So the other day, we watched a Twilight Zone segment about people displaced in time, and here’s the Eerie, Indiana equivalent. The state of Indiana, sensibly, didn’t observe Daylight Savings Time in the early nineties. They finally stopped fighting the good fight in 2006, sadly. Anyway, Marshall, demanding his extra hour, sets his watch to what he considers proper New Jersey time anyway in protest, and wakes up almost totally alone. The only people in Eerie are some strange, violent removal men, a 105 year-old milkman driving one of those accident-causing Eerie Dairy trucks, and a 13 year-old girl who ran away from home a year ago.
“The Lost Hour” is absolutely excellent, and it introduces a wonderful concept or three that make the show’s early cancellation even more regrettable. It’s the first episode of the show written by Vance DeGeneres, better known as the guitarist in Cowboy Mouth, and better known still as Ellen DeGeneres’s older brother. The girl who is also trapped in the other time zone is played by Nikki Cox, who later starred in a couple of long-running sitcoms on the WB and a show called Las Vegas that suggests I wasn’t paying a lick of attention to American TV in the early 2000s, because I had no idea that James Caan starred in a prime time drama for four years on NBC.
Anyway, our son completely loved it, although the main point of comment was a strange visual effect when Marshall is running up his staircase as the lost hour is almost up and the roof of his home has vanished, leaving a music-video-looking weird sky. He couldn’t quite explain what about the shot seemed unreal to him, so he could only say “they did that in a studio because those aren’t real clouds.” But honestly, for a show with a small budget for special effects, the integrated animation of Marshall calling Simon from the missing child panel on the side of a milk carton is really excellent!
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 