posted on January 1, 2001 04:53:42 PM new
Inspired by another thread...here are my very favorite TZ episodes (sorry, I'm not "up" on the actual titles):
1. Billy Mumy as the kid who can form the world to what *he* wants--and can send folks "to the corn field."
2. A hen-pecked bank teller survives the destruction of the world in a bank vault & now has time to read all the books he wants--but then breaks his glasses.
3. Jack Klugman as a neglectful father who meets the ghost of his son Pip (who is dying in Vietnam) looking as he did as a boy...and makes up for everything by giving his life so Pip will live.
4. An old man dies and is walking down the road toward Heaven with his dog Rip--and is saved from the entering Hell (the gatekeeper tries to convince him it's Heaven) because they won't let dogs in, and he won't leave Rip.
5. Agnes Moorhead plays a woman who holes up in her house, terrified of Death...one day she lets in a handsome young policeman who has been wounded, and discovers that death isn't so bad after all.
6. Telly Savalas as a man who intensely dislikes his step-daughter's new doll, Talky Tina. And she doesn't like *him* either...
7. Ed Gwynn is an old man beloved by the neighborhood children, especially one crippled little girl. But he's an alien prince & when government reps from his planet come to take him back, refuses to leave without the girl, whose family treats her badly.
8. Burgess Meredith is a librarian on trial for his life in a future world that has outlawed books.
9. A woman desperately tries to survive as the world draws closer & closer to the sun--but it is all an hallucination of her fevered mind...the world has left the sun's orbit & is slowly freezing.
10. A dying man calls his greedy family together at Mardi Gras time. He tells them the only way they'll ever get his money is to wear masks he's had made for them until midnight. When they remove the masks, their faces have permanently changed to look t=like the twisted masks of greedy and pettiness they'd worn.
posted on January 1, 2001 08:12:52 PM new
#5. was called "Nothing in the Dark" it starred Gladys Cooper (not Agnes Moorehead) and a young Robert Redford. That was one of my favorites.
#2. Is one I remember best, "Time Enough At Last" I was very young when I saw that originaly aired, still remember it very clearly.
One of the most memorable not on your list for me was "Terror at 20,000 ft" with William Shatner and a gremlin chewing on a plane engine.
posted on January 1, 2001 08:47:02 PM new
uaru...that gremlin one was my favorite, too. To this day, I keep the window shade closed when I am flying at night!
The one about the guy on the train that keeps coming to the same station is pretty good. Turns out he's part of a kid's miniature train set.
posted on January 2, 2001 04:57:38 AM new
The ones that scared the heck out of me as a kid were:
The woman goes to the dept. store to buy a gold thimble and is sent to a floor that doesn't exist ... turns out she's a mannequin and her time as a live person is up (the mannequins take turns at being 'alive')
The bandaged woman whose plastic surgery is a failure .. but the doctors all have pig-faces and she's really beautiful .. they're going to send her to a 'colony' to live with others of 'her kind' ...
The astronauts are set up in a lovely home on Mars (or wherever it is that they landed) and it turns out they're in a natural-habitat cage in a zoo (I think it was called something like 'People are the Same All Over') ..
As an adult, the Burgess Meredith breaks-his-glasses on the library steps episode is the one that still really gets me ...
And the one where the soldiers are all walking down the road, going 'home' from the Civil War ...
posted on January 2, 2001 10:06:41 AM new
All the ones you folks have listed are my favs too. Might mention the episode with the dummy that was alive. Outer Limits had some good ones too.
Where are the writers for this genre these days ? These shows used sometimes cheesy props, low budget productions, but the writing and imagination carried the show.
It seems writing went from ' what if ......' to slash, crash, blood, gore, shot em, stab em, beat em, cheat em.
How old do you have to be to long for the good ole days ???
posted on January 2, 2001 10:20:08 AM new
One of the scariest episodes I ever saw wasn't on TZ, but on Night Gallery. That was still Rod Serling, so I guess it counts.
A guy kills a spider, which keeps coming back, bigger and bigger, until it's big enough to take out the guy. To this day I can't wash a spider down the drain...
The newer TZ was okay but it wasn't as good as Rod's. He was the master of scaring the pants off people.
