I’ll tell you what I’d like turned into a one hour show. I don’t remember the author, but long ago, maybe 40 years ago, I read a short story about the first contact with some aliens. No muss, no threats, and they gave us lots of really powerful technology, even technology that could be used as weapons, none of this disarmament stuff.
At the end of the story one of the aliens studying earth leisure activities is taken bird hunting by one of the people. The alien observes that the hunter only shoots birds on the wing, not those on the ground, and asks why. When it’s explained that no one would shoot a sitting duck, it’s just not sporting, he replies, “How interesting, we have the exact same custom.”
This is turning out to be a mass slaughter of electrons. Anytime that someone tries something like this I try not to get my hopes up. Why did I think that this might be different?
That will always be the standard against which we measure any anthology series, but no one really seems to have the same touch that Serling had. I had high hopes, looking at the casting and the choice of authors, but they are clearly aiming for mediocrity.
And why why why do always they think that they have to follow the same formula of The Twilight Zone by having a narrator at the beginning and the end (ala the new Outer Limits)? The earnest pontification, trying to moralize to us because we just may not have understood what we just watched. Bad enough in a melodramatic tone, but through a vocoder? Crap, why not just have HAL give the intro and wrapup?
There have been other anthology series that DON’T follow this method of having a narrator – in the 1950s there was Tales of Tomorrow, for instance. In Great Britain in the 1960s there were Out of This World and Out of the Unknown. I’d dearly love to see some episodes, because they did exactly what everyone here says they want – they adapted works by famous science fiction writers. Reportedly they had shaky cardboard sets, but I suspect they were honest about it. Out of This World :
Had The Cold Equations and Little Lost Robot
Out of the Unknown
Immortality, Inc. (HAD to have been better than Freejack), The Naked Sun (!!), The Little Black Bag, The Midas Plague, The Prophet, and others.
Tales of Tomorrow:
The Crystal Egg, What You Need (years before The Twilight Zone did it), and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (before Disney’s version)
Sorry to bump this, but I thought of another implausibility. Missiles don’t hit their targets immediately. Even assuming the Chinese (and others) could target the remaining missile sites (and how did they know which ones were still active) the missiles would get to the remaining silos a few minutes after they were deactivated. Plus, the moment they launched, the US could launch, making the whole thing pointless. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
In the early '50s there were several radio programs which dramatized sf stories. They were advertised in Galaxy, for instance. I think some are available. I have heard the dramatization of Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains and it was excellent.
I think one of the reasons that TZ was so good was that Serling used screenwriters who were also good sf writers - I’m thinking of Matheson and Beaumont. Maybe Harlan will pull the last of these out, and make it 1/4. I don’t have much hope for this week.