You guys are adorable. I mean it!
I’m a collector, and I have real pulp sf magazines and a full run of Galaxy and a full run of F&SF minus about four issues. The latter were not published on glossy paper, but they were not pulp, and the issues have survived quite well. Unlike issues of magazines which were published on pulp, such as some of the Thrilling Wonder Stories reprint magazines and even Palmer era Amazings.
I thought the episode where the sidewalk salesman/huckster tricks death was pretty cute.
Yes, I loved that one too. “One for the Angels”.
I don’t think “To Serve Man” was in Galaxy. It’s a Good Life was in Pohl’s Star Science Fiction Stories #2. But they were Galaxy style stories rather than necessarily Galaxy stories.
As for trimmed edges, I clearly have crappier magazines than you have seen.
Now pulp has two meanings - average story quality and average paper quality.
They don’t necessarily track. I have a bunch of Unknowns and my sense is that the paper quality is mediocre (due to the war) but the story quality is top rate. When Ziff Davis kicked out Ray Palmer and put in Howard Browne, both paper and story quality improved. Palmer’s new magazines were digest in size and had reasonable paper quality, while their story quality still wasn’t so hot. I’d agree with you calling them pulps.
F&SF had tasteful covers, good quality paper, excellent stories, and endorsements from leading literary lights on the back cover. Call that pulp and you are saying that all magazine sf not appearing in The Saturday Evening Post was pulp. Your call, but it seems to destroy the utility of the term.
I had a different take on that one…
He thought he had escaped his fate but didn’t. Death made it appear to be his on his terms but the end result was the same. In the end no one escapes.
Oh, that would probably be another reasonable take on the story (to be honest I forget the details).
Without spoilering it too much, I just want to say its a good episode. Nothing particularly fancy or gotchay or stuff like that. A simple premise well executed and well acted.
On another note. The Black and White cinematography was top notch (at least for the studio and budget restraints they had). Young whippersnappers of today probably think doing good black and white is just like shooting color but doing it BW instead.
El wrongo.
Good BW photography/cinematography is probably coming close to being a lost art these days.
It was. Pohl reprinted it.
wiki “first appeared in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction”.
I liked most of the episodes Burgess Meridith was in, especially “The Obsolete Man”, and if you’re only going to watch a few episodes, maybe you should watch that.
No, I’m just destroying the term the way you use it.
You;re obviously a fan, but your use of “pulp” reminds me of the non-SF fan definitionof “science fiction” – it excludes anything good covered by that term (“It can’t be science fiction – it’s good”)
I don’t use “pulp” to refer to crappy low-budget sf thsat appeared in cheap magazines, but to anything that appeared in non-slick magazines in the 1920s on up. I think most fans, and the SF encyclopedia, use it the same way. It’s not synonymous with “crappy”. I think that’s the basis of our disagreement. You read my statement as “TZ is based on the worst type cheap of pop sf/fantasy”, whereas I meant “TZ is based on the most available and widely-read form of sf/fantasy”
I always liked the episode where the young Robert Duvall was an aspiring Nazi leader. He meets Hitler (always in shadow), and gets many tips and financial help.
Unfortnately, Hitler can’t help him (he gets charged with murder).
This came up not long ago; there are, arguably, a double-digit number of 'em with no such aspects.
There was another one with Death in it, where Death tricks the person, but is actually a pretty nice guy otherwise.
This was the Robert Redford one.
Kingsley Amis (I think from “New Maps of Hell” but I’d have to look at my copy to be sure.
SF’s no good,
They say until we’re deaf
But this is good
Then it’s not sf.
Anyhow, pulp = bad was just one of the definitions I say you might be using. I don’t. I rather consider pulp as a factor in magazine print quality. I’d certainly never say there were no good stories in the actual pulps - The Gostak and the Doshes for instance is a fantastic story, and there are plenty of others. I’d argue that the average quality (as measured by some of the issues I have and mostly the stuff reprinted by Sol Cohen’s reprint mags) is lower, but that might be a factor of age.
This is from the wiki entry on science fiction magazines
The pulp era
Astounding Stories began in January 1930. After several changes in name and format (Astounding Science Fiction, Analog Science Fact & Fiction, Analog) it is still published today (though it ceased to be pulp format in 1943). Its most important editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., is credited with turning science fiction away from adventure stories on alien planets and toward well-written, scientifically literate stories with better characterization than in previous pulp science fiction. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History in the 1940s, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity in the 1950s, and Frank Herbert’s Dune in the 1960s, and many other science fiction classics all first appeared under Campbell’s editorship.
Plenty to quibble about here. Was golden age Astounding really a pulp magazine? Is 1955 the right cutoff? In any case, there is no difference between 1954 Galaxy and F&SF and 1956.
To use the MITSFS motto, I’m not a fan, I just read (and collect) the stuff. But I have a lot of the stuff. Pulp, as generally used, is not a compliment about quality, though much pulp is looked at with nostalgia, like in Goulart’s book on the Pulps. And of course sf was not the only, or even the major, pulp genre. I’ve got books of covers with mysteries, horror, horror mysteries, spicy horror mysteries, etc. The BEM and scantily clad girl covers of sf magazines were actually pretty tame.
I’ll look up the SF Encyclopedia entry later. But when do you think the pulp era ended? Is IASFM a pulp magazine? Was the actual “Twilight Zone” fantasy and sf magazine a pulp?
I have to say that this is probably my absolute favorite episode ever.
In thinking about the episode, I have to say that Romney really reminds me of the overly officious Chancellor played by Fritz Weaver.
“…The 47% of you who don’t pay taxes…obsolete…”
“…Middle class tax cuts…obsolete…”
“…Public Television…obsolete…”
Sounds just like him…
Pretty sure that wasn’t Duvall, but a young Dennis Hopper.
Not GD, but I could just as easily picture Obama saying:
“…The top 5% of you with obscene wealth, obsolete…”
“…An individual’s choice of healthcare, obsolete…”
“…Profit as the motivation for work, obsolete…”
In fact, given the time that episode aired, and how religion had been replaced by the State, I’d say it was more of a left-wing totalitarian utopia. Or not… 
Burgess Meredith was a librarian in that one. No way the left are killing off librarians.
But a non-revisionist librarian is doubleplusungood; who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past; down the memory hole, rectify the historical records by removing the unperson from that picture with Comrade Stalin, eliminate oldspeak and oldthink; rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen that episode, but yeah, I seem to remember that Meredith’s character was an old school, all books are good (even disturbing ones) traditionalist sort of person. The fact that the climax involved getting the Govt bureaucrat to finally in desperation say, “For the love of God let me out!” and having said that on national TV the Weaver character was then prosecuted as well, showed that religion was supposed to have been an ‘obsolete’ concept.
American politics have changed a lot in the last 50 years. On one hand that episode could have been portraying a typical communist, militarist, totalitarian state (as was the usual enemy at the time) or it could have been seen as a more left-wing, socialist faux-utopia. Or a mixture of the two. That was part of Serling’s genuine talent, he kept his ideas flexible enough to not have them become dated even today.