The Twilight Zone predicted this
A reader pointing to the anti-Semitic riots in Washington by the spoiled brats of socialism last week made a reference to Billy Mumy and the Twilight Zone episode, It’s A Good Life.
In it, Mumy plays an 8-year-old boy named Anthony whose telepathic powers terrorize his small town in Ohio.
Anthony had not reached the age of reason, which is why he used his supernatural powers capriciously. He did not realize his actions had consequences. This led to death and destruction with the boy sending people who think a bad thought about him to the cornfield.
The episode was set in his parent’s living room with him and a half-dozen or so adults. None dared confront him or challenge him. They were struck by fear.
Finally, one man got drunk on brandy and does confront him. Mumy’s character got mad and turned him into a jack-in-the-box. His head bobbing back and forth was more than his wife can handle and she begged that he be sent to the cornfield. Wish granted.
The episode ended with the boy creating more havoc by having it snow, which would kill the crops they needed to eat. The adults did nothing. They pretended everything was fine.
I always saw the episode as a cautionary tale about Baby Boomers who were an outsized group in 1959 that was changing culture and later downstream politics.
The boy was not the villain. The cowardly adults were.
Our situation today is also like Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, in which William Shatner played Bob Wilson who was flying home from a mental institution after a nervous breakdown. It was night. He looked out the window and saw a gremlin eating the aircraft’s wing. When he tried to show his wife and later a stewardess, the gremlin had disappeared.
The story is Cassandra meets the Boy Who Cried Wolf because there really is a gremlin, played by Nick Cravat who once was part of the circus acrobat team, Lang and Cravat. They decided to go to Hollywood and become movie stars.
Lang became Burt Lancaster.
When I watch Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, I think of Ron Paul. We should have listened to him, put a mafia hit on Osama bin Laden and skipped a war in Afghanistan.
Most readers are familiar with these episodes but the best episode may have been The Midnight Sun. It is set in a sweltering city. As usual, Rod Serling opens the show:
The word that Mrs. Bronson is unable to put into the hot, still, sodden air is 'doomed,' because the people you've just seen have been handed a death sentence. One month ago, the Earth suddenly changed its elliptical orbit and in doing so began to follow a path which gradually, moment by moment, day by day, took it closer to the sun. And all of man's little devices to stir up the air are now no longer luxuries — they happen to be pitiful and panicky keys to survival. The time is five minutes to twelve, midnight. There is no more darkness. The place is New York City and this is the eve of the end, because even at midnight it's high noon, the hottest day in history, and you're about to spend in the Twilight Zone.
The next 20 minutes is about people dealing with the heat. Lois Nettleton played a painter named Norma who was in her home with her landlady, who was being driven crazy by the heat. The electricity was cut off as well as the water as the world was breaking down under the heat. A looter later broke in and drank all their water, and then he broke down sobbing and asking for forgiveness.
TV Tropes said, “Delirious, the landlady imagines swimming in splashing in the imaginary water and praises about how cool it is before succumbing to the heat and dropping dead. As the heat gets stronger and stronger, Norma watches in horror as the thermometer bursts and her paintings melt around her, screaming and collapsing as well.”
Then came the plot twist. It was getting colder.
The world was spinning away from the sun. Soon it would be too cold for human life. I apply that episode to global cooling/global warming/climate change.
That and Man cannot destroy that which God has made.
A more famous episode, To Serve Man, is a favorite of many because its surprise ending surprises everyone even those who expected an unexpected twist at the end.
Richard Kiel, 7-foot-3, played the space alien who led a pack of aliens who came to Earth to serve man. Serling’s opening narration was:
Respectfully submitted for your perusal — a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone.
Kiel’s character promised the UN to cure diseases and feed the world. Hooray! And he and his race do. Hooray! And they take people to the home of the space aliens.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, government linguists worked to decode the space aliens’ book, To Serve Man. It was a difficult task.
Soon enough it was time for the boss of the government unit to board the spaceship. Just before he entered, his assistant came running and stated those magical words that we all remember so well:
Mr. Chambers! Don't get on that ship! The rest of the book, To Serve Man, it's — it's a cookbook!
