Month: October 2024

Welcome To the Twilight Zone

/ thewritelife61 / 2 Comments

As we wind up our Eerie Shows blog series, we are ending with a show I remember being both fascinated by and totally creeped out by – The Twilight Zone. In 1958 CBS purchased a teleplay written by Rod Serling called “The Time Element.” It was introduced by Desi Arnaz. It became an anthology series called The Twilight Zone and was on the air from 1959-1964.

This show had more lives than The Brady Bunch. A second version debuted in 1985 and was on four years on CBS. From 2002-2003, it appeared again on UPN hosted by Forest Whitaker. But that still was not the end. In 2019, a fourth reboot was on for a season. In addition to the reboots, Steven Spielberg produced Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983 starring Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, and John Lithgow. Leonardo DeCaprio was rumored to be putting together a current film and Aron Eli Coleite was hired to write the screenplay. Four years later, Christine Lavaf was brought on to write a script. I could not find any information whether this movie was still in the works or not.

In this blog, I am focusing on the original series. While the show could be described as fantasy or science fiction, the episodes covered a lot of genres including absurdism, dystopian fiction, suspense, horror, and psychological thrillers.

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The opening is one many of us remember: “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space, and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.” The “Twilight Zone” was a term used by US Air Force pilots when crossing the day and night sides above the world.

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The series was produced by Cayuga Productions, Inc., owned by Serling. There were a lot of other famous writers who penned episodes on this show. Of the 156 episodes, Serling, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson wrote 127 of them. Other famous writers included Ray Bradbury, Earl Hamner Jr., George Clayton Johnson, and Jerry Sohl. Many of the episodes were social commentaries about nuclear war, McCarthyism, racial inequality, and the greed of capitalism.

One of the earliest shows, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” is a great example of the Cold War and McCarthy subthemes. It aired in 1960, and the themes are still relevant today. The residents of Maple Street are alarmed when they hear rumors of monsters from outer space in their neighborhood. After a shadow passes by and a loud roar is heard, the citizens start accusing each other of being aliens. One man dies, another is physically attacked, and rioting occurs. We watch the residents destroy each other without seeing aliens involved. The twist is that there are aliens. They cut the power, but they let the humans destroy themselves. The message was if we think communists are in our midst, we’ll invent evidence to prove it and attack each other while Russia simply sits back and watches us destroy each other.

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All the shows were filmed in black and white. Seasons one, two, three and five were half-hour shows, while season four was an hour long. The Twilight Zone was never very high in the ratings, and the show struggled to find sponsors during its run. To save some money in season two, the network decided to shoot episodes on videotape instead of film. I’ve heard of this happening with several television shows in the sixties, but I wasn’t sure what the difference was. Apparently, videotape was very primitive at that time. Using videotape meant that the show was “camera-cut” which means using four cameras on a sound stage. Location shooting was not possible, and editing the tape was almost impossible. These disadvantages, along with the poor visual quality, made it hard to work with, and the technology was abandoned after a brief trial period.

The original theme for season one was composed by Bernard Herrmann. Season two switched to a theme by Marius Constant which is the most-remembered theme song. (The Grateful Dead performed the theme in 1985 for the reboot, Johnathan Davis of Korn composed the 2002 version, and Marco Beltrami was on board for the 2019 revival. The 1983 movie used composer Jerry Goldsmith.)

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Several actors were in more than one episode and are noted for their appearances in the show: Jack Klugman, Burgess Meredith, Warren Oates, William Shatner, Jack Warden, Fritz Weaver, and William Windom.

Everyone has their favorite scary episode. “The Dummy” from 1962 is about ventriloquist Jerry Etherson who thinks his dummy Willie is alive and evil. He locks Willie in a trunk, deciding to write a new act with another dummy, but Willie doesn’t like the plan.

In “The After Hours,” a woman is locked in a department store after hours and it seems as though the mannequins have come to life. Even though no one is left in the store, she is treated badly by several “salespeople.”

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My most-remembered episode was “Eye of the Beholder.” Donna Douglas stars in this one about a young woman lying in a hospital bed with her head wrapped in bandages. She is waiting to see the outcome of a surgical procedure that was supposed to make her look “normal.” We see the bandages come off, we see the beautiful face of Donna Douglas, we see her look into a mirror, and then we hear her scream. When the scene pans out, everyone else has the face of a distorted pig and Douglas is devastated by her “ugliness.”

Also, like The Brady Bunch, the show has never been off the air since it debuted thanks to syndication. The episodes, despite being in black and white, have stood up to the test of time very well. Many things have changed in society since 1959, but people really have not changed much, and the stories are still applicable today. Newton Minnow who headed the FCC in 1961 is the person who called television a “vast wasteland.” The only series he praised was The Twilight Zone. (The US Minnow on Gilligan’s Island was named for Newton.)

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There are some shows that are classics for their writing, some are classics for the quality of actors on the show, some are classics for their ability to transcend time and stay relevant for decades, and some are classics for the novelty they bring to the television schedule. The Twilight Zone is a classic because it does all these things and is as enjoyable to watch today as it was more than 60 years ago.

