Tuesday, July 21, 2015

GHWP Live Tweet July 28, 2015 - Spectreman and The Hypnotic Eye



Live Tweet Selections:
Episode 34 - The Wrath of Moonthunder
Episode 35 - Is Spectreman Dead?


      The Apollo program makes a second landing on the moon this week, and the American space explorers discover a luminescent stone on the lunar surface.

Should we tamper with the unknown? Yeah, let's tamper.
     Dr. Gori, in his superior intelligence that has failed him at least thirty times up to this point, proclaims that only he has the right to explore the solar system, and he and Karas pursue the Earth astronauts to jump their claim of the mysterious rock. Both Gori and the Apollo spacecraft, however, are caught off-guard when they discover that the moon rock has something else coming to claim it: a giant lunar monster called Moonthunder. For some reason unknown to the humans and Gori, Moonthunder wants the stone back, and Dr. Gori is content to sit back, let the creature do the dirty work destroying the planet, and then swoop in to pick up the pieces of his conquest just like any despot would do.

     Moonthunder touches down in America, wreaking havoc in an attempt to find the moon stone, and Spectreman flies to New York to find a way to stop the monster. Everything changes after this story, so you won't want to miss its conclusion.


     If you feel like staying up late after Spectreman, then we've got an extra special treat sure to strike your fancy. #TrashTue followers especially may want to be on hand for this late evening spectacle as we bring you an episode of Joe Riley's The Hypnotic Eye.

One of my heroes.

     Before there was YouTube, there was VHS and public cable access. The YouTube generation has so much at their fingertips, and it is easy to take for granted. A young viewer might look at this and think that it is nothing special, but a young viewer would be wrong. A young viewer probably would not have some of the things we have on YouTube at all if not for the dedication that obscure media curators like the late Joe Riley had to show you things from the wild corners of the underground and the hidden recesses of international borders.

     The Hypnotic Eye was a Dallas, Texas, public access show that ran in the late 90s, several years before YouTube was born. For whatever reason, there was no mention whatsoever of The Hypnotic Eye on Joe Riley's Wikipedia page until I added it myself during this write-up. If you are a fan of Night Flight from the '80s and remember the Church of the Subgenius, then the late, great Joe Riley is not unfamiliar to you. Riley was responsible for much of the media editing in the early Subgenius videos, and his editing style holds true in The Hypnotic Eye. The series itself, which ran twelve episodes, was, for lack of a better word, inspired. The title of the show was taken from the 1960 horror movie of the same name, and Riley used the theme from Ultra Q as his theme song. In 1996, fair use was a lot more lenient, and a great deal of the music and video footage used on The Hypnotic Eye came from foreign films and television not commercially available in the US. Riley loved this obscure material, and he wanted to share it with the masses. Today, of course, so much of this material can be found on the Internet if you know where to look, but in 1996, people like Joe Riley had to spend hours in a room with stacks of traded basement VHS tapes putting together their final product, just one of which I am presenting for you tonight.

     I grew up only two hours from Dallas, but I, sadly, was out of cable range for this phenomenal show. When I watch it, there are days when I wonder if I wasn't abducted from the Riley family as an infant and raised elsewhere. This show encompasses everything I love about movies and television, and it deserves to be seen and shared. All twelve episodes can be seen on archive.org, and more than half of them are also on YouTube. #GHWP will be featuring one of the best episodes of the series, episode two, as its selection for tonight.

     There really is no description of this show that does it justice, so I won't try. It is difficult to describe just what you will see because you will be seeing a multitude of things at once. It is a clip show, a puppet show, a live music concert, an underground movie theater, and a trip around the world all rolled into one. When it is over, you may feel like you just spent an hour flipping through a set of channels you wish you had, and you may have a long list of things you want to go looking for in their entirety. If you are a follower of #TrashTue, #Driveinmob, and #Riffotronic, then this certainly is something that will appeal to you.

Spectreman and The Hypnotic Eye (plus another exciting episode of Go! Greenman!) will be wiling away the hours starting at 10:45EST, after #TrashTue.

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