Several months ago I bought a couple of box-sets of TZ DVDs, but have only watched a couple of them.
The episode I like the best so far is called “The Lonely.” It’s about a guy that’s been exiled as punishment to a planet where there are no people – just himself living in a trailor in a vast, empty desert.
And then, well, I probably shouldn’t give it away, as that wouldn’t be fair to people that want to see it. But I’ll just say that the girl that visited him for a while was very beautiful … and their love for each other was, to say the least, quite special.
Do any of you people remember the TZ? Any favorite episodes?
Incidentally, with these two box-sets … it would have been nice if they’d left the commercials in them, as it would have been great fun to see what they were selling way back in the '50s and early '60s. But just the same, it’s still way cool just to watch 'em in their black and white … and get a sense of what this world was like in them thar days.
Good night! I’ll check to see if I got any responses tomorrow.
It was actually a very touching episode…I, too, won’t say more to avoid spoiling it.
ITo contribute, I guess I’ll have to mention my second favorite. A spaceship crew lands on a planet which has a typical small earth-town on it. And all the people in the town are dead, but are preserved doing the things they most wanted to do in life. The crew meets up with the “caretaker” who explains the setup to them. All the crew wants to do is get off the planet and be back on their way to earth. (Can’t remember if there was something wrong with their spaceship or not). Which lead to a really surprising conclusion to the episode.
Strangely enough, this series was one of my grandmother’s favorites, and we watched it together most weeks.
Oh, my, it’s been a long time, but always thought a very funny one was the woman (now I can almost think of her name) who murdered her husband with a frozen leg-of-lamb. She then put it back in the freezer, adn the detective never did find the weapon.
She didn’t put it back in the freezer. She thawed it and served it to the detectives. The story the teleplay was based on is “Lamb to the Slaughter”, written by Roald Dahl, and it didn’t appear in “The Twilight Zone”, but “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”.
As a kid, I loved the one where the housewife discovers a miniature flying saucer in her attic. The show had almost no dialogue for a very good reason. For those of you that have yet to see it, I won’t spoil the ending.
Another episode that I enjoyed was the one based on the Ambrose Bierce short story An Incident At Owl Creek Bridge. This was another show with almost no dialogue in it, again for a very good reason. It’s about Union Troops attempting to hang a captured Confederate soldier. It’s a great story and the screenplay was very faithful to the source material.
A lot of the shows that had aliens in them or were meant to be funny seem very dated when watched now. The ones that work best for me are the one about people trying to relate to other people. The show about the millionaire inviting his enemies to share his bomb shelter on the eve of a nuclear attack. The show set in a typical suburban neighborhood whose inhabitants have just learned that Earth has been invaded by aliens. The shows that depended on O. Henry type endings have worn badly. The trick endings are not the surprise now that they may have been in 1960.
I will always have a fondness for the show Shatner did about the gremlin on the airplane’s wing. The one Shatner did about the fortune telling machine with the devilish head on it just seems dumb now.
“The Martians on Maple Street,” where a neighborhood mysteriously loses electricity after something flies overhead, and paranoia causes all the neighbors to turn against eachother.
There are two I like btu I don’t know the title of either
The first one involves a crook and his moll who find in the most recent “booty” a camera that takes pictures of the future
the second one is Agnes Moorhead fighting teeny invaders only to be revealed as robotic probes sent by NASA
The one where the woman keeps seeing faces in patterns creeped the hell out of me as a kid and has haunted me ever since, even though there’s no real point to it (that I recall).
I wouldn’t mind having the aforementioned episodes spoiled for me.
My all time favorite was with Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis clutching books in ‘Time Enough at Last’. A book-loving bank teller who becomes the last man on Earth after surviving a nuclear attack. But his glasses drop, smashing the lenses and leaving him unable to read.
BTW marque elf useless bit of Info. That old Lady was Endora from Bewitched and Elizabeth M. was in an excellent episode with Charles Bronson.
**Jeep’s Phoenix ** I don’t remember the hunt, can you give more details?
Probably “The Shelter.” It’s almost the same story as “The Monsters are Coming to Maple Street,” but its presentation is a little more plausible. It doesn’t wander as much, which is good for a 23 minute teleplay.
I also like “I Am the Night, Colour Me Black.” (The one where the sun fails to shine on a town where a man is set to be unjustly executed.)
I guess I just like hysterical, panicky people and heavy-handed moralism.
One of my favorites has rarely been shown. And when I describe it, nobody remembers it.
It takes place during Mardi Gras. The patriarch of a wealthy family is on his deathbed. His nasty, greedy relatives are gathered around and wearing masks, (he may have requested the mask wearing). The masks are not very flattering. He lets each member know what he thinks about them, (again, not very flattering). After much bickering and whining from the relatives, the old guy dies.
Then…
They take off their masks only to discover, their faces have changed to look identical to the mask they were wearing.
I think I though these were the same episode.
Anyway, our next door neighbor was a defence industry type, and he built a bomb shelter under his driveway when they were the rage. I always knew, deep in my heart, that in a real situation, the exact same thing would happen. That was creepier than the show.
