(It doesn't end well for him, what with the demonic Samantha Eggar hatching homicidal mutant children in the attic).
Stryker's plan unfolds first at a school for mutant children in New York State, which he attacks by night, and then in an underground bunker, tucked behind a hydroelectric dam, where he tries to make the planet safe for purebred humans.
The storylines of the thirteen episodes that aired during this timeframe center on the many attempts of fictional mutant children living in an orphanage to get adopted.
"It was a stunner," writer Harlan Ellison, who knew Matheson for 50 years, recalled Tuesday of his friend's tale about a mutant child kept in the basement by his parents.
David Cronenberg had a five-year-old daughter when he made his 1979 gyno-horror movie The Brood, with its murderous mutant children, and David Lynch memorialised his complicated feelings about fatherhood with the monstrously deformed baby in Eraserhead.
For Slater, the story of Cardona and Reta is, at least in part, an indictment of American obliviousness: a parable about the mutant children of the drug war.
"It looks like hide-and-seek in terms of the Chapman brothers," he said with a chuckle, referring to the hot British artists, Dinos and Jake Chapman, who create fiberglass and resin sculptures of X-rated Siamese twins and mutant children.
This sort of came to me growing up in suburbia: this idea of the American dream, and then you have this couple -- this sort of horrific couple -- creating these strange mutant children.
Another possible reason, especially in the absence of pfcrt 76T mutants, is that some children in this study may have failed to achieve therapeutic CQ concentrations.
Catalan cartoonist Joan Cornellà takes us back to those halcyon days in ZONZO, with depraved illustrations of crocodile hunters stabbing children in the heart, deformed mutants imitating road signs with their warped viscera, and melted cows being reshaped into cute dogs.
A mutant third species of book envelope entered from Japan, lined with plastic bubble-paper that children in their innocence loved to pop, releasing odorless vapors into the atmosphere.
