The Different Ones/Tell David.../Logoda's Heads

'The Different Ones' - Dana Andrews plays a troubled father whose unhappy son is deemed too ugly to live in society, and so is sent on an interplanetary exchange mission which has unexpected results... Though derivative of "The Twilight Zone", episode 'Eye Of The Beholder', likable tale has a most heart-warming finale, a rarity for this series(that is part of the twist I think...)

'Tell David' - A woman(played by Sandra Dee) gets an unexpected trip to the future where an important warning goes unheeded... Good tale by story editor Gerald Sanford explores the nature of fate and responsibility.

'Lagoda's Heads' - Unremarkable tale of African voodoo revenge.

The monorail, red Jaguar police loudspeaker car, and the quartet of flying policemen footage was ripped off from the (quite good) Oskar Werner & Julie Christie film 'Fahrenheit 451.'

I never cared for the 'Night Gallery' series, as I consider it to have been poorly written and crudely filmed in comparison to Serling's far superior 'The Twilight Zone' series.

'Night Gallery' also included a lot of occult/horror episodes, a genre rarely seen in 'The Twilight Zone' program, and occult/horror has never appealed to me.

Have fun, Folks!

I agree with an earlier reviewer that "The Different Ones" bears marked resemblances to Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder," which Serling also wrote. The crucial difference is that "Eye" reeked of quality, whereas "Ones" reeks of ineptitude. The light and shadow play that characterized much of "Eye" kept us largely in the dark until it was revealed--at the bitter end--that the protagonist was the lone (or nearly lone) beauty adrift amid a hideously ugly populace. The episode made a sort of intrinsic sense: you could almost genetically divide it into the pig-people and the people-people. "The Different Ones," however, postulates utter lunacy: a profoundly deformed man on Earth is sent to a planet where the normal population just happen to match his every feature. As if that were not bad enough, his "profoundly deformed" counterpart from the planet Vorion is--guess what--a fellow who would pass for drop-dead gorgeous on Earth. Are the odds even calculable that, among two disparate planets, the outsiders of planet A would physically match the insiders of planet B, and vice-versa? PUH-LEEZ! (It's also profoundly ridiculous that--in the 1970s--we could be entirely ignorant of Vorion, a planet that, it is claimed, lies just beyond the orbit of Mars . . . but I digress.)

I take serious umbrage with "Logoda's Heads," as well, almost from top to bottom. First, the episode was profoundly cheaply filmed: assuming that my aging TV is not to blame--which it assuredly is not--the level of background lighting and tinting ranges from a light purple sky one moment to a deep green sky the next moment; and, while we trek from one valley, over a short hillock, to the next valley, the background lighting changes from day, to night, back to day. O.K. That's bad enough. Here's where the anthropology gets so backward that my beloved Prof. Stephanie Fins would be forced to commit seppuku. We have a black (= African) sorcerer, and a black "anti-sorcerer" (the young girl), and--I think--a black old woman situated among an Amazonian people. In addition to the Amazonian shrunken head fetishes ("tsantsas"), the Logoda is fond of shaking ironwood statuettes that are--unless my memory escapes me--quite West African, whether Dahomeyan or, in fact, Malian not being terribly important. Then, the young girl refers to the "native" animals, to wit, leopards and hyenas--none of which are to be found in South America (though, I'm sure, some rake will point out, "Aha! You can find leopards and hyenas at the Sao Paulo zoo!" {There's one in every crowd.}). I mean, how ridiculous does ridiculous get? There is definitely some good material to be found on Night Gallery, but you won't find it amid this pair of corkers!

I can't comment on the third segment about "David" insofar as my chopped, sliced, diced, and regurgitated version of "Night Gallery" as shown on the MeTV cable network at 1:30AM did not condescend to sport that third piece. Pity.

These three episodes are a little on the weak side, in my opinion. The first "The Different Ones," for me, was just warmed-over Twilight Zone. A young man who lives in an "advanced" culture has the great misfortune to be born deformed. He is hideous to the eyes of everyone and his father, who feels greatly for his misfortune, doesn't know what to do. One of the options for people born this way is termination. They have, for whatever, reason, developed an exchange program with another planet. The wind up...and the pitch.

"Tell David..." is an odd episode. A woman loses her way, trying to find her house, and ends up getting help from some odd people. They have technology beyond that which she is used to. David, the young man (who has the same name as her little boy) is a master at repairing devices she's never seen. When she returns to her husband, he is dressed as a monster and nags at her and chases her. It is obvious that this is the way he sees her. She is monumentally jealous. She comes to realize that she has an opportunity to change her history, to prevent herself from doing a deadly thing. As it goes along, it becomes nonsensical. It also gets caught in the problems with the mutation of time.

"Lagoda's Heads" concerns a couple of men who visit a medicine man in an African jungle. The brother of one of them has disappeared and it is suspected that Lagoda, the medicine man, is responsible. Lagoda does things with shrunken heads that he talks to. He also can put curses on people. A young woman who is cursed, tells the man his brother has been there. Through a series of spells and counter-spells involving the young woman, everything comes to a "head." Or I guess it's heads. Terrible acting and another convoluted plot.

This episode of "Night Gallery" is quite honestly just Rod Serling blatantly ripping himself off. "The Different Ones" is just "Eye Of The Beholder" from the original "The Twilight Zone" series with a boy instead of a girl and a planet of disfigured inhabitants...or is it two? The problem is that "Eye Of The Beholder" was directed with style and made the viewer care about the central characters of the story. The only thing "The Different Ones" has going for it is...well...that it's in color and incorporates some N.A.S.A. footage which I'm sure was riveting at the time. Oh, there was also some stock footage of what I believe was the monorail from Disney World to help make the planet Earth look futuristic...that was absolutely hilarious...along with some random announcements over a P.A. system concerning "flying policemen" (on very visible wires and some very bad green screen) and something about aliens landing and then later being found to be "friendly"...not sure what that was except possibly a way of stretching out the story to fit the formatted running time. This is definitely not one of the better "Night Gallery" episodes.