50 Years of the Twilight Zone 104
pickens writes "Fifty years ago on October 2, American television viewers first heard the words: 'You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone.' Like the time-space warps that anchored so many of the show's plots, Rod Serling's veiled commentary remains as soul-baring today as it did a half-century ago, and the show's popularity endures in multiple facets of American pop culture, appearing nearly uninterrupted through television, syndication and DVD releases and under license to air in 30 countries. 'The whole idea of "The Twilight Zone" jumped off the television screen and became a catchphrase, a buzzword for something much beyond the TV show itself,' says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. 'When you say Twilight Zone, it's its own genre.' The original show ran just five seasons, 1959 to 1964, with 156 episodes filmed; Serling wrote 92 of them, and other contributors included Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury. Anniversary observances were held at Ithaca College in New York, where Serling taught from 1967 until his death in 1975, and which keeps Serling's archives; and also at Antioch College in Ohio, where Serling was a student."
GRRM (Score:2)
I only discovered this recently, but George R. R. Martin, famous for his high fantasy Song of Ice and Fire series amongst other things, also wrote some of the early Twilight Zone scripts. Not to dismiss the larger significance of TZ, but for ASoIaF fans, it seems appropriate to be discussing that early screen work as GRRM's own epic series begins filming soon.
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Um, considering GRRM's age, I think you mean that he wrote some of the early scripts for the 1980's revamp of The Twilight Zone.
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Oh, you're right :)
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Unfortunately, Google was down
OMG, somebody really does control the vertical !
Re:GRRM (Score:5, Funny)
Sigh. That was The Outer Limits, not The Twilght Zone. You've just given me this image of Mayor Quimby telling Leonard Nimoy "May the force be with you!"
Great Writer (Score:2, Interesting)
Makes you wonder in 50 more years or 100 years if some future race of humans dig us up and find all these works what they will think.
We had space travel, wars with other worlds, technology that rivaled anything future man will invent.
Keep that mindset and the Sandskrit writings of India, the Greek tales of Atlantis, and pretty much all of the stuff we think may have been real; ancient Egypt all becomes flight of fantasy. Or does it.
Man's imagination is vast and uncharted.
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Makes you wonder in 50 more years or 100 years if some future race of humans dig us up and find all these works what they will think.
We had space travel, wars with other worlds, technology that rivaled anything future man will invent.
Keep that mindset and the Sandskrit writings of India, the Greek tales of Atlantis, and pretty much all of the stuff we think may have been real; ancient Egypt all becomes flight of fantasy. Or does it.
Man's imagination is vast and uncharted.
Um, no. In 50 or 100 years, assuming we haven't entered a new Dark Age from some catastrophe, we'll still have the records we have today. That near term, we'll also have oral accounts from eye witnesses who are still alive. And if we do have a catastrophe large enough to destroy enough records to make it unclear this is all pretend, it will take centuries before any descendants will be able to put together the pieces enough to read our DVDs and other data again. They'll probably also have to forget what "sc
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Scary Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
I still get the hee-bee-jeebies about ventriloquist dummies after I watched The Dummy when I was like four or five years old. It's actually pretty amazing, which cheesy late 1950s early 1960s special effects that a lot of the stories are incredibly powerful. Serling and the writers he got make scripts were some of the best the business ever had.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe it or not, the majority of Twilight Zone episodes merely adapted episodes of the radio series Dimension-X (and X Minus One, itself both continuing and drawing heavily on Dimension-X material) to TV.
But aside from that detail, yeah, I'll agree, some of the best.
My Favorite (and Only) Rod Serling Story (Score:5, Interesting)
It goes like this... a buddy of mine was going to Cornell at the time, which as you may know is a stone's throw from Ithaca College... It was a dark and stormy night... quite literally... my friend is driving back to campus and sees this one lone guy, trenchcoat, hat pulled down, making his way through the pouring rain... small college town, he does what any decent person would do, he pulls over to see if he can give the guy a lift... by now you know that guy is Rod Serling... my buddy pulls the window down, and Serling smiles and says something like, "You've just crossed over!"
Apparently, Rod Serling used to do "the hitchhiker bit" ALL THE TIME around Cornell -- he got a big kick out of the expressions on the good samaritan's faces when they realized who they had just picked up...
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Well, to be more accurate, they all drew from the same short stories. Most of Dimension X and X-1 shows were adapted from the sci-fi short stories of the day.
