Wow.
I haven't seen this show since I was a kid but caught some of it on MeTV recently.I decided to check out the cast list for the series and I couldn't believe impressive it was!
shareThose are the chopped-up, syndicated versions. If you really want to see the series at its best, it is available (sans the pilot/tv movie) on Hulu, or the entire thing is available on a season by season collection on dvd.
Yes, it is painful to watch the syndicated version. The picture quality is uneven and changes within each scene. They add in extra sections to make shows longer. "Logoda's Heads" is a great example where they spliced in whole chunks of another movie to pad it out.
shareIf you'll recall in its original format, "NG" was an hour-long show made up of multiple segments. I have an episode from iTunes comprised of "Pamela's Voice/Lone Survivor/The Doll". When the show went into syndication, it wasn't believed that it would play well in its original format. Thus the segments were cut up and shown seperately. However, because those segments wouldn't fill a half-hour time slot, either footage from other Universal shows and movies or repeat footage from the segment was used to pad them. That explains why "Big Surprise" had scenes from "The Birds" in it and "The Housekeeper" utilized footage from "Frankenstein". The footage that was used in "Lagoda's Heads" came from "Curucu, Beast of the Amazon". It's weird seeing scenes with African natives one moment then Brazilian Native Americans the next.
Annoying the world since 1960!