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Something's rotten in Denmark. Prince Hamlet finds out his dad the king is suddenly dead, and his uncle Claudius has just as suddenly married his mum and taken the throne. Sound suspecious? So thinks Hamlet's dad's ghost, who tells him it was murder and demands revenge. But Hamlet's indecisive, so he pretends to be cray-cray so he can gather clues without alerting Claudius. While so detecting, Hamlet kills a series of people with varying degrees of intent, and holds a skull a bit. He gets revenge, but dies too. I'm going to level with you. This episode is commonly regarded as one of the less accessible ones. It's another case where the movie drags everything down. This is a low budget, black-and-white, 1961 made-for-TV German production of Hamlet, with over half the content cut for time, dubbed into English. It's a bit entertaining that a couple of the dubbers are, it turns out, Ricardo "Khaaaan!" Montalban and John "Sgt. Schultz" Banner themselves, but it's still a dry episode. It's all downhill from here! Episode 1009 is available on YouTube. Premiered June 27, 1999. Four episodes left. [more inside]
posted by JHarris on Apr 11, 2018 - 4 comments