2x10 "Is That a Rocket in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?"

This week, Craig watches helplessly as two different spaceship crews make emergency landings and get themselves into all sorts of crazy unpredictable jams. Strap yourselves in, kids, ‘cuz it’s gonna be one helluva bumpy ride when we launch the Twilight Zone episodes “Elegy” and “People are Alike All Over” into orbit simultaneously and see which one comes back unscathed... and which one burns up on reentry. Along the way, Craig marvels at the fashion choices of future astronauts and struggles with the pronunciation of Liebfraumilch.

nscatathed.uch s as we

Marc Scott Zicree’s “Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury: The Untold Story”:

https://youtu.be/8bhvb8Tmi38

Marc Scott Zicree’s “Mr. Sci-Fi” YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkKt7gHnZpcY0nreBdPhwmQ

Brandi Jackola reads ‘Brothers Beyond the Void’ (Tom Elliot’s The Twilight Zone Podcast):

http://thetwilightzonepodcast.com/the-twilight-zone-podcast-brandi-jackola-reads-brothers-beyond-the-void-2/

Jim Moon Reads ‘Elegy’ (Tom Elliot’s The Twilight Zone Podcast):

http://thetwilightzonepodcast.com/jim-moon-reads-elegy-2/

Theme Music: “Neither Here nor There (3.3)” by Twin Loops

“Phoenix.beacon10” performed by SETI (from the album Pharos, copyright 1995 by Instinct Ambient Records)

“Is It Wrong” performed by Golden Suits (from the album Kubla Khan, copyright 2016 by Hit City USA)

“Don’t Wanna Fight No More” performed by Alabama Shakes (from the album Sound & Color,  copyright 2015 by ATO / Fontana North / MapleMusic Recordings)

“Bullet with Butterfly Wings” performed by Smashing Pumpkins (from the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,  copyright 1995 by Virgin Records)

“Lost-Found” performed by Space Monkey Death Sequence (from the album People Are Alike All Over,  copyright 2015 by Space Monkey Death Sequence)

Check out Space Monkey Death Sequence’s full catalogue at:

https://spacemonkeydeath.bandcamp.com

Elton John’s “Rocket Man” performed by William Shatner (The Science Fiction Film Awards, 1978)

The Twilight Zone is a trademark of CBS, Inc.

Between Light and a Shadow: A Twilight Zone Podcast is a nonprofit podcast. Music clips and dialogue excerpts used herein are the property of their respective copyright owners; we claim no ownership of these materials. Their use is strictly for illustrative purposes and should be considered Fair Use as stated in the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. section 107.

TZ Promo: "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" (4/18/1963)

Season 4, Episode 15 (#117 overall)

Cayuga Production # 4854

Originally aired April 18, 1963

50 years ago tonight, yet another of The Twilight Zone’s nostalgic misfits found himself visiting his own idealized past.  No, it’s not last week’s episode all over again.

“The Incredible World of Horace Ford” (written by Reginald Rose, adapted from his own 1955 Studio One teleplay) finds the title character, an overgrown man-child, designing toys for a living and aching for his treasured childhood on Randolph Street (is this the same Randolph Street from “A Game of Pool”?) as he nears his 38th birthday.  He takes an evening stroll down to the old neighborhood and marvels at how little has changed.  

A gang of kids runs by, one of whom bumps into him and knocks his pocket watch out of his hands. The boy smiles at him before running off, and Horace recognizes him as Hermy Brandt, a kid he knew as a youth, impossibly still a child. Horace, understandably freaked out, gets the hell out of there.  Later that night, Horace’s wife answers the doorbell: it’s Hermy, who hands her the pocket watch and smiles, “He dropped this.”

It’s a pretty obvious hook to get him to return to Randolph Street… which he does.  He won’t like what he finds, though, as time has a tough lesson to teach him.

It’s impossible to watch “The Incredible World of Horace Ford” without drawing parallels to season one’s “Walking Distance” (and other similar nostalgia-driven time travel stories throughout the series’ run).  It’s fairly successful on its own, but the been-there-done-that vibe is palpable.  In all fairness, Rose’s original version was written before Serling's 1959 teleplay, which makes one wonder if Serling remembered the live broadcast and, um, subconsciously borrowed from it.  However, one could draw a parallel between Rose’s original 1955 teleplay and Ray Bradbury’s 1953 short story “The Playground,” in which a man is beaten to a pulp by a mob of children (oops, spoiler alert!), and wonder if Rose did some, um, borrowing of his own.

