The Twilight Zone, I just discovered that all of the Twilight ZOnes have been put on to TV. I bought two of them, but I wanted to tell you my three favorites.
1) The thing on the wing of the plane with William Shatner. I saw it at age 8. It scared mke s**tless of my big dark grandmothers house. It was so well done, Unfortunately the movie faggoted it up. It is also nice to see Shatner in the sky before Trek.
2) The living doll- It has been done over and over, but not much better than this. The doll even reveals herself as evil in the end. I always wondered if the family was living to this day under the doll's tyranny. The Simpsons did a good take of this.
3) The Monster's On Maple Street- A perfect example of irony. Well acted too. Lots of fun and a surprising end to this day.
4) The Women vs. the Small Invaders- And the invaders were from the U.S.A. It was a great episode with no words. Great use of light and darkness and the closest TZ has come to a slasher.
What are your favorites???
Hands down, my favorite is "It's A Good Life," the one with Billy Mumy as the kid who could wish people into the cornfield. I so wanted to be that kid when I was 10. To this day, I regularly use the lines "You're a bad man! You're a real bad man!" and "It's good that you did that... It's real good!"
Fun fact: 20 years later, Mumy, with his band Barnes & Barnes (of Fish Heads fame), recorded a song called "Cemetery Girls" that sampled several lines from It's A Good Life, and included the refrain "Fresh souls in the cornfield/Anthony put them there/And it's good, it's real good!"
I have to agree on the cornfield one, I loved that too.
For some reason I also used to like the one with the woman who was enduring the heat becomes the earth was going towards the sun. Then at the end she wakes up from a feverish sickness and it's snowing a blizzard outside where you realize it was just a dream. Because the earth is really spinning off course out into space!
Then there was that vantriliquist one with the puppet who was really alive that single handedly creeped me out for life about puppets.
"To serve man"....to this day, it creeps me out.
Thats also the first thing i thought of when i finaly say the alien in "Phantom from space" ,,,"So, he's a Kanamit, looking for Kanapaes"
That one about the world slowly spiralling out of orbit really creeped me out. It still makes me feel uneasy today, especially the melting painting. Brr!
To Serve Man, glad someone mentioned that one. I haven't seen it in awhile but it was one of the great twist endings. Did rod ever get acknowledged at all for his show during his lifetime? His work really does endure
>What are your favorites???
I've always liked some of the more obscure episodes;
Elegy - Astronauts land on an asteroid and find it filled with people frozen in time.
Mr. Dingle, the Strong - Invisible aliens doing a study of humans give Burgess Meredith super strength to see what he'll do with it. He wastes it performing tricks.
Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up - Police track footprints from a crashed UFO to a diner where the passengers of a bus are waiting for a snowstorm to pass. They then have to figure out which person wasn't on the bus.
Five Characters in Search of an Exit - Five people wake up in a circular pit with no exits and no memory of how they got there.
The Fugitive - All the kids love an old man who can change into all sorts of creatures, but he's being hunted by a pair of strangers.
Little Girl Lost - Parents searching for their missing daughter hear her voice coming from the wall and discover a portal to another dimension.
The Changing of the Guard - A teacher who doesn't think he's made a difference in anyone's life, and plans to kill himself, is visited by the ghosts of former students.
Mute - A young girl with telepathy is forced to go to a school with a cruel teacher who is intent on destroying her ability.
The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms - Modern day soldiers end up back in time and facing the battle of Little Bighorn.
Mr. Garrity and the Graves - A con man tells townspeople that he can raise the dead. Turns out the cemetary is full of people the town hated and they pay him NOT to bring them back.
The Fear - A cop investigating mysterious happenings at an isolated cabin, finds evidence that a giant alien is on the loose.
The Bewitchin' Pool - Two kids, unhappy with their parents' constant fighting find a supernatural passage to paradise in the bottom of their swimming pool.
>Did rod ever get acknowledged at all for his show during his lifetime? His work
>really does endure
Yes, TZ won 3 Emmy awards and 3 Hugo awards as well as being nominated for others.
Wow, sounds like you are a big fan. I love the Twilight Zone marathon on Sci Fi, every year. Thanks for mentioning that wall one, and the pit one. I love them both and forgot about them. The Simpsons did a great take on the wall one and I suspect Spielburg's Poltergeist was great too.
I also think Rod Serling was as ahead of his time as Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock. Who agrees??
Definitely. The Twilight Zone is one of the few true masterpieces of TV, along with The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, the Simpsons (seasons 2-8), maybe Monty Python, and maybe some of Jim Henson's stuff. My dad and I were talking about great screenwriters a while ago, and he brought up Serling as his all time favorite. It's really hard to argue with; Serling, Matheson, Beaumont, and the rest pumped out amazingly original stories, week after week for years.
>Wow, sounds like you are a big fan. I love the Twilight Zone marathon on Sci Fi,
Well, I did have to consult an episode guide for all but maybe 4 of the episode titles.
>every year. Thanks for mentioning that wall one, and the pit one. I love them both
>and forgot about them. The Simpsons did a great take on the wall one and I
The show Weird Science did a good episode spoofing several episodes of The Twilight Zone. They're walking down the school hallway and find a talking doll, with the same voice as the one in the TZ episode. They drop-kick it. :)
Felicity also did a TZ themed episode. At the end, the characters are trapped in a room with no exits and you see that it's the box that her roommate never lets anyone look in.
Felicity.... uch... they have no honor... why were you even watching Felicity.
>Felicity.... uch... they have no honor... why were you even watching Felicity.
I watched it when it first started because I liked Kerry Russell. I watched that particular episode because I saw the previews for it and they made it clear that it was a TZ ripoff.
AH! The Weird Science TZ parody. I loved that one! Good to know some one else had a chance to revel in its splendor.
THE ENCOUNTER is, in my opinion, the best episode of THE TWILGHT ZONE. Featuring a young George Takai, it was about a World War 2 vererain and a young Japanese-American both getting locked up in an attic and both go after each other.
Even though THE TWILIGHT ZONE went into the depths of human fear, THE ENCOUNTER heads for presenting people with hatered their fellow man. The episode, while available on video and DVD, was so controversial in it's time (and this was made during the end of the Postwar days and at a time of racial conflict) that it was only aired once and never was seen again in any syndicated re-issues.
I'll say it agan, THE ENCOUNTER was the best TWILIGHT ZONE I have ever seen. I remember seeing it on video when I was 9, and let me tell you the conflicts these two characters get into was more frightining than anything involving alien invasions or the like.
>THE ENCOUNTER is, in my opinion, the best episode of THE TWILGHT
>ZONE. Featuring a young George Takai, it was about a World War 2 vererain
>and a young Japanese-American both getting locked up in an attic and both go
>after each other.
Unfortunately, I've never seen it.
>it was only aired once and never was seen again in any syndicated re-issues.
Which ties in with my theory that once the TV/syndication versions of things are decided upon, they're set in stone and never changed again. This episode could easily be aired today, but since it was decided years ago that it shouldn't be shown, nobody ever goes back and re-evaluates it. :(