Which reminds me, since the infamous Capricorn One is mentioned here from time to time, the basic premise of *that* abomination actually comes fr
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I don't believe it:
Dimension X [archive.org]
Neither do I believe that broadcasts of stories like The Veldt have entered the public domain, as alleged by archive.org.
Destination X looked to stories like First Contact, Destination Moon, A Pebble in the Sky. You can't fault these choices for a hard core sci-fi series.
But The Twilight Zone mined very different ground.
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Actually, the radio broadcast has entered public domain, even though the original short story is still under copyright. I know this makes no sense, but as Mark Twain once quipped, even God can't make sense of the copyright laws.
Science Fiction: Substance vs. Fluff (Score:5, Insightful)
In recent years, many directors have forgotten that slick special effects do not compensate for poor storytelling. Consider "Star Trek V" (directed by William Shatner) and "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace" (directed by George Lucas). Both movies are packed with colorful special effects generated by sophisticated computers.
Yet, I prefer the black-and-white story of the "Twilight Zone".
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My mother met Rod Serling at a writer's conference (she wrote Disney comic books and a few of the old Crusader Rabbit scripts. Fast company!)
She said Serling was very short and extremely charismatic.
Come to think of it, my little sister is a bit under-height for our family...
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She said Serling was very short and extremely charismatic.
I met one of his cousins 15 years ago and she was also very short. While she may not have been as charismatic as Rod, she was friendly and an interesting conversationalist.
culture... (Score:2, Insightful)
... and now it lives on as a ringtone and a diddy we hum whenever something weird happens.
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I've always wondered why, when the Ventures appropriated the music from the Twilight Zone, they went and called it "Out Of Limits". Retaliation for not getting permission, maybe.
Oblig. futurama reference (Score:5, Funny)
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Scientist: "I have combined the DNA of the world's most evil animals to make the most evil creature of them all."
Evil Creature: "It turns out it's man!"
(The Scary Door [metacafe.com])
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Noonee Noona! Noonee Noona! Noonee Noona! Noonee Noona! Pling! Pling! Pling! Pling!
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http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3069419/the_scary_door_4/ [metacafe.com]
Twilight Zone isn't SciFi enough. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Twilight Zone isn't SciFi enough. (Score:5, Interesting)
So what you're saying is you have a hard time with any kind of fiction that's not science fiction?
The Twilight Zone was never pitched as a science fiction show. In his intros during the opening credits, Serling specifically says things like, "It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge."
The point was not to tell you a cool story with aliens and space ships in it, or to speculate on what the future would be like (though some episodes had these elements). The point was to present teleplays that used elements of the fantastic as shortcuts that allowed the show to present universal moral dilemmas and commentary on the human condition within its half-hour format. If you can't deal with that because it doesn't include aliens, then I suspect you've been missing out on a vast world of literature and ideas.
So often I read Slashdot and I see all these smart people, and then every kind of discussion of any fiction or entertainment is always science fiction. And then there's always one of those "Star Trek vs. Star Wars" nerd who will jump in and scream, "That's not really science fiction, it's fantasy! IT'S FANTASY!!!!" Y'know... who cares? Good stories are good stories.
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Nope.
I merely expressed a preference. That's all and it's nothing more. I respect Serling's immensely. I just prefer The Outer Limits over the Twilight Zone and I expressed why I have that preference. Everything else you projected onto my post - which is easy to do, especially here on Slashdot because of all the Star Wars vs. whatever statements you have pointed out.
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I merely expressed a preference. That's all and it's nothing more.
I think there's a little more to it that than. When you compare, you are making an implicit claim that the two are comparable. What if I had said, "I prefer Snoop Dog's Doggystyle to Twilight Zone." Are the two really comparable? A music album compared to a TV series? Why would the two be comparable? Or how about, "I prefer hand-made Swiss watches to Twilight Zone"...? People would say that that's non-nonsensical, and it is. But your comparison is sensical. Why? Because they have an element in common.
The i
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So what you're saying is you have a hard time with any kind of fiction that's not science fiction?
Perhaps they're saying that this note doesn't belong on slashdot, but on cinemabuffs.com or something like that.
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Uh, guy? Maybe you and Sarah Palin consider this science fiction, but let me tell you, it ain't.
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You missed GPs point. See we educated people know very exactly, when something we see is physically unthinkable and impossible. Which is what's the difference between SciFi and Fantasy.
