TVSquad

While trying to keep up with all the casting news for the Wachowski brothers feature-length, live-action Speed Racer adaptation, I missed this bit of news.

As I've written before, the character of Chim Chim, Speed's monkey pal, would be played in the movie not by some animatronic 'bot or CGI creation, but by an actual flesh and blood chimp. Unfortunately, the chimp bit an actor on the set and was beaten, or so PETA was told, and the animal rights group sent a letter to producer Joel Silver asking him to stop using a real chimp.

(S01E07) Everyone has a list of fears, and being buried alive and waking up during surgery are both very high on my list. People have awoke during surgery before -- it's rare, but it does happen. Stephen King based his short story "Autopsy Room Four" on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which a man is paralyzed in a car accident and pronounced dead, despite being very much alive. To his horror, he's taken to the autopsy room to be hacked into, but he manages to save himself by crying a single tear to show he's still alive.

As King writes in a note after the story, a tear is nice and all, but he wanted his protagonist, Howard Cottrell (Richard Thomas) -- who gets paralyzed by a snake bite while golfing -- to demonstrate a different way of showing he was still alive. So King has him get a huge boner while the older sexier doctor is handling his junk. That's very King-like, and it works on paper, but I knew it was going to be difficult to portray that on television and not have it seem trite or silly. In King's story, Howard is single, but in the televised version he's married and suffering from occasional impotence due to an old war wound. The backstory makes Howard's eventual "rise from death" seem a little less gauche, but it's still kind of goofy.