As usual, the Sci-Fi Channel is running its Twilight Zone marathon. Right now is one of my favorites, “Eye of the Beholder”. In it, a woman (the amazingly hot Donna Douglas), is undergoing the last legally allowed surgery to make her look “normal”. Throughout the first half of the show, you never see the faces of the hospital personnel. When the woman’s bandages are removed, you see she is very attractive. Then they show the staff and they are quite hideous!
A lot of the Zone is fairly tame by today’s standards, but I wonder how people reacted back in the day?
People were definitely impressed with it. Though I didn’t see it when it first came out, people talked about it for years later.
My first impression:
Mannequins really scared the ba-zeejus out of me when I was little!
The Long Answer:
I was not alive in the 60’s, unfortunately. But I remember hating them because they were black & white as I became conscious in the early 70’s. Growing up with fundamentalist Catholic parents was difficult, but my extended family liked Star Trek and Twilight Zone – Rod Sirling and Gene Roddenberry were addressing some very weird, but in some way obvious issues that my parents and my church groups refused to discuss.
One example where I was permanently affected:
My parents lived by watching the news, reading the paper, etc – their souls, smiles, love and humor seemed to be temporarily swiped away by the news… just like church. When they finished with the news (or church) they were transformed into stricter, angrier people, as if some of the “normal person” of them had been stolen. Many of the kids around me also hated the damn news (NBC, CBS, ABC - that’s it back then) because they had the same problem with their parents – so I tried to turn to comedy at every turn. But my parents, recogizing the more “liberal” views often presented in the funnily sarchastic remarks present in comedy, attempted to strip that slowly away also.
I had no idea of how universal the problem was or what nightmares COULD evolve from given social systems until I reached that age where I started understanding the Twilight Zone. One day when I was 11 or 12, I had this horrible realization (during a New Year’s Twilight Zone-A-Thon 
) that the “black & white” didn’t matter and the “seemingly tame” subject matter wasn’t really so tame after-all. It contained (in various stories of morals) hints of keys that allowed me to later comprehend the classical and modern philosophers and appreciate the weirdness of extreme physics stuff. They provided an avenue for me to travel from the mainstream without being seen doing so.
I am of the opinion that the material was less tame then, but was couched in stories that to the passing observer seemed normal and tame enough. When I would talk to grown-ups, they would refer to it as “weird stories” and would never pay attention to an entire episode, thus missing all of the hard-core social commentary and rebellious points. I felt like I finally had a leg up on the grown-ups – they couldn’t read the morals as they were presented… and how they related to how things REALLY WERE in common life.
I have not been nearly as impressed with anything done recently. The newest iteration of ‘Twilight Zone’ certainly is not tame by sexual/bloody… (the superficial mainstream standards), but the stories underneath are more like urban legends and not stories of morals – as if Sirling’s original intent of social commentary in twilight zone (minus admitted advertizing concessions) has been completely lost. The ‘Outer Limits’ however has retained it’s more scifi-like story-telling.