Panic!

This was a good show. Each episode started out with the TV screen (glass) seemingly shattering. No regular cast, each episode had guest stars who were inevitably thrown into dire circumstances and who then had to save themselves or be doomed! Thus the title.

I think this was one of the many shows forbidden me when I was ten, but obviously mainstream 50s TV (a "Panic!" marathon would be a great Thanksgiving Day). The only one I remember has of course the heavy voice-over at the beginning. A man is on a subway with three men sitting opposite him. All are wearing generic 50s suits. "Your friend seems to have had one too many," he says. The heavy voice-over then comes in ending ominously "... the man in the middle was dead." At the next stop, the 'hero' reaches down for his newspaper and bolts out the door. The pre-commercial shot is a close-up of the face of one of the three men (with gun) pressed against the closed subway door ... (The memory trail now grows cold.) Think of all the great things I could have done in life if my brain were not cluttered with things like this.

I just now remembered another episode of the short-lived TV series Panic. This one involved a Catholic priest. He hears the confession of a stranger, who confesses to planting a bomb somewhere in the city. - But before he can reveal where he planted the bomb, he dies of a heart attack. Now the priest is forbidden to reveal what he heard in the confessional - thus his panic. - What the priest is able to do, however, is find the bomb himself -- which is the story line of this episode.

One of the best things about the show was the voice-over at the beginning of each episode done by Westbrook Van Voorhis (you just don't see names like that anymore.) He had a great deep voice that added much intensity to the show intros. I only remember fragments of episodes, one had a scene with two boys hiding under a porch and overhearing some sinister conversation, and the other episode had something to do with a lighthouse. I believe that when I was watching this show in Washington DC, it was on at the same time as "Twilight Zone" and it was always a tough decision which one to watch. I hope these shows are not totally lost or destroyed, so we can see them again.

I wish I had the episode listings of this old show. You were always on the edge of your seat watching the predicaments the characters got into. Here are three I remember:

1) My favorite episode was the one where Mercedes McCambridge played a young deaf woman who still lived at home with her struggling parents. She was going to a school for the deaf and seeing ear doctors (pun?)periodically. One day her ear doctor solves her hearing problem. She comes home to excitedly tell her parents that she can hear, only to overhear them plotting her death (for the insurance money I presume). I nearly had a heart attack!

2) A businessman gets a new job in a high-rise office building (25th floor or so). He gets hired on a Friday and decides to bring his family down to the office on Saturday to see it. He uses his key to get in and take the elevator up to the 25th floor. While they are looking at his office a fire breaks out (in the elevator?). The phones weren't working on the weekend, and the stairs were the only way down. For the life of me I can't remember what happened at the end!

3) This one is real fuzzy, but it has to do with a couple of young boys left together while their mother runs to the store. They decide to make some peanut butter sandwiches, but they are tainted with botulism (I don't remember why or how). I think they were ready to take their first bites when the mother returned home.