Monday, June 3, 2013

Calvin Trillin & Studs Terkel host Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison & Gene Wolfe: NIGHTCAP (1982) (and the animation episode with Bakshi, Bluth, Elin)

Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov: 


Ralph Bakshi, Don Bluth, Larry Elin:   


Nightcap was a shortlived series, hosted by Trillin and Terkel and associated with The Nation Institute, that ran on the A&E cable channel in 1982. Nowadays, of course, A&E has Longmire, The Glades, the Bates Motel revision and repeats (they don't even have Breakfast with the Arts any longer), and a whole lot of "reality" series uninteresting even of their kind.

(Courtesy Paul Di Filippo on the FictionMags discussion list)

3 comments:

Randy Johnson said...

Interesting program NIGHTCAP. Not familiar with Trillin, but know Terkel. And what a lineup that night.

Asimov was an early SF discovery. Heinlein was the first(Tunnel In The Sky) followed by Asimov and Norton. Before then, I'd read such as The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift(which I hesitate to call SF).

Not sure why but Wolfe was never a favorite. I liked his work, just not enough to grab anything I came across.

Todd Mason said...

Calvin Trillin is a journalist, humorist and doggerel-writer who first came to national attention, I believe, on the staff of Monocle; he has since written extensively for The Nation and The New Yorker.

The Tom Swift (Jr.) novels were certainly a sort of juvenile Gernsbackian sf...

Wolfe is rather like Jack Vance, only less sardonic and a little more likely to bore directly into the real ugliness in human affairs...

Sergio (Tipping My Fedora) said...

The art of conversation returneth - hurrah! Never seen these - great stuff Todd, thanks very much.