"'Way Out" (1961) TV series

User Rating:

7.6/10   

Director:

Daniel Petrie

Writer:

Sumner Locke Elliott (writer) (episode)

Seasons:

1

Release Date:

31 March 1961 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Sci-Fi

Plot:

A new drama in the macabre genre was broadcast each week hosted by Roald Dahl.

Plot Keywords:

Anthology

Cast

Roald Dahl

...

Host (9 episodes, 1961)

Runtime:

USA:25 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Filming Locations:

New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Talent Associates

Trivia:

Show's official title ('Way Out) actually begins with an apostrophe, to indicate that it is short for Away Out.

Quotes:

Roald Dahl: I have a maiden aunt in Norway who was actually rolled out of bed onto the floor three nights running, by a ghost. But then she lives in what was once a very old trysting place. About 400 years ago, they bricked up a naughty girl in the wall of that room: that sort of thing always produces a ghost...

Movie Connections:

Featured in Science Fiction: A Journey Into the Unknown (1994) (TV)

Look Out for Way Out

This certainly would make a nice DVD box set. Actors and crew on this show are a who's who of Television in the 1960's. I've only seen 5 episodes all were odd in the best sense of the word and none of these five sound like the best of the series even.

The show features eerie electronic music in part by Robert Colbert who went on to to Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker. Title sequence of hands sticking up like trees out of sand is also memorable.

The show, like Roald Dahl's fiction, has heavy doses of dark dark humor, so much so that it's hard perhaps to call it horror but also hard to accept as just comedy either. This sets it apart from the lighter comedy episodes of other fantasy shows of that, or any, era, and perhaps left a mass TV audience confused and abandoned. It certainly had a good lead in time slot right before Twilight Zone and would make a nice lead in to those shows.

So it's too bad, though maybe not too much of a surprise, that the show didn't catch on. Someone bring these to DVD to be rediscovered as they deserve to be. Seems like a show ahead of it's time. Looks to have been shot on video, though copy I saw was so murky it was hard to tell.