Let's pretend that In Search Of... was not cancelled, but went on to a 7th season in 1983. What topics would you like to have seen get the traditional treatment, with Nimoy's narration, and Rinder & Lewis's score?
In Search Of...
*Zombies
*The Ark of the Covenant
*Secret Societies
*Spontaneous Human Combustion
*Satanism
*The Death of John Paul I
Any more suggestions?
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
[deleted]
Well, the Chupacabra wasn't around in 1983 or before; people didn't begin claiming to have seen it until 1995. But that's fine - there's other cryptids to choose from.
*Mothman
*The Jersey Devil
*Werewolves
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
Nice topic. I've often thought of "what might have been" if ISO continued. Here is my list keeping in mind topics ISO might have covered or considered "mysteries" pre-dating 1983...
In Search of...
The Attempted Assassination of Pope John Paul II / Mehemet Ali Agca
Cure for AIDS
Custer's Last Stand
The Death of Mozart
The Fall of the Roman Empire
Jesus Christ
The Honeymoon Island Murders / Glen Consagra
Medicinal Marijuana
The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination
Sea Monsters
Virgin Mary
Viruses
Watergate / Deep Throat
Zodiac
I've noted elsewhere that In Search Of... avoided serious controversy; I'm unsure what the show would say about some of your topics. I think they might have avoided some of them.
In 1983, the Reagan Administration had thus far refused to acknowledge AIDS, much less homosexuals, and HIV wasn't yet discovered until the end of '83 (Montagnier in France; Gallo and his team in '84). Had the ISO team even touched it (which I think unlikely), what could they have said about it?
It's okay; I think they'd have avoided some of my suggestions as well; certainly the death of JP1 would have been too hot for them. Perhaps 'Satanism' as well. They might not do 'the Zodiac' for the same reason they never did 'the Manson Family;' in '83, they might not have necessarily considered it over with. Zodiac might not have stopped killing, and some of the Manson Family were still acting out. Radio DJs still refused to play The White Album on the air.
Pressure from the Reagan White House via the network might have discouraged them from doing RFK, Watergate, JP2/Ali Agca, and Medicinal Marijuana.
I wanted to suggest
*Joseph Smith
*Aleister Crowley
*The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr
but I think they would have had trouble with those topics. Perhaps not MLK, provided they stuck to the official story. How about these?
*The Philadelphia Experiment/USS Eldridge
*Eva Peron
*Spiritism/The Fox Sisters
*Ambrose Bierce
*The Knights Templar
*The Interrupted Journey/Betty & Barney Hill
*Lost Christianities/the Gnostics
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
Enjoying your thread, Poisoned_Dragon1964!
I'll throw out the Tombstone Epitaph's Thunderbird.
http://www.burlingtonnews.net/thunderbird.html
The picture at the link, by the way, is from the brilliant 2000 TV show FreakyLinks.
Someone needs to call Alan Landsburg and try this series once again. Then again, it's all about the feel, Nimoy, and the era production values with this show isn't it?
Histories Mysteries, Monster Quest, Mystery Quest, etc. spend twice the time covering these subjects with little to no style and aren't near as effective.
I used to enjoy the Jack Palance Ripley's Believe it or Not but really can't stand the modern, obnoxious Dean Cain version. It's really all about style, presentation or the lack of it.
~Shadow
Freakosity is a very vast subject.
They did release a new version of In Search Of..... Back in the early 2000s but it wasn't the same.
shareI agree about Palance's Ripley's - the newer one just doesn't do anything for me.
I liked the original Unsolved Mysteries, too!
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
How about In Search Of....
1. Spontaneous human Combustion
2. Mothman
3. The First Americans
4. Alzheimer's Disease
5. Demonic Possessions
6. Sound Power
7. Mind Control Over Women
8. Star Wars
Justice for Caylee Anthony! Death penalty for Casey Anthony!
One on the philadelphia experiment would have been interesting.
It's been ages since I've seen this series ,did they do one on time travel?
Time slips? ie people temporarily moving into different time periods out of nowhere.
