My favorite, is the one where this boy is living in a house with all these adults and they all have to do what he says because he can hear what they are thinking and does not want them to think anything bad about him and if they do he turns them into something freaky like a Jack in the Box.
Also I like the one where this really nearsighted guy likes to read all the time and so much so that he doesnt want to be around people that much and some type of catastrophe happens, kills everybody except him and he is getting ready to enjoy books in peace and quiet and his glasses break leaving him unable to see the print.
And the one where this husband and wife wake up in a bedroom that is not theirs, they get and walk around the house only to find that everything is fake and when they go outside they see that everything outside is fake, on top of that there are no people anywhere. They are asking “what the heck happened to us?” and they hear a train thinking it is going to take them back home but it doesn’t.
They then find out that they are pets for a little girl who is some type of gigantic but very humanoid alien from another planet.
Do any dopers have atleast one favorite epsiode of the twilight Zone?
The one about the broken glasses is “Time Enough at Last” and a favorite of mine, as is “A Kind of Stopwatch” where someone gets a watch to stop time and it breaks while he’s using it during a bank robbery.
I kinda like “Of Late I Sometimes Think of Cliffordville”, where a wealthy and mean businessman (is there another kind in Hollywood?) is given the opportunity to return to the small town of his youth. He accepts, thinking he can take his knowlege of the future and make an even bigger fortune. However, he finds he can’t do much with his knowlege because the technology available at that time isn’t advanced enough. He winds up as a janitor.
It may be that I like this episode so much because Julie Newmar played the Devil, with a pair of the cutest little horns you ever saw – Damn! She looked good!
I love the one with the round room and the odd assortment of characters. There’s a clown, a ballerina, a soldier, etc. They spend the entire episode trying to figure out how they got there and how to escape. In the end, it turns out that they are
dolls in a charity bin.
I used a spoiler box because I don’t want to get yelled at by those who haven’t seen it.
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” from a story by Marvin Petal–not to be confused with “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by Luigi Pirandello.
BTW, the ballerina’s daughter would later be known as Darva Conger, the “winner” of the “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire” program (or was it “Multimillionaire?”).
Jack Klugman as a pool player who goes up against the deceased world champion (Jonathan Winters) in a winner-gets-to-live match. The discussions of life, achievement and the trading of one for the other are outstanding.
Another one with Klugman where he plays a down-on-his-luck jazz trumpeter with a drinking problem. Magnificent meditations on why to cling to life even when it sucks.
The small time crook who gets shot during a robbery. He wakes up to find himself in what he thinks is heaven…
My favorite may be “The Trouble With Templeton”, about an aging theatre actor who’s feeling his years. He longs to return to his happier youth, and his beloved late wife. It’s more involved than I care to write here, but when he does find himself mystically transported back, what happens is one of the most touching, and empowering things I’ve ever seen on TV. (Bit-o-trivia: the director Sydney Pollack has a small role as a… director).
I’m sure there are others, but that’s all I can think of right now.
Excellent choice, Bear. I’d give Nightcrawlers a slight edge for the extra tension, but the final scene in “Invisible Man” is by far the best moment in any TZ. The New TZ was generally better than the original show, which stuck to too many nasty twist endings and not as many human issues.
For the original show, I’d go with, “Nick of Time,” where William Shatner played a man who is drawn in by the incredibly accurate predictions of a penny fortune-telling device (with a little devil’s head). It’s a neat little twist on dealing with superstition, and also have a terrific final scene.
I like sentimental. I think it was the first, or one of the first episodes, called “The Big Pitch” It was about the sidewalk salesman who is visited by Death. He asks for a delay, because he always wanted to make one “big pitch”. What happens, and how he achieves his desire, always touched a chord with me.
The Invaders (with Agnes Moorehead)
Living Doll (with Telly Savalas)
From Agnes - With Love (with Wally Cox)
The Masks
But I have to say there are literally dozens of episodes that I love and haven’t seen in years beacuse they seem to only play the same 50 episodes in the annual marathon and I haven’t ponied up the dough for the DVD collections…yet.
Baker, that’s “One for the Angels”; the second episode aired, and a very good perfomrance by Ed Wynn. I like the melancholic/wistful ones, too - one of my favorites would be “Walking Distance”, where our protagonist learns all to painfully you really can’t go home again.
I’m so glad the original series is finally coming out on DVD in neatly packaged season sets!
I was a kid when these originally aired, and never missed an episode. Now, after seeing them umpteen number of times, there’s only one that still retains its original impact:
“The Eye of the Beholder.”
A woman is in the hospital, her head completely bandaged. She’s horribly deformed, and has had a last-chance operation to give her a normal appearance. Then they remove the bandages. . . .
It turns out the patient is beautiful, but the doctors and nurses, along with everybody else, have ugly and hideously twisted faces. Sort of situation where ugly has become beautiful and vice versa.
There are just too many good ones to pick a favorite, but I have to mention the one–I don’t remember the title–where a man named Bemis, a bumbling and disorganized but happy office clerk, loses his job, apartment and car in one day. In spite of his life on the edge, everyone in the neighborhood loves the guy–with the exception of the landlady.
A genie or guardian angel appears and turns him into a very correct and efficient man, who gets his job back with a raise, a to-die-for roadster instead of the old Rickenbacker he lost, and enough money that he’s ahead on the rent instead of behind.
But then it turns out that all the people in the neighborhood–the kids playing ball in the street, the grocer, and so on, no longer like him. So he tells the angel to put everything back the way it was, and he does…but at the end there’s a definite sign that the genie is still looking out for him.
START I’m curious, what brought this up? Are they doing a marathon somewhere?
