MovieChat Forums > The Mummy's Hand (1940) Discussion > Incompatible 'Trivia' items

Incompatible 'Trivia' items


With italics instead of links for film titles:

The second "Trivia" note reads: "Due to a clerical oversight, The Mummy's Hand (1940) was never legally made available for television viewings, and remained largely unseen until Universal Studios['] VHS release in 1997. It was also the lone mummy feature that Realart did not own the theatrical rights to issue in the late 40's-early 50's. Viewers who attended screenings of its sequel, The Mummy's Tomb (1942), did get to see about 15 minutes of footage cribbed from this film"

The fifth (and at this writing, final) one: "Part of the original SHOCK THEATER package of 52 Universal titles released to television in 1957, followed a year later with SON OF SHOCK, which added 21 more features."

Obviously, these are absolutely incompatible and one must be wrong. As the latter is appended ver batim to many of these vintage Universal horror pictures, one might assume that it was posted here virtually on automatic. However, the other is quite problematic. The "15 minutes of footage cribbed from this film" seen in the first sequel is mostly lifted from The Mummy (1932), with more-or-less close-ups of Tom Tyler and/or tanna leaves in place of similar shots of Boris Karloff and/or the Scroll of Thoth (instructions for resurrecting the dead). The total running time of footage in this sequence actually shot for ...Hand is almost certainly less than half of it, but this is somewhat picky. More significantly, I myself definitely saw ...Hand on US television, a local station in Denver, Colorado (specifically KWGN-TV, channel 2, owned by the Tribune company), in the 1970s, and I believe again in the 1980s on a basic cable channel (TBS?). This is highly consistent with the SHOCK THEATER release claim, and certainly incompatible with "...never legally made available for television viewings...." Can somebody come up with a verified list of the SHOCK titles to settle this once and for all? Please!

The GREEN HORNET Strikes Again!

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Well...I first saw "The Mummy's Hand" on Saturday April 4 1987 on Monster
Movie Matinee...a local Syracuse, NY show that ran on Ch 3 on Saturday afternoons.

Then I recorded it off AMC on Wed Sept 20 1989...That's when AMC ran movies uncut
and commercial free.

Now I own "The Mummy Legacy" DVDs.

And yes..."The Mummy's Hand" was part of the first Shock package from 1957.
It made it's NYC debut on Shock Theater on Thursday Jan 2, 1958...11:15 PM

Then it made it's debut in Philly on their Shock Theater program on Friday Feb 28, 1958.
I don't know the dates for the rest of the country.

Anyway..."The Mummy's Hand" has been on New York TV since Jan 1958 and has
been shown once a year or more on different channels in NY until 2003.

And then on cable from 1989...until 2008 that I know of?

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Thank you. Since the note about this film being "largely unseen" has now been shown to be false (with the possible exception of the Realart exclusion, but knowing that the rest of it is wrong means giving that little if any weight), as soon as my unrelated update submission to the same film is dealt with, I'll ask for its removal. Thanks again.

The GREEN HORNET Strikes Again!

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One thing u didn't list in most parts of the nation Tomb played first.

See some stars here
http://www.vbphoto.biz/

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I saw it at the same time on the same station in Syracuse! NBC had a Universal film, perhaps two, every Saturday.

Then you could flip over to channel 9, which usually had an American-International movie or a Japanese giant monster flick.

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Actually, the The Mummy's Tomb DOES feature an unbearably long flashback sequence in the beginning re-capping the events of The Mummy's Hand, done simply to pad out the former's running time. So you're wrong there.


"...When they found her, she was still smiling."

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