You Are About to Experience The Outer Limits

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📷wikipedia.com

It’s Eerie Shows month. Last week we learned about Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a thriller anthology show. Today we have another anthology series of science fiction themes – The Outer Limits. The show examined the nature of man every week and included many classic science fiction themes such as life in outer space, time travel, and human evolution.

The original title of the show was Please Stand By. It was on ABC from 1963-65. Joseph Stefano was the producer for season one and the creative guiding force, writing more episodes than anyone else. He was the writer of Hitchcock’s film, Psycho. Harlan Ellison, a prolific writer, wrote two episodes for season two. Robert Towne wrote a script for the show and later received an Oscar for his writing for Chinatown.

The show also employed a well-known cinematographer in Conrad Hall. He worked on a variety of television shows and in film, winning Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty, and Road to Perdition; he was nominated for another seven movies.

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The shows began with a Control Voice saying:

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to The Outer Limits.”

Seasons one and two were a bit different with season two focusing more on hard science. Sometimes we forget that special effects were not something these crew members had much experience with on television. Often, the cast was experimenting, just trying to find solutions to creating these new effects. Robert Justman, who was one of the assistant directors on the show, talked about how they created monsters on the show in his Television Academy interview. He said for one of the first monsters, they had planned to use a negative image instead of a positive one, but that was not enough. He got the idea to rub the image with Vaseline and it created these iridescent spots on it which gave them their monster.

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The music for season one was by Dominic Frontiere and season two was supplied by Harry Lubin. Frontiere was credited with 59 shows and films, including Matt Houston and Vega$. Lubin was best known for his music on The Loretta Young Show and One Step Beyond.

Season one garnered good ratings and their fans were very loyal. However, the ratings dipped in season two after changing focus and moving from Monday to Saturday night. Stefano knew that competing with The Jackie Gleason Show on Saturday night meant the show was over, and he left before season two started.

The episodes of The Outer Limits were often confused with The Twilight Zone, not only by viewers but by actors appearing in them. We’ll learn more about The Twilight Zone next week.

Another fan of the show was Gene Roddenberry. He was often on set, and the show would become a big influence on Star Trek later in the decade. A lot of the crew, cast, costumes, and props on The Outer Limits made their way into Star Trek episodes.

📷theguardian.com

Like so many shows, this one was revived in 1995, and it ran for seven seasons.

I’m not sure why but I don’t remember watching this show in reruns the way I did The Twilight Zone. Maybe it was not shown as often or maybe it was on when our family was watching other shows, but it was interesting to learn what made it different from The Twilight Zone. I’m not sure how many of the “monster” episodes would compete with the special effects of today, but it’s worth taking a look at a few of them and the science they not only developed but the technology that was invented.

Good Evening Alfred Hitchcock

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📷noizetv.com

In October, we are tackling a blog series on Eerie Shows. It would be almost impossible to not include Alfred Hitchcock Presents which was on television for a decade.

The show premiered in 1955. Hitchcock had been directing films for more than three decades at that time. The series experienced several changes. It began as Alfred Hitchcock Presents on CBS but would switch both nights and networks during its run. In 1962 it became an hour-long show and was called The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Many fans recall the opening. There is a line-drawing of Hitchcock’s profile with the “Funeral March of a Marionette” playing in the background. Hitchcock appears at the edge of the screen and walks to the center where he fades into the caricature line drawing. Then he said, “Good evening.” The silhouette was one that Alfred drew. He began his entertainment career illustrating title cards for silent movies.

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Hitchcock himself directed 17 of the episodes of the series. Two of those were nominated for Emmy awards: “The Case of Mr. Pelham” in 1955 with Tom Ewell and “Lamb to the Slaughter” in 1958 with Barbara Bel Geddes.

Hitchcock’s job during this series was to introduce the story and then to wrap it up at the end. Both the openings and closings were written by James B. Allardice. Allardice wrote for 38 different shows, many of them very popular series in the fifties and sixties. Norman Lloyd, who produced the show and appeared in five episodes, said Hitchcock respected Allardice so much that he never even changed a comma that he wrote.

The network demanded that if a character got away with murder during the show, then Hitchcock would let them know during the closing that he was eventually brought to justice; in the TV Guide, Hitch described this as “a necessary gesture to morality.” Lloyd gave an example of this in a Television Academy interview. In one episode, a woman kills her husband with a frozen lamb’s leg and gets away with it. At the end of the show, Alfred explains that she later remarried and tried the same trick again but when she took out the leg and hit her husband with it, it was not frozen enough, so he caught her in the act and turned her in.

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The episodes were not your average thriller shows. They included drama, suspense, and humor. Audiences never knew just “who done it” till the end.

