Next stop: the Twilight Zone!

You’re traveling through another dimension – a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!

Fiction writers love to play with the ‘what if’ scenario.

What if an ordinary girl meets the heir to a throne, only to have the prince’s parents disapprove? (The plot for an endless number of Hallmark movies.)

What if a massive rogue shark decides to use a coastal New England town as its personal buffet? (Jaws)

What if a man who’s recovering from a nervous breakdown sees a destructive gremlin on the wing of the airplane he’s flying in? Can he convince anyone that he’s not imagining things before the plane crashes? (Twilight Zone, S5, Ep3, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”)

Writer and producer Rod Serling loved to mess with our heads. He placed ordinary people in extraordinary situations and let us imagine what we’d do in their place. He was the creator of the brilliant, award-winning television series The Twilight Zone.

I watched the series avidly in syndication, and its imaginative twists and turns were the single greatest inspiration for my own writing, both as a child and adult. Come with me for a look back at what many consider one of the greatest television series of all time.

Rod Serling – By CBS Television-CBS Portrait by photographer Gabor Rona-mark is faint in spots. – eBay itemphoto frontphoto back, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22101341

Rod Serling was a performer from an early age, mounting plays on a stage his father built for him in the family basement. He spent hours acting out dialogue from movies of pulp magazines, the cheap glossy magazines featuring sensational stories, including the likes of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Flash Gordon. He also spent a lot of time listening to horror, fantasy and thriller shows on the radio.

In high school he became something of a social activist, writing for and editing the school newspaper. He felt strongly about service in the military during WW2, and enlisted as soon as he graduated. The horrors of war shaped his later script-writing, such as the Twilight Episode “The Purple Testament”, which began with this intro: “Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Philippine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear—yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.” It was about a man who see in another man’s face if he was about to die in battle.

After the war ended, Serling used the federal G.I. bill’s educational benefits to enroll in college, where he began learning broadcasting, and that became the springboard for his career. But he quickly became frustrated with the socio-political climate of television shows, which were wary of producing anything that might be too ‘controversial’ in the eyes of the corporate sponsors. Any script he submitted that covered contemporary social issues became heavily watered-down. So he decided to create his own show using speculative fiction, where the messages he wanted to include could be couched in science fiction and fantasy; those genres weren’t as scrutinized. It was a premise that the series Star Trek used to good advantage down the road.

The new weekly series would be called The Twilight Zone.

The series logo in a graphic; logo by the twilight zone – http://www.seeklogo.com/files/T/The_Twilight_Zone-vector-logo-2F75848C1B-seeklogo.com.zip, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35129758 – image by E. Jurus, all rights reserved.

Serling pitched a script called “The Time Element” to CBS for the pilot episode, but CBS used it for Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, a new show produced by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. The episode, about a man who recounts his vivid nightmares of the attack on Pearl Harbour to a psychiatrist, had what would become one of Serling’s trademarks: a twist ending. It was so popular with fans that CBS gave Serling the green light for his own series, and The Twilight Zone premiered on October 2, 1959.

The bulk of the scripts over the show’s five-year run were written by Serling, drawing largely on his own experiences from boxing and military life. During his time in the military Serling had been a good boxer, and used that experience to write a teleplay called “Requiem for a Heavyweight” for Playhouse 90, which won a Peabody Award.

Each airing featured his voice narrating the characteristic introduction that let viewers know they were departing the boundaries of the known world.

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.

The episodes weren’t all science fiction – Serling used numerous genres to make viewers think, including fantasy, suspense, horror, thriller and even black comedy. There was often a moral to the story. In an episode I just watched again this past weekend, during a Twilight Zone marathon on television, “A Game of Pool”(Season 3, Episode 5), Jack Klugman plays a pool shark whose deepest and most obsessive desire is to beat a former legend of the game, James Howard “Fats” Brown, played by Jonathan Winters. When “Fats” Brown shows up from beyond the grave to play him…well, I’ll let you watch it to find out what happens, and why you should be careful what you wish for.

Two state troopers investigating a report of a spaceship crash in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up” – image from YouTube.

Every episode then had its own opening narration to set the stage. For my favourite episode, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, it was:

Wintry February night, the present. Order of events: a phone call from a frightened woman notating the arrival of an unidentified flying object , then the checkout you’ve just witnessed, with two state troopers verifying the event – but with nothing more enlightening to add beyond evidence of some tracks leading across the highway to a diner. You’ve heard of trying to find a needle in a haystack? Well, stay with us now, and you’ll be part of an investigating team whose mission is not to find that proverbial needle, no, their task is even harder. They’ve got to find a Martian in a diner, and in just a moment you’ll search with them, because you’ve just landed – in The Twilight Zone.

As you watch events eerily play out inside the diner, it’s clear that there’s one extra person from a busload of passengers halted by a snow storm. Despite how normal everyone looks, one of them shouldn’t be there, and suspicions fly. If you pay close attention, you’ll figure out who the invader is, and perhaps you’ll guess the extra twist at the end.  

“Nightmare At 20,000 Feet” is probably the best known episode, featuring a young William Shatner and a gremlin outside chewing up the airplane wing that only Shatner’s nerve-wracked character seems to see. My hubby and I often joke about seeing something outside the window when we fly – it’s a good thing we’re not nervous fliers. Shatner himself reports that even today when he flies a fan will occasionally recognize him and ask “Do you see anything on the wing?”

Shatner wasn’t the only Trekker to appear on the show – Leonard Nimoy appeared in the episode “A Quality of Mercy”,

It’s August, 1945, the last grimy pages of a dirty, torn book of war. The place is the Philippine Islands. The men are what’s left of a platoon of American infantry, whose dulled and tired eyes set deep in dulled and tired faces can now look toward a miracle, that moment when the nightmare appears to be coming to an end. But they’ve got one more battle to fight, and in a moment we’ll observe that battle. August, 1945, Philippine Islands. But in reality, it’s high noon in the Twilight Zone.

The series featured many actors who were well-known at the time or subsequently, from Mickey Rooney to Charles Bronson to Carol Burnett to Robert Redford. Many of these renowned performers later confessed that they weren’t necessarily proud of their performances. The Twilight Zone‘s budget allocated most of the money per episode to sets and special effects, which meant that the actors had only one take to cement their scenes.

Serling’s own two favourite episodes were:

“The Invaders”, with Agnes Moorehead playing an old woman who finds a tiny spaceship and its alien crew of two on the roof of her farmhouse. They attack her and she manages to kill them, but of course there’s a fascinating twist at the end.

“Time Enough at Last”, with Burgess Meredith as a meek, myopic bank teller who just wants some time to indulge in his favourite pastime, reading, denied at every turn by his mean-spirited wife. When he happens to survive a nuclear war inside one of the bank vaults, he’s finally given that time, but…

The Twilight Zone received two Emmy nominations (for cinematography and art design), but didn’t win. However, it collected three prestigious Hugo Awards for “Best Dramatic Presentation.

It inspired me to let my imagination soar, along with likely thousands of other budding writers. You might recognize a couple of them: Stephen King, J.J. Abrams and George R.R. Martin. That’s what great storytelling does, a legacy that maybe my own novels will leave some day.

Check out Screen Rant’s list of the 25 Best Episodes Of The Twilight Zone Ranked for more nostalgia and information.

This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you’re on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable…Go as far as you like on this road. Its limits are only those of mind itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, you’re entering the wondrous dimension of imagination. . . Next stop The Twilight Zone.