The thing is, that every story, every game, book, movie or whatever, as soon as it loses its believability, it loses the viewer. Like how the current Star Trek movie failed, when you saw nobody running away in terror, when Spock drove that giant mass of red matter (of which previously a tiny drop killed a whole planet) into t
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Of course I meant "We can't follow bullshit like that". No idea where the "'t" went. ^^
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The thing is, that every story, every game, book, movie or whatever, as soon as it loses its believability, it loses the viewer . . . So Fantasy can not ever possibly be a good story for anyone who understands physics. We can follow bullshit like that. It disgusts us. And therefore loses us.
Then again, if someone's dumb enough to be unable to detect its failure, he will love it. Simple as that.
Yeeee-eeaaahhhh, so what you're saying is that you can't deal with any form of fiction that's not science fiction?
Seriously: Consider the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens come down to Maple Street and turn on and off the lights and mess with people's cars and everything turns into chaos. That was clearly impossible. The aliens at the end were just a couple of dudes with some wireless box full of buttons. That disgusts you?
On a related note, there's a chapter in Moby Dick where Melville explains that s
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Well, you prove right there, how lack in imagination, lack in knowledge of physical possibilities, and lack of understanding my question proves that you are the very fantasy-loving idiot I talked about.
I never watched Twilight Zone. So I can't comment on that. Either I was too young, or it was not interesting to me.
Your Moby Dick example is a straw man argument, and I don't know if I should simply laugh at you, or if you are able to grasp the point, that what Melville believes to be true in that world, is n
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I never watched Twilight Zone.
So why comment in a thread about it?
Your Moby Dick example is a straw man argument, and I don't know if I should simply laugh at you, or if you are able to grasp the point, that what Melville believes to be true in that world, is not actually what is true in that world. Which is the very point of the book. He's fucked up (much like you), but he is not the story. He's a character in the story.
Actually, Smart Guy, Herman Melville is the author of the story, and the observations on whales in Moby-Dick were taken from his own firsthand experience. This doesn't change the fact that, for a book about whales, it contains a lot of pretty erroneous information.
You obviously put no thought into that Star Trek example. Because then you would have noticed that they do not actually travel faster than light, but bend the universe around them. Something which theoretically is entirely possible in our current theories of the universe. And: Oh yes! I checked this. Or else I would not have watched the series.
Wow. Just wow. So you really are just as blinkered and myopic as you claim to be.
article cites Robert Thompson = fluff piece (Score:2)
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Shanter showed up in two episodes - the airplane one and one where his character and his newlywed wife discover a fortune telling machine in a small town.
Nimoy also showed up in an episode dealing with WWII and seeing things through the eyes of both American and Japanese troops.
I finally got a Tivo awhile back and Twilight Zone is one of the first shows I had it start recording. It's amazing the actors that have appeared on that show.
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Loenard Nimoy had a very early SF role as an alien in the Republic serial "Zombies of the Stratosphere", and multiple appearances on the Outer limits. For original Twilight Zone, he's on record for only one appearance: "A Quality of Mercy" (Season 3, Ep. 15 - 1961). He also played a young hood in Dragnet and several appearances on the Virginian in his earliest career.
One notable early appearance for Twilight Zone - Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson in "Two", where they are the o
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Nimoy also ended up in rawhide.
You couldn't tell if he was an Indian, a Vulcan or a Romulan. '-)
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I don't believe he ever "starred" in an episode, but he did have a minor role in A Quality of Mercy [wikipedia.org].
-Mike
Veiled? (Score:2)
I don't see what was particularly veiled about the commentary in the show. Half the time, Serling himself would outright state the moral the end, or the beginning.
Favorite Twilight Episodes (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of my favorites: ...and many more, but those are the two on my mind.
1. The Pitch - to distract Death from taking a little girl.
2. Santa's sack - the bum giving presents to all.
50yrs! Wow.... I feel old :)
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Another good one was "Two," with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery.
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Another good one was "Two," with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery.
And great though it is, it's hard to imagine a stranger pairing than the guy from Death Wish and the chick from Bewitched.
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"Time Enough At Last" - Burgess Meredith's best Twilight Zone performance. He was also awesome in "Printer's Devil"
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"The Arrival", a DC-3 lands at an airport with no crews, passengers, or luggage-- and despite being a normally-scheduled flight, no family members of the passengers inquire about the status of the flight. An FAA investigator, assisted by the airline's PR guy and ground crew, tries to figure out what happened.
