I’m not just proclaiming Henson’s greatness because as a child I was subliminally implanted during The Count’s hypnotic numerical chanting. Nor because I have a bit of an obsession with cubes. I’m a believer now. I was introduced to the above media by Bill Ginder, who initially started talking about something called “Man Eating Cube.” Phill did some Googling, and discovered The Cube, a television experiment conceived and directed

The above was part of some mysterious entity, hosted by Alastair Cooke, known as the NBC Experiment in Television, that apparently aired in 1969 & 1970. Beyond that all I know is that an episode of Star Trek was pre-empted by it on April 11, 1969, and that two pieces, Dream on Monkey Mountain (adapted from the play by Derek Wolcott) and another Henson project, the documentary Youth ‘68, are archived in the Library of Congress. So there might be other pieces of interesting media out there, I just don’t know about them.

Anyways, The Cube is an hour-long teleplay wherein “The Man in the Cube” finds himself in a tiny cube, obviously the subject of either some kind of experiment or some kind of torture. Others can enter and exit the cube, but he cannot leave unless he “finds his own door.” It’s a carefully constructed examination of the nature of perception, reality and of one’s sense of self. I really don’t want to describe it further - just set aside some time and watch it. If an hour of video on your computer is too much for you, just leave the audio on in the background - the audio alone is astounding.

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