Who wants to play The Death Game™ ?

It's The Death Game™, the exciting family game that transports you back to ancient Rome for a thrilling duel of sorcery and superstition between father and son!

OBJECTIVE
The Death Game pits one child player (called "Caligula") against one father player (called "Germanicus") in a battle of magic charms and witchery. Caligula must prove his worthiness on his path to divine Godhood by frightening Germanicus to death. He does this by hiding various magical artifacts for Germanicus to find. The more artifacts Germanicus uncovers, the weaker he becomes and the closer Caligula comes to winning Godhood!

DURATION
One game typically lasts several weeks.

SET UP
Before play begins, check to make sure you have all the game parts.

You should have:

• 1 naked, decaying corpse of an infant, its belly painted red, with horns tied to its forehead;

• 1 corpse of a cat with rudimentary wings growing from its back;

• 1 decapitated head with a child's severed hand in its mouth;

• 1 skull of an ass (write Dad's name on it before the game begins);

• 1 set of bloody cock feathers (not pictured);
• 1 Green Jasper Charm of Hecate.

GAMEPLAY
Germanicus begins the game in bed. Caligula must try to hide as many cursed artifacts as he can in various places around the house (for example, Caligula might hide the dead infant under a loose floor tile, or place the bloody cock feathers among the bed cushions.)

Being a very superstitious person, Germanicus must try to avoid discovering these items as he moves around the board, lest they frighten him to death. Every item that Germanicus accidentally uncovers costs him one life point. When all life points are expended, Germanicus dies and Caligula wins!

The only defense Germanicus has against the cursed artifacts is the Green Jasper Charm of Hecate, which negates their power. However, during a sleeping round, Caligula has a chance to steal the charm, leaving Germanicus defenseless.

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Okay... as much fun as this seems, there isn't really a board game. You see, The Death Game is a game played out in real life by son Caligula against father Germanicus, one of several horrific vignettes depicted in the 1970s BBC television drama I, Claudius.

Even though this was essentially a soap opera for grown ups, with lots of talking heads going on about interpersonal and political intrigue within the Roman Empire, it caught my attention as a youngster right off the bat with its eerie musical theme (by composer Wilfred Josephs) and a creepy opening sequence in which a snake slithers across the titles... uh, tiles. Both, actually.

Shot on videotape, lending it a surreal tone that I've always been drawn to (see also 70s-era Dr. Who, Land of the Lost, and Sapphire and Steel), I, Claudius depicts the decadence of Caligula in all its horror (fairly graphic for a television series of that era!)

The Death Game is among Caligula's earliest exploits, in which he enlists a grab-bag of disgusting ingredients with supernatural implications to drive his sickly and superstitious father Germanicus to an early grave.

In a later episode, an adult Caligula "cures" the persistent cough of a palace child by ordering his beheading...

I, Claudius has been released to DVD in a few different releases, including the most recent 35th Anniversary Edition.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977)

One evening while channel surfing in the early 1980s (which, back then, involved standing next to the TV and manually turning the mechanical tuner knob to cycle through less then a dozen stations...) I happened upon some show I had never seen before but immediately captured my attention, a spooky mystery set in the dark, fog-draped streets of Victorian London.

Mauled bodies were turning up in the Thames...

...and young girls were disappearing off the streets.

But this wasn't the work of Jack the Ripper. Rather, the mysterious goings-on seem to revolve around the Palace Theater.

There, the popular magician and hypnotist from the Far East, Li H'sen Chang, appears nightly, astounding audiences with an act which includes mesmerizing and levitating a member of the audience.

He is joined on stage by Mr. Sin, a creepy ventriloquist dummy that provides comic relief during the show.

But as entertaining as Chang's stage show is, the real interesting stuff is occurring backstage. Strange noises have been heard coming from under the theater after hours, and one stagehand claims to have seen a ghost.

There's also more to Chang than meets the eye. His powers of hypnosis go beyond those of a typical stage magician, and he can command people to do his bidding with an almost otherworldly persuasiveness.

We soon learn Chang has been using that power to command women to follow him down this hidden backstage trapdoor...

...into the subterranean lair of Weng-Chiang, a mysterious masked figure living in the sewers beneath the theater.

Weng-Chiang has a degenerative condition, requiring a constant diet of young victims to stave off death. He extracts their life essence with this distillation chamber, a high-tech contraption that leaves its victims' bodies shriveled and brittle like dried leaves.

That horrific process may postpone death, but it can't keep the disease from rendering Chiang's face a deformed nightmare behind his mask!

