Friday, March 06, 2015

At Flashbak: Survival of the Fittest: Ten Times Cult-TV Played the Most Dangerous Game



My newest article at Flashbak looks at the various TV adaptations of the short story "The Most Dangerous Game."



"In 1924, author Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game” (also known as “The Hounds of Zaroff”) was published in Colliers. 

This literary work depicted the frightening tale of Sanger Rainsford, a hunter and New Yorker who ended up stranded on the island home of exotic (meaning “foreign”) General Zaroff and his mute-servant Ivan. 

As Rainsford soon learned, Zaroff was a hunter too, but one who had grown tired of standard game. The hunt had come to bore him. 

At least, that is, until he sought new prey: human-beings. 


Ship-wrecked sailors, in fact, became his the general’s new quarry.  In an attempt to be sporting, Zaroff always offered his human prey a fighting chance. If they could elude him on his wild island for three days, they would be allowed to leave alive and well. 

If they didn’t…well, they would be killed.

And as Rainsford learns as the story develops, no sailors have ever survived Zaroff’s hunt.

The Most Dangerous Game became an RKO movei in 1932, starring Fay Wray and Joel McCrea,, and was unofficially adapted in the 1960s (with Robert Reed) as Bloodlust (1961).

By the mid-1960s, however, cult-TV shows of all stripes were deploying the Most Dangerous Game template or trope -- hunted humans and an evil hunter -- all the time.

Here are ten memorable examples of the Most Dangerous Game adapted to cult-television..." (Continued at Flashbak).

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