About 20 minutes in there's a scene that's just amazingly mind-blowing. (The last 10 minutes or so, unfortunately, are kind of wasted. But alas.)
The Shatner one with the airplane and gremlin (Score:1)
...would be my #3 favorite.
Especially nice was how a final scene shows the engine cowling with all the claw damage, so the viewer gets to know it wasn't hallucination.
Room for one more, honey . . . (Score:2)
Haven't see the episode since I was probably 8 (c. 27 years ago), but that line still gives me chills.
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Great show, used to watch it as a kid.
The episodes that stuck with me:
The kid whose parents are worried because he has to go sit a test. He does too well, and is never seen again. That one stuck with me through high school.
The button, where this family is given a button that will give them a million dollars, and kill someone who they don't know. (being made into a movie).
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Watch old TZ online! (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/video/video.php [cbs.com] (region blocked to non-Americans I believe).
Public Domain (where I live). (Score:2, Funny)
Fifty years, which means each season is now falling one year at a time into the public domain in Canada. Yay!
-Gareth
Oh did they really? (Score:1)
Is not what the intro to my first episode says... I wasn'a around at the time, and YouTube stated it was down for maintenance when I was going to check the link.
However;
The intro to the first episode (1959) that I watched says:
Hey!... (Score:2)
...You wanna see something really scary? [youtube.com]
whew (Score:5, Funny)
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You were probably zoning out while reading.
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I first saw the word Twilight in the title and was instantly appalled about a Twilight story on /. thankfully initial impressions were wrong.
You're moving into a land of both werewolves and vampires, of proms and screaming teenagers. You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone.
Na na na na, na na na na ....
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I first saw the word Twilight in the title and was instantly appalled about a Twilight story on /. thankfully initial impressions were wrong.
I made the mistake of watching that utter piece of shit the other day. Why the fuck didn't someone warn me it was just a vampire themed episode of the Gilmore Girls? Weakest vampire film ever. And I'm including kiddy cartoons.
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Craig Ferguson (of the Late Late Show) had the best joke about it: Vampires with 6 pack abs! Do they come out at night to go to (in vampire mock-scary voice) Goooold's Gym! Then Craig does an impression of Sesame Street's The Count while miming a bench press: "One! One Repetition! Two! Two repetitions!"
He hates these so called Vampires because they should really be pasty white and frail.
ohman maybe offtopic but all for Craig
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Wait, Hold-Up... (Score:1)
Imitation shows (Score:2)
The Twilight Zone spawned a lot of great imitators in the 80's and 90's. My favorite was Friday the 13th [wikipedia.org]. They carried the torch for presenting bizarre concepts that stretched your mind. My favorite was a woman from our modern times that gets drawn back in time to the Puritan era. When she lights up a cigarette with a BIC lighter they say she is a witch - "She make fire without flint nor tinder." Great show.
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In the same genre though more fluffy was Amazing Stories TV series in the 80s and Amazing Stories: The Movie. I like the old man who gets on the ghost train that crashes through the house. "Thank you, Mr. Coffee!"
Lots of guest stars on that one.
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tedgyz wrote:
One of my favorites of the Twilight-Zone (TZ) type shows is "Freddy's Nightmares," esp
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There are those who call her...Tim?
But the real question would have to be, does she weigh the same as
It's the lighting...and the writing (Score:1)
Charles Beaumont wowed by big budget (Score:2)
1) Before the show premiered, a science fiction writer named Charles Beaumont, one of whose stories was adapted for an early script, wrote a piece in one of the magazines raving about the show and the big budget and production values. I recall him saying "I couldn't believe it! They actually built a roller-coaster on the set." According to him SF was finally getting taken seriously and getting the respect it deserved.
2) But, personally, I never liked it. My recollection is that none of the stories ever reso
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Someone else posted this to a similar complaint above, but Twilight Zone was never sold as science fiction. Most episodes do rely on some kind of supernatural element, but that doesn't *necessarily* imply that it's science fiction-- many of the best episodes are about things that occur only in a person's mind, and how reality differs.
Look at, for example, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" which is a faithful adaptation of a short story with absolutely no science fiction elements at all.
Compare that to The
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You probably have to see more episodes. Yeah - some ended along the lines of "wow - what was that - guess we'll never know." But a lot of them had pretty solid endings. A few that come to mind...
