Here is the episode in question.
I liked Bewitchin’ Pool.
Apparently I’m alone in my opinion!
Watch it. In the first two minutes, Serling says, “perhaps it’s already happened, two million years ago.”
But again, pinning the story definitively in either past or future is kind of missing the point. It’s a cyclical history trip. They’re two people starting over after a cataclysmic war. Whether they ‘are’ an American and a Soviet or not, they’re obviously representing a caution about closeness to such a cataclysm, and a counter about common humanity.
Post-apocalyptic Elizabeth Montgomery was very doable.
Any Elizabeth Montgomery was very doable.
For me, 99% of the hate for The Bewitchin’ Pool is the God-awful dubbing of Mary Badham’s voice by June Foray. Ugh.
UT~
Also the fact that while it may be unintentional, it’s possible to interpret the end as the children committing suicide.
Yes. Yes, you are.
Not Cousin Sabrina. Plenty slutty enough, but kinda creepy.
I just re-watched “Bewitchin’ Pool” last night to make sure we’re not being unfair to it, and ugh, it’s awful. If anyone cares, Hulu has it, and so does Netflix. (for some reason, Netflix has TZ S. 1-3 & 5, but not 4.)
It has all the previously described awfulness, including the Rocky the Flying Squirrel voice, which I’d forgotten about, but it has a terrible title; mostly it has something no one has mentioned yet: a presumption that children of divorce are unwanted.
I can see how Earl Hamner’s mind is working: in his world, people stay together for the children, so people who don’t must not care about their children.
There are so many ways that is wrong, I don’t even know where to start.
At any rate, the parents are 2-dimensional, awful characters, and the children really are unwanted. It’s not a misunderstanding on the part of the children that gets resolved. The magic of the “bewitchin’ pool” happens because of the parents’ neglect.
Hamner has said that he wanted to editorialize about the high rate of divorce in California, which he found shocking when he arrived there, but this is not well thought out, and completely misses the point that being the product of a bad marriage is harmful to children whether the parents stay married or not. At least in some cases, it’s probably better to get resentments out in the open.
I understand the parents are supposed to get a comeuppance in that they ask the children to choose between them, and the children make a third choice the parents didn’t know was on the table, and we’re supposed to love this, because the parents have been set up as hatesinks (especially the mother), but aside from the fact that it’s unrealistic that children this age would have their custody left entirely up to them (a judge would probably ask them in chambers what they wanted, and tell them he had a lot of things to consider, like who had the most free time, and who would be living in the house), any divorcing couple usually fights a knock-down-drag-out over the kid.
Maybe in 1959, you could get away with such an unrealistic picture of divorce, but not now. Even someone like me who hasn’t been divorced, and whose parents were never divorced, knows how awful this story is.
So, the basic premise is highly flawed, and many details are flawed as well (like the bad dubbing). There’s also some terrible acting in it. In fact, Mary Badham is really the only very good performance, and it’s marred by that Rocky the Squirrel voice.
In short, not only is it as bad as I remembered, it’s worse.
Serialized television has so much going against it that getting 100% good episodes is neigh impossible. Serling himself said about TZ that he would be happy to get one third great episodes, one third good, and one third stinkers. I think that ratio holds for most people, even if there isn’t a consensus on which are the stinkers.
“The Bewitchin’ Pool” is still a stinker, which might have been somewhat redeemed by Mary Badham’s performance, if she hadn’t been dubbed by Rocky the Flying Squirrel.
I know we weren’t NEARLY as litigious back in the 1950s, but I still wonder how “Hey kids, maybe your answer and your way out can be found waaay at the bottom of the pool” made it on the air.
I’m not sure I dug up the Twilight Zone thread I was looking for. I see I posted to this in 2014, but I thought I did to one much more recent.
Anyway, all the TZ eps are rated on the IMDB, and their top twelve, rated on a ten point scale and ties not being broken, are…
9.2-- Eye of the Beholder, To Serve Man, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
9.1-- Time Enough at Last
9.0-- The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
8.9-- It’s a Good Life, Living Doll
8.8-- Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
8.7-- A Stop at Willoughby, The Obsolete Man, The Shelter, Five Characters in Search of an Exit, The Masks.
And the worst of the bad:
5.9–Cavender is Coming (Yes!!! Or to quote from memory the TZ Companion, "Its ‘humor’ is so terminally unfunny it might better have been titled “Cadaver is Coming”), Sounds and Silences (this one was out of circulation for decades. No great loss, evidently)
6.0-- The Bard*
6.2-- Mighty Casey
6.4–Black Leather Jackets
6.5–The Whole Truth, The Incredible World of Horace Ford*, Showdown with Rance McGrew
6.6–A Thing about Machines, I Dream of Genie, From Agnes–With Love.
- Hour eps, which maybe shouldn’t count.
Time Enough at Last is a stupid episode. I’m sure there are many pairs of reading glasses strewn around the city/state/country/world that he could find and use.
I’ve been thinking about this over the years, and I think the rule of thirds holds for a lot of shows. I think ST TOS follows this and L&O seems to as well. Maybe ST TNG is more like 1/4 - 1/2 - 1/4.
The New Twilight Zone (1986) I think is more like 1/2 -1/4 -1/4. There are a lot of good ones in there. If you’ve never seen them, check it out.
Re: “Time Enough at Last.” Always wondered why the hero wasn’t tripping over corpses as he made his way around town. And I agree with everyone who said they can’t watch this one again…it’s just plain mean.. And Meredith makes the character such a sweet little man.
“It’s a Good Life” WAS better as a short story than on TZ. I should say the same about “To Serve Man.” The original story ends with the punch line. The screenplay drags on for five minutes too long.
He didn’t wear reading glasses. He wore coke bottles that he was utterly blind without. The chances of finding a pair with approximately the right scrip was unlikely, even if he could actually see to locate one.
Man, just imagining the headache Meredith must have had by the time cut was yelled…
It seems like they were just cracked when they fell, not utter smashed to pieces. Could probably still be used to muddle to the closest drug store and try all the reading glasses for sale there. And there would be no other way to magnify text on a book without those specific glasses that he wore? I’m doubtful.
“The Bard” may be in the bottom tier of episodes, but at least it has Burt Reynolds doing his best Brando impression.