As if he didn't already have enough on his plate, Weng-Chiang has also taken time to populate the adjoining sewer tunnels with giant rats, genetically enlarged to the size of a bear. He feeds them with the bodies of whoever is unfortunate enough to get in his way (or failing that, a nice hunk of butcher's meat laid out on the sewer grate).

When one of the missing girls is traced back to the theater, it attracts the attention of a special investigation team from Scotland Yard.

Known only as "The Doctor", and looking and acting very much like Sherlock Holmes, The Doctor and his assistant Leela, soon learn that Chang's on-stage assistant, Mr. Sin, is no mere ventriloquist dummy, when he (it?) appears in their doorway one evening, brandishing a knife.

Even after Leela, a trained fighter, quickly plunges a knife into the thing's neck, Mr. Sin continues to march forward undaunted, like some murderous automaton.

Of course by now you may have figured out that the program I happened upon was an episode of Dr. Who. I had never heard of the show prior to stumbling upon this rerun of 1977s The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but quickly became a big fan, and when it started airing in the afternoons, I would rush home after school to catch every cliff-hanging minute.

Anyone familiar with the show knows that Dr. Who is a human-looking alien time-traveler, always appearing in different time-periods and on different planets, getting involved with aliens, robots, and monsters. Which makes The Talons of Weng-Chiang a rather unusual first episode for the uninitiated. The Doctor spends the entire 6-episode series in Victorian London, pretending to be a Scotland Yard detective, and there's little to suggest he's anything but that for those not already in the know.

Incidentally, that creepy ventriloquist dummy Mr. Sin is portrayed by none other than cult character actor Deep Roy (Star Trek, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc.)

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is available on DVD here (although it's apparently gone out of print as of this writing and is going for some outrageous prices on the second-hand market).

The Golden Book of the Mysterious (1976)

Written by Jane Werner and Sol Chaneles (with excellent illustrations throughout by Alan Lee), The Golden Book of the Mysterious (1976, Western Publishing Co.) delves into all aspects of the supernatural world, from ESP, psychic premonitions and reincarnation, to werewolves and witches, hauntings, UFOs, mythological monsters and cryptozoology.

Branded a "Golden Book" (although at 144 pages, and with its 8" x 11" hardcover, it is definitely not a Little Golden Book) ...Book of the Mysterious is sort of a children's version of the multi-volume non-fiction book series that were popular at the time (among them Time-Life's Mysteries of the Unknown and A New Library of the Supernatural).

This is the kind of stuff I ate up as a kid, especially before my post-James Randi conversion to junior skeptic.

Here's a sample of illustrations and topics covered.

Ghostly appearances.

Seances.

Poltergeists.

Exorcism.

Witchcraft.

Devil-worship.

Magical powers, such as levitation.

Werewolf transformation.

The yeti.

Monsters of the deep, from sea-serpents to the Loch-Ness monster.

Carvings like these, believed by some to depict an extra-terrestrial traveler, were featured in the Rod Serling narrated TV special, In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973). (Watch it on YouTube while it lasts).

Magic from the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland (1970)

"Magic from the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland" (1970) is a fun little 60-page book presenting basic table-magic and card tricks for kids. The tricks are okay, but the real treat of this book is the cartoonish depictions of the Haunted Mansion and its denizens.

Four royal spectres are made to materialize in this card trick, "Rescue of the Queens".

In this rendering of Madame Leota, she looks very similar to Sleeping Beauty's evil sorceress Maleficent (both characters were voiced by Eleanor Audley).

The graveyard's decapitated knight is used to illustrate another card trick, "A Found Head".

The skeleton, whose arm is seen laying the brick and mortar of its own crypt in the Mansion's graveyard, is demonstrating a coin trick.

You won't need a coffin to perform "A Coffin Escape"...just a coin and envelope.

Here's the mysterious hat-box ghost, whose cult popularity with those in-the-know ranks him as the Boba Fett of the Haunted Mansion.

"The Crying Griffin", another coin trick, is illustrated by the leering demonic candelabra from the stretching room.

In this next illustration, a Disney executive explains the impending ticket-price hikes at the Disney parks.



A ballroom ghost, and a business card from "Elias P. Etherial".

One of the stretching portraits.

This green ghoul looks like he could be related to the attic ghosts that pop-up out of the bric-a-brac.

A happy mummy pops out to ask "How old am i?"

The graveyard's masked executioner looks a little underdressed for Disneyland.

The cadaver dangling from the rafters of the stretching room...she lost her life, but looks like she kept her hat.

To my knowledge, there isn't a vampire depicted in any version of the Haunted Mansion attraction, but here's one performing a handkerchief trick.

Another stretching portrait, this time for "The Miracle Rope Splice."

The graveyard opera singers show you how its done in a section on throwing your voice.