Monsters were monsters to me. I would stay up late at night and idolize the Saucer-Men, She Creature, Tarantula, then on the weekends on local CH 11’s – Family Theater – I’d watch Lugosi as the Monster, fight Chaney as the Wolfman and think that’s the coolest rumble ever! Monsters weren’t really scary to me. They were friends that really couldn’t dress well. They were esthetic types, who, for some reason, hated conforming to society – kinda like art students.

—-Joe Riley, interview on Latex Mask Central

The Dallas Eye,
Dallas, Texas

Since my medical incident I have been trying to exercise regularly – at least an hour a day. If I don’t ride my bicycle outside, I have a spin bike, with a television hooked to a Roku and a DVD player. I’m always looking for something strange, entertaining, and an hour long – so I can watch it while I ride my spin bike… to fight off the boredom. I was exploring the outer regions of the weird channels way down the Roku list and I found something called Badass TV. Looking through the odd second-rate offerings there I found something fifty-nine minutes long called The Hypnotic Eye. I know there is an old pulpy science fiction/horror movie  by that name – but this was something different.

Back in the day, I always dreamed of getting myself a public access cable TV show and put a bunch of weird stuff on. Well, somebody here in Dallas did that. The guy’s name was Joe Riley (he was big in the early days of the Subgenius thing) and his show was The Hypnotic Eye. One episode was on Badass TV and I watched it and it did make the hour go by relatively boredom free. This episode was The International Show and it had a bunch of cool things on it – some I was very familiar with.

One was the fantastic dance scene “Jaan Pehchan Ho” – you may have seen this from Ghost World.

There were even a few Scopitones – which everybody knows is one of my favorite things.

So now I see that there are more episodes of The Hypnotic Eye available on Archive.org. I think I need to take a look.