Posted on 06/28/2025 11:16:11 AM PDT by Borges
You’ll like it. It’s got that fine Rod Serling quality, but in a Western.
Thanks! I saw the episode with William Shatner but not the movie. That looks scary, too.
Wow!
Thanks for posting the information about his service, and medals!
We recently watched all the episodes of the Twilight Zone. The first 2 seasons were the best,imo. Such stories with good lessons. He wanted to fight Hitler but was deployed to the pacific. So many episodes involving military characters. His writing no doubt helped him with his ptsd, as did cigarettes. He was a genius writer and host for his series.
That might have been the inspiration for "A Stop at Willoughby."
Art Carney as Santa Claus and the farmer and his dog are so good.
I always thought Brigadoon inspired Willoughby.
All were dreadful, anemic, and to varying degrees, "topical" and politically correct. I guess they were trying to make it more "relevant" for younger generations.
The original was sometimes heavy-handed in its liberalism, but it was also often original, surprising, and yes, thematically universal.
But despite that, I wonder how many younger people can appreciate them. The endings might not surprise the young, who've seen copied endings on many films and TV shows. And younger people hate black & white.
I thought that the “Shelter” episode best exemplified liberalism.
A person takes responsibility to prepare for a nuclear attack, only to have all the people who scoffed at him begging to be allowed in, when it appears it’s really happening.
He got his start on Gunsmoke.
I don’t know anything about Rod Serling concerning what he believed about God, but its always been clear to me that he had a strong ‘eyes wide open’ and ‘ears to hear’ spiritual component to his storytelling and writing.
His otherworldly observations are far too on-the-mark accurate even if just to be conjecturing ideas for sci-fi stories,
And the one with where the sun never rose, because everyone vomited up their "hate," was also very heavy-handed.
LOL...me, too. I lived in the White Mountains of Arizona for a while, worked in Wyoming, a bit in New Mexico, all over Washington, Oregon and California (CA from the lumber country in the far north to the deserts in the south). I traveled a lot in Colorado and Utah. Like you, I can spot authentic scene locations and get bugged when filming is done hundreds of miles away from the purported location. The Vasquez Rocks were real popular!
I always laugh when they show Mt. Whitney in the background and claim they are in the Gold Rush country. Or they show guys placer mining years after the placer deposits were picked clean and all the big mining capital investment was going into deep hard-rock mines. Or, worse, they show a guy in the desert placer mining with enough water to operate a rocker! There’s no water there for wet placer mining.
Me too! The episode that haunts me the most to this day was the one where the little girl goes into another dimension under her bed and her father barely saves her in time before the door to the other dimension under her bed closes.
Binghamton looks like a twilight zone these days.
“Binghamton looks like a twilight zone these days.”
That’s too bad. I went to college there in the ‘60s and it was a nice place then.
Then add, when you are a scared youngster, that your parents won't let you sleep with them because they say they don't want the monster to follow me into their bedroom and get them by mistake.
That episode was directed by Richard Donner, who would go on to direct “The Omen”, Superman (the original 1978 film) and the Lethal Weapon films.
The show didn’t last much longer after JFK was killed. It pretty much shut down production some four months later.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.