OT:Twilight Zone

Joan Collins, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, Robert Redford, Burgess Meredith, Cliff Robertson, among others, starred in T.Z.episodes. Writers like Buck Houghton, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson gave us thrills. Some later wrote for the original Star Trek series.

I just don't know about these constant pop culture references...

I absolute love, love, love that show.

Too young to see it originally, I discovered the show during high school when a local station aired late night re-runs.

I saw pretty much every episode when they first aired - must see TV!

My favorites:

1. To Serve Man - the alien's manual is actually a cookbook.

2. Death Ship - three astronauts find their own dead bodies

3. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet - William Shatmer sees a gremlin trying to sabotage his airplane's engine.

"The Eye Of The Beholder"

@Slick - is that the one with the twist ending where all the "normal" people look like Juice?

In college, we used to get drunk, order pizza, and watch the twilight zone. My favorite episode by far is to serve me.

Serve man. Second favorite is the guy who survives a nuclear war in a bank vault. Also the bank clerk who can read people's minds. Great show. Way ahead of its time.

I remember the episode where the little prick kid sent everyone he didn't like to vanish in the corn field. What an asshole, I'd like to wring his neck and

Although not often seen on "top 10" lists, my favorite might be "A Nice Place to Visit"

Sebastian Cabot as Mr. Pip. The ending was great.

So many to choose from....

My other favorite, which does appear on peoples lists, is "The Invaders".

This one starred Agnes Moorehead from
Bewitched fame.

I'm back, fuckin kid............Yes, "The Invaders" is the first one I remember as a kid. Great stuff

I love the hell out of TZ!! I think I know every 1/2 hr ep by heart....there was only one season of hour long shows and they hardly ever run those. I love the marathons that the SciFi channel runs at various long holiday weekends. I nestle in for 48 hrs of TZ heaven.

My favorite eps are The Hitchhiker, Room 22, and my all time fave is the western themed one with Lee Marvin as a gunslinger challenged to visit the grave of his nemesis. A truly classic TV series.

TUSCL is the titty zone

I loved that show, even though I only saw it in reruns well after they were new. In college, one of my roommates and I would watch it together.

For many many years I thought Rod Serling was just the guy who introduced the episodes. Only recently did I learn that guy wrote all those episodes !!!! Absolutely amazing...probably one of the best written tv shows in history.

^^^
Mo-head points out a good one with "A nice place to visit". "The After Hours" was pretty creepy until you find out the woman is a mannequin on vacation.

I also like the one with the rich, arrogant guy (making $350,000) who makes a bet that he won't talk for an entire year.

I don't know beans about Twilight Zone but I just spent the better part of a day of my convalescence watching all episodes of an old British series from the 1960s called The Prisoner. My brother has been ragging me for years to watch this series. I am glad that I did; it is a stunning series with great acting and a fantastic setting. Just this summer I visited the village where much of the series was shot, Port Meirion in Wales so the series echoed in my mind with that recent visit.

The Prisoner brought the works of Franz Kafka to my mind. Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis or K in The Trial could easily be interchanged with Number 6.

I believe I may have watched every twilight zone tv show and movie. Reruns used to come on tv every day. I just didn't pay much attention to the names of each episode. It was the best tv show on for late night tv reruns.

Wasn't there an episode where aliens invaded but quickly left when they found out we were like 100 ft giants in comparison to their size? Made me wonder what if an alien spaceship visited Earth but the entire ship was no bigger than your thumb? If I were such an alien, I would be very cautious too.

That show was the bomb. Growing up in LA I remember in the 80's KTLA running an hour of it each day at noon until I guess they lost the rights to but and it moved to ScyFy channel. I used to race home at lunch to watch it.

My favorite episode was the one at the snowed in diner where there was an extra person there who was an alien but no one knew who it was.

Of course I saw the original due to my age. I don't recall the episode names, but two that I loved:

1. A man had a watch that would stop time, except for him.
2. A woman was terrorized my little aliens.

SS & farmerart - what a jolt to the old memory cells.

Like a few others I'm old enough to remember watching the original TW broadcasts. Rod Serling was a great writer bringing us many memorable episodes.

Art - difficult to believe there were ONLY 17 episodes of The Prisoner. The cast was excellent; I especially liked Patrick McGoohan.

er, TZ broadcasts

Too many good episodes to name favorites. Rod Serling's opening and closing comments were works of art in their own right. As I read some of them now I can still hear the words in Serling's distinctive voice.

One 2-parter from the first season comes to mind: The Lonely A convict, living alone on an asteroid, receives from the police a realistic woman-robot.

Witness if you will, a dungeon, made out of mountains, salt flats, and sand that stretch to infinity. The dungeon has an inmate: James A. Corry. And this is his residence: a metal shack. An old touring car that squats in the sun and goes nowhere - for there is nowhere to go. For the record, let it be known that James A. Corry is a convicted criminal placed in solitary confinement. Confinement in this case stretches as far as the eye can see, because this particular dungeon is on an asteroid nine-million miles from the Earth. Now witness, if you will, a man's mind and body shriveling in the sun, a man dying of loneliness.

Initially, Corry rejects the fembot but eventually falls in love only to learn that, when he is allowed to return to earth, he can't take Alicia with him leading to a powerfully emotional ending.

*[Ship Captain] Allenby suddenly draws his gun and shoots the robot in the face. The robot breaks down, malfunctioning, its face a mass of wire and broken circuitry which repeats the word "Corry". He then takes Corry back to the ship, assuring him he will only be leaving behind loneliness. "I must remember that", Corry says tonelessly. "I must remember to keep that in mind".

Serling's closing : On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man's life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines he used. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that act upon them. All of Mr. Corry's machines, including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete - in The Twilight Zone.

Echoes of this theme are found in Isaac Asimov's robot novels down through Cmdr Data's struggles with being human in Star Trek, TNG.

I don't think Serling wrote every episode. Many if them certainly, perhaps even most, but not all.

gmd - you're right. The show attracted some wonderful writers.

I didn't put it clearly but I was remarking not only on some he did write but also on his commentary which was lucid and entertaining in its own right.

gmd,

In reality, Serling was my pen name, and he wrote them all. :)

After this discussion, I decided to look up Rod Serling. He was only 50 years old when he died. I recall his death but had forgotten just how young he was.

And he wrote about 60 percent of the TZ episodes. He wrote ~90 of the ~150 episodes.