Jul052007
Get in the zone, the Twilight Zone
Filed under Uncategorized by jennifer o'callaghan at 10:57 am
Fans of great storytelling know that the Fourth of July isn't just a day to celebrate our nation's independence. It's also a day to celebrate The Twilight Zone with the annual SciFi Channel marathon.
The series ended a full decade before I was even born, but I've always loved to catch reruns and the occasional series reincarnation. Sunday editor Marty Karlon, Assistant Sunday editor Sandy Bucknam and I were all discussing our favorite episodes this morning, when a younger co-worker piped up that she had never seen any and asked us to explain.
How do you explain the often cheesy special effects and storylines that crossed frontiers of space and time? It isn't an easy series to sum up.
"Sort of like a half-hour M. Night Shyamalan movie," I offered.
Do I need to warn about spoilers ahead in a show more than 40 years old?
I loved Rod Serling and crew's storytelling, which always helped me overlook any campy costumes or props. They were sucker punches, like the doctors in shadow in "The Eye of the Beholder" explaining to their plastic surgery patient that they had done their best to make her beautiful. Then the bandages came off to reveal a gorgeous young woman, and the doctors stepped out of the shadows to reveal grotesque faces. What was really beautiful?
So many famous names and faces cropped up: Robert Duvall, Elizabeth Montgomery, Robert Redford, Jack Klugman, Ed Wynn, William Shatner, Roddy McDowell, Art Carney, Agnes Moorehead, James Coburn, Mickey Rooney, the list goes on.
I was also a huuge fan of Twilight Zone: The Movie, which came out in 1983 engulfed in the scandal of the on-set deaths of Vic Morrow and two young extras in a horrific helicopter accident. It was probably one of the first movies I was allowed to watch that had scary scenes in it. I remember being terrified of Dan Aykroyd for years after because of his two very brief cameos, not to mention having developed a lifelong fear of the song "The Midnight Special." But I also fell in love with the kick-the-can sequence, in which Scatman Crothers arrived at a retirement home with a simple tin can and helped the aged residents remember their inner children. I remember at first feeling sorry for Bill Quinn's Mr. Conroy, who hadn't gotten to turn back time, but the sight of him kicking the tin can around at the end of the segment gave me hope that he had found his way back after all. There was something so beautiful about that whole segment, tucked in among the scarier bits. Even in the way the golden afternoon light played on the metal can, or the way Mrs. Dempsey, returned to childhood, talked about how she wanted to see Halley's Comet go by at 80 and how she couldn't imagine going through life again knowing that her Jack Dempsey would not be in her future.
*Pop-culture aside: Did you know Scatman Crothers' last gig was voicing Jazz in the Transformers cartoons of the 1980s, which were just translated into Michael Bay's big-screen blockbuster?*
My favorite episode from the original series, I think, has to be the first season's "Time Enough at Last," in which bookish Burgess Meredith survives the H-Bomb and realizes he has all the time in the world to read — until his glasses break.
Any other Twilight Zone fans out there? What's your favorite episode?
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