TZ Promo: “Kick the Can” (2/09/1962)

Season 3, Episode 21 (#86 overall)

Cayuga Production # 4821

“You can’t stop kids from playing kick-the-can. It’s like statues, and hide-and-seek. It’s in their blood! It’s a special summer ritual. Did you ever stop to think of it? All kids play those games, and the minute they stop--- they begin to grow old. It’s almost as though playing kick-the-can keeps them young. Did you ever notice that?”

That’s Charles Whitley, who’s just figured out the secret of youth. Ben Conroy, his lifelong friend and fellow resident at Sunnyvale Rest, steadfastly and stubbornly disagrees. 50 years ago tonight, one of them was proven right.

“Kick the Can” is George Clayton Johnson’s fourth and final* Twilight Zone script, and it’s easily his best (if only the other writers could’ve gone out with a similar bang). This is one of those episodes where everything, from Johnson’s script on up, works beautifully. There is a palpable air of sentimentality, but it never becomes cloying or maudlin. The scene in which the nursing home residents, led by Whitley, endeavor to sneak out for a nighttime game of kick-the-can is a sheer delight. There's a simple sweetness that's irresistible.


Ernest Truex is wonderful as Whitley. You can’t help but sympathize with him right off the bat. The opening scene, in which he says his goodbyes to his fellow residents, fully believing that his son is about to pick him up and take him home, is staged masterfully (we only hear snatches of dialogue between father and son; most of the scene consists of the other residents on the front porch, leering expectantly, figuring out that things aren’t going according to Whitley’s hopes). When Whitley’s son drives away without him, and he sits down beneath a nearby tree, near tears, our hearts break for him (which is pretty amazing, given we’ve only known this guy for three minutes). Truex’s face is marvelously expressive, conveying disappointment and heartbreak. From there, his growing elation at figuring out the secret of youth (playing the titular game of kick-the-can) is just plain fun to watch.


Truex was last seen in season one’s “What You Need,” playing a peddler with a supernatural knack for providing exactly what people need at the exact time they need it. He was fine there, but here he truly shines. It’s a shame The Twilight Zone didn’t utilize his talents more.


Equally great is Russell Collins as Conroy. Bitter and tired, he has no patience for Whitley’s sudden flights of fancy and reacts brusquely and without sympathy. The scene in which he discusses Whitley with Sunnyvale’s superintendent, however, belies a convincing concern for his friend, which adds a nice dimension to the otherwise gruff character. And just watch his turnaround at the end of the episode…. It’s just damned heartbreaking.


Burt Mustin has a minor role as another of the Sunnyvale residents (we last saw him in season two’s “Night of the Meek,” where he received a new pipe and smoking jacket from Henry Corwin, aka Santa Claus).


Whitley’s son is played by Ernest Truex’s real-life son Barry. A nice touch (even though the poor guy didn't get screen credit!).

The child playing the transformed Whitley is similarly uncredited, but he reminds me of Hermie Brandt (Jerry Davis) from season 4’s “The Incredible World of Horace Ford.” Compare these two shots:


I dunno, maybe it's the messed-up teeth. Or maybe it's the lamp globes. Are they the same kid? The answer lies somewhere... in The Twilight Zone.



“Kick the Can” was one of four episodes remade in 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie. It plays out more or less like the original, except it ends with most of the residents ultimately rejecting the opportunity to be young again. This version lays on the sugar and sentiment pretty thick, but the cast is great (Scatman Crothers in particular). Steven Spielberg himself directed this segment of the film, and it fits squarely in with his other 80’s work (E.T., TV’s Amazing Stories, etc). Not terrible by any means, but the original beats it hands down.


“Kick the Can” is stock-scored. While it’s too bad Cayuga didn’t deem the episode worthy of its own score, at least they were smart enough to pull stock cues from season one’s “Walking Distance” by Bernard Herrmann. Wistful and yearning, the music fits in perfectly here.

Next week: Barry Morse! A player piano with supernatural properties! It can’t lose… right? Well…..

