I need some spoilers. I believe I know what happens at the end of “Living Doll,” but I only saw up to the point where the father is trying to kill the doll using various electric tools. Please use spoiler tags.
I wonder about the actors…back in the 60s, were Ed Wynn, William Shatner, John Anderson, Telly Savalas, etc, considered established actors, and TZ was a good gig to get, or were they still trying to get established and TZ was a way to pay the bills? How popular was TZ back in the day? Along the lines of I Love Lucy, or underappreciated like Star Trek?
For some reason, “The Flight of Global 33” reminded me of a Ray Bradbury short story. I’m almost positive I remembered a similar story.
I can’t get over how everyone is smoking! In the hospital bed, in the airline cockpit, heck, even Rod Serling is smoking as he introduces the show! Was he so hooked on nicotine he couldn’t even go the 2-3 minutes it too to introduce the show?
After trying to “kill” the doll, Erich’s wife is quite convinced he’s crazy; she tells him she’s going to leave him, so he relents and returns the doll to Christine. Later that night, he trips on the doll and falls down the stairs, dying. Annabelle rushes to him and finds the doll, which says as she picks it up, “My name is Talky Tina, and you’d better be nice to me!”
The Twilight Zone was a popular show; Serling won Emmys for it, and it had a fan base. George Clemens (Director of Photography for many episodes) recalls they got appearances from actors they thought they’d never be able to afford because the actors would take half what they usually got just to do the show.
Well, for one thing, remember smoking was not quite perceived as “evil” back then, but it probably also bears mentioning American Tobacco became a sponsor beginning with the third season.
It only ran five seasons, from 1959-1964. Afterwards, Serling was involved in Night Gallery, another anthology show, but that one never quite reached the heights of the Zone.
I know there wasn’t such a stigma against smoking back then, but it seems so anachronistic to see it know. I mean, even in Steel Magnolias, there’s a scene with Ouiser smoking in the hospital waiting room during Shelby’s kidney transplant, and that was only what, 15 years ago or so?
I wonder what will seem anachronistic about our television shows 40 years from now?
It’s somewhat reminiscent of Bradbury’s “The Visitor” from The Illustrated Man. In it, people with a deadly contagious disease (the “blood rust”) are quarrantined on Mars to slowly die. The main character looks forward to new arrivials because they’re something new in their monotonous lives. One day someone arrives who has some amazing mental powers…
Is that it?
I suddenly found “The Lonely” amusing when I heard them pronounce the word “robot.” They said “RO-but,” just like Zoidberg on Futurama. Heh. I always thought Billy West just made that pronunciation up.
My second ex-wife used to “sit” a few days a week for a blind lady who was a secretary to the writing staff at WLW Radio in Cincinnati, back when Serling worked there. She described him as a nice guy, very insecure about his height, and said he “never stopped smoking,” and outsmoked everybody even back then (early-mid 50s) when everybody smoked. She said his preature death was no shock to her.
I read somewhere that Serling’s cancer stick of choice was unfiltered Chesterfields. I recall trying one or two back when I smoked. Pretty damn harsh cig.
Although Ray Bradbury, after Serling’s death, began to gentlemanly “not remember the details,” it is pretty common knowledge within the SF and Twilight Zone communities that back in the TZ days he came to openly despise Serling, and to accuse him of plagiarism. Do a Google search on their names, maybe with “plagiarism” also.
Charles Beaumont also took Serling to task for nipping his ideas. Serling wrote Beaumont an effusive letter of apology and the matter rested there.
Serling and CBS were sued many times for supposed story theft, but most were settled out of court.
Funny, one episode “The Fugitive,” attributed to Beaumont (but possibly ghosted for him due to his Alzheimers), is an almost beat-for-beat lift of Michael Shaara’s short story “Citizen Jell,” something that galled Shaara to no end.
I’m not sure exactly what episode is on now. A guy in his mid twentys appears to be wandering through a ghost town shouting “Is anybody here?!”. Oh, and he has amnesia. First person viewing this episode to succesfully guess how it ends wins!
It doesn’t count if you’ve seen the epsidoe before.
Joe, you’re watching Where Is Everybody?, the pilot episode of TZ, starring Earl Holliman, who, as one of the dwindling number of surviving TZ stars, does commentary on this ep on the new DVDs.
It is one of the very few that, maybe, just maybe, could really happn IRL (as I mentioned yesterday).
And the plot twist: It was all a military experiment. I was way off. I love the bit Sterling does at the ending where he describes space as being an enemy possesing a great weapon: isolation. I heard it on a commercial this morning and wanted to see the episode it was attachted to.
I need to run and buy snake food before the stores close, so I’m going to end up missing the next episode or two.
He also did a radio show called *The Zero Hour * back in the '70’s. This is kind of unusual, as radio dramas had pretty much died out by the early '60’s.
Rod Serling’s first sale was by coming in second place in a contest to write a script for a radio show. He started out in college and at WLW writing for radio, so maybe he was doing the 70s radio show for old-time’s sake.
The Howling Man is classic Charles Beaumont, written before his awful degeneration into Alzheimers.
Point of trivia: Harlan Ellison, while editing a magazine (forget which one), around 1959, purchased the short story version of The Howling Man. He and Beaumont later became friends and Ellison of course worked on the 80s TZ.
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