Why does nobody ever talk about the 1983 HBO adaptation of The King in Yellow?

 

 

I kid, but it's an interesting weird-adjacent bit of trivia.  

I first became aware of it while reading Kenneth Hite's excellent Appendix II:  The King in Yellow - The Encores in Arc Dream's excellent annotated King in Yellow.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in Robert W. Chambers:  it has the best scholarship on the subject ever printed, as far as I've seen.  

In his discussion of works inspired by TKiY, Hite says:  
 

Raymond Chandler references the book (or perhaps the Play?) in his own crime story “The King in Yellow” (1938), in which detective Steve Grayce sees trumpeter “King” Leopardi dead in yellow pajamas and muses, “The King in Yellow. I read a book with that title once.  

It's just a namedrop, but back then as a fan of weird fiction you took what you could get.  I have a pet theory that the 1938 D. Appleton-Century Company edition of TKiY jogged some memories and got some creative juices flowing, because before that there was very little Chambers-inspired weird fiction. and then all of a sudden we have Chandler's story, Starrett's Cordelia's Song in 1938 as well, and Derleth's The Return of Hastur in 1939.  

In any case, Chandler's story first appeared in the March 1938 issue of Dime Detective magazine.  The text of this version is available on the Wayback machine.

In 1945, the story was collected in the book Five Sinister Characters, reworked into a Philip Marlowe story (sorry, Grayce).  

Two years later, a radio adaptation was broadcast as the July 8, 1947 episode of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe radio show. Once again, archive.org comes to the rescue, and you can listen to it here. 

Finally, coming around to my cheeky title, the story was adapted for television as the April 23, 1983 episode of Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. 

This is how things were for Chambers fans before True Detective made The King in Yellow a household name, and before even the "modern era" of Carcosa stories kicked off in the 1980s in weird fiction circles.  It may be the only time TKiY was referenced at all in mainstream popular media in the entire 20th century.