Donald Pleasence in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

So this is probably content more suitable for my Horror Podcast, but I’m in the middle of rebooting that and moving the content to a new server. Besides we’ve talked about The Thing (1982) many times on the show so I’m sure you’ll forgive me for posting this trivia here. 

I’m in the process of putting all our backlog onto the Monstertalk.org website and there were a ton of broken links.  I’d tried to write this up once but I foolishly trusted that Google would keep its content around for a while and posted on Google+.  (Remember that?)

So I’m re-posting this so that hopefully it will make it into IMDB’s trivia page at some point on the entry for this film.  And honestly I’m sure that via the network of 6-degrees of separation somebody in our listener base can reach John Carpenter and ask him about this – but here we go.

I’m always paying attention to little details when I rewatch this movie. One of my favorite things is to imagine re-creating the “rec-room” at Outpost 31. To that end, when the BluRay came out for this film I discovered that I could now freeze-frame the movie and see particular details.

This is how I discovered Donald Pleasence has a very strange cameo in the film.  I will now present my case.

Here we see Palmer (David Clennon) lighting up a doobie next to a bookshelf:

There are several books on the shelf with easily readable titles including Welcome to the Club, The Religious Body, and Seven Who Beat the Headsman. 

So – here’s the thing. There isn’t any such book in real life.  This is a fictional book that was used one time prior to The Thing – in an episode of the mystery television show Mrs. Columbo. 

If you’d like to take a listen – I’ve queued up the relevant episode on YouTube at a moment when the book is discussed:

S01E02 – Murder is a Parlor Game. (I’ve queued up to the relevant point.)

In the episode, that fictional book is created by actor Donald Pleasence!  Now according to IMDB (and I’ve been unable to confirm this in a primary source) Pleasence was originally cast to play Outpost 31 scientist Blair (ultimately a role played unforgettably by Wilford Brimley.)

Here’s a screenshot from the Mrs. Columbo episode in question with Pleasence (as Ian A. Morley) showing his book off to some fans.

Thus, with the inclusion of this prop from Mrs. Columbo, Director Carpenter includes a very obscure nod to his frequent actor, Donald Pleasence.  Now the only mystery here is whether this was literally Carpenter doing this as a nod – or whether one of the prop people did it.  The thing is they had to get the book somehow. Was this Carpenter’s idea? Pleasence’s? Some set designer? 

I’d love to know. Regardless, it’s fun to know that – like Adrienne Barbeau’s cameo as the voice of the Chess Computer – Pleasance makes a tiny footprint in the snow of Outpost 31.

Also – I have to admit that since the whole thing resulted because Pleasence wasn’t available and Brimley was substituted for the role of Blair, I can’t help but think of all this work as a sort of Blair Switch Project.