I always remember that as ‘N! O! S-M-O-K-I-N-G! Noooooooo SMOKING!’
That episode is an adaptation of a short story.
I read the original in a horror anthology a couple years back, but I forget the name of both the story and the author.
Anyone know what the original story is called?
“It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby.
Great! Thank you very much. I always wanted to go back and reread that again someday.
I watched last night on Netflix. It has held up very, very well. Part 1 especially so.
Weird, I clearly remember it being Dan Ackroyd at the end, but I don’t remember it being him at the beginning. That makes sense though. Maybe I was just paying more attention a the end.
It’s also weird that it holds up well, since I remember it being tedious at best … not at all on a par with the TV series.
I think the best bit was when the US troops in the Viet Nam segment said that the shouldn’t have killed Neidermeyer.
(In case you didn’t catch that, it’s a reference to Animal House)
Well, the movie gave me a chance to make a really good pun in a thread about actors being injured on set by melee weapons.
Also: “You big silly! You used to be a normal person!”
This is hilarious. I was watching 3rd Rock From the Sun the other day and saw this episode for the first time. If you watch from 6:20 to 6:50, you get a nice revisit from Jon Lithgow to the fourth Twilight Zone story in that movie:
Now, if Albert Brooks had been a graduate of the Wesley Wyndam-Pryce Rogue Demon-Slaying School, the outcome would have been different.
The last segment was about the best of them. And Lithgow was excellent in the role. The expression on his face in the ambulance when Ackroyd reappears (he was in the beginning and the end) and says, “Wanna see something really scary?” was priceless. But it was still a big disappointment that they were all remakes of classic episodes. I mean, we all knew what was going to happen in them.
Except for the Morrow one, but that was just a mess. It went nowhere, had no conclusion, and was totally tainted by the grisly tragedy. That whole segment should have just been scrapped. Plus, for his segment Spielberg was originally going to do a remake of the superlative episode “The Monsters are due on Maple Street”. But after the accident with Landis he distanced himself from the project and instead remade the ‘no-special-effects-needed’ episode “Kick the Can” which turned out to be just an embarrassingly lame schmaltz-fest!
And not to push this to GD, but it was an absolute travesty that Landis got off scott free. Everyone, and I mean everyone who witnessed that shoot said that he went above and beyond reckless. The two kids that died with Morrow were:
[list=a]
[li]In the country illegally[/li][li]Working illegally long hours[/li][li]Working illegal night hours[/li][li]Working illegally in hazardous conditions[/li][/list]
I mean I loved Animal House and Werewolf in London and Blues Brothers etc. but Landis was a complete asshole on that shoot and deserved a huge fine and some jail time!