Favorite TZ Episode

[Bargle5]

The Original Twilight Zone

The Last Flight
Time Enough at Last
A World of Difference
King Nine Will Not Return
Deaths-Head Revisited
A Game of Pool
The Changing of the Guard
Miniature
The Masks

The New Twilight Zone

Wordplay
A Message From Charity
Wong's Lost and Found Emporium
Her Pilgrim Soul
To See the Invisible Man
Voices in the Earth

[The Burgomaster]

I have all of the TWILIGHT ZONE DVDs from the set that was issued a few years ago.  There are over 40 DVDs in the set.  I have watched about 70% of the episodes.  Some of my favorites are:

1. The "Talky Tina" episode with Telly Savalas;
2. There is a "ventriloquist's dummy" episode that is pretty good.  I can't remember who the star is;
3. There's one where William Shatner and his wife go to a diner and get terrified by a coin operated fortune telling machine;
4. "Time Enough at Last" (of course);
5. "To Serve Man" (of course);
 
Plus, 3 of the ones Susan mentioned:

 1. The boy who had the power to wish anything, when he didn't like someone he would wish them into the corn. It's sort of odd how today's society is not much different, in that we do whatever we can to pacify kids even if it is excessive spoiling.
2. The heat wave, with the woman painter. The twist at the end is that she is sick with a high fever and was dreaming the whole thing. Well except that the earth did go off course, but away from the sun and they are all freezing to death.
3. The one with the woman who doesn't realize she is a mannaquin

There are really quite a few good episodes, but I can't remember them all.



Post Edited (08-22-04 20:51)

[Dave Munger]

>Susan: (sorry I don't know the titles)

WELL, YOU'D BETTER BE!!!!!!!! I actually know the titles of quite a few of them, oddly enough.

Scary magical Billy Mumy - "It's A Good Life" (they have to always think that everything he makes is good, because he can read their minds)

The Devil trapped in the monestary - "The Howling Man"

Everyone has a pig face in "Eye Of The Beholder", with the girl from Beverly Hillbillys.

I think Mr Frisby was Slim Pickens. I kind of liked the swimin' hole episode, although I prefer them shorter, and I think the little girl might have been Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.

I also especially liked the end of "The Obsolete Man". I got the impression that part of the reason the Chancellor becomes obsolete is that they simplify the procedure; Fire the judge guy and just have the "jury" tear the victim limb from limb. You kind of have to suspend extra disbelief to buy that they'd let you pick your own death instead of just shooting you or whatever, but it's worth it.

The bad episodes tend to be the generic ones- A deal with the Devil goes awry, bigot gets ironic comeupance, etc.

My nominations:

 "(The?) Invaders", where some famous actress isn't talking at all, she's alone in a cabin getting attacked by little robots, at the end she finds their ship on the roof and smashes it with an axe...

One they don't show often is "The Fear", kind of the opposite of the above in a way. A man and a woman are in a remote mountain cabin terrorized by GIANT aliens. In the end it turns out they used tractor beams or something to make it look like they were pulling the roof off, spray paint to put giant fingerprints on the car, and big inflatable cyclopses. The real aliens are tiny, and unwilling to contact any species that dosn't fall for their intimidation tactics.

I love "The Old Man In The Cave". There's been a nuclear war, these villagers have a guy that they send to talk to the old man in the cave to find out what the weather's going to be like, what's safe to eat, etc. Either Lee Marvin or the guy I always mix up with Lee Marvin shows up and tries to take over and convince them not to heed the warnings of the old man anymore, then they all go to the cave to drag him out...

Wow, giant post. What have I done with my life?

[trekgeezer]

I think Charles Bronson is in the Old Man in the Cave episode.

[Susan]

nobody wrote:

> The episode you're talking about is called "Stopover in a Quiet
> Town"
>
> "The day after a drunken party, a married couple awakens in an
> unfamiliar house with no idea how they got there."