It was, of course, too late. The lesson in the story is never trust the government to protect you from aliens because the bureaucracy works at what comedian Ron White calls the speed of smell.
But the big lesson is that allowing government to take over your health care and food supply is a one-way ticket to death.
Twilight Zone also saw the tranny fad coming with its Eye of the Beholder. Mandi Bierly wrote of it in May:
It’s a timeless life lesson, exquisitely staged by director Douglas Heyes for maximum suspense. A woman named Janet Tyler sits, face entirely bandaged, in a hospital. She describes a life of children and adults screaming at the sight of her.
We learn this is her eleventh and final State-sanctioned treatment attempting to make her look “normal.” If the injections have failed, she will be forced to segregate with “her own kind.”
Her frustration grows: “The State is not God. It hasn’t the right to penalize somebody for an accident of birth! It hasn’t the right to make ugliness a crime!” You’ll be on the edge of your seat as the doctor takes nearly four minutes to remove her bandages once the process finally begins. Only after we see Janet’s face are those of her attendees shown.
The jaw-dropping reveals hold a mirror to the arbitrariness of beauty, “the norm,” and privilege — and are a somber reminder that being different in a way that harms no one is still considered treason today.
Taking the bandages off reveals the woman to be Donna Douglas before The Beverly Hillbillies came along. The attendees were all horrible looking people. Government was promoting ugliness and calling it beauty, just like Sports Illustrated, right?
California took a step closer to state-mandated tranny surgery by requiring schools not to tell parents about their children changing sex identity.
Oddly enough, the least political Twilight Zone episode may be one that warns of nuclear holocaust, Two.
One of the more formally audacious half hours of the show’s five-year run, this literal two-hander finds a brutish soldier (Charles Bronson) duking it out with his female counterpart (Elizabeth Montgomery) as the last two survivors of World War III. The catch is that there’s hardly any dialogue at all. It’s as close to a silent movie as the show ever did, with the music, the post-apocalyptic set design (the street sign covered in vegetation still gets us) and the actors doing all of the heavy lifting. And Bewitched fans, are you in for a treat — no offense to Samantha Stephens, but this is by far the best work Montgomery ever did.
Now I have watched this episode many times and wondered who the actress was. It never occurred to me to wait for the closing credits or look it up online. Elizabeth Montgomery was that good in that episode. Serling had a knack for good casting.
To me, the story offered hope that mankind eventually will get its act together, even if it has to go down to its last two people.
What was science fiction — or just plain fiction — 60 years ago is now simply everyday life in the 21st century.
Picture it: 1970, Southern Illinois (almost as far as Cairo) a small high school gymnasium, Rod Serling is the guest speaker for the brand new local community college’s Speaker’s Series. My dad and the college deans picked Mr. Serling up at the airport in Marion, took him to lunch at Bob White’s Cafe. The conversation was illuminating and engaging. Mr. Serling commented on the left/communist almost complete control of the television and movie industries - over a half century ago! He talked about the pervasive homosexual lifestyle in the industry. Mr. Sterling’s speech later that night didn’t call out these things (I was 10 or 11) but I remember the reporters from St. Louis, Paducah, Cape Girardeau, Carbondale, and Harrisonburg wanted him to talk about where his ideas came from. My memory is that he talked about serving in WW2, what he saw and the effect it had on him. Dad probably kept the transcript of his speech, I need to check in the boxes at my house. My brother and sister and I got to shake his hand, my brother sat next to him at the dinner and asked him all sorts of questions about WW2 which Mr. Serling was gracious to answer. I just remember I’d never seen a man who looked like him before, very tan, handsome, impeccably dressed, unique accent to my ears, without knowing much at that age I thought this is what a Palm Springs Californian looks like!
When I was 5 years old James Arness came to my hometown to be Grand Marshall of the Southern 500 NASCAR race (Marshall Dillon as Grand Marshall). Still the most famous celebrity I ever met.