TZ Promo: "It's a Good Life" (11/03/1961)

Season 3, Episode 8 (#73 overall)

Cayuga Production # 4801

Fifty years ago tonight, the entire world disappeared, save for one little town in Ohio. How? Why? Well, if we must assign blame, we must gaze down at a six year-old boy, who might just wish us away into a cornfield for bothering him.


“It’s a Good Life,” adapted by Rod Serling from a short story by Jerome Bixby, is one of the best offerings in the series’ five-year run (it’s in my top 20 favorites). Anthony Freemont, well played by Billy Mumy (in the second of his three TZ appearances, before he gained fame as Lost in Space’s Will Robinson), appears to be a normal kid. Well, guess what? He’s ANYTHING but normal. He has mental abilities that border on the godlike. As Serling tells us, he wished away the entire world, except for his hometown of Peaksville, Ohio. He can create hideous creatures (a three-headed gopher, for example) or transform people into…. well, other things. He can also read minds, so you’re never really safe.


The performances, particularly those of John Larch (the psychiatrist in season one’s “Perchance to Dream”) and Don Keefer as the unfortunate Dan Hollis, are uniformly excellent. This is a collective of people who live moment-to-moment in a prolonged state of teeth-clenching fear. At any moment, they might say or do (or think) the wrong thing, thereby incurring Anthony’s devastating wrath. It’s like the denizens of Orwell’s 1984, trying not to commit thoughtcrime, teetering ever closer to the bleeding edge. These folks are borderline hysterical, every waking moment. We can only assume Anthony can’t read their dreams, or perhaps they’ve trained themselves to dream only happy, safe dreams.


I like the suspended-terror aspect of this episode. Nothing really changes or gets resolved… we merely spend 25 minutes in this horrific world. There’s no comeuppance for Anthony, and no relief for his victims. There are no character arcs to speak of (unless you count Dan Hollis’s drunken standoff with Anthony, which we presume has been building for years)… funny, I complained about this sort of static storytelling approach with regards to last season’s “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” but here I’m not complaining at all. The only event that could really shake things up would be for one of the adults to, in the words of Dan Hollis, “lay something heavy across (Anthony’s) skull.” But then you’ve got a child getting bludgeoned to death on national TV (in 1961!), so I can kinda see why they didn’t go that route.


But don’t get the wrong idea ---- this episode certainly isn’t soft or sanitized, particularly when you start thinking about bigger-picture issues. Anthony doesn’t just separate the townsfolk from the rest of society… he basically uncreates THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD. Real life is precarious enough (random acts of violence, catastrophic so-called acts of God, etc) but here we have a planet with billions of inhabitants suddenly blasted into nonexistence with a simple thought from a child’s mind? Every evolutionary leap forward, every advance in technology… gone in a microsecond. It kinda renders everything --- and I mean EVERYTHING --- pretty moot, doesn’t it? This is either chaos theory on steroids or a universe ruled by a malevolent deity. Along those lines…. could Anthony Fremont be from the Q Continuum? Wait, wrong show.


A MOIST MOMENT


During Dan Hollis's ill-fated confrontation with Anthony, a very noticeable tendril of drool escapes from his mouth. This is either great acting or an embarrassing mistake. Either way, slobber on, Big Dan!


REMAKES, SEQUELS AND PARODIES. OH, AND COMIC STRIPS!

Jeremy Licht (whoever that is) as 1983's Anthony. Yeah, whatever.

“It’s a Good Life,” along with three other TZ episodes, was remade as part of 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie. It, well… wasn’t pretty (only season five’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was treated well in that particular enterprise). Don’t get me wrong… the film isn’t as bad as, say, the 2002-2003 UPN series… it’s just misguided. The sensibilities are off somehow. It feels more like a feature-length episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories than The Twilight Zone that we know and love. Oh, and speaking of the UPN series….


