'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.

In one of the few extant episodes of the long defunct, "Way Out" actress Constance Ford takes the audience on a roller coaster ride not soon to be forgotten.

Though accomplished at all types of portrayals, Miss Ford's stock in trade was the vulpine proletariat tart--a woman who will stop at nothing to get where she's going, and doesn't make any bones about it! Consider her a more cerebral, subdued, and streamlined Shelley Winters type.

In "I Heard You Calling Me" she holds the audience in the palm of her hand all the way--it's a real tour de force, inasmuch as she's doing it "live on tape." As the telephone calls from beyond exert their growing menace over her, we watch her go from casual indifference, to hard nosed annoyance, to trembling rage, to nauseated panic, and finally to whimpering, resigned, child like submission--pathetically assuming a fetal position as she drops the receiver to the floor in anticipation of her impending doom.

At a recent screening, all attendees were impressed, most especially an astute 16 year old boy. "We don't have anything this good on now," he remarked as Mr. Dahl sardonically concluded the teleplay.

No, we don't, and the loss is ours. Another forgotten jewel in Mr. Susskind's crown.

Does anybody remember the TV show Great Ghost Tales. This show was very similar to Way Out. First, it was filmed live in New York City. Second, the show came on at 8:30 P.M. CST. Like Way Out, the show was short lived. Great Ghost Tales ran for 12 episodes, Way Out for 14. Fourth, Richard Thomas of The Waltons fame starred in one episode of Way Out and one episode of Great Ghost Tales. Way Out aired on CBS from 3/31/61 to 7/14/61. Great Ghost Tales aired on NBC from 7/6/61 to 9/21/61. The show replacing Great Ghost Tales was Hazel. A viewer would almost get the impression that Great Ghost Tales was a continuation of Way Out on another network with another announcer, Frank Gallop. On Way Out the episode that frightened me the most was "I Heard You Calling Me" about a woman who drowned 49 years ago aboard the Titanic. She haunted the room on the 7th floor of a hotel in London. On Great Ghost Tales, it was "A Phantom of Delight". This episode was about a woman who died forty years ago on her wedding day. Wearing her wedding gown, she would haunt her bedroom that was left locked and untouched by her parents.

The "galaxybeing" did a good job of describing this series and did so with a great deal more specificity than I could. The show was genuinely frightening. I do remember the episode about the love affair with the headless "electric woman". It gave me nightmares as a child. One of the most chilling things about the show (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) was the lead in at the beginning. I recall hands sticking up out of sand and writhing to the tempo of beatnik bongo drums. As the drum crescendo increased in intensity, the hands would burn up.

No wonder it lasted just fourteen episodes in the days of Ward and June Cleaver! Definitely ahead of its time.

The 12th episode ("Side Show") of this GREAT terrifying anthology series was one of it's BEST and most unsettling and left a lot of kids (including myself & my best friend) - VERY scared! It had to do with a carnival Sideshow where there was this "Lady with a light bulb for a head". She was strapped into this electric chair and 10,000 volts of electricity ran through her and kept her alive... This meek henpecked husband (Harold) goes to the sideshow and falls in love with this "Headless" woman named Cassandra who begs him to free her from the chair. He returns the third night with pliers to free her, which they show him trying to do. BUT, the final ending sequence is the most unsettling and unforgettable - when you see that the MAN is now strapped into the electric chair with a light bulb in place of HIS head and the headless woman (Cassandra) is standing next to him, laughing, with a *HEAD that looks like it was sew on (*from an opening sequence where the head of a woman is guillotined into a basket as one of the Sideshow's other attractions...) Anyone else who saw this episode - will NEVER forget it (even after 55 years) - it is THAT haunting! Anyone else recall seeing this extremely SCARY one? I would love to see it again, but unfortunately THIS episode has NOT been unearthed on any kind of VHS or DVD (even a "bootleg" or unauthorized one!) as yet. We can only hope that someday the superb WAY OUT series will finally be made available again! ;)

**ATTENTION (April 2016) - This episode has just shown up on you tube under: WAY OUT - Incredible!! Check it out while you can!**