalog, even if nobody’s going to request them.

If I might backtrack to the subject of Hans Conried for a moment, I’ll point out that by coincidence I ended up watching Peter Pan (with features two of his more famous roles) last night for the first time that I can concretely remember. Well, in as much as you can say you watched a movie when your four year old niece was asking to know why almost every plot point happened. She finally seemed satisfied when I explained “because Captain Hook’s a bitter old bastard, Peter’s an emotionally stunted freak, Tink is a catty b, and Wendy’s getting ready to unleash all sorts of hormones on her body.” At least, she stopped asking me questions after that.

In order to serve you better (or maybe just mix things up) I’m moving around the ‘programming blocks’ at Inventing Situations. There’s still going to be five hours a day of ‘Non-Ephemeral’ films (e.g. feature films and tv shows), they’ll just be playing at different hours. Here’s the new schedule. It can also be found on the info page.

I’ve decreased the Library of Congress images to one hour a day since they’re repeating a lot faster than either of the larger collections.

In the coming weeks and months I’ll be tinkering with the schedule a little more:

• Adding another hour of “Non-Ephemeral” films.
• After Thanksgiving, I’ll be adding all of this year’s new to IS turkey-day movies to the regular rotation. There should be at least five this year. I’ll proceed to drop in the rest at some steady rate.
• Bonanza: Six new to IS episodes should start showing up in a month or two. Once those have premiered, the 18 episodes I’ve already run will start appearing.
• Plus, I’m toying with yet another programming block. It’s material that technically could go in with the feature films, but that I think will work better on their own.

While I’m discussing picture sources, thought I’d offer an update on how my campaign to add grabs has been going since I last discussed it:

Without considering the 1,500+ images I’ve tossed from the ephemeral collection, that’s around 75 grabs a day.

One last thought: Can anybody suggest a better phrase than “Non-Ephemeral Films”. I’m looking for a term that differentiates them from the “ephemeral films”, acknowledges the fact that they conist of more than just feature films (there’s cartoons, tv shows, movie trailers, Three Stooges shorts, and drive in ads in there too), and is less awkward and obscure than “Non-Ephemeral”.