Fall is well under way, even though this evening, a youth baseball game was played in the park next to the school behind my house. It’s warm enough for it, but not summertime warm. It might be the last game of the year for that particular neighborhood diamond. I mowed my yard today under a warm sun, which I’m sure will be the last time this year.

With the coming of fall is the end of the Summer of Here. Back to posting when autumn is much further along, around November 9.

Wikipedia asserts that this image, from 1961, is in the public domain. Probably so. A publicity still published without any kind of copyright notice, it seems.

The other day I saw, by chance, an episode of The Twilight Zone that I’d never seen, or even heard about before. I saw a moment of it in passing and thought, wait, that’s Buster Keaton. What’s he doing in The Twilight Zone? Turns out he starred in an episode in late 1961, “Once Upon a Time.” Using the marvel that is streaming, I rewound the ep at the touch of a button and watched the whole thing.

As a story, the episode isn’t that good. In fact, it’s pretty dopey. But it is an unusual example of a comic episode of the series and worth some chuckles. Mainly, it’s worth watching for the aging star. Keaton was roughly 40 years past his prime, but he still had those Buster Keaton moves.

No point in going into too much detail about the story, but it involves Keaton’s character, who dislikes all the hubbub associated with living in 1890, traveling in time to ca. 1960 – which he hates even more. Interestingly, the sequences set in 1890 play like a silent movie, complete with title cards, a musical score and lots of physical comedy (of course). The 1960 sequences have sound and also a fair amount of pratfalls. Buster’s going to be Buster.

Two of the supporting characters evoke, “Hey, it’s that guy.” Namely Stanley Adams, best known as a dealer in tribbles a few years (or a few centuries) later, and Jesse White, who plays a repairman in the episode – a few years before he became the lonely Maytag repairman for my generation. Always fun to see familiar faces in unusual settings.