Outer Limits, The Vol. 4 - Fun and Games (1963)/A Feasibility Stu

FUN AND GAMES "There was a moment in time when those who were brilliant and powerful also were playful...they replenished their darker passions with fun and games. On the planet Earth, such games have been civilised, and drained of all but their last few drops of blood." The Senator, a sporting alien representing the citizenry of planet Andea, abducts ex-boxer Mike Benson (Nick Adams) and troubled divorcee Laura Hanley (Nancy Malone), "electroporting" them to a distant, neutral planet. On this 'arena planet,' they are pitted against two huge, hissing, primitive alien beasts from Caleo Galaxy. The goal of this hideous contact is survival. The stakes are the home planet of each team, with the world of the losers to be obliterated in a display lasting five years-all for the further enjoyment of the bloodthirsty Anderans! A FEASIBILITY STUDY "The Luminoid need slaves, and they have chosen the planet off of which their slaves will be abducted. Not too many at first, a neighbourhood-full, prehaps. A neighourhood like mine or yours." Waking up one morning, the residents of a six-block section of Midgard Drive in Beverly Hills find themselves on another planet. They are the subjects of a grotesque experiment...a feasibility study undertaken by a doomed alien race to test the Earthlings' hardiness as potential slave labour. With mankind's fate in the balance, each person is forced to dig deep within himself to uncover a coward...or hero. Directed by Byron Haskin and called by the show's producer-writer Joesph Stefano "the most humanitarian script of the series," A FEASIBILITY STUDY succeeds both as a thinly-veiled anti-slavery message and as a vivid, poignant examination of the human spirit. The powerful ending (at first objected to by the network censors) will forever haunt you with it's lingering image. © United Artists Television and Villa di Stefano