Comments on: Episode 194: Wear the Dead Man’s Coat https://www.ghoulishdelights.com/2020/11/11/episode-194-wear-the-dead-mans-coat/ Sophisticated Scares Tue, 30 Dec 2025 23:01:25 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 By: Smuggins https://www.ghoulishdelights.com/2020/11/11/episode-194-wear-the-dead-mans-coat/#comment-9393 Sun, 03 Apr 2022 20:51:52 +0000 https://www.ghoulishdelights.com/?p=3078#comment-9393 Really enjoyed this one. Excellent point about what causes the tramp to ‘die’. I kind of like the idea that the main character realizes he is already dead, then dies. Of course, Zombies are dead, but they don’t really ‘die’ until the brains are destroyed. So if you remove the coat or recieve a mortal wound, you are undead.

So putting on the coat makes you undead.

]]> By: Bob https://www.ghoulishdelights.com/2020/11/11/episode-194-wear-the-dead-mans-coat/#comment-9044 Sat, 14 Nov 2020 20:31:25 +0000 https://www.ghoulishdelights.com/?p=3078#comment-9044 I don’t think the Lights Out TV episode “Dead Man’s Coat” was adapted from Cooper’s QP script “Wear the Dead Man’s Coat.” Rather, I believe Cooper adapted it from one of his old 1930s Lights Out radio scripts. The plotting and dialogue in the TV program sound suspiciously like mid-1930s radio, and are a lot more primitive than Cooper’s late-1940s style of scripting.

Cooper would sometimes borrow basic ideas from his ’30s LO series to write more sophisticated scripts for the ’40s QP: LO’s “The Coffin in Studio B” became QP’s “A Night to Forget”; LO’s “The Haunted Cell” became QP’s “Good Ghost”; LO’s Christmas episode became QP’s “Rede Me This Riddle”; LO’s 1935 ever-growing amoeba script became QP’s 1948 ever-growing virus script “One Hundred Thousand Diameters.” And so on.

I think it’s possible that Cooper wrote a ’30s LO script about a dead man’s coat making its wearer invisible — and then reworked the basic idea as QP’s “Wear the Dead Man’s Coat” in ’48. And when the LO TV people signed Cooper to write scripts for them in ’51, he chose to update or adapt the old radio script, and not the QP script with its completely different plot, characters, and emphasis.

Also, the QP series was jointly owned by Cooper and Ernest Chappell, and it may be that Cooper didn’t have the right to adapt his QP scripts for television without Chappell’s permission. On the three TV series Cooper produced in 1949 and ’50 (Volume One, Escape, and Stage 13), none of the scripts appear to have been directly adapted from QP.

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