A passenger bus stops off at a small roadway diner with a problem - somehow they ended up with one more than the passenger manifest claims should be there. The mystery is solved after the bus leaves and all are presumed drowned when the bus crosses an unstable bridge. All, except for one gentleman who returns t
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My recollection is that none of the stories ever resolved. That always seemed sloppy and lazy to me. The basic Twilight Zone plot always seemed to be: a) Creepy, weird, moderately intriguing things start to happen for no reason. b) Things continue to happen. c) Finally, things stop happening, for no reason. I always felt cheated. Couldn't the writer at least have taken the time to, say, have someone throw a bucket of water on whatever creepy entity was doing the weird things, and have the entity scream "No! No! I can't stand water! I'm melllltttting! I'm melllllttting!" Or end with the main character waking up and finding out that It Was All A Dream? :-) Well, maybe a little bit more clever than that; but it's those little touches of verisimilitude that distinguish SF from fantasy and help suspend disbelief. I always felt that The Twilight Zone was unequivocally fantasy, not science fiction.
Actually, I've been showing season one of the Twilight Zone to my students for a while (as an alternative to reading more short stories, and as a treat), and I can't say that I agree with your impression. My favourite one ("Time Enough at Last") has the dramatic unities of time, space, and character and resolves, tragically. My second favourite ("The After Hours") resolves when the main character finds out and accepts who she is. "What You Need" resolves when a conflict between characters ends (I won't say
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By the way, does anyone remember Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" with fondness? -Gareth
From what I gather Rod Serling did not. He was basically screwed over and the network welched on the promise that it wouldn't become a "Witches and Warlock" type of show.
WHERE ARE YOOOOOOU? (Score:2)
But, personally, I never liked it. My recollection is that none of the stories ever resolved. That always seemed sloppy and lazy to me. The basic Twilight Zone plot always seemed to be: a) Creepy, weird, moderately intriguing things start to happen for no reason. b) Things continue to happen. c) Finally, things stop happening, for no reason. I always felt cheated.
It sounds like Scooby Doo was using the story-telling pattern which you click with best. Mysterious force appears, wrangling with said force, and
Also it spawned... (Score:2)
Arguably one of the best pinball games ever made, amongst pinball aficionados. TZ always represented the best 80s era pinball, and Mars Attacks! the best 1990s era pinball. A friend of mine owns both.
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So much to love about this show! (Score:4, Insightful)
I spent my adolescence staying up all night throughout the summer watching The Twilight Zone on WPIX Channel 11 from New York City (after Star Trek at midnight) and ticking off the episodes in my Twilight Zone Companion.
Although the narrative twists became a wee bit predictable when watched night after night, the humour and humanism of Serling's own scripts and choice of material from others kept the show fresh.
So many poignant moments that showed me what it meant to grow up and grow old, revealed the motivations of others in the adult world. I'm thinking of "A Stop at Willoughby", "Nothing in the Dark" with Robert Redford and Gladys Cooper, and "A Passage for Trumpet" with Jack Klugman - amongst all the other famous episodes.
Bernard Herrmann's music also thrilled me with the evocations of his work with Hitchcock and his own personal projects from the 1930's and 40's. And I was introduced to the work of Richard Matheson through The Twilight Zone and eventually found an old cheap edition of I Am Legend and wondered why it wasn't known more widely.
How I love this show. I need to order the complete series now!
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Was it worth not having any sex at all during adolescence? ^^
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Hey, let's call this "knife-in-wound troll moderation"! ^^
I clearly hit the bullseye there, didn't it? :D
Twilight zone radio (Score:5, Interesting)
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ortholattice wrote:
I agree with you that the Twilight Zone Radio Dramas are excellent. One of the best things about them is that the
Original Intro... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, The original intro played and the one people would have heard 50 years ago was:
"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone"
I just find it strange in a funny way (Score:2)
there I am, reading /. and I see the following topics one after the other:
50 Years of the Twilight Zone
Perl 5.11.0 Released
--
Of-course, of-course, Perl is only slightly over 20 years old but I bet Twilight Zone could easily go another 50 years if it used more Perl. Yes, more Perl.
Anne Serling, key writers, and actors interviewed (Score:2, Informative)
www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2009/10/02
Just listened to this the other night at work--worth finding in U-space. ;-)
The Blue Men (Score:1)
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It's called "A Matter of Minutes":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Minutes [wikipedia.org]
"Hope this helps"