Kim Basinger, Don Johnson & Barbara Hershey in From Here to Eternity (1980)

1980 was the year for remaking films as television series, it seems. Yesterdays post featured a show taken from the 1973 film Westworld and this series, of course, comes from the 1953 classic film of the same name. It follows up on a 1979 three part miniseries that retold the story of the film. The series found the characters dealing with life in Hawaii after the Pearl Harbor attack that brought America into WWII. The cast also included Roy Thinnes and William Devane.

This series lasted only 13 episodes and has never made it to DVD. There are a few clips on YouTube, but not much more. Above is a commercial for the show from a St. Louis affiliate uploaded by ziggyelman.

Obscurity factor: 9 (got big buildup at the time, hardy remembered now, not on DVD)

Sharon Gless & Julie Kavner in Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980)

The highly successful 1975 film The Stepford Wives  based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin, led to a whole series of sequals - The Stepford Husbands (1996), The Stepford Children (1987), and of course the 2004 remake, but this was the first. The town of Stepford is doing very nicely, with the residents quite content with their lives. The lack of divorces and almost total lack of turn-over of town residents has caught the attention of a television producer, Kaye Foster (Gless) who has come to find out why everyone is seemingly so happy. Of course this causes alarm among the men, who are concerned that their habit of drugging and brainwashing their wives into docile homemakers who do their bidding without question will come to light. So from the time she checks in to the town motel, Kaye is skating on thin ice. Will she be able to make it out alive, or will she become one of them...or worse? Look for Mason Adams as a husband with regrets and Don Johnson as a newly recruited cop who's wife (Kavner) undergoes the treatment.

This film was released on VHS in 1989 and used copies can still be found. It has yet to be released on DVD, and online video of it has been limited to a few scattered scenes until just lately. It's been uploaded to YouTube in full by TVTERRORLAND. It can be watched in its entirety above.

Obscurity factor: 7 (available on VHS and YouTube, largely forgotten)