I thought it was pretty cool how the slot machine said “Franklin!” with the sound of falling coins.
For all you scoffers, let me remind you that it’s still entirely possible Fidel might someday be killed by flying shards of mirror glass.
“Eye of the Beholder” gets my vote for most telegraphed, no matter how many times they went to the “…Earth!” well (we’re not supposed to notice that we haven’t seen anyone’s face for 25 minutes?).
I do admire Serling for having the one all-black cast, but was there a single black actor in any other episode? I think maybe the butler in “the Masks”.
When I hear a laugh track, I generally assume something must be funny, but not in “Cavender is Coming” (or “Cadaver is Coming” per the “Twilight Zone Companion” [of which my personal copy is long since worn out]). To answer the OP, this gets my vote.
“Black Leather Jackets” (or “It Came from Outer Space” meets “the Wild One” [TZC again]) was almost so bad it was almost good. Almost.
I once read something about the story O. Henry was working on when he died, and had he not died, the world would have one more “Owl Creek Bridge” rip-off today.
“This IS the other place!” was a catchphrase among my friends back in the day (as was “already in progress”, which often preceded the episode that followed the Yankees game, the news, the Honeymooners and the Odd Couple),
Apropos of little, but maybe something, most TZ’s I’ve seen aired since the early 80’s ran with about 20 seconds somewhere edited out.
Neither the martian costumes in “Hocus and Fris” nor the Shelley Berman masks in whatever that one was called would have cost Edith Head any sleep, but I think it nice still that there was an Andy Devine episode, and Berman would otherwise have been about as well-known (to me) as Shecky Greene or Lou Holtz (not the football coach).
I’ve never seen the film “Young Man with a Horn”, but it’s hard to believe it did not inspire the Klugman/jazz ep. Just observing. Of course, ditto “The Hustler”/A Game of Pool". Reminds me of how I used to think it unjust how much the artists were the stars of the comic book industry, but eventually I realized how derivative comic book plots tended to be.
I liked “The Hunt”. Not “Bewitchin’ Pool”, though. I really hated that kid who invited the two over. I also liked “Steel”, because Lee Marvin was so good, and that heckler was kind of stupidly funny. So, two boxing episodes, and one baseball (“Mighty Casey”). Any more? Not too proportionally different from cinema’s depiction of sports.
“In Praise of Pip” (Klugman and Mumy) was one of the few where Serling does actually say “submitted for your approval” (he also said “…for your perusal” once). I think “It’s a Good Life” was another one, or maybe that was the “perusal” instance.
The Simpsons’ spoofing TZ in its Halloween shows is one of my favorite random TV traditions.
Reading through this thread before posting, I was surprised not to have posted in 2011. I must have been going through quite something.
Even more fun when you read a zombie thread and realize that you created it.
To each his own. This one ranks up there as one of my absolute favorites.
Submitted for your approval, the pinhead himself.
At one point the Twilight Zone was being rerun on some channel or other, and I watched several of them, and I found them full of extremely ham-handed moralizing and also a lot of the stories involved ending in which the actors discover they are ghosts. At that point I sort of lost interest in the series. TwiZone never seemed to be very science fictional to me, it always seemed to be more straight-up fantasy. Meh. Very few good episodes, though I do remember one about department store dummies who took turns magically coming to life as real persons every so often that was amusing. I’ll take “Outer Limits” over TwiZone any day of the week, and that includes the stinkers like “The Zanti Misfits.”
Yeah, that’s a nice effect.
Saw that one recently - was surprised how much the main character’s performance seemed like Robert Hayes in Starman.
The one with Dennis Hopper yelling about Nazis at a podium. Don’t even want to look it up.
Billy’s Cornfield is one of the pinnacles, IMHO.
Some of the better episodes were dumbed-down versions of John Collier. Reading
Fancies and Goodnights beats the snot out of any Twilight Zone marathon for time well spent.
No fun for me! I invariably realize that I was completely wrong! Let’s see what I say about this in 2017…
Can’t help noticing how many of these are last season eps. Yet no one has yet mentioned “Come Wander with me”. Bing Crosby’s son plays a singer who meets a woman out in Deliverance country whose song tells what’s happening.
Crosby’s a competent actor and I’ve seen the woman in other things and she was OK, so I gotta blame the script or the director. But the script was written by Serling and the director was Richard Donner, so I don’t know.
I love that one, but then I’m a sucker for time based fiction. Time travel, time loops, time acceleration, you name it.
I had no idea that was Bing Crosby’s son. That’s pretty interesting. Bing Crosby’s son stuck in a time loop. Works for me.
