Not a dream sequence, but in a similar vein I always enjoyed this episode, where the castaways are trying to impress a Hollywood producer with musical version of “Hamlet”:
In addition to being a class act toward his fellow cast members, Bob Denver didn’t have a bad singing voice.
I agree that much of television then and in the years since is pretty bad.
But I want to point out that when Minow made his “wasteland” speech in 1961, “The Twilight Zone” had been in production a couple of years, as had “Naked City”. While we all celebrate “The Twilight Zone”, I feel “Naked City” deserves far more credit than it gets. I discovered it recently by accident and am hooked.
The “vast wasteland” produced a lot of shite, but it also produced Green Acres, one of the most surreal, odd, and (for me) fantastically delightful TV shows EVER made!
OK, how about a remake of Green Acres starring Donald Trump as the Eddie Albert character and AOC as his wife? - kinda juxtapose the plot. She yearns for a return to the good life while he yearns for Manhattan - but moves to an old farm just to please her.
If I’m not mistaken, the two actors shown here are The Rest.
O! The ignominy of having to be one of the two “rest” for what? That first season?
Let us not forget that, apart from no phones, no lights, no motorcars…in fact: not a single luxury! : Lovey Howell was not named either. I mean, like, ya know? Where’s the JUSTICE, man?
So I have an idea for a TV series. It’ll be called “A Steaming Pile of Shit”, and will be the tale of the ill-fated crew of the First Class Cruiser (F.C.C.) Ajit Pai, a garbage scow launched from New Jersey. They’re adrift forever, being denied the right to put into any port because it smells so foul. As a result, no one can board or disembark.
Every week the plot will revolve around some illegal scheme of the captain’s to con some port into letting them dock, and every week the incompetence of the crew will thwart the attempt.
The Captain will be an utterly one dimensional lackey of the ship’s remote owner. Every episode will have the unseen owner yelling “you’re fired!” at the end of a speaker phone conversation. And whenever the harbor master radios them to tell the local people are complaining about the smell, the Captain will find a way to rig the comment system so that they can ignore the complaints.
The First Mate will be a new guest star every week; they’ll be hired as a sycophant, but will turn out to actually be competent at something, so they’ll have no choice but to fire them. The running gag is that nobody onboard is smart enough to figure out how they can bring new people on board every week because they’re not allowed to dock, and there’s clearly no other way on or off the boat. Another joke is that the crew never radios for a launch to ferry them ashore.
The rest will be an ensemble cast of yes-men and lapdogs, with no redeeming human qualities. Someone will comically asphyxiate from the methane every week, but will always return alive in the next episode.
Now all I need is an executive producer who isn’t a rapist, child molester, or secretary of the treasury.
Yeah, but unlike Trump, he probably wasn’t a venal narcissist with delusions of Orange Julius.
He also happened to be right about the wasteland, which is exponentially more vast than it was in 1963, and we have to pay through the nose to watch the shit. Back then the shit was free!