The Night Gallery - 2nd Edition Kickstarter!

If you're a fan of Rod Serling's The Night Gallery, and you missed the first edition of this gorgeous collection of paintings and information from the show, you're in luck! A new Kickstarter project has, um, kicked off with Rod Serling's Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour—2nd Edition!

From the page:

Greetings, Art Lovers and Mavens of the Macabre!

In 1998, Syracuse University Press published Rod Serling's Night Gallery: An After Hours Tour written by Scott Skelton and Jim Benson, the world's leading historians on the classic NBC anthology. At the time, the 404-page trade paperback was the most complete history ever documented on the 1969–73 TV series, featuring interviews and a selection of 100 photos.

Over the past 24 years, Skelton and Benson continued to compile interviews and imagery resulting in this newly expanded 824-page masterwork, now in full color!—a deluxe companion guide to Rod Serling’s dark fantasy series that revises, updates, and vastly expands the first edition from 1998 with the addition of deeper archival research, a crop of new interviews with cast and crew members, and more than 900 color and black-and-white photographs—including reproductions of all the introductory paintings!

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on the First edition of the book they did on the art of The Night Gallery, and I can tell you that it's worth every penny!

Head over to the Night Gallery Kickstarter Page to become a part of this project!

The Art of Darkness - The Night Gallery

I have been meaning to post this for days, now, but I've been too busy. And forgetful. What are you gonna do? This is life these days.

Anyhow, the guys over at Creature Features got a nifty project together on Kickstarter a while back. A book of the wondrous and weird! The paintings from Rod Serling's Night Gallery! Yaaaas!

And I got one. In a slick, leather slipcase. Because I deserve it! And? It's amazing! Beautifully curated, with explanations and history, galore! Anyone who is a Night Gallery aficionado will be proud to own one of these.

This is a big deal, folks! Having a compilation of both sculptures and paintings seen in the series in one book is the result of literally decades of sleuthing and hard work. One can imagine that just gathering the appropriate permissions and clearances from NBC Universal for use of the photos and all the artwork, would have been a daunting challenge.

Finding the paintings, themselves, was a major miracle, not least because we only have most of them because of some intrepid dumpster-diving on the Universal lot after the show ended and the studio was clearing out the sound stages to make room for whatever show was coming in.

It looks like there are still some books available at various tiers, so you might want to pop over to the Art of Darkness Kickstarter page to see if you can still run off with one of these beauties!

The Art of the Night Gallery

In the event you haven't already heard about this, there's a Kickstarter campaign for this wonderful book, which is a collection of the art from Rod Serling's The Night Gallery.

Fortunately for all of us, the campaign is fully funded and they're getting ready to ship the book towards the end of the month! But you can still be a part of this and have all manner of delicious goodies to enjoy!

As you may know already, I'm a fan of the series and I was so lucky to get the opportunity to see some of the paintings and meet Tom Wright, one of the artists, at Creature Features a while back. 

If you haven't had the opportunity to see The Night Gallery, click here to be taken to the full DVD set of all three seasons on Amazon.

Night Gallery at Creature Features

Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Night Gallery! A place where the chill in the air has less to do with temperature, and more to do with the infernal pieces of art on display...

"Lone Survivor"

"She'll Be Company
For You"

Burbank's own Creature Features has done something truly wonderful in gathering a spine-tingling selection of the original paintings from Rod Serling's Night Gallery, a show which is open to the public until March 31.


Painted by Jaroslav “Jerry” Gebr and Tom Wright, the paintings were a staple of the show, allowing Serling, with his trademark voice and diction, to introduce each tale of supernatural horror to his viewers. (You can get more history on Night Gallery here.)


Tom Wright, himself, was in attendance, a thin, stylish man with a quick wit and a ready smile for the fans who cornered him to sign their prints. He's gone on to become a director, mostly in television, since he did his time in the Night Gallery, with Castle and Supernatural among his credits.

"Pamela's Voice"

"Spectre in Tap
Shoes"

I remember that as a kid they fascinated me, so being in the same room with them was truly an awe-inspiring event. I could have stood most of the night, studying the brush strokes and drinking them in, but the show was a smashing success, and with that came the droves of fans. To be polite, I couldn't just stand there and block everything!


Those paintings were amazing, in large part because Tom Wright (who painted the lion's share of them) made a decision to paint each of them in completely different styles, so they'd appear to the viewer to be by different artists, as they would be if they were hung in a gallery setting. This one decision gave Night Gallery a layer of reality and believability it may not have had, otherwise.


It made me nostalgic for the days when studios seemed to be willing to go that extra mile, to pay a little extra money for that special touch to give the viewer a more intense experience with a story.

Untitled for an unproduced episode

I hope that if you're in the Burbank, California area in the next week or so, you take the time to go see this once-in-a-lifetime display of paintings!

"The Cemetery"