Hey kids!  If you've ever had difficulty making paper airplanes (like yours truly), we’re given a very useful step-by-step close up of Horace doing just that at the end of the prologue.

And I’m not sure it’s an actual Forbidden Planet connection, but Horace’s robot toy design looks, at least from the waist down, an awful lot like Robby the Robot.

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a little something-something going on between Horace's wife Laura and Leonard, his coworker at the toy company?  Watch as he stares intently at her with the burning gaze of unrequited passion, and gasp in shock as he basically paws the hell out of her, never mind that her husband is in the next office over.

Down with O.P.P.? Yeah, you know me.

Pat Hingle is pretty effective here as Horace, swinging wildly from wide-eyed glee to sullen brooding, oftentimes in a matter of seconds (you know, like a little kid).  It’s impossible not to get caught up in his excitement as he giddily relives his childhood to whoever happens to be in the same room, and it’s easy to forgive his childish behavior once we've witnessed his living situation (he shares a home with his wife AND mother!). Hingle is probably best remembered by modern audiences as Commissioner Gordon in the Tim Burton (and later Joel Schumacher) Batman films (1999-2007).

Nan Martin is fine as Laura in her only classic TZ appearance (I’m undecided if she qualifies as a TZ babe; she’s not bad looking, though….). She’d return to The Twilight Zone for two appearances (“If She Dies” and “A Saucer of Loneliness”) in the 1985-1987 revival series on CBS.

We last saw Phillip Pine (Leonard) playing Virgil Sterig, one of Arch Hammer’s alternate faces, in season one’s “The Four of Us Are Dying.”  He also plays a pivotal role in the “Hundred Days of the Dragon” episode of The Outer Limits as Vice President Ted Pearson.

Mr. Judson, Horace’s boss, is played by Vaughn Taylor in his fourth (out of a total five) TZ appearance.  We previously saw him in season one (“Time Enough at Last”), twice in season three (“Still Valley” and “I Sing the Body Electric”), and we’ll see him again in season five (“The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross”).  He also showed up twice on The Outer Limits (“The Guests” and “Expanding Human”).

“The Incredible World of Horace Ford” is yet another stock-scored episode with disparate cues by multiple composers, including Rene Garriguenc, Lyn Murray, Fred Steiner, Nathan Van Cleave and, most significantly, Bernard Herrmann.  Herrmann’s “Walking Distance” evokes the sweet ache of nostalgia, so it fits in quite well here (as it did in season three’s “Kick the Can”).

"The Incredible World of Horace Ford” is decent, but it would undoubtedly be more effective as a half-hour episode. Horace goes back to the same moment in time on Randolph Street three different times, stretching the proceedings out into three stages instead of one.  Martin Sloan, meanwhile, learned his lesson in a single trip and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of the half-hour format.

Ha! Suck it, Horace!

Two weeks from tonight:

A bunch more Forbidden Planet eye candy but, more importantly, a great episode.

RIP Ray Bradbury

RAY DOUGLAS BRADBURY

August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012

Ray Bradbury, writer of the Twilight Zone episode "I Sing the Body Electric," has passed away at the age of 91.  Bradbury's influence on The Twilight Zone, and on the science fiction and fantasy genres, is incalculable.  I'm a huge fan of his work (my favorite novel of all time is his Fahrenheit 451), so naturally I'm devastated.  Yet another hand I'll never be able to shake....

Rest in peace, good sir.  Thank you for all the rockets and Martians you filled my head with.

TZ Promo: “I Sing the Body Electric” (5/18/1962)

Season 3, Episode 35 (100 overall)

Cayuga Production # 4826

50 years ago tonight, The Twilight Zone aired its landmark 100th episode.  Thankfully, Cayuga didn’t pick a dud to mark the occasion (see “The Whole Truth,” which was the 50th episode aired).

“I Sing the Body Electric” was written by sci-fi luminary Ray Bradbury, his only contribution to the series.  We meet a grieving widower (his name is never given, he’s simply referred to as “Father”) who endeavors to purchase a robot to act as a maternal proxy for his children.  It appears that a company called Facsimile Limited has just what he needs… unfortunately, his oldest daughter’s bitterness over losing her mother is a much bigger roadblock than he realizes.