Which is funny in that it has a moral lesson about that partying lifestyle, except most people who wake up not knowing where the hell they are, don't often find themselves in a giant alien childs toyroom. That kind of reminds me of the episode where the people wake up in a room and nobody knows who they are or how they got there. As it turns out they are toys

[Susan]

Bargle5 wrote:
>
> The New Twilight Zone
>
> Wordplay
> A Message From Charity
> Wong's Lost and Found Emporium
> Her Pilgrim Soul
> To See the Invisible Man
> Voices in the Earth


The only episodes of th new twilight zone i can really remember well is the one where the couple finds themself stuck inbetween seconds, where all these workers come out and replace everything. Apparently they do it each second. The other one was the time travel/butterfly theory one.  I seem to also remember seeing a show that i want to say was a twilight zone episode. It involved a man who was just living an ordinary boring life, but as it turns out he is, unbeknowgst to him, part of a secret tv show that has been filming his life. (like the truman show). When he discovers the cameras..ec..the show talks to him and tells him to act normal. But once he realizes he's on tv all the time, he doesn't act normal and ratings begin to slip. They tell him his show is cancelled, but he doesn't really know if that's true or not.

Then there's one show about a guy who sells bits of his memory for money. Apparently there's some trade where people buy memories.



Post Edited (08-23-04 17:31)

[Susan]

Dave Munger wrote:
 I kind of liked the swimin'
> hole episode, although I prefer them shorter, and I think the
> little girl might have been Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.
>

Yeah but the really trippy part is everytime you hear her talking in one of the worlds (i think it's the real world, not the swimhole world). it's somebody elses voice!!! She is totally voiced over about someone else, who sounds alot like the voice of rudolph or Rocky something from one of those dated cartoons. I always wondered who did the voiceover

[Max Gardner]

Twilight Zone was just a phenomenal show.  If I had to pick a favorite episode it would probably be "Uncle Simon," where this old inventor and his sister (I think she was his sister) live together, and they're both horrible people and make one another's lives miserable.  The inventor dies, leaving his estate to his sister on the condition that she care for his last invention.  This invention is a robot who begins to take on more and more of the inventor's horrible traits.

[Dave Munger]

The guy who I mix up with Lee Marvin is James Coburn (had to google "In Like Flint"), but I wouldn't be too surprised if Charles Bronson was in there somewhere as one of the townsfolk. He was in a lot of stuff, and is kind of easy to overlook when he's not shooting people. He was in the ultimate generic Adam and Eve episode with Samantha from Bewitched. They're soldiers with different insignia on their uniforms and she dosen't speak English. I kind of like how the jungle had already encroached on the city like Angkor Wat or something.

Not sure if it was the girl, but I have a feeling someone in the swimin' hole episode was in "To Kill A Mockingbird". Maybe they just used some of the same incidental music or something. The voice was probably the same lady who did Rocky the Flying Squirrel, she did assloads of voicework. I'm pretty sure she did the voice of Talky Tina and was probably a TZ semiregular (just googled it, it's [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22June+Foray%22&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8]June Foray[/http://www.google.com/search?q=%22June+Foray%22&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8] hope I did that right). Kind of reminds me of Andie McDowel in that Tarzan movie where they used Glen Close's voice. Never has a film been less true to the spirit of Burroghs. I hadn't noticed though, I guess I just thought the sound was funny.

The newer ones seem even easier to mix up with other stuff, like Night Gallery. Probably because of being in color.  I kind of remember "Wong's Lost And Found Emporium", but just the setting and a part at the begining where a guy's in the sex shop at the front of Wongs trying to sell them an especially realistic baby doll for pedofiles, at least that's how I remember it. TZ memories seem especially prone to distortion. "To See The Invisible Man" was great. My parent's said it reminded them of "The Prisoner", but I didn't see that until after high school. I put that show right up there with The Zone.

Starting to remind myself of the guy on Seinfeld that made Elaine a boquet out of Frank's old TV guide then based a manequin on her.

[Susan]

Tv shows don't have cool intro's either, anymore. I used to love watching shows that either had a theme you could sing to, talk with or that was just a cool little tune (like hitchcock presents). I admit that while i didn't care for the show that much, i loved getting my casio organ out and talking/playing along with the intro of Tales from the Darkside...lol The Twilight Zone had two different openings as I recall.

You're travelling to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound...but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land, whose boundaries are only that of the imagination...you're entering...the Twilight Zone...


