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AmeliaMangan t1_ixzew5u wrote

There's a really fascinating version from 1958, performed and broadcast on live television, starring Boris Karloff, Roddy McDowall and Eartha Kitt. The set is deliberately surreal and artificial, like a school play production of Where The Wild Things Are (or an adolescent's anxiety dream, which it is sort of framed as), and there's a heavy emphasis on then-fashionable Freudian psychology and sadomasochistic overtones. Obviously not super-faithful to the source material, but I think it's a really strange, interesting, almost fairy-tale interpretation of the story.

(It's rendered even weirder by the occasional ad breaks. Roddy McDowall writhing half-naked in chains as he succumbs to his repressed desire for colonialist brutality is brought to you tonight by LUXO SOAP [TM]!)

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