That sort of described the 1980s reboot. It wasn’t all, but there were several short stories adapted.
So he’s basically dead as soon as his glasses break.
Not that strength or optics.
Of the several returns/remakes, there were two mentionable in the 2002 version, hosted by Forest Whitaker.
“It’s still a good life”, with Billy Mumy as Anthony, and he has a daughter. I did not really need to catch up with how he was doing (still terrorizing the residents of the small town of Peaksville) as originally that episode scared the shit out of me when I was 10 and it was in reruns.
I reckon the movie remake, where Anthony goes off with the teacher who can control his temper, would have been more frightening but I was older then. The opening teaser of that film “Do you want to see something scary?” was indeed scary, and the closer, with John Lithgow saying, “I love Creedence,” followed by Ackroyd, as the ambulance driver turning around, asking, “Would you like to see something really scary?” and the look on Lithgow’s face makes it funny.
Another remake was “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” renamed The Monsters Are On Maple Street was worthy. However, it lacked the Cold War paranoia and recently launched Sputnik, yet did have crazy people like me who can sometimes be seen looking up at the stars, as if waiting for something.
Back to the originals, one that is funny to me is just how cheap it all seemed to make. That, of course, is “The Odyssey of Flight 33” which features a set of a curtains behind two pilots. They take off on a 707 from London to Idlewild (IDW - now JFK) and on approach fly back in time to see grazing dinosaurs on Manhattan Island. So it’s a frontal view of the cockpit, a view of the airplane, and like stock footage of dinosaurs. They change altitude and find LaGuardia Airport (LGA) and the air traffic controller has no idea what sort of flying terminology these pilots are using.
Turns out they flew back to 1939. So from one New York World Fair (1961) to another.
Good stuff.
Lots of them: “Shatterday,” “To See the Invisible Man,” “Paladin of the Lost Hour,” “Nackles” (almost - the network thought it was too scary), and probably others I don’t remember
For me, the clear “winner” is “I Sing the Body Electric”. I marvel at how Serling thought it was going to be good. Was the concept of robots a novelty back then? Was it respect for Bradbury? I remember that Bradbury was mentioned by name in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up”.
Even if you rationalize away the atmosphere, you can’t explain away not noticing the gravity. Edgar Rice Burroughs made it an important element in his “John Carter of Mars” books decades before TZ. If they thought it was an asteroid, they’d know the gravity would be even less.
If we’re going to talk about inaccurate science, like earth-like unknown worlds with 1.000g gravity, then we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the incredible high levels of radiation in Bemis’ town. He’ll be dead before the day is out.
Even in Star Trek - and pretty much all Treks, gravity was never simulated. I can only recall Star Trek III where it’s turned off so the Kilingons’ would be extra-pissed off as they were floating. Done in pools or with strings, those kind of special effects are expensive.
For Trek, the only planets worth exploring were Class M and gravity was the same and the air was breathable. You didn’t need Spock announcing “It’s class M, gravity 0.6” and have them taking “giant steps”.
For the Twilight Zone, space travel was an established thing, yet they too did not use precious budget for the reality of the environment or gravity. In fact, I just read that what I called “stock footage of dinosaurs” in "The Odyssey of Flight 33” was from some old movie, yet still cost $2,500. Chump change now, even inflation-adjusted, yet a lot of money for a show that was not all that much of a money-maker when originally shown. And while I said it was just a curtain behind them, apparently Boeing had just finished a mock-up of a cockpit for stewardess flight attendant training, so no curtains and free mock-up. Oh, and they didn’t land at LGA in 1939 (if they had enough runway and didn’t go into the East River, an intact 707 would have been interesting), they changed altitude, and Rod says they may still be flying up there somewhere/sometime.
As for Bemis, he’s given up entirely. I reckon the time to rummage for lenses of some kind would have been before the unfortunate incident.
I believe Wilson proposed a similar solution, tongue in cheek, to one of the children who was afraid he’d look like a dork with glasses in Home Improvement.
My parents and I were looking at a house for sale and the realtor told us Charles Beaumont lived next door.
Serling was an active member of the Unitarian church in Ithaca, so it seems unlikely he would intend it to be Christian propaganda.
Apparently Cavender is Coming was proposed as a weekly sitcom, with a laugh track, where Cavender the Guardian Angel visited someone different every week, to show them how their sucky life was really great. Yup, week after week.
I did think Carol Burnett was good in the episode, though.
I’ll add yet another. And mention that I read something somewhere, where the writer suggested that it’s a legitimate interpretation to think the children drowned in the pool.