Does anyone remember the version with the "sign post up ahead"?

Hmm, Rod Serling's writing credits include "Planet of the Apes". Facts about serling I never knew:
He stood only 5'4"
He was only 51 when he died
Served in WWII as Infantry Combat Demolition Specialist and a Paratrooper

While "the time element" was meant to be the pilot episode for TZ, because it was previously aired he had to write another script. He penned one called "The Happy Place" about a future society where when people reach age 60 they are sent to a concentration camp called "The Happy Place" and killed. It never happened, CBS told him it would never sell the series. He wroteanother script, "Where is Everybody" and it was accepted.

[JohnL]

>1. The boy who had the power to wish anything, when he didn't like someone he
>would wish them into the corn.

It's a Good Life. The UPN Twilight Zone had a sequel to this with Billy Mumy reprising his role of Anthony as an adult. He has a daughter (played by Mumy's real life daughter) who has the same power as her father.

>"To See The Invisible Man" was great.

I liked that one also. Also the one where the weapons designer is awakened in the future to help stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth and at the last minute he finds out that he was tricked into helping destroy an Earth ship bringing weapons back to the world.

My favorite New Twilight Zone was one of the 30 minute episodes that was made after it went into syndication (the network version was an hour with 2-3 different stories in each one): The Cold Equations. A girl stows away on a spaceship bringing emergency medical supplies to a colony so that she can see her brother. Unfortunately, the ship doesn't have enough fuel to deal with her extra mass. If she stays on board, the ship will end up running out fuel and crashing so she'll die, the pilot will die and all the people waiting for the medical supplies will die. In the end, she's forced to sacrifice herself. This was also made into a TV movie which had hints of government conspiracy and basically blew it all out of proportion. Find the Twilight Zone episode, it's much better and just the right length.

[nobody]

Susan: "Hmm, Rod Serling's writing credits include "Planet of the Apes"."

Unfortunately, Rod's version of "Planet of the Apes" was ruined by outside forces. Here's a quick explination from rodserling.com:



"I first became involved with Planet of the Apes about ten years ago," Serling told journalist David Johnson in 1974. "I was approached by an outfit called the King Brothers, who did mostly Indian-elephant pictures shot for about $1.80…The King Brothers had a notion about doing the Pierre Boulle book as a nickel-and-dime picture." Serling provided a detailed treatment for the prospective producers, he said, but ultimately the budget simply proved too high. The King Brothers dropped the idea. But then Serling heard from Blake Edwards, "the next individual to get into it and who was going to produce and direct it." Again, the matter was ultimately dropped for budgetary reasons. Finally Arthur Jacobs became involved, for whom Serling wrote "about three drafts of the actual screenplay."

Though Serling had followed his producer's instructions in creating a modern, ape-city environment for his story, Jacobs ultimately decided, again for reasons of budget, that a more primitive world was needed. Serling himself, who by this point had been involved for several years with Planet of the Apes, felt burned-out on it, and he and Jacobs mutually, and amicably, agreed to part ways.

It is often claimed that Serling's work was completely discarded when Michael Wilson came on to the project, but this is far from true. Wilson "took away almost all of my dialogue," Serling said, but "the chronology of scenes and events was identical to mine—except that people didn't say the same things."

[Max Gardner]

On a sort-of-off-topic-but-not-really note, has anyone here seen A Town Has Turned to Dust? Serling wrote the teleplay (I think it may have been his last), and it ended up as a Sci-Fi Channel original movie with Stephen Lang (not so great) and Ron Perlman (great as always).  Interesting future-western with a journalist investigating various doings on a Martian mining colony.

[nobody]

I've never heard of this movie until now. I checked it out on IMDB, and the popular opinion is that it's a weak, watered down movie, full of borrowed ideas and cliches from other movies. I find it hard to believe that Serling would write such a thing... but then again he could've written it during his not-so-golden golden years, in between commercial breaks for "The Liar's Club."
I'll still check it out, but I won't go in expecting much.

[the bouncer]

I like one or two episodes from the new series such as the man with the talking doll or the or the episode with the babysitter and the toys,but they dont compare to the previous series.