There seemed to be something about the TZ format that didn’t ‘scale up’ to an hour. It may be that the suspense element is harder to maintain for that long. Of course there are great feature-length movies that manage to keep the suspense up, but it may just have been too hard to do every week, on a TV budget.
It”s interesting to note that Rod Serling’s next show Night Gallery had even shorter stories (three in one hour) although even Serling thought the 37 second one-gag stories that began in season 2 were a step too far.
Twilight Zone episodes were largely brief morality plays, usually with a twist at the end, but also highly predictable twists. Some of the best episodes ventured into science fiction territory setting them apart from murder or conventional horror anthologies. The worst all suffered from poor production.
Wasn’t William Shatner a Sky Marshall or something in that episode?
No, a salesman, recovering from a nervous breakdown, apparently caused by his fear of flying.
But I guess you could say he deputized himself as a sky marshall.
I think a big difference was that TZ was often based on twist, but TOL was usually a monster story (sometimes with a twist at the end).
With a twist story, the longer it goes, the more likely it is to telegraph the twist. For a monster story, you can come up with multiple ways for the monster to attack and reveal what they are before the end of the story.
No, but the guy who was carrying the gun was a cop.
In the John Lithgow / George Miller movie remake, the guy with the gun is a sky marshall.
Also in that movie Billy Mumy has s small role in the beginning of the remake of “It’s a good life” and about 20 years later in a sequel tv show he plays an adult Anthony, who has a daughter. Somehow Cloris Leachman reprises her role from the original zone.
It’s a Good Life has a slightly star studded cast for a Twilight Zone episode. John Larch, Max Showalter, and Cloris Leachman were all seasoned veteran actors, and even Mumy has several credits under his belt.
If you can ever find the original short story of It’s a Good Life by John Bixby, read it. It’s even scarier than the Twilight Zone teleplay. Your own imagination tends to make it a lot more graphic. Remember the part when Anthony turns Dan Hollis into a jack-in-the-box? In the story, it says he turns Hollis into “something like nothing anyone would have believed possible.” Then at his father’s begging, sends Hollis to the cornfield.
Billy Mumy loved that role and said whimsically that he sometimes wished he could actually send nasty people to the cornfield.
The book was horrifying. As was the tv episode, it lived in my brain for decades
In the TZ episode, Anthony looks like a regular little kid, but in the short story he’s a monster of some sort, right? I seem to recall the impetus for his isolating the town was the doctor who delivered him tried to immediately kill him.
Amen. I’m remembering him making a rat eat itself, starting at the tail until it dies somewhere north of the pelvis.
And I doubt Anthony would be as cute as Billy Mummy, either. A wet, purple gaze is mentioned and the moment he was borrn the doctor tried to kill him with a scalpel which is when the village was transported to wherever it is, assuming it was transported and not just what’s left when he destroyed everything else.
Edit: Found it.
And Anthony is described as having “crawled” out of his mother when he was born, so yikes
I had found in a used book store an anthology that was every short sorry that had been turned into a TZ episode including that one. It was indeed well done.
the best 80s TZ story was about this frumpy chick who reads away too many romance novelsSHEacquired a cat who at night could turn into the stereotypical romance book lover aka pepe le pew
after a grand romance, he was going to move on because cats…she convinces him to stay one last night and she knocks him out T
the final scene is her handing him over tt to a vet tech to be fixed while he’s meowing and hissing …after reassuring her that they can do it even with his having a hissy the tech says"This will help the roaming around at night too" as the MC leaves with a big smile
Note this one I’m not too sure if I have it right there’s another one where this song writer and this singer meet and convinces her to sing a song he wrote to some music industry friends at a party and she does and a short time right before he tells her shes getting a pro contract they get into a fight she runs out and gets killed in a accident …and years later he gets a chance to redo it …
The first one was “Cat and Mouse” and
the final scene was much better than your memory.
She takes him to the vet. And when asked why she was there, she says “I want to have him fixed.”
Cut to a closeup of the cat giving an agonized meow.
Credits roll