That Time Playboy Made Their Own 'Twilight Zone'-Type Show

Playboy also hired Bernard Rose, who would go on to direct Candyman in 1992, and Lizzie Borden, who previously made Born in Flames, the low-budget dystopian feminist classic that is about as far from a Playboy Channel production as you can get. Not to mention Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure co-star and filmmaker Alex Winter, who made the decidedly unsexy segment “Meals on Wheels” about a grotesque buck-toothed nerd who is randomly seduced by a strange woman.

Which also involves him battling a reanimated severed head for some reason. Sure, it technically has nudity at the end, but good luck pleasuring yourself to that, horny premium cable customers of yesteryear.

There were also several joyfully odd stories by writer and performer Joe Frank (whose work was once inadvertently cribbed by Martin Scorsese), and one episode featured the handiwork of credited camera operator Sam Raimi (it happened to star his brother Ted). We can’t say for sure that all the stories are winners (they are almost certainly not) but given the pedigree of the crew, why is this show not available anywhere? Surely it’s a pop-culture curiosity that, at the risk of angering parents who were just looking for a Pixar movie, should be on some kind of streaming service, not just a handful of tapes and laserdiscs that are presumably still tucked underneath mattresses across the country.

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Top Image: Playboy