* Of course Johnson's contribution to the series extends beyond four teleplays. Three other TZ scripts were based on his ideas or unpublished short stories, and he did submit a fifth teleplay for season 5 called "Tick of Time," based on his own unpublished short story "The Grandfather Clock." It ended up heavily revised by another writer, to the extent that a chagrined Johnson requested that he be credited under a pseudonym. Therefore, "Kick the Can" is Johnson's final contribution in which he is properly credited as the sole writer. We'll delve into this more when we get to that particular episode (which, by the way, was aired as "Ninety Years Without Slumbering") next December.

TZ Promo: “A Quality of Mercy” (12/29/1961)

Season 3, Episode 15 (#80 overall)

Cayuga Production # 4809

50 years ago tonight, a glory-hungry lieutenant in the final days of WWII found the tables turned on him on a genetic level (I almost typed “quantum” there, which would’ve been a cute joke; read on…) when he finds himself inexplicably transformed into that which he hates most: his Japanese counterpart. The DNA, as they say, is on the other helix. Or something like that.

“A Quality of Mercy” stars Dean Stockwell, probably best known to genre fans as Admiral Al Calavicci, hologram advisor to Scott Bakula’s time-skipping Dr. Sam Beckett on TV’s Quantum Leap (now do you get the “quantum” joke above? Hey, c’mon, that’s gold!). Here he’s… well, much younger, and his voice is much higher. He’s appropriately loud and obnoxious (and fittingly contrite later on) as Kattel, the young lieutenant with a hard-on for blood.



Albert Salmi, last seen in season one’s “Execution” (and who will pop up again in season four’s “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”), is quite good as the war-weary sergeant who just wants to stop fighting and go home…. However, I would’ve liked to see him reprise Joe Caswell just long enough to treat Kattel to a knuckle sandwich.

Spock to Enterprise...

Everybody’s favorite Vulcan, Leonard Nimoy himself, appears here in a bit role. And furthering the Star Trek connection: Stockwell appeared in the “Detained” episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2002 (which starred Scott Bakula! A-ha!), plus he appeared in the 80’s Twilight Zone revival series (“Room 2426”). I’m not sure this qualifies as a “six degrees” situation, but there you go.

“A Quality of Mercy” was semi-remade in Twilight Zone: The Movie as “Time Out,” the catastrophe-laden filming of which cost the lives of actor Vic Morrow and a couple of Vietnamese children…. a horrific tragedy to be sure, made even more tragic by the fact that the resultant film wasn’t even very good.

Eine Kleine Nacht.... Morrow?

War is hard enough. Do you have to be a dick too?

“A Quality of Mercy” is another WWII-in-The-Philippines script from Rod Serling, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (he lived it, after all; the core idea might be someone else's, but Serling totally makes it his own). It’s impossible not to compare this episode to his earlier “The Purple Testament,” and yeah, it’s probably not quite as good… but it stands up pretty well on its own. It has that vague “been there, done that” quality that the series will regularly exhibit for the rest of its run, but it’s certainly not a bad effort. I’d probably rate it somewhere smack dab in the middle, and when it comes to The Twilight Zone, that’s still better than most TV, then and (most certainly) now.

Next: The Twilight Zone rings in the New Year with another appearance by Mr. Death, only this time he’s kinder and gentler… not to mention painfully handsome.

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.

"156" Contest Winner: Lauren McCloskey!

Lauren McCloskey of Greensburg, PA is our contest winner! She was the first to correctly answer yesterday's spontaneous trivia question: Why is 156 a significant Twilight Zone number? The answer is: there were a total of 156 episodes aired during the series' 5-year run. Lauren is receiving a copy of Twilight Zone: The Movie on DVD. Congrats!

The lovely Ms. McCloskey, semi-conscious in Madrid.

TZ Promo: “Time Enough At Last” (11/20/1959)

Time Magazine recently released a Top 10 Twilight Zone Episodes list, which can be viewed here. There's really no science or actual polling behind this list; rather, it appears to simply list ten of the most iconic, best-remembered episodes. We can debate the relative merits of such an approach (incidentally, only one of my top 10 favorites, "The Hitch-hiker," appears on Time's list), but what's the point? Most fans love all ten. I certainly do. Well… almost. There's one that I have serious issues with, and that episode is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary tonight.

