50 Years of the Twilight Zone

pickens writes "Fifty years ago on October 2, American television viewers first heard the words: 'You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone.' Like the time-space warps that anchored so many of the show's plots, Rod Serling's veiled commentary remains as soul-baring today as it did a half-century ago, and the show's popularity endures in multiple facets of American pop culture, appearing nearly uninterrupted through television, syndication and DVD releases and under license to air in 30 countries. 'The whole idea of "The Twilight Zone" jumped off the television screen and became a catchphrase, a buzzword for something much beyond the TV show itself,' says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. 'When you say Twilight Zone, it's its own genre.' The original show ran just five seasons, 1959 to 1964, with 156 episodes filmed; Serling wrote 92 of them, and other contributors included Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury. Anniversary observances were held at Ithaca College in New York, where Serling taught from 1967 until his death in 1975, and which keeps Serling's archives; and also at Antioch College in Ohio, where Serling was a student."

Comments

Re:Twilight Zone isn't SciFi enough.

[Hurricane78]

You missed GPs point. See we educated people know very exactly, when something we see is physically unthinkable and impossible. Which is what's the difference between SciFi and Fantasy.
The thing is, that every story, every game, book, movie or whatever, as soon as it loses its believability, it loses the viewer. Like how the current Star Trek movie failed, when you saw nobody running away in terror, when Spock drove that giant mass of red matter (of which previously a tiny drop killed a whole planet) into the space-time rift / huge ship. Or like in Hellboy, when you saw that they obviously "flew" trough air from the explosion on invisible wires/strings, as if it were rails. Etc. (This is basic theory of story telling I'm explaining here!)

So Fantasy can not ever possibly be a good story for anyone who understands physics. We can follow bullshit like that. It disgusts us. And therefore loses us.
Then again, if someone's dumb enough to be unable to detect its failure, he will love it. Simple as that.

And the same reason why "hypnosis" does not "work" on us.

Re:So much to love about this show!

[Hurricane78]

Was it worth not having any sex at all during adolescence? ^^