I found a DVD box set on Amazon.com tonight called "One Step Beyond." It's a sci-fi anthology show that's supposably older than "The Twilight Zone." Most of the reviewers refer to it as "the poor man's Twilight Zone." I was wondering if anyone here has seen any (or all) of the episodes before- and if they were worth buying.
I love those old sci-fi shows/movies where all the scripts crazy predictions for the future are WAY off base, and where the "science" is so unbelievable it's almost retarded. In other words, I love old, naive sci-fi stories. I'm hoping "One Step Beyond" is right up that alley.
I saw a few episodes of this show when I was quite young. A few years ago, I saw some episodes of it on the SciFi channel, strangely with a new CGI opening.
From the shows that I remember seeing, none of them were futuristic. I think the stories were supposedly based on fact, or at least they were presented that way.
For example;
The Haunted U-Boat - The crew of a german submarine keeps hearing someone or something banging on the hull, giving away their position.
??? - A young boy claims he has a new friend that nobody else has ever seen. However his friend leaves three-toed footprints in the ground and is tall enough to lift the boy up to high places.
One Step Beyond (http://www.tvtome.com/OneStepBeyond/)
It used to air on America One within the past few years, including after the syndicated b-movie show "Enigma Theater" on weekends. I remember seeing one with Charles Bronson, but for the most part I didn't care for it. I like the old epsiodes of "Tales of Tomorrow" and similar stuff (mostly from the Wade Williams Collection) that Sci-Fi used to air on Retro TV until a few years ago.
Good show, excellent theme music. Not fiction, all the stories supposedly happened, which makes them not very memorable actually. Lots of sort of generic "warned by a ghost" stuff. I'm sure at least once on that show a hitchhiker turned out to be a ghost. The non-fiction aspect does make it spooky though. The theme music is some super creepy waltz, The Outer Limits used it for awhile I think, over the closing credits.
I have a DVD with 3 One Step Beyond episodes and 3 Flash Gordon episodes. The OSB episodes ones I have are boring. The show was based on fact and one I have is pretty realistic...it has Robert Blake as a guy in jail. LOL.
The theme song is cool. One of the best versions was done by the Ventures. The composer of the music for the show, Harry Lubin, went to work for Outer Limits during the second season. He started using the One Step Beyond theme for the colsing credits. Why? I don't know.
I've read that the budget for the original "Outer Limits" was cut during the second season. Maybe Lubin was trying to save money by reusing his own work.
It's a great song, and I think it's pretty effective at the end of Outer Limits too, as the credits roll over M-13 or whatever. (Wouldn't it be cool if that turned out to be the exact gallaxy they used?) My dad says that one time when he was trapping muskrats in S Dakota, there was a blizzard, he ducked into some shack that just had a chair and a radio. The radio was playing that song, and went right off at the end of it, then he saw that it wasn't plugged in and went right out into the blizzard. It's his most made up sounding story, but I believe it.