They reused that same makeup in another episode, where a rich man made his relatives wear masks before the reading of his will. When they took off the masks, their faces were stuck that way.
Funny thing about “A Nice Place To Visit.” It seems to be a virtual (uncredited) remake of a one-act play by John Balderston, written in the 1920s I believe, called “A Morality Play For The Leisure Class.”
A businessman arrives in the afterlife and is told by his otherworldly “servant” he can have anything he asks for at all. There are hints that he wasn’t a terrific person–that he cheated others in business, that he wasn’t a good husband to the wife who predeceased him (she’s here as well but he doesn’t particularly want to see her).
You know the drill…at first, he’s delighted, but soon it loses all its meaning. Nothing but perfection for eternity, without having to work for it…of course it gets empty. Finally, he loses it and screams at the “angel”, “I want to go to Hell!” Of course, the “angel” answers in genuine shock, “But where did you think you WERE, sir?”
Anyway, I like a good many eps that some others here have expressed dislike for. “Spur of the Moment”, for example…the Twilight Zone Companion chides this episode for making it obvious that Anne’s assailant was her older self. But as Douglas Brode points out in his book on TZ, that’s not the real twist at all. Knowing it’s Anne’s older self, we expect that she’s trying to warn Anne to follow her heart and marry the impetuous poor boy she really loves instead of the proper guy her parents approve of. But it turns out that the warning was NOT to marry the poor boy…and it turned out to be well-founded, because she did marry him and he ended up squandering her fortune and ruining her life! That was the twist.
And the more I think of that one, the more daring it seems. In a time period that was filled with “bad-boy-redeemed-by-the-love-of-a-good-woman” stories, this was saying, “Sometimes, the bad boy isn’t a misunderstood hero or a diamond in the rough. Sometimes the bad boy is a weakling and loser who’ll never be anything more than a bad man.”
Anyway, least favorites. I think I dislike “I Sing The Body Electric”, mainly because I love Ray Bradbury’s original short story and don’t think this ep does it justice. Changing the kids’ names and genders willy-nilly is one thing, but it rushes through the story at bullet-train speed–the daughter rejects the grandmother, rushes into traffic, is saved, and accepts the grandmother all in the same day, not over time as the story presents it. Even worse, the episode lops off the wonderful ending where the family pays for Grandma’s “retirement” at the factory, with the promise that she will return when the kids need her again. Years later, the children, grown old, their spouses dead and their children grown, move back into the old house and summon Grandma. The story ends with the sarcophagus landing on the lawn once more.
Then, too, I’ve seen the story done better–in a TV movie called “The Electric Grandmother”, with Maureen Stapleton, Edward Herrmann, and a pre-E.T. Robert MacNaughton. It was an hour long, so it took the time to develop things instead of rushing through them.
Everyone seems to love Nightmare at 20,000 Feet with William Shatner, but I can’t stand it. To me it was boring and the “monster” was a let-down.
I went to that link. That’s like calling Pravda “The Truth.” 
It is similar but not quite the same. As a kid I could never look very long at the page that had the pictures of the creatures in Eye of the Beholder in my copy of the Twilight Zone Companion. They freaked me out.
I have now finished Season One of Twilight Zone and over all I have enjoyed it. Yeah, a lot of them are dated and fairly predictable but there were some damn good performances in there. I think my least favorite was “The Fever” that slot machine was just silly not menacing. “Third from the Sun” was rather boring and terribly anti-climatic.
My favorite is a ties between “Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and “Walking Distance”.
Slight detour:
Way back when I was living with my ex . . . There was a TZ marathon coming up, and he mentioned that he’d never watched the show. So I sat with him and watched his reactions. The one he reacted most to was “Eye of the Beholder” He actually screamed when he saw what everyone looked like. It’s one of the few episodes that, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, I can still mentally go back to the first time, and experience that shock.
Heh. Reminds me of the New Year’s Eve I was over at my friend Rick’s house (Rick introduced me to the Dope) for a house party.
They had the marathon on in the living room and we were catching “Eye of the Beholder”. Rick said he’d never seen it before and I was looking forward to seeing his reaction to the ending.
Five minutes before the ending, Rick’s uncle, who’d had a few, wandered in and blurted, “Hey, I know this one. She’s beautiful and everyone ELSE is really ugly!”
That’s the equivalent of sitting in a crowd who’s never seen Citizen Kane before and yelling out in the middle of it, “Wait a minute, I know this story…Rosebud’s the sled!”