TODAY ONLY! Twilight Zone T-shirts available from Shirt Punch!

Ever heard of Shirt Punch?  It's a company out of Canada that creates pop culture-oriented T-shirts, frequently in a humorous vein.  Their T-shirts are a measly $10.00 each, and each design is only available for 24 hours.  Crazy? Kinda.  Wacky enough to fall under the Twilight Zone umbrella?  Well, it appears that the answer is a resounding yes.

Today they're offering two different TZ shirts.  Check 'em out!

It may be a bit hard to tell, but the text on the second design is Serling's first season narration in its entirety.

Both shirts went on sale at 9:00 last night (PST), so they'll only be available for about 14 more hours.  If you're at all interested in them, I'd say get over there and order one (or both, like I did) NOW!

Doctor Bernardi Bobblehead Announced!

Well now, who's this handsome devil?

From season two's brilliant "Eye of the Beholder" comes the hideous (but compelling) Doctor Bernardi.  He's already been immortalized in plastic in last year's excellent action figure (spotlighted here), and now our friends at Bif Bang Pow! are giving him the bobblehead treatment as well.  $12.99 plus shipping is all it'll set you back to add this dark-eyed surgeon to your collection of bobbleheads (Twilight Zone or otherwise).  It's scheduled for a December release, but like all good things, you may have to wait a bit longer (these things tend to get delayed a bit; I'm just sayin').  Pre-order yours here.

Faithful readers of this blog will recall that, two short years ago, I (with the invaluable help of my wife Teresa) assembled my own homemade version of the character for Halloween.

While I may never again don the distorted visage of the good doctor, I still have the scrubs and stethoscope stashed away somewhere in my storage unit.  One must be prepared if one is to play doctor....

It's Fall... Where's Season 4?

Fall is upon us, which means another Twilight Zone season should be celebrating its 50^th anniversary any time now, right?

Wrong.

The Twilight Zone didn't return for season 4 until January 1963 and, when it finally did return, it had mutated into a different show…. but we’ll get to that in January.  For now, we've got four solid months of… well, nothing.

However shall we fill the time?  I did have one idea a few months back, which spawned the following plan:

In the beginning of this blog, my episode promos were extremely brief: we’re talking maybe a paragraph or two, with only one or two screen shots; real basic. The format expanded over time and, by midway through season one, the format had started filling out nicely (I have made adjustments over time, however, culminating in the pretty snazzy alternating-checkerboard-text-and-photo layout that debuted near the end of season three).  Trouble is, some of the series greatest episodes aired very early on and therefore never got the proper spotlighting (except for “Walking Distance” and “Time Enough at Last,” both of which I feel I've sufficiently covered).  It’s always bothered me that I've written more about dogs like “A Most Unusual Camera” and “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” than favorites like “The Lonely” and “Perchance to Dream.” Therefore, I think a nice exercise might be to revisit some of those early episodes and give them the attention they so richly deserve.  Plus, this’ll give me an excuse to reach back before season one and spotlight Serling’s “The Time Element,” which aired on Desilu Playhouse in 1958 and is The Twilight Zone’s unofficial pilot-before-the-real-pilot (I’ll explain when we get to it).

That was my grand idea. But in all honesty, I just don’t have the time or energy right now (see previous post for a glimpse at my current circumstances).  I think this is the perfect time to take a few months off.  Funny… it’s almost as if some grand design brought about this opportunity to get my head screwed on straight, right when I needed it (thank Rod!).

I definitely want to revisit season one at some point, however… it’ll probably happen in summer 2014 (after the fifth and final season wraps up).

I’ll probably still pop in once in a while between now and January: I still need to review the recent Bif Bang Pow! offerings, plus I want to spotlight the above-mentioned “The Time Element” (which I would've done before I started on season one, had Image Entertainment seen fit to make it available earlier!).  But come January, we’re back in full force, baby.