The show debuted on CBS on Sunday nights for five years, up against drama anthologies for two years and then competing with The Dinah Shore Show for three years. For the next two seasons it moved to NBC on Tuesday nights. It aired against The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis on CBS those years and against Wyatt Earp on ABC. For three months it went back to CBS on Thursdays before moving to Fridays on CBS the next season with The Price is Right and 77 Sunset Strip. The ninth year found it on CBS on Fridays with little competition and the final year it showed up on NBC’s schedule on Mondays against Ben Casey. I could never find the reason for cancelling the show. I’m assuming ratings began to decline but if anyone knows, I’d love to hear it.

NBC chose not to air a 1962 episode called “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” because the sponsor felt the ending was too gruesome. In the episode, a magician’s helper is supposed to help in a trick where he “sawed” a woman in half, but he doesn’t realize he truly saws her in half.

📷thecompletehitchcock.com

As you might guess, with a new story every week, many celebrities appeared on the show including Charles Bronson, Bette Davis, Bruce Dern, Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Peter Falk, Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre, Walter Matthau, Steve McQueen, Vera Miles, Claude Rains, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Thelma Ritter, George Segal, and Jessica Tandy.

In addition to the Hitchcock-directed episodes, the show received Emmy nominations for Best Series four times. In 1956 it was up for Best Action or Adventure Series, but it lost to Disneyland. The following year found the show in the Best Series – Half Hour or Less category, but it lost to The Phil Silvers Show. 1958 found it in the category of Best Dramatic Anthology Series. You would think that would be a no-brainer win for this show, but it lost to Playhouse 90. It had its fourth category nomination in 1959 as Best Dramatic Series – Less Than One Hour and lost to Alcoa Theatre. I guess the Emmy committee had a hard time determining categories for a few years.

In a different twist, NBC tried to air the show again in 1985. Hitchcock had passed away five years earlier from renal failure. A made-for-TV-movie combined new stories with colorized segments from the original show. It lasted a year before NBC canceled it. USA picked it up for three more seasons.

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The original show can still be seen on a few different networks including MeTV.

With Hitchcock’s popularity in 1955, it’s no wonder that this show was a successful series for a decade. The episodes were well written, and they had a wonderful cast of actors. Many people probably tuned in just to see Hitchcock, and his personality was larger than life, even if his behavior was a bit despicable at times. One of Alfred’s quotes about the show was that “television has brought murder back into the home – where it belongs.”

Eerie, Indiana: This Show is Doubly Eerie

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It just doesn’t seem right to do a blog series on Eerie Shows and not include Eerie, Indiana. This series ran on NBC for two seasons but only produced 19 episodes. It was later shown on both The Disney Channel and Fox Kids Network. A version of the show, Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, lasted one season on Fox Kids in 1998.

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The show was created by Jose Rivera and Karl Schaefer. Joe Dante, who directed Gremlins and Gremlins 2, served as creative consultant.

Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) is a teen who moves to the small town of Eerie, Indiana with this family. There are not a lot of normal people in Eerie, but Simon Holmes (Justin Shenkarow) is one of them. Marshall and Simon become friends, and they are faced with a variety of bizarre situations that they investigate, including intelligent dogs taking over the world; a tornado hunter; Bigfoot; and of course, Elvis Presley, whom we all knew was alive somewhere in the world–we just didn’t know he was in Eerie, Indiana. Marshall and Simon learn something about themselves, or their town, every time they solve a mystery. Every piece of evidence accumulated was stored in a locker and noted in a diary.

Marshall’s parents are Edgar (Francis Guinan) and Marilyn (Mary-Margaret Humes) and his sister is Syndi Marie Priscilla (Julie Condra). There were also a variety of recurring community characters.

📷femalevillainswikifandom.com

Pop culture references are a big part of the writing, especially horror films. The first episode was titled “Foreverware.” Betty Wilson and her twin sons come to welcome the family to the neighborhood. Betty and the boys look like they came from a 1960s sitcom. And there’s a reason for that. Betty sells a Tupperware type of product that her husband invented before he passed away. It supposedly preserves food for a decade. However, one of the twins passes a note to Marshall that Betty uses the containers to keep herself and her children preserved from what they looked like in 1964. The boys are tired of middle school and want to move forward in their lives.

The critics liked the show. Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker noted that “you watch Eerie for the small-screen spectacle of it all—to see the way . . . feature-film directors . . . oversaw episodes that summoned up an atmosphere of absurdist suburban dread.” Ray Richmond of the Orange County Register said, “it’s the kind of knowingly hip series with equally strong appeal for both kids and adults, the kind that preteens will watch and discuss.” USA Today described it as “Stephen King by way of The Simpsons.”

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So, with all this positive press, why did it only last for 19 episodes? It was at the cusp of time when shows for tweens would become very popular. When the show aired, the 9-12-year-old audience was not catered to. It was also more expensive to produce because the directors wanted it on film rather than video.

The DVD was released in 2004, and it can be streamed on Amazon. In 1997, a series of books came out with seventeen volumes. The series has held up very well and was considered ahead of its time. It paved the way for similar shows that would do much better in the ratings in the mid-nineties. If it had debuted half a decade later, it probably would have been a huge hit. It was such a unique concept for a show—something that we need a bit more of in television now thirty years later.