A sequel (“It’s Still a Good Life”) was produced in 2003 for the UPN series, starring Bill Mumy and Cloris Leachman reprising their roles from the 1961 original. It’s actually not a bad effort, and it’s nice to drop in on these poor unfortunate souls once again. Anthony is a middle-aged adult, and he’s raising a daughter (guess he wished his wife away at some point… you know, speaking of that, I kinda wish ---- wait, honey, put down that frying pan!). Minor spoiler alert: this new story isn’t static at all. Things change dramatically for all concerned. It makes a nice bookend to the original. Watch 'em back to back.... I will be, as I view the original tonight, on it's 50th anniversary.


Calvin & Hobbes fans will likely enjoy the following gem, which draws a pretty convincing parallel between Anthony and the rambunctious Calvin. It's not an actual C&H work by strip creator Bill Watterson, but it's great nevertheless. Click on it to see it full size:

And of course, who can forget the nod to "It's a Good Life" on The Simpsons? The parody was part of the third season's Treehouse of Horror II episode. Bart Simpson as Anthony? Yeah, I can kinda see it.


THE MUSIC

The music in “It's a Good Life” is sourced from Bernard Herrmann’s score for the CBS Radio Workshop’s 1956 adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” This score (like much of Herrmann’s radio work) was subsequently added to the CBS Music Library, and its various cues found their way into several TZ episodes. The score was released on vinyl in the early 80s by Cerberus Records (Bernard Herrmann: Music for Radio and Television), and on CD in 2003 by Prometheus (Bernard Herrmann: The CBS Years Volume 2: American Gothic).

Next week: What did the Jew say to the Nazi? “Payback’s a bitch.” Okay, bad joke… but GREAT episode. Don’t miss it.

TZ Promo: “Long Distance Call” (3/31/1961)

“Long Distance Call” (3/31/1961)

Season Two, Episode 22 (58 overall)
Cayuga Production # 173-3667

Fifty years ago tonight, a little boy’s dear departed grandmother reached out and touched him. No, this isn’t a zombie story (those wouldn’t be in vogue for a few more decades). Rather, Grandma bridged the gap between the real world and the afterlife with a simple phone call.

Brrrrring. Billy, it’s for you!


Charles Beaumont’s “Little Girl Lost” offers us the latest in a long line of The Twilight Zone’s supernatural objects. It’s a toy telephone which, for reasons never explained, can somehow connect the living with the dead. The supernatural aspect is actually pretty subtle… Billy could be imagining/pretending that he’s talking to his grandma. Billy’s mom, shocked into near-catatonia when she hears breathing on the other end of the toy phone, may simply be the victim of her own nerves. Billy’s near-death incident may have been a simple accident, not influenced by grandma’s urging. And the climax, in which Billy’s dad pleads with grandma to release her grip on the boy… well, the end result might just be a coincidence. Either way, the chain of events is undeniably horrific. The death of a loved one is hard on a kid, but sheesh.


Forbidden Planet alert! Well, sorta. Billy is played by Billy Mumy, probably best known as Will Robinson from TV’s Lost In Space, the cast of which included the B-9 Robot, Robby the Robot's fraternal twin (Robby himself appeared on the series once too). This is Mumy’s first of three TZ appearances, but most people don’t remember this one. Next season, he’ll return as little Anthony Fremont, the most powerful kid in the world, in the excellent “It’s a Good Life.” Beyond that, he shows up in season five's "In Praise of Pip," opposite the legendary Jack Klugman. I was hoping to snag Mr. Mumy for a brief Q&A before this entry went to press, but he didn’t return my messages. Ah well, he’s a busy guy, with his folk music career and all. He’s still okay by me.


I scoured Google Images for the toy telephone used in this episode, but I came up empty. I did, however, find this:

Bet you weren’t expecting a Toy Story 3 plug here, were you?

Interestingly, another “chat with the dead by telephone” episode will crop up down the road, in season five’s “Night Call,” which will beat this episode by a mile. However, “Long Distance Call” is decent enough. It’s hampered by the videotape it was shot on (this is the final of season two’s six episodes that were shot on tape to save money), but the script and the performances are of sufficient quality to overcome the technical end of things. It’s not a favorite of mine, but I don’t mind recommending it.

Next week: A desperate man in 1880 walks over a sandy hill and finds himself in 1961. It’s the first of a Twilight Zone time travel double-whammy, and it’s a good one. Do tune in.