Beauty And The Beast (1987)

Rewatching Terminator 2 led to finding Beauty And The Beast streaming and rewatching it for the first time since it was on.

This is where the wealthy and the powerful rule. It is her world, a world apart from mine...

The first third of season one are mostly solid versions of obvious ideas based on the premise, with at least one “kiss him, you fool!” moment each.

KISS HIM YOU FOOL!

The pilot sets up the high concept premise in the first half and the District Attorney procedural part in the second, Vincent as urban legend and frightening to Catherine, Vincent gets Catherine’s help with a surface problem and Catherine dates someone else but finds him way too normal, Vincent trapped in the world above, Halloween dance when Vincent can show his face in public, someone from the World Below is now unwelcome, someone captures Vincent, Father’s backstory.

The most obvious hook not touched is Vincent’s origin, which the show keeps back and never answers directly.

I could have lost the Irish politics from the Halloween dance episode, and the overly stylised gang from the “Vincent trapped in the world above” episode, and from later in the first season the Voodoo episode, and the Chinatown episode is now a fascinating artefact of something hopefully extinct, with a lot of cast in common with Big Trouble In Little China who helped stomp it. But the Poor Children Forced To Steal By Modern Fagin Episode is better than the Batman: The Animated Series one.

Creator Ron Koslow wrote the season openers and closers, suggesting a darker show than it ended up being most of the time until late in season two.

I wonder if the secret tunnel community influenced the Nosferatu warrens in Vampire: The Masquerade, secret entrances and all, though maybe not as directly as the Morlocks in X-Men. Did they influence this? Quite possibly.

A remake starting in 2012 gives its Vincent a clear origin and makes him able to change between human and scary-eyes-and-fangs form, because I guess there weren’t enough shows about vampires or werewolves at the time.

But overall I’m often amused by how Vincent has to live in secret because people react to his appearance with alarm and then... mostly immediately get over it.