Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Little Soldiers
The August 1953 issue of Adventures into Weird Worlds #21 contains today's story called The Little Soldiers. Without spoiling the plot, let’s just say that this “living toys” tale found it’s way many times into a variety of film and TV series episodes over the years in many entertaining, (and not so entertaining) variations. My personal favorite, and most similar to today’s post, is the Siege of 31 August (episode 5) from the excellent but very short-lived horror TV series Darkroom from 1981. Are there other versions of this tale? Let me know.
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8 comments:
GOOD POST TODAY. I COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT THE DARKROOM SERIES. IN FACT I DIDN'T REALLY REMEMBER IT UNTIL I STARTED READING SOME OF THE COMMENTS ON IMDB AND THEN IT ALL CAME BACK TO ME. I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THESE AGAIN!
Darkroom was a good series. I remember it quite well, including the toy soldier episode. Me and my brother still talk about that one to this day, and the one about the guillotine too.
>Darkroom was a good series
It was good show with stories by many great writers too like Robert Bloch, Brian Clemens, Cornell Woolrich etc... I have a complete set of the episodes on vhs in fair quality condition, maybe someday Darkroom will get a proper DVD release.
Also, a commentor from IMDb says: "The toy soldier story was an adaptation of Stephen King's short story "Battleground" from his first collection--NIGHT SHIFT."
Great story here. Although it hardly qualifies as a movie, I actually made a stop motion animated short when I was about 16 using a related theme- I had my Star Wars figures come to life, but rather than attacking a person, they did battle amongst themselves. Would have been better to make them attack someone tho!
>I actually made a stop motion animated short
Put it on your blog, I'd love to see it!
The 1940s radio show "Quiet, Please!" has a version of the story in the episode "Tap the Heat, Bogdan". There's a transcript of it here.
The Darkroom episode was actually based on a short story by Davis Grubb called "The Siege of 318", an excellent horror yarn that appeared in the anthology "Modern Masters of Horror" edited by Frank Coffey.
Stephen King's "Battleground" was similar in plot, but Grubb's story was better.
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