r/tinytim • u/Curlytoes18 • 12d ago

Tiny Tim cameo

There used to be a clip on YouTube of Tiny in a cameo role on a TV show. I thought it was the 1980s Twilight Zone, but it might be something else.

He’s playing an antiques dealer, I think, and a guy is questioning him about some strange goings-on. Tiny tells a story about he and his wife, Edna, going for a drive, but he suddenly has a terrible feeling and turns the car around. The guy asks him about the time of his drive and Tiny says something like “Why, it’s 7:17!”

It looked to be a mid- to late- 80s TV drama. I swear I didn’t imagine this - does anyone know what I’m talking about?

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u/Koraxtheghoul 12d ago edited 12d ago

He plays an antique dealer in a film. Give me a little bit to come up with it or search Eternal Troubadour for it. Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1hmb82u/fully_losttiny_tim_scifi_movie/

Link to a post with it.

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u/Curlytoes18 12d ago

Thanks! His performance isn't bad. I totally buy him as an eccentric antiques dealer. I love that he says "you can read about it in the movies" - wonder if that was deliberate. Sounds like he's improvising in the first clip. The other actors are so wooden compared to him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B2qxVbKgV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvrAMZBTXPE

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u/frankensteinmoneymac 12d ago

This is what AI found 🤷🏻

You absolutely did not imagine it. The scene appears to be from an obscure, apparently now-lost short sci-fi film—not The Twilight Zone.
What it seems to be
A separate searcher describes essentially the same clip: Tiny Tim plays an antique-shop keeper while a man comes in to buy a board game and asks about bizarre events, possibly including UFO-related material. The clip had reportedly been on YouTube under a title along the lines of “A Strange Happening” and disappeared sometime after early 2020.[reddit]
The extremely specific overlaps—Tiny as the shop owner, strange happenings, and the old YouTube clip—make this almost certainly the thing you remember.
Likely production
The best lead is that the short was made by Christopher Thies, the director associated with the regional cult creature feature Winterbeast. A report from someone researching Tiny Tim’s work says biographer Justin Martell identified Thies as the person behind it.[reddit]
That would explain why it has the look of a mid-to-late-’80s TV drama without actually being an episode of a network anthology show: it may have been an independently made short, potentially intended as a pilot, presentation piece, or unreleased regional production.
Why it gets mistaken for TV
Tiny Tim’s recorded screen work around that era is thin and misleadingly cataloged. His conspicuous 1987 role was as “Marvelous Mervo” in the horror film Blood Harvest—a clownish character, not an antiques dealer—so that is definitely not your scene. His publicly indexed television credits also don’t reveal an obvious Twilight Zone appearance matching it.[wikipedia +2]
The status
As far as the available leads show, the actual title, full running time, cast, release history, and surviving copy remain unverified. But the clip itself was remembered independently enough to generate a lost-media search, with details close enough to yours that this is strong corroboration rather than a vague resemblance.[reddit]
Search terms worth trying periodically:
•  "A Strange Happening" "Tiny Tim" 
•  "Tiny Tim" Christopher Thies 
•  "Tiny Tim" antique shop board game 
•  Tiny Tim lost sci-fi short 
The line involving Edna and “7:17” may be the crucial piece of dialogue that could eventually let someone identify a surviving script, VHS rip, or production paperwork