They showed “The Fear” earlier today. That’s the one in which a rural cop and the fashion mag. editor hide out from the gigantic aliens in her cabin… only to discover that all is not what it seems. (Although not even Rod Serling was up to the challenge of explaining just how the giant alien spaceman inflatable balloon was supposed to fit in that spaceship.)
I could swear the spaceship in that episode is the exact same model used in, um, “The Invaders” [title?], in which three tiny aliens terrorize an unsophisticated rural woman in her rustic cabin… only to be killed off by her in turn, whereupon it’s revealed they’re actually U.S. Air Force spacemen* (not being very diplomatic, though.)
Don’t you just love Hollywood depictions of pre-NASA space program stuff?
A girl gets trapped in a department store after it closes, and the mannikins start calling her name. She finds out she’s a mannikin too; she forgot that they get to live one day a year as a real person. That one scared the piss out of me.
I like “Death Ship” which starred Jack Klugman (Quincy) as a spaceship captain trying with his crew to figure out the horrifying sight of finding a crashed ship identical to their own on an alien world, complete with three corpses that match their own. Star Trek TNG totally nicked a lot of the ideas of this for their own (excellent) episode “Cause & Effect”.
I also love “Miniature” which wasn’t often shown during the show’s life in syndication due to legal problems at the time but is now screened as part of the marathons. This one has a beautifully heartfelt performance by Robert Duvall as a kind but lonely young man spotting that the little doll in a museum dollhouse seems to be alive.
For the gorgeous Bernard Herrmann score alone (seriously, how the hell did the TZ get the calibre of talent it did?) I also adore “Walking Distance” in which a troubled advertising advertise finds himself back in time in the town of his childhood and gets to talk to his parents and young self.
I see “Nightmare at 20,000 Ft” and “Time Enough At Last” have already been mentioned so that is covered
I don’t know the episode names and I think I missed the marathon :(. Anyway my favorites are:
The one with the doll (Talking Tina?) “If you’re not nice to me something bad will happen to you.” Guy attempts every possible way to destroy her, doll trips him down stairs.
The caravan that magically travels forward (I think) in time, he crawls along the road to get medicine finds a place which gives him some drug and he turns out to be the one who invented it? (I probably massacred the actual plot the only things I’m certain of are the time travel and a family with a sick member getting stuck in the middle of the desert).
Dunno the titles either, but the first one starred Telly Savalas and the second, Cliff Robertson. (The latter was of a pioneer wagon train headed to California in 1847; Robertson is given penicillin for his sick boy, who grows up to be a prominent doctor – albeit not discovering penicillin.)
I was joking. There’s several episodes with that plot. It’s always a small town. Nobody on TZ ever wishes they could go back to their apartment in Brooklyn and play stickball on the streets.
It wasn’t a relative, but another member of his club. The twist was that
at the end of the year he can’t pay off the bet because he’s lost all his money in the stock market. Then the talker reveals that he had had the nerves to his vocal cords severed because he knew it was the only way he could win the bet, figuring that he could use part of the winnings to have the surgery reversed.
I like the Mr. Frisbee one. It cracks me up.
I like Invaders; I think Agnes looks HOT.
I Sing the Body Electric. (Yes, I am a sentimental sap, thanks for asking.)
The one with the old lady who keeps getting mysterious phone calls and it turns out that the phone call is from a phone line that has fallen into her dead husband’s grave. Still scares the crap out of me.
The one I remember scaring me pretty intensely (and I don’t scare easily) is the one with Lee Marvin as the Old West bounty hunter who visits the grave of the guy he’s been chasing…I will say no more.
“People Are Alike All Over” with Roddy McDowall for one of my favorite surprise endings: “Marcuson, you were right! People are alike all over!”
“The Howling Man”–saw it coming a mile away, but still chilled me.
Sort of in that vein: “Laugh-In”'s Alan Sues (much younger and heavier) in the episode where the family patriarch makes his family wear Mardi Gras masks until midnight to inherit his fortune.
