Monday, August 19, 2024
Mystery Man
An unexpected joy of having purchased a Samsung TV is that it comes with a bunch of Samsung channels that just show a single program over and over again. There is a Degrassi channel, a Murder, She Wrote channel, and perhaps most horrifyingly of all, a Drew Barrymore Show channel. Generally, these channels just provide background noise for doing other things, like researching grand jury secrecy rules or performing open heart surgery. But the Unsolved Mysteries channel is perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of our time.
Yes, these are the original Unsolved Mysteries from the '80s and '90s. Yes, the theme song is still creepy as hell. Yes, it still seems at times as though Robert Stack can't believe the shit he is getting paid to say. Yes, I am transfixed.
It is impossible to choose just one favorite. There is the one about the Brazilian guy who claims to be channeling the spirits of great deceased artists who are using them to create new works from the afterlife, except they all kind of look like the pastels our third grade teacher had us do during our unit on Impressionism. (Not a slam, I was an amazing artist.) There is the one positing that the Unabomber was also the Zodiac killer, largely based on presence in California and general craziness. There is the one where one of the New Kids on the Block (Jordan?) is enlisted to try to find a missing girl. And there is a one where a woman claims to have a special touch that allows her to soothe animals, but is instead nearly mauled on camera several times consecutively. All classic television, to be sure.
And these stories have only improved with age, since now we get "updates" that almost invariably indicate how completely off base all of the speculation in the original stories was. Did a Des Moines housewife abandon her children to live a life of luxury in Monaco with a con man? No, she was just murdered by her husband and stowed under the house. Did aliens leave strange graffiti all over a Montana town? No, it was just some guy. Is a Wichita man's bizarre illness that baffled his doctors the result of a gypsy curse? No, it's just a common disorder easily diagnosed by the viewers of Unsolved Mysteries.
Also, they've put together a "documentary" where the makers of Unsolved Mysteries talk about how great and important Unsolved Mysteries has been. Why can't I get that kind of treatment?
