Daily Archives: September 19, 2007

Mystery Solved

Oh my goodness, after all these years.

Do you ever have like some snatch of memory of something, something you saw in a movie or on TV when you were a kid, and can’t remember what it was or who was in it? I’ve had this one bugging me for years, and now I’ve got it nailed.

There was an earlier one, bugged me for a long time. All I remembered was that something was happening in a jungle, where some kind of tribe or clan worshiped this white rhinoceros. I seemed to remember Doug McClure and maybe Jane Seymour in it.

Through the magic of IMDB, I was able to do a plot summary search on white rhino, and came up with some British b-movie from the mid-sixties called alternatively Prehistoric Women or Slave Girls, the latter apparently being the UK theatrical title and the former being the US television title. I would have seen the US TV version, natch. No Doug McClure or Jane Seymour in sight, however, but I’m sure this one’s it.

Another one that’s nagged me, a lot longer, and much harder to pin down, was some scene in some sort of futuristic college classroom, where at the end one of the students gets shot in the head and we come to find out that he’s a robot. Oh, man, no amount of Googling has ever got me close to finding this one.

But then today, for no reason that I can now determine, I decide that maybe it’s from an episode of Night Gallery. So I go toodling through episode guides, first on IMDB, then on epguides.com. Hmmm, there’s an episode in the second season called Class of 99. That sounds promising. Had Vincent Price and a young Randolph Mantooth. I sure don’t remember them being in it, but still, not a deal-breaker.

I follow a link from epguides.com to a review at tv.com by one Blugis, who says, “Full of surprises, Class of 99 opens on the day of finals at an unknown, unnamed university sometime in the future (most likely 1999). We see these students answer complex questions, that gradually become more about bahavioral [sic] responses. You start to realize that this is no ordinary group of students, and soon you’re drawn into the story, wanting to know just what is happening between them as their behavior starts to change.” He also calls it “[t]he best episode in the series.”

Still, nothing conclusive, but nowadays we’ve got Google video search and YouTube. And sure enough, somebody’s ripped the thing and posted it on YouTube, in two parts. And, oh yeah baby, this is it! Mystery solved!

It’s really not that good, ultimately, watching it now, but it sure spooked me as a kid, haunting me these last thirty-five years or so.