Parallel dimensions?
in search of
billy the kid
killer sharks
parallel lives
hope dimond
black holes
fakers from india
doomsday dates
real robots
to name a few i would have liked to seen .
Actually, they've covered the Hope Diamond, in season 3 episode 20, 'The Diamond Curse.'
Memory says, I did that. Pride replies, I could not have done that. Eventually, memory yields.
It's been ages since I've seen this series ,did they do one on time travel?
Mind Control Over Women???
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
In Search Of...
Evolution
Neanderthal Man
Pharaoh of the Exodus
Francisco Goya
The Cottingly Fairies
Ambrose Bierce
Undiscovered Wildlife
Ancient Knowledge
The Great Chicago Fire
The Black Plague
Memory says, I did that. Pride replies, I could not have done that. Eventually, memory yields.
PoisonedDragon1964 said: "I've noted elsewhere that In Search Of... avoided serious controversy."
I don't know if I can agree with that. UFOs were a really hot topic item at the time, and I know "In Search Of ..." explored a possible government cover-up. The program also explored the potential "end of the world" scenario more than once, including in the episode "The Coming Ice Age."
It also did its part in helping to propagate the alleged conspiracy surrounding the JFK assassination. Given a longer series life, I think the show would have delved into some of the other controversial issues of the time.
UFOs were a hot topic, but hardly controversial. A television series, "Project Blue Book," aired not long after In Search Of... began.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077065/
The UFO Incident (1975) was an excellent dramatization of the account of Betty and Barney Hill:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073834/
The episode dealing with JFK (In Search Of Lee Harvey Oswald, Season 5, Episode 3) was rather a disappointment, in that it directed the inquiry into politically safe (and incorrect) directions, as a communist conspiracy, hatched in the Soviet Union. Nothing edgy there.
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
You're right about the JFK stuff, but I disagree with your point on the UFOs. True, "The UFO Incident" aired in 1975, but that film did not talk about a government coverup.
Talking about the government covering up the truth about UFOs in a national television broadcast didn't truely begin in earnest until the 1980s. I know this because I studied the subject extensively. (I saw a UFO up close and personal in 1994, an event that made me realize the government definitely has to know something is going on but is keeping quiet about it; if the government knows nothing like it claims, we're in big trouble.)
"Project Blue Book" meant nothing to you? For there to be a mainstream television show that mediocre dealing with the subject, the controversy had been going on a lot longer than that.
I recall reading a number of trashy conspiracy paperbacks during the 70's, covering issues like Roswell and the Philadelphia Experiment, which was a topic peripherally related to UFO conspiracy lore.
How old are you?
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
The question is, "How old are you?" Trashy conspiracy paperbacks aren't mainstream national television. Furthermore, the first Roswell book was not published until 1980. And as you said, the "Project Blue Book" program came after "In Search Of ..."
shareThere's no need to get all 'internet hostile.' I was just asking, pertinent to whether you were speaking of history you'd read about, or actually lived. If you'd like to know how old I am, subtract 1964 from 2010.
The first book exclusively about Roswell was published in 1980, but although Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz claim credit for being the first, the Roswell Incident had been peripherally mentioned by several books prior to their novel.
At least for the era we're discussing, printed publications were more an indicator of what was on national consciousness than what was on television. Television tends to means more to a younger generation. Belief in government conspiracies can be dated to the time of the Kennedy assassination, becoming more prevalent by the end of the 60's, although it was already appearing in UFO literature in 1956, when the first "men in black" were being discussed (whether or not these were a hoax is irrelevant in this context). By the time of Watergate, belief in government conspiracies and coverups were commonplace, and were being postulated in UFO literature as well.
Project Blue Book was 1978.
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
This list could, for me, be a hundred suggestions long but, here are a ten that I definitely would have loved to have seen!
1. Eastern State Penitentiary
2. The Jersey Devil
3. Johannes Kelpius/The Mad Monk of the 21st Ward of Philadelphia
4. Abandoned Asylums (Eastern State Hospital & School, Philadelphia State Hospital/Byberry Mental Hospital, The Pennhurst State School, Waverly Hills Sanatorium, The Harlem Valley Psychiatric Hospital, The State Hospital at Greystone Park, The Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital, The Hudson Valley Psychiatric Hospital, The Sea View Hospital and Rehab Center, Danvers State Hospital, etc.