“I Sing the Body Electric” is moderately successful (while fairly soap-operatic), but the scenes inside Facsimile Limited elevate things considerably.  There’s a delightful phantasmagorical quality to its selection of body parts, not to mention a chute in which one’s selections are deposited.  If only we could build our spouses and children in such a way…. maybe the New Life Corporation should partner with Facsimile Limited…?

“Grandma” (similarly unnamed) is well-played by Josephine Hutchinson, warm but never cloying.  Genre fans may remember her as Elsa von Frankenstein in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein (I didn’t, despite the fact that I’ve seen it numerous times and own it on DVD twice over; good thing I have the internet to do my remembering for me!).

“Father” is played by David White (best known as Larry Tate, Darin’s boss on TV’s Bewitched), who last visited The Twilight Zone in season one’s “A World of Difference,” where he played harried agent to Jerry Regan (or was it Arthur Curtis?).

Vaughn Taylor, the Facsimile Limited rep, is a TZ vet.  We first saw him in season one’s “Time Enough at Last” as Henry Bemis’s stick-in-the-mud boss at the bank, then again earlier this season as a grizzled warlock in “Still Valley.”  Here he’s a congenial salesman with just a hint of Willie Wonka about him (Facsimile Limited is a bit magical, after all, not entirely unlike Wonka’s storied chocolate factory).  Quite a diverse trio of roles; happily, Vaughn is quite good in all three.  He appeared in several episodes of TV’s The Fugitive, but he’s probably best remembered as Janet Leigh’s boss in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Veronica Cartwright is quite good as the eldest child Anne, sullen and distrustful of the new addition to the family.  Watch her face light up when she finally gives in and accepts “Grandma.”  Cartwright is something of a fixture in the sci-fi genre: she was most recently seen as the beleaguered human-alien hybrid Cassandra Spender on TV’s The X-files; she also met a gruesome end in Ridley Scott’s original Alien.

Many have lamented the fact that this is Ray Bradbury’s sole contribution to the series.  I’m not going to go into the troubled history between Bradbury and Serling, but I will say that, while I’m a big fan of Bradbury’s work, I think it usually works best on the printed page.  Most all adaptations of his work… well, just don’t work for one reason or another.  And it’s not always because of Bradbury’s unique dialogue either… Serling himself said that Bradbury is “hard to dramatize,” and I completely agree.  Not everything needs a visual translation (I’m talking to you, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  You too, Hunger Games).   Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is one of my all-time favorite novels, and (IMO) the 1966 Francois Truffaut adaptation leaves a lot to be desired (despite featuring my all-time favorite film score, by none other than Bernard Herrmann).  No mechanical hound?  C’mon, seriously?  

Anyway, Bradbury’s prose approaches the poetic, and adapting it for TV or film strips that aspect away.  Sure, the story’s still there, but the Bradbury voice is silenced.  Something huge and wonderful gets lost.

Having said that, I quite like “I Sing the Body Electric.”  It’s not one of the more popular TZ episodes, and it’ll never make my top 20, but I do like it.  It’s funny: Serling was so hot on serializing his lame guardian angel idea (see the god-awful “Mr. Bevis” and next week’s “Cavender in Coming”), but don’tcha think Facsimile Limited would’ve made a much better springboard for an anthology series?  A different electric grandmother each week, a different family…. Ah, the possibilities!

Next:  “Mr. Bevis” --- that wretched creature --- gets a remake.  The horror!  The horror!!!

TZ Promo: "Elegy" (2/19/1960)

 

With their rocket quickly running out of fuel, three astronauts touch down on an asteroid... and are astonished to discover that they're back on earth.  Okay, they aren't really back on earth, but it sure as hell looks like it... barns, houses, people --- except that nothing moves.  Everyone and everything appears to be frozen in time.  It's a mystery, and our intrepid voyagers will find the answer... but the cost will prove rather high.

Charles Beaumont wrote the teleplay, based on his own short story, and as much as I love his work, I've never been particularly fond of this episode for three reasons.  First, the "frozen in time" people DO move, because director Douglas Heyes opted to use live actors instead of mannequins or still photography.  Consequently, the viewer will spot many instances of movement on the part of the various actors.  It's damned distracting, and essentially kills the suspension of disbelief.  Second, the script attempts to inject humor into the proceedings for no