Posted on 10/02/2009 4:06:07 PM PDT by Perdogg
Hard to believe, but Friday marks the 50th anniversary of “The Twilight Zone,” the twisty-turny, highly influential science-fiction anthology series. (Or does it? No, wait, it does.)
(Excerpt) Read more at artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Terror at 26,000 feet.
ping
To Serve Man.
IT’S A COOKBOOK.
The one where Jonathan Winters played a pool shark waiting for someone to beat him so he could go on to his final rest; or - when William Shatner was stuck in this town because he believed in the napkin holder’s horoscopes it kept issuing ...
Little dweebish Burgess Meredith, all alone with his precious books. No one else left on earth.
Terror at 26,000 feet.
Oh man, I remember being a kid and seeing that episode at my great-grandparents house late at night. I was scared to look outside a window for like a week, thinking I would see that monster staring back at me!
Also the one where Roddy Macdowell is an astronaut and stays on the alien planet, only to find he's locked into the house they made him as a zoo exhibit.
And the one where the neighbors all go crazy cuz the one guy has a bomb shelter.
There are so many. Rod Serling was THE MAN!
Was that the John Lithgow segment? If it is, that’s a classic.
And his glasses were busted or lost. Couldn’t read his precious books w/o them.
The earwig.
The episode where a kid enters another dimension from falling out of bed and rolling under. Dad had to rescue him and just in time finds another “door” in the house to come back through. I was just a kid and it scared me!
I like the episode where the rocket crashes on an alien planet from earth. One man kills others to have more water for himself. Minutes later he discovers he landed in US desert.
Burgess Meredith is a meek bookworm working in a bank. All he wants is time to read and be alone. One day, while reading in the vault during lunch, a nuclear attack occurs. He stumbles out in shock only to find himself at the library. Finally, he has all the time in the world to read.
Then he trips, and shatters his glasses.
YEAH BABY
My fav Talking Tina
I sing the body electric
Howlin Man
Obsolate Man
Eye of the Beholder
I think the earwig was an Alfred Hitchcock item.
The First Season’s “Walking Distance,” directed by Robert Stevens, written by Rod Serling, first broadcast October 30, 1959.
The “earwig” was a Night Gallery segment.
To this day, my brother won’t watch that episode. He’s 55. I scared the cr@p out of him during that episode.
DITTO!
Bingo!
(Although I remember it as the “earwick” ????)
It was many years ago, you and I were just crawling around on the floor.
The one where a beautiful woman is sent into plastic surgery because she isn’t beautiful like everyone else. We, the viewers, don’t actually get to see how everyone else looks... until the end.
Look at the emotion!
It still does it to me today, when the music starts playing I get a shiver down my whole body in anticipation and also at times during th show.
Written by Robert Serling, “He Lives!” from Season Four. Starring Dennis Hopper.
Yeah that photo is most photoshop on FR
From Harry Reid to Helen Thomas LOL!
So did "Will the real martian please stand up?" The guy's third eye freaked me out.
Times have changed.
Dang. You beat me by 23 seconds!
Yup, that is the face that made me scared to look out windows!
An old lady is terrorized in her rural/ desert house by tiny astronauts — and it turns out those are US astronauts terrorizing an alien giant.
These guys at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
The one where Obama gets elected president.
Horrible fright.
Glad it was a fiction.
It's A good Life
The Obsolete Man
Time Enough at last
Two
So many memorable ones but this episode came to mind first.
Mine is “The Passerby” where the wife of a Civil War soldier watches as numerous troops keep walking by. She finally sees her husband who confirms they’re all dead, but refuses to accompany him. Finally, Abe Lincoln comes along and confirms that he’s the last casualty. She then accompanies him into the distance. I also liked the one with Donald Pleasance as the old teacher comforted by the ghosts of students he’d taught.
"Change".
It means socialism and servitude.
Favorite Episode is about the devil being held by a mysterious group of bearded monks in a European castle and some lost hiker who gets duped into letting him go. The hiker, having realized what he had done, spends the rest of his life determined to recapture Oba-...I mean...Satan
Cliff Robertson whose wife was sick in a wagon. He went up over a hill, crossed a modern road and was given anti-biotics that saved his wifes life. He was almost run over by a truck as he had never seen one before.
I like the one with the old man and his coon dog “Rip.” - The dog drowns and the man dies trying to save him. They are in the afterlife and a devil tries to get him to enter what looks like heaven, but he won’t let the dog in, so the man declines.
Farther down the road he meets the real heaven gatekeeper who lets the dog in. And he welcomes the old man as well. His wife “Old Woman” will be along soon, St. Peter says.
I also like “Two” with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery as the last survivors of an apocalyptic war. Untrusting at first, they eventually get together.
Toss-up.
..between the episode where the guy gets immortality (via a deal with the devil), attempts to kill himself in all sorts of ways (which all fail), in the process ends up killing someone (his wife?), and after he’s arrested, does everything he can to get convicted of murder, flippantly declaring, “Let’s give the electric chair a whirl”. The jury verdict is guilty, and the judge sentences him to LIFE IN PRISON.
and...
I’m fuzzy on this one. A guy meets up with another guy (somehow) who claims he’ll give the first guy “just what he needs”. The first thing he gives him is a pair of scissors. The guy who gets the scissors is sort of an asshole, and is making fun of the other (meek) guy for giving him scissors. But he gets on an elevator, his suit gets caught in the door, threatening to strangle him as the elevator rises. Then he remembers the scissors, and cuts himself free.
Next, the mild-mannered guy gives him a fountain pen. But it leaks! And a-hole is mad about that... until it leaks on top of his racing form and he bets on the horse it leaked next to and wins a bundle.
I was just thinking about this the other day, and I don’t recall clearly what the last gift was. I think a pair of shoes that cause a-hole to slip at an opportune time.
Now cut me some slack on this — unlike the rest of you hi-tech folks with every episode on DVD, *I’m* recollecting my favorites from memory, probably nearly 40 years ago!
The Hunt
from 1962
Old Man and his Dog...
The Howling Man
Lots of good ones listed above. I also remember “The Hitchhiker”.
That’s it! Thank you
I faced my own prejudices at an early age.
The other one, simular is the body change one where two older people can get new bodies ... I forget the twist, but they both decided to grow old together ... another 'thinker' for me.
I’m still waiting for Serling to walk in front of the camera after one of Obama’s press conferences and tell us that we’ve crossed over.....into the TZ. After all, totalitarianism was one of THE reoccurring themes of his show. That said, I’d have to say the Agnes Moorehead episode was one that creeped me out. The gremlin one was disturbing but maybe more because the guy in the suit looked like a perv in a really bad Halloween costume.
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