Spielberg's Duel (1971) and The Incredible Hulk (1978)

I first caught Steven Spielberg's made-for-TV film debut Duel on television in early grade school. At that time I had only recently become aware of this thing called a "film director", and could name exactly three: Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. So I was curious to see this earliest work from the guy who gave me nightmares with Jaws and left me watching the skies after Close Encounter of the Third Kind.

Based on the short story by Richard Matheson, Duel is a tense thriller built around a simple premise: a milquetoast salesman (Dennis Weaver as David Mann, in a mostly one-man-show) on a cross-country road trip, finds himself the seemingly random target of a psychopathic truck driver.

Their first encounters are of the nuisance variety.... the slow, over-sized vehicle hogs the road, only to tailgait once passed, etc., but slowly escalate into deliberate harassment, reckless endangerment, and finally a full on murderous chase with Weaver driving for his life.

You can detect elements in Duel that would appear in Spielberg's later work... the  monstrous, expressionless truck is reminiscent of the relentless, pursuing great white from Jaws. 

We're gonna need a bigger car.

Comical, colorful elderly supporting characters flavor some scenes, as they later would in Sugarland Express and Close Encounters.

A run-in with a road-side exhibit of snakes and spiders seems like a first draft of the creepy crawly encounters of Indiana Jones.

Simple but effective camera work distinguishes Duel from lesser made-for-TV fare of the period. The opening titles, artfully arranged around the geometry of the tunnels as the camera passes through.

Interesting shots like this, with Weaver framed in a laundromat dryer window...

...or this perspective shot which places Weaver's tiny car in the consuming cloud of the truck's smokestack. 

But what really made Duel stand out was the out-of-nowhere, big twist ending that nobody saw coming. Weaver's car has overheated at the top of a hill and is cornered against a high cliff ledge when suddenly his eye's start to glaze over...

...his shirt rips open...

...and he transforms into a mean, green smashing machine. What the---? David Mann is actually The Incredible Hulk??

Hulk smash telephone pole!

Hulk hit truck with pole!

Hulk push car into truck!

Truck driver jump to safety!

Truck and car spill over cliff!

Hulk celebrate!

What's that you say? This isn't the ending you remember? 

Okay... so, this happened: Universal, the studio that produced both Duel and the 1970s television series The Incredible Hulk, got the bright idea of building a first-season episode entirely around repurposed footage from Spielberg's mini-masterpiece.

The plot finds David Banner (Bill Bixby) picked up hitchhiking by a lady truck driver (Jennifer Darling... a former fembot from The Bionic Woman) who steals back her father's scary, flammable and strangely familiar truck from a group of smugglers.

The whole episode is a series of back-and-forth carjackings and chases in which everyone gets their turn to drive both Weaver's red 1971 Plymouth Valiant and the 1955 Peterbilt truck.

There's also new footage using the original truck, and it's cool seeing the iconic monster continue its path of destruction in an entirely new context and setting...

...not so cool? Discovering its being driven by the darling Ms. Darling.

Spielberg wisely resisted studio pressure to shoot Duel's car interiors on a stage with rear-projected backgrounds and instead filmed on location in a moving car, but we can get a sense of how things may have turned out in this Hulk episode, which went with the rear-projection technique.

Bixby and the lead smuggler (Frank Christi) each wear blue collar shirts to help match the original Weaver footage...

I can't tell where Duel ends and The Incredible Hulk begins!

...and, as The Incredible Hulk plot demands that occasionally the red car carry two occupants, the script helpfully provides excuses for the passenger to duck his head down to explain away why there is only a lone-driver visible in the inserted Duel footage.

"Duck your head all the way down under the seat and look for that gun, dammit!"

This isn't the only time a Universal television character found themselves crossing paths with a Spielberg villain. Did somebody say... Nancy Drew vs. Jaws? 

Duel is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
The Incredible Hulk episode "Never Give a Trucker an Even Break" is available on DVD and is streaming on Netflix as of this writing.
The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries episode "The Mystery of the Hollywood Phantom", featuring Jaws, is available on DVD.
Die-cast toys of Weaver's red '71 Plymouth Valiant and the 1955 Peterbilt 281 Tanker are available... NOWHERE. Come on, Hot Wheels, make this happen!

The Haunted House club (Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, 1977)

Here's another haunted house themed club, also called, simply, "The Haunted House". But unlike the one covered in my last post, which was an actual Hollywood hotspot, this one existed only as a series of sets created for the 1977 pilot episode of "The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries".

The episode was "The Mystery of the Haunted House", and junior detectives Frank and Joe Hardy (Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy) find themselves at the unusual venue while pursuing a lead in a missing person's case. Let's take a tour, shall we?

The exterior certainly looks the part. Any similarity to the Pyscho house is purely coincidental.

You don't just stroll into this club...you have to pass through a series of spooky (if impractical) obstacles. You'll first encounter this creepy organist.

He doesn't smile much, but he does direct you to the coffin in the adjacent room, which is surrounded by windows illuminated by artificial lightning flashes.

The coffin opens to reveal a hidden staircase that must be descended!

The staircase becomes a chute that deposits you in the next room, where you are immediately swung at with an axe by an animated suit of armor.

Both Hardy boys get a whack. Insert haircut joke here.

Next a face in a crystal ball intones...

Welcome to the Haunted House! If you survive the ordeal, we look forward to you joining us in the main crypt. If not, happy hereafter!

...before laughing maniacally and disappearing.

This room is draped with several curtains. Which one hides the door to the main crypt? Most are just dead-ends, like this brick wall.

Or this door that opens to another brick wall.

How about a giant animated spider?

Or a hovering skeleton?

Eventually the boys find the correct door, a small hidden panel that lets them into this midieval themed room.

They pass a few pieces of scenery, like this cackling skeleton in a rack.

And a flying ghost that whips past them.

The ghost leads them to this ornate sarcophagus which conceals another staircase that must be descended.

Again, the downward staircase becomes a slide that deposits us into the next room...a confusing maze of mirrors.

The boys find their way out of the maze by following the sound of some funky music emanating from the club. They are greeted by a Frankensteinesque maitre d' (played by Richard Kiel, better known as the Bond villian Jaws) who asks them if they have a reservation.

Luckily its not very busy and there is an available table.

Most staff members are appropriately costumed.

Luckily, getting out of the Haunted House club is a lot easier than getting in...you just scale the staircase...

...and exit out the front door.



Even though I was not a reader of the Hardy Boys book series, I was pretty excited about the TV show when it first premiered. The premise of two kids (alright, being in grade school at the time, the Hardy Boys seemed like adults to me...) who went out at night in their van, snooping through graveyards, abandoned buildings and haunted houses while solving mysteries was awfully enticing.

The surreal opening sequence promised plenty of adventure and intrigue. It started with this mysterious maze, which is not merely an abstract graphic, but is presented as an actual structure located somewhere in the desert, under a full moon.

This is followed by a series of book cover illustrations that suggested a deep treasure chest of spooky adventures just waiting to be uncovered.

Unfortunately all this anticipation and excitement didn't amount to much, as I quickly lost interest after only a few episodes. Why? Because with the increased popularity of Shaun Cassidy amongst teenage girls, the show was quickly diverted away from midnight trips to the graveyard and haunted lighthouse investigations, to scenarios built around Cassidy's budding singing career...

...and decidely "cool" topics like dunebuggy racing and surfing contests.

Meh.