Here's the ninety minutes you spent in 1972 watching NET Playhouse's "Between Time and Timbuktu," a mashup of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. stories (including Welcome to the Monkey House, Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, and Happy Birthday, Wanda June), featuring Bob and Ray, Kevin McCarthy as Bokonon, and William Hickey as Stony Stevenson, astronaut, poet, and hapless victim of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Phillip Bruns (Mary Hartman's dad) and Second City's MacIntyre Dixon also make "I know that guy" appearances.
So much of Vonnegut's work is derived from his time employed at General Electric in Troy, N.Y., which is portrayed as "Ilium" in Player Piano. In this film, Flushing Meadows Park stands in as Heaven, which, when I was seven, would have been perfectly credible. Also, its adaptation of "Harrison Bergeron" is, um, brilliantly executed. Producer David Loxton is also responsible for that great 1980 NET version of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven with Bruce Davison.
"You must be very careful about what you pretend to be, because one day you may wake up to find that's what you are."
