Recently, I posted about a favorite sci-fi book of mine the Midwich Cuckoos by John Windham. The title refers to a breed of birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, who are then tricked into incubating the eggs and raising what hatches as their own offspring
The book is also known by the title of two movies based on it – Village of the Damned from 1960 and the 1995 remake starring Christopher Reeve.
I read about a new version of the story, a seven episode series produced by Sky TV in the UK. At the time I couldn’t find it available to stream here in the US. I discovered it was offered on the Sundance Channel service, with one episode released each week.So out of curiosity , I subscribed for a month.
In the book after an odd occurrence in the village of Midwich, all the women of childbearing age become pregnant. When the babies are born, they are unusual, with fine platinum hair, and yellow eyes and they all look the same, no matter who was the mother.
The look of the children for the two movie versions is based on the book. But for the new TV version, the producers went an entirely different route. The village of Midwich is now very multicultural and the mothers are a variety of races. This time the children do not look identical and have the same ethnic characteristics as their mothers.
In the book, the children become very independent at an early age, and prefer to be left on their own, not needing their mothers to care for them. The TV series, went in the opposite direction. The children are obsessive about the mothers and father and refuse to let them leave town. In fact, in one episode, one of the children demands that the mothers love them.
In our modern times, I understand the desire to have the cast reflect the diversity of our population. But these changes defeat establishing that the children as something other than human.
The earlier films were only 78 and 98 minutes long each. But the series has seven hours to fill. So they’ve added a lot of soap opera drama which at times gets tedious.
With only one episode released a week I’m not sure if the series will be over before my subscription expires. If that’s the case, I don’t mind. This version of the Midwich cuckoo is far from Must-See-TV.
Note: in the film version because the children were supposed to look at identical they all wore blonde wigs. Oddly enough, the wigs from 1995 looked worse than the wigs from 1960, but in this new version, with all the children looking different, there really wasn’t any need to use wigs yet several of them have some pretty bad, fake looking hair.