Generally beloved by fans both casual and hardcore, and certainly well remembered (if for no other reason than it's shocking, ridiculously tragic ending), "Time Enough at Last" stars Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a sad, henpecked son of a bitch who just wants to READ. Newspapers, books, poetry, ketchup bottles, whatever. Trouble is, everyone around him seems determined to stop him, relentlessly so. Then, a twist of fate (surprise, surprise) changes the game completely. And then another twist of fate…. well, surely you know how this ends. But if you don't, I'm not spoiling it. At least not until my next entry, in which I'll dissect the hell out of it and see if I hate it as much as I think I do.

Anyway --- the episode was written by Rod Serling (based on a short story by Lynn Venable), directed by John Brahm, and has spawned many media references and parodies over the years (including a very funny bit on The Drew Carey Show; it was also mentioned in Twilight Zone: The Movie, which I should probably do a spotlight on one of these days). The episode features an original musical score by Leith Stevens, who scored hundreds of radio shows, including episodes of Suspense and The Abbot and Costello Show. This was his sole contribution to The Twilight Zone.

50th Anniversary Musings...

October 2 is less than three weeks away, and I’m getting excited. I’ve already scheduled the day off from work, and I’ll have the house to myself. My plan is to immerse myself in All Things Zone leading up to my viewing of the pilot episode (“Where Is Everybody?”) at exactly 10:00 pm, precisely 50 years after its original broadcast. This viewing will kick off a five-year marathon in which I’ll watch all 156 episodes on their respective 50th anniversaries (see previous entry for details).

So far, my daylong anniversary celebration will include a viewing of the excellent American Masters documentary on Rod Serling (titled, appropriately enough, Submitted for Your Approval), as well as The Time Element, an episode of Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse that was originally intended to launch The Twilight Zone but ultimately didn’t (long story; I won’t recount it here). I thought about doing a countdown of my ten favorite episodes, but then I’d be watching ten of the episodes early and out of sequence. I also thought about watching 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, or maybe some episodes of the 80’s revival series, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the day should focus exclusively on classic Zone. I dunno, maybe I’ll re-read one of the Serling biographies for part of the day and listen to my extensive collection of TZ music to kill some time.

I really wish (and this is gonna sound pathetic) that I had someone to share this day with. My wife couldn’t care less (and honestly, why would she?). My good friend (and fellow Zone fanatic) Bill Huelbig lives across the country, and my local friends aren’t really fans of the show. There are celebrations happening, but as far as I know, nothing in my neck of the woods. So yeah, I’ll be celebrating this anniversary solo. Damn, I need to find myself some local TZ fans to hang with.

There are several cool items being released in the next few months, all commemorating the anniversary. Already available is a TZ postage stamp, released as part of a sheet of stamps commemorating several vintage TV shows (I Love Lucy, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, etc.; I bought two sheets).

Hallmark is releasing a Christmas ornament in the form of a miniature TV set that lights up and plays the theme music. It comes out in October, and yes, it will be hanging on my tree this year (I’ll likely buy a second one to keep displayed in my office year round).

Three episode-specific bobbleheads are coming in October/November from a company called Bif Bang Pow!, which look amazing.

I saw something online about an interactive DVD game (along the lines of the Scene It? DVD games, several of which we own and quite enjoy), but I haven’t been able to verify a release date.

A few new TZ t-shirts popping up for sale online, from a company called Trevco.

Lastly, some classy clothing items are being made available by The Rod Serling Memorial Foundation (baseball cap, polo shirt, etc).

So… lots of items to be acquired. I might need to sell a kidney on eBay to stay caught up.

What DOESN’T seem to be coming in time for the anniversary, however, is a blu-ray release of the series, which really bugs me. Don’t get me wrong, the existing Definitive Edition DVD sets are absolutely stellar, but the episodes will look even more spectacular in true high definition (for example, the original Star Trek series looks staggeringly pristine on blu-ray). And this is the FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY, for Rod’s sake. I wonder if the sluggish economy is to blame…? Oh well, maybe next year. I can wait. There’s time. Time, time, time enough at last. All the time I need, and all the time I want. *

And while I’m griping, why the hell isn’t there a Rod Serling action figure by now? Sheesh. Maybe a Serling bobblehead will show up, assuming this BifBangPow! company makes it beyond their first three. Fingers and toes are duly crossed.

*Yeah, another TZ pun, but less obscure than the last one.