Just For Fun / Symphony In Black

"The sound that now reaches your ear is of course music. It is, however, unlike music as you know it. The notes that play here are not played by musicians, but by those who no longer walk among you. Those who have fallen and who fell within the acts of darkness inside their souls. They are bound to play and will do so until a time far from now. To guide them is a Maestro with a particular wickedness that man knows all too well. In this hall she conducts... the Symphony in Black."

Symphony in Black is a horror anthology series airing on CBS in July 1993. Each episode consisted of The Maestro (Christine Renoir) conducting a series of featureless black shadows into providing the score of whatever story of morality has come to her mind and music. At the end of each episode, whoever has died arrives in empty chairs, then is transformed into another shadow, another player ready to perform the Maestro's works for eternity.

The show was created by horror writer Jude Mallon and comic artist Archie Dyer out of a shared respect for EC Comics, who wished to bring them to the screen. However, seeing as HBO already had Tales from the Crypt going, they had a rather harsh competition. The show often struggled to match Tales while dealing with standard television standards and the lower budget. The show officially ran for one season, with a slew of episodes being filmed and produced in preparation for the second season taking off... and then things went to Hell from there.

For reasons that are constantly debated, Mallon and Dyer has a massive falling out over who contributed more to the show, and have been in constant legal battles over the rights ever since. As such, the only home video release was a VHS with the first three episodes created just before the lawsuits went into effect, and anything official after that is likely stuck in limbo or only through VHS bootlegs. That is, unless you're willing to visit Renoir in person.

As a small compromise and apology to the actress for the show falling apart, the two and the studios agreed to let Renoir have access to the finished episodes and display them in private within her own place of business, a gas station in Georgia just outside of the small town of North Candel. The express understanding is that no footage of the show is to leave said station nor can she charge a cent. But if one is willing to make the trip, it can be watched and, as this page proves, be troped.

^ExplanationThis show of course, never actually existed. It is an In-Universe show created for a series I hope to get off the ground someday, the Jonas Jacoby Mysteries. If anyone wants to contribute, the general guideline is that the show consists of adaptations of EC comics that either just boringly stick to the material, don't translate well to TV, or are just sort of OK. Would appreciate being messaged if you want to ask me, JacobyInvestigative, directly about anything.

The stories that are confirmed to have been adapted are as follows^note If you know of other EC Comics and want to make entries about them, feel free to do so. Be sure to add it to the respective folder.:

Tales From the Crypt Stories

• "A Sucker for a Spider" (#29)
• "Gas-tly Prospects" (#30)
• "Taint the Meat, It's the Humanity!" (#32)
• "Squash... Anyone?" (#32)
• "The Funeral" (#33)
• "Last Laugh" (#38)
• "Four-Way Split" (#43)
• "The Substitute" (#45)
• "Tatter Up" (#46)

The Vault of Horror Stories

• "The Death Wagon" (#24)
• "A Sock for Christmas" (#29)
• "Practical Choke" (#30)
• "Notes to You" (#30)
• "One Good Turn" (#31)

The Haunt of Fear Stories

• "A Grave Gag" (#6)
• "The Irony of Death" (#8)
• "For the Love of Death" (#13)
• "Fed Up! (#13)
• "Foul Play" (#19)
• "The Silent Treatment" (#27)

Crime Suspenstories Stories

• "Jury Duty" (#6)
• "Revenge!" (#7)
• "One Man's Poison" (#11)
• "Paralyzed!" (#12)
• "Touch and Go" (#17)
• "One for the Money..." (#17)
• "Cinder Block" (#22)
• "Food For Thought" (#24)^note Not to be confused with the story of the same name from Tales From the Crypt #40, the adaptation of which aired around the same time as Symphony did.
• "Just Her Speed" (#27)
• "Good Boy" (#27)

Shock Suspenstories Stories

• "Fall Guy" (#12)
• "The Orphan" (#14)

For your listening pleasure, The Symphony in Black now performs... Tropes:

• Adaptational Attractiveness: Jennifer from One Good Turn, is still older but is much more pleasant to look at, thanks in part to being played by Betty White.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • In the original comic for Food for Thought^note Not the one with the circus folks that goes by the same name, the miner stumbled upon the paymaster opening the safe and killed him in a greedy heat of the moment with a hammer that happened to be nearby. In the episode, Chester actually lies in wait for Tobias with a knife, making him more calculating.
• Asshole Victim: As per usual with EC Comics, being a criminal or otherwise unpleasant dickhead will likely see you put in the ground or worse.
• Character Catchphrase: The Maestro has a one for her opening and closing segments.
  • Opening: "For your listening pleasure, The Symphony in Black now performs '[title of the episode]'".
  • Closing: "And with this comes the end of our piece. The music shall never truly cease, as there is always cruelty to guide me and blood to pen it. More shall be played whenever there is evil to play it. But for now... The Symphony in Black welcomes its newest players."
• Dies Differently In The Adaptation: In the original comic for Squash... Anyone?, the murderous husband was picked up by the zombie of his old elephant and slammed into the ground while his mistress was crushed under the foot of it. Here, the deaths are reversed.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first couple of episodes had the Maestro make horror puns much like the Cryptkeeper. The show dropped it quickly to try and give her her own identity.
• Gender Flip:
  • The leader of the three students in Practical Choke is made into a woman by the name of Mel. She even gets a Panty Shot when she and the other two are strangled and hung by Francois' intestines.
  • Junior, the Gristle's son in Taint the Meat, It's the Humanity!, is made into their daughter Junior in the episode.
• Honest John's Dealership: The main antagonists of The Death Wagon, a duo of unscrupulous car salesmen who sell dangerous cars while making them look safe.
• Jurisdiction Friction: Four-Way Split centers on the owner of an air freight business murdering his partner by dropping his body out of a bomb bay into the dead center of where four states meet, leaving the case juggled between jurisdictions. Of course, his business partner returns from the dead to give him the executions he deserved.
• Named by the Adaptation: The nameless protagonists of Practical Choke are named Mel, Collin, and Kyle.
• Large Ham: Danny in Fall Guy, which makes sense when you're being played by Jim Carrey.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The three students in Practical Choke are constantly insulting Francois Altidor's vodou practicing and often in faux Haitian accents. Kyle even comes rather close to saying the n word.
• Sanity Slippage: King Desmond in "The Silent Treatment" becomes so wracked with grief over his daughter's death that he failed to notice over his loud partying, that he orders the whole kingdom go silent to unreasonable degrees.
• Severed Head Sports: The baseball players in Foul Play, like the comic, dismember the murderous rival player and use his body to play a game. Unlike the comic, however, it's all implied, since the network wouldn't let them show any of it onscreen.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: In one episode, the main character, a raging alcoholic, is said he should be in the drunk tank for having a Blood Alcohol Content of 2.4, which is over the legal limit. One has to assume the actress meant to say ".24", because if the man had that much alcohol in his blood, forget the drunk tank, he would be dead six times over.

---

"And with this comes the end of our piece. The music shall never truly cease, as there is always cruelty to guide me and blood to pen it. More shall be played whenever there is evil to play it. But for now... The Symphony in Black welcomes its newest players."

Trivia

• One of the notable facts about the show is that in its first season, it attempted to use one of its episodes to effectively do a crossover with Tales From the Crypt, adapting "One for the Money..." in order to have it tie into the Tales episode Two for the Show, as in the original comic, the former story lead into the second via the twist ending. However, for spoiler reasons that are a bit complicated, the attempt ended up backfiring due to how Tales adapted the story, which led to a lot of confusion and the effort becoming infamous in TV circles. ^{But if you must know...}In the comics, "One for the Money" ends with the Gold Digger main character of the story murdered, and her body is stuffed into a suitcase and left on a train. In "Two for the Show", a man murders his wife and cuts her body up, leaving it in a suitcase to do the same thing, but is forced to get on the train by circumstances involving a police officer. In the end, the husband swaps tags on his bag and throws it off the train, only to find the bag he put his tag on has the first story's main character in it. In the TV version, "One for the Money..." ends the same way, with a porter calling the names of Crypt's characters, and Two for the Show maintains the twist of the chopped up body in the swapped bag. The problem is that in Two the other body is the police officer's wife, who he killed out of revenge for having an affair with the main character's wife, and he set up circumstances to make the main character swap bags in order to frame him for both murders. This results in the twist for "One for the Money..." making no real sense and the story just sort of stop.

YMMV

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Touch and Go focuses on a man obsessed with wiping things and is played by Tony Shalhoub. Is this some sort of murderous predecessor to Monk?
    • From that same episode, said murderer is renamed from "William Acton" to "William Afton".
• Special Effects Failure: Zigzagged in Squash... Anyone?. The puppet of the rotting Emma the elephant zombie is actually lauded by fans as one of the show's best special effects. But then the CGI model that was made to handle the reshoots comes on screen and looks absolutely horrendous. The fact that it keeps switching between the two just makes it more noticeable.