Heh. I caught an episode of the Twilight Zone on one of those channels that plays nothing but old tv shows and was completely entranced by the story of 2 soldiers from opposing sides learning to live together as the last remaining humans in a post apocalyptic world and the female soldier was played by Elizabeth Montgomery.
Wasn’t the male played by Charles Bronson, or am I conflating episodes?
It certainly could have been. I’m not very familiar with Bronson and it’s possible his name didn’t stick in my mind. Mostly I was just surprised because the female soldier looked and acted quite differently than I envisioned Montgomery. If I hadn’t seen it in the end credits, I wouldn’t have believed it.
We’ve been watching the Twilight Zone BD sets and last night we watched one I hadn’t seen before, “The Shelter”. That’s some powerful TV for 1961.
The best part of any given episode is the part where the main character stops dead in his tracks and delivers a to-the-camera monologue of pure one hundred percent Rod Serling Outrage. You know the “you maniacs” part at the end of PLANET OF THE APES? There’s some of that in most TZ episodes. None of this subtle beating around the bush subtext stuff, we’re giving you the message with blunt-force trauma impact.
Much of the SF stuff seems cliche’d, but that’s because it’s 2012 and we’ve had these ideas recycled through most of popular culture for fifty years. In 1960 they weren’t cliches yet, certainly not on television. But the show isn’t about science fiction, it’s about the human condition, and stories could and do take place in the old West, medieval times, WWI, WWII, modern day, the far future, other planets, you name it.
Or even a big obstacle. If YOU had immortality, would you immediately leap to trying to kill yourself? he and his wife didn’t even look any older. Or would you spend a couple of hundred years trying to clean up on long-term stocks, learning everything you could, traveling and exploring, trying new things, having sex with lots of people, before you decided life was too boring to live.
If you were on a mission that went awry, wouldn’t you at least try to implement contingency plans before you went direclty to murder, do not pass Go?
Etc.
Ahem…it’s “To Serve Man”
It was Charles and Elizabeth playing Adam and Eve…literally…
and you can, if you look hard enough, find Captain James T. Kirk, Scotty, Spock and Sulu in some TZ episodes.
I don’t disagree really with anything said so far, positive or negative. There were good shows, there were stinkers.
I would just like to offer some historical perspective. At the time, TV shows did not intend nor try to make you think; Serling did attempt this, and often succeeded. In the better shows, he held up a mirror to some of our worst traits, as a society and as individuals, and dared us to look.
One of the episodes I remember best is the one where a man is due to be hanged in a small town for a crime he didn’t commit; the people hate him because he’s different; the deputy would like to personally roast him over a spit, and so on. On the day of the hanging, the sun doesn’t rise, and the town is left in the dark. What I liked most about this episode is that the person being hanged isn’t lovable at all, he hates everyone right back. And so he is hanged, and the town is still dark and full of hate. No happy ending, no redemption.
Roddy
Robert Redford was in one as well. Shatner was in two episodes.
And Pierre Boulle wrote Planet of the Apes. Serling wrote the screenplay in which it was earth all along. In the book it actually wasn’t.
Serling later claimed that a third of the episodes were pretty good, a third OK, and a third sub-par. Of the five episodes cited in the OP, only one is generally agreed to be in the first group.
Here are some episodes that may change your mind:
“Number 12 Looks Just Like You.”
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit”
“Mirror Image”
“Masks”
“The Invaders”
“Midnight Sun”
“Living Doll”
Um… no. It had a pro-reading sentiment. Henry Beemus, nerdy as he was, was the only sane person in the story. Everyone else was a jerk.
And he had food and shelter. He even metioned that he would never starve. The only thing that he lacked was for something to do.
I was ten in 1960, and even then I thought TTZ was usually ridiculous, often just plain stupid. One of the most overrated, overhyped TV series ever, IMO.
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I watched many of these episodes on their first or second runs on tv. They scared the hell out of me. I still get chills - bad, evil chills - if I just hear the theme music. They were damn effective tv shows. Have no idea how they come across today, since they scare me too much to watch 'em.
They were also figuring out how television worked and what made it different from radio, live theater, and movies.
A while ago, the AV club began reviewing the first two seasons of the Twilight Zone. There are some clunkers (they were doing close to 30 episodes a year), but there’s some excellent TV in there.
I know it’s supposed to be the irony of the episode and all, but as i have pointed out (and as I’ve read recently in a backpacking magazine), even people with severe aberrations can read, if there’s sufficient light, by using pinhole lenses. In fact, before it was easy to generate aspherics, pinhole lenses were the only recourse for people with serious vision problems.
And you can make pinhole glasses out of just about anything – cardboard, leather, pottry, shells, wood… All you need to do is make a circular dsc with a hole in the middle and wear it like a monocle. Or you can go all-out and make a pair of pinhole “spectacles”
Mr. Beemis was a clever guy. I’m sure he’d have figured it out.
The Creature from the Cleveland Depths is a great story - an early precursor of the technological singularity story (and predicting the personal data assistant)
Isn’t The Lonely the one with the prison planet?
“Hey, look at that weird mirror.”
Was there an episode of Twilight Zone where a guy flips a coin and it lands on it’s side, staying upright? He then gains the ability to read people’s minds, until someone knocks the coin over later.
Was that TZ or was it Hitchcock or something else completely? Anybody know?