Granted, most of these are on the Eastcoast but that's where I'm from and I think you probably get the general idea...)
5. The history of the Hollywood Sign (including the suicide of Peg Entwistle) (There have been at least two suicides at the Hollywood Sign, supposedly but, that's the one that I know about.)
6. Alcatraz
7. The Winchester House
8. Gettysburg
9. 99942 Apophis
10. Earth Destruction Theories (1984, NWO/Illuminati, 99942 Apophis, The Anti-Christ, Climate Change/Global Warming\Cooling, Hypernova)
(If I have mistakenly included something in here that was covered in an episode of In Search Of, then, someone, please do let me know. I have most of the episodes and I'd hate to think that I missed something in posting a suggestion on here. Thanks!)
Intriguing; some of your proposed topics are unfamiliar to me. What's unusual about the Eastern State Penitentiary? I've never heard of Johannes Kelpius/The Mad Monk of the 21st Ward of Philadelphia. And I was unaware that the Hollywood Sign had an unusual history.
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
*Incorruptibles (corpses that don't deteriorate).
*The Rosetta Stone
*The last days of Elvis Presley
*Computers and their possibility to take over the world.
*Faith Healers
*Mt. St. Helen's explosion.
*DNA mysteries.
* The Missing Link
* child prodigies
* last days of Pompeii
* Nostradamus
* The next Ice Age
* Charles Manson followers
* the Salem witch trials
* The Masonics
* Doomsday Earth predicitons
* Dead Sea Scrolls
Some of these were already covered during the series, like
2:10 The Dead Sea Scrolls
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0840879/
2:23 - The Coming Ice Age
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0894213/
4:10 Pompeii
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0894199/
5:2 Faith Healing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902024/
5:7 Dangerous Volcanoes
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902022/
5:13 Salem Witches
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902042/
5:14 Super Children
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902044/
5:22 The End of the World
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902050/
6:15 Nostradamus
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902041/
6:18 The Missing Link
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902057/
DNA mysteries are something that the series approached several times, in episodes like 'Cloning' and 'The Secrets of Life.' Their understanding of it was poor.
Elvis would have been good, and so would the Rosetta Stone, as well as The Incorruptibles, computers, and the Freemasons. Elsewhere I've speculated that they didn't cover the Manson Family because it was too rough a subject for the network.
§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§
* Spring-heeled Jack
* The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
* The Lake Worth Monster, aka Goatman
* The Tasmanian Tiger
* Leviathan and Behemoth
* Nicola Tesla
* Charles Fort
* Ambrose Bierce
* John Wilkes Booth
* Rasputin
* The Antikythera Device
§« "Anger is the proper emotional response to injustice."- DAdvocate, Sun Apr 3 2011 »§
[deleted]
I think an episode dealing with the city of Ur or ziggarauts (Ancient Sumeria) in general would have been fascinating.
Some scandalous mysteries of old Hollywood...
In Search of...The Death of Paul Bern - murder or suicide?
In Search of...The Death of George Reeves - murder or suicide?
In Search of...Clark Gable's Fatal DUI Accident - did Gable kill a pedestrian?
In Search of...Snuff Films - are they real?
The disappearance of Col. Percival Harrison Fawcett during his search for the 'Lost City of Z'.
As it was in the beginning,
So shall it be in the end,
That bullsh*t is bullsh*t,
It just goes by different names.
"Why do people, sometimes otherwise intelligent people, swallow the preposterous claims of shows like In Search Of?" On second thoughts my episode wouldn't have made the cut.
share"Why do people, sometimes otherwise intelligent people, swallow the preposterous claims of shows like In Search Of?"
I don't really think I subscribe to most of what this series proposes. (The In Search Of writers take a believers' tack on every subject they touch upon - they never met a subject skeptically, ever.