When you’re a kid everything looks novel and original even if they weren’t for the time. And, if the episode was actually groundbreaking in any way, watching them now they look stale because so many people have copied them since.
I loved the old Twilight Zones, and still do. As a kid I thought of them all as simply stories with twist endings but seeing them as a grown up I realize that they’re much more than that. The “Eye of the Beholder” episode, for instance (the one with Donna Douglas as the pretty girl in a world of people with twisted faces) actually has a lot of dialogue about why her crime is being beautiful – the government in that world values conformity, and wants everyone to be the same. Her crime isn’t being beautiful, it’s being different. And that’s the message Rod Serling was selling. Ugliness isn’t bad, but forced conformity is.
Serling could fill a half hour with dialogue, usually compelling. But he didn’t write all the Twilight Zone episodes. A lot of them were written by Charles Beaumont and the legendary Richard Matheson. And a lot of the stories were adaptations of short stories from the science fiction pulps (which Beaumont and Matheson frequently published in). In the 1950s the short-short with a twist ending was a very common and popular form in the pulps, so it’s not surprising that the Twilight Zone episodes came out that way. “To Serve Man” started out as a Damon Knight short story from the magazine Galaxy in 1950. The aliens looked vert much like pigs in the story, but in the Twilight Zone the Kanamit are very tall guys with huge bald heads (the main one played by Richard Kiel, who went to to play “Jaws” in the James Bond films)
Yeah, I just suddenly realized while reading that, that Harry Bates’ Farewell to the Master would have been a natural for Twilight Zone if it hadn’t already been made (without the full twist) into a feature film. I don’t know if it would have been a good adaptation, it would doubtless have jettisoned a lot of plot unless they did it as one of those extended episodes like Of Late I Think of Cliffordville. But it would have fit the mold perfectly.
I have a certain fondness for an episode that I never saw as a kid. My sister kept talking about it and finally dvr’d it for me during a SyFy marathon – The Ring-a-Ding Girl.
It’s pretty sentimental but it “got” me. I think I shed a tear or two at the end.
I remember being very disappointed by “A Passage for Trumpet,” which was Jack Klugman’s first appearance on the show. Maybe it’s because I remember liking one of his other episodes, “Death Ship,” so much better that it stands out as a bad episode.
I was charmed by Art Carney’s performance in Night of the Meek. I also read it as a short story in a TZ paperback anthology, and one scene struck me as mathematically implausible.
When the drunk Santa is paying up at the bar at the end of his lunch break, he asks the bartender how much he owes him. The bartender says “Let’s see, that’s six shots of rye and a ham sandwich. That comes to fifty cents.”
And I’m almost certain that the tab came to the same thing in the TV version.
Never mind. I just found the episode on YouTube, an it was “six drinks and a sandwich, that’s $3.80.”
Not as ridiculous as fifty cents, but I still want to take my lunch breaks at that bar.
Fifty cents a shot and Eighty for the sandwich jibes with the countless mid-century hardboiled detective stories I’ve read. I mean, it would have to be a really good sandwich…
Maybe the sandwich was 50¢ and the drinks were free?
Generally the other way around- a “free lunch” if you bought booze.
Wishes like that GET you into the Twilight Zone, where you’re perpetually stuck in the past.
Just sayin’…
The past is a foreign country… with a lot of resources and an outdated military…
I was riffing off the linked strip. Did you not notice the winkie?
We thought it was rude to look at your winkie.
I know, sorry, sometimes the pedantic urge is strong.
And sexist as hell. Wouldn’t live there even if prices tripled.
I just realized the thread title is a play on “In Praise of Pip” ( right?)
Yep. 
Perhaps they knew how to trap the devil, aka Mr. Scratch, from the instructions in “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”
“And now,” he [Webster] said, “I’ll have you!” and his hand came down like a bear trap on the stranger’s arm. For he knew that once you bested anybody like Mr. Scratch in fair fight, his power on you was gone.
It’s actually worse than that - he has Hitler in his sights and lets a knock on the door interrupt him. Why? He’s on a suicide mission; what does he care if he’s caught after he gets the job done