Man, do I miss seeing that show. When I was but a young boy, the “new” episodes were running on prime time TV (was it CBS?). Two I vaguely recall were:
A woman gets a charm or something at a garage sale and she can stop time for everyone but her. At the end of the episode, nuclear war has been declared - the missles are airborne and she stops time. That kept me up nights, wondering if she ever started time again, or if there was some way she could deactivate the missles.
Another one was when a war vet saves an old man from a mugging and the old man has a stopwatch with one hour of time on it. It’s the leftover hour from when civilization went to the Julian calendar. He can run the stopwatch and wishes come true or something, so he uses a few seconds of it for the war vet to see the man that saved his life in Vietnam.
Were these remakes or variations of old TZ episodes? I haven’t seen a whole lot of the old series - maybe 20 episodes or so, but the two above stories really stuck in my mind.
Has anyone mentioned the one where Carol Burnett is a mean old aunt taking care of her niece who has braces on her legs? The little girl befriends an old man, who turns out to be a king of an alien world. He heals her before he returns to his planet.
That’s Paladin of the Lost Hour, by Harlan Ellison. It is a touching story. It is not a remake. I have not seen the episode, but I know it stars Danny Kaye (Ellison had wanted somebody else for that role).
I liked the one with the Darren from Bewitched (why can’t I remember his name? grr…). He flips a quarter and it lands on its edge, he can read people’s minds and foils a bank robbery I think.
I also liked the one with the mannequin who was out for a month…the ending was cool, with all the mannequins talking to her.
Among those mentioned I like the Invaders and Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? (that’s the one with the 3rd arm & 3rd eye, right?)
I only saw one episode of the new twilight zone and I think it was about this (retarded?) boy who could make pictures come to life, and at the end he makes a nuclear bomb explode or something…? It was really bad and the only part I remember was that he was at the doctor’s office and he made a human heart appear. It was really gross.
The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree [Silman-James Press; ISBN: 1879505096] Air dates, plot synopses, famous people and other tidbits of information for the Serlingphiles among us.
Snooooopy, I believe the episode you are referring to is the one I mentioned, “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge” where a Civil War soldier is hanged, the rope breaks and he escapes to his home, with a TZ-ish twist ending. IIRC, that episode had no dialogue at all, only action and music to tell the story. (Of course I can be wrong about that.)
Ukulele Ike, I think the pitchman in “What You Need” was Sterling Holloway (the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh). He also played a TV repairman in another episode.
Damn, now I have to get another copy of the book!!! :mad:
A lot of my favorites have been mentioned so far, so I’ll put in one that I like that I haven’t seen mentioned yet (even if it’s a little implausible) . . .
Three astronauts lose radio contact with Earth and go off course during the first mission to Mars(?). They crash land on a rocky, sun-baked asteroid, though they aren’t sure where. They have little water and no real way to secure any, plus they know there’s no chance of rescue. Madness ensues, and they end up shooting each other. The last crew member is mortally wounded, and starts wandering off to die when he comes over a rise and sees … a telephone pole, the outskirts of Vegas …
I’ve seen only some of the episodes, but I’ve read many of the stories they’re based on (there’s anthologies about, though several were written by Serling himself.)
I always thought “Midnight Sun” was on Night Gallery. Was it TZ as well, and remade for it?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by shimmery *
**I liked the one with the Darren from Bewitched (why can’t I remember his name? grr…). He flips a quarter and it lands on its edge, he can read people’s minds and foils a bank robbery I think.
No, the episode was called “Dust” because one of the major plot points involved a swindler who went to the condemned man’s father and sold him some dust – it was plain ol’ dust, of course, but the swindler said it was magic dust that would make everyone forgive the condemned man and not hang him.
I always imagined that she commandeered a big ol’ crane, grabbed all of the Russian missiles and turned them around.
Earlier in the episode, two activists came to her door and asked her to come to some kind of community meeting. She stopped time and dragged their bodies into the yard for a joke. So I suppose the moral of the episode was that you should be involved in your community or something.
And I obviously didn’t mean for my whole previous post to be underlined.
One of my favorites (there are many) is People Are Alike All Over.
Roddy MacDowell plays an astronaut, worrying to his partner that they’ll find hostile life on the planet they’re going to explore. But he winds up getting captured and put on display in a zoo. His partner had kept telling him, “Don’t worry. People are alike all over.” The irony is, the man was right.
There’s also the one where Jean Marsh plays a robot companion to Jack Warden on a desert planet. I don’t recall the name of it. But it’s well-done and poignant.
There’s also the one where Keenan Wynne plays a writer with a tape recorder that actually makes what he speaks into it come into being. The joke at the end is that Rod Serling winds up being one of the writer’s creations as well.
It’s amazing to realize that Rod Serling wrote the lion’s share of these episodes, and so many of them still remain fresh and viable today. An astounding output in so short a time.
The prudish guy and his wife go to a resort. The guy gets hooked on gambling and in the final scene, the slot machine wheels itself into the room mechanically squawking;
“Franklin”… “Franklin”
He deliriously topples backwards out of the window, unhappy ending…
PS: Don’t know why but it reminds me of E.S.Maughm’s “Rain”.