Yes! I was going to post that if no one else did. Refusing to speak to your child so that she is forced to develop her psychic abilities. Sheesh. That’s abusive. What if she turned out not to have any psychic abilities? Reminds me of parents who won’t use any kind of signed language with their Deaf children to force them to learn to speak and lipread-- except the majority raised this way don’t learn-- because, well…they are DEAF, and they end up with developmental disabilities they didn’t need to have, from language deprivation.
BTW, that 12-yr-old actress is Ann Jillian.
I’m not crazy about that one either. It’s more like an infomercial than a TV episode, because it doesn’t really have a plot.
I’m pretty sure the description of the Uncanny Valley hadn’t been done yet when the episode came out, and the idea of robots that could pass for human was conceptionally different for people though-- more like magic than brilliant technology.
His intent doesn’t matter much to me. The author is dead. He wrote what he wrote, and I read it like I read it. Both of us no doubt influenced by our upbringing in a nation full of Christians who want to insist that makes it a Christian Nation.
The original TW made their best android story in just their 7th episode. “The Lonely” (1959) beat Westworld to the punch by nearly 15 years with this imagery:
If you remember the episode, a kindly woman (who we all know is really an android) is abruptly shot in the face. Shocking as all get out, despite knowing (or thinking you know) the character’s true nature.
Oh, right! the actress was Jean Marsh, whose Upstairs, Downstairs fame was still about 13 years in the future.
A lot of it certainly was stupid, and still is. But there was some great storytelling in the 50s and 60s, unfortunately much of it lost because the first commercial videotape recorder wasn’t introduced until 1956, and even then a lot of material was lost because the two-inch wide tape reels were so expensive that they were frequently reused. Fortunately classics like Alfred Hitchcock Presents were filmed, and so are available today in high definition. I Love Lucy was also filmed, but only because Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz paid for the extra cost themselves in exchange for the syndication rights. 39 episodes of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners were also preserved on film through the use of Dumon’t “Electronicam” system which combined a film camera and television camera in one unit.
A lot of I Love Lucy was pretty cheesy comedy by today’s standards and had a typically 1950s misogynistic view of the role of women, but its popularity was unmatched even by today’s standards. And it broke lots of new ground. The network and the primary sponsor, Philip Morris, were adamantly opposed to casting Desi Arnaz as Lucy’s husband because his heavy Cuban accent was thought to be un-American and implausible as a TV husband. Ball said either he was playing her husband or there would be no show. It turned out to be a serendipitous choice because Arnaz had a great sense of comedic timing and used his accent to good comedic advantage.
And Lucy’s real-life pregnancy caused a major kerfuffle, with writers struggling with how to hide it. According to the movie Being the Ricardos, the horrifying thought worrying the network and the sponsors was, if Lucy was pregnant, how did she get that way? 
Arnaz insisted that the pregnancy be openly acknowledged and took the matter to the chairman of Philip Morris, who, due to the incredible popularity of the show, reportedly sent a memo to all involved staff and CBS executives saying “don’t fuck with the Cuban”.
As for The Twilight Zone itself, I think it’s a mixed bag. There were some great episodes and some poor ones. Suffice to say that I consider it worthy to have in my collection of old-time TV shows, along with the venerable Hitchcock series which IMHO is some of the best 1950s television ever made.
i dont remember that one, but it does sound terrible
We dont really know his prescription, and if you are that bad, you always have several spares. And a magnifying glass can be pretty powerful.
Re ‘The Odyssey of Flight 33”, i would have stopped in 1939, rather than take that risk.
I didnt take it as that either. He was obsolete as there were no more books.
There would be bodies, right?
One for the Angels is one of my faves, perfect casting.
Very true. TV series had a lot more episodes back then, usually 39 per season. They couldn’t all be gems. Serling had some excellent writers feeding him stories, including Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, but a lot of them he wrote himself. It’s been said that Serling could knock out a T-Zone script in one afternoon while sitting by the pool.
Hah! That would indeed be “heavy” because in the future gravity is stronger (“Back to the future”).
My guess is that 707 planes would not have enough room to land in 1939 LaGuardia and run into the East River and disappeared into the aethor of The Twilight Zone and filed by the CAA (Civil Aviation - per-cursor to the FAA) as something the pilot described as a “Jet” and perhaps as large (no RADAR) that made a splash in the East River.
A 707 is readily identifiable as a small 4 engine Jet that (in this case) can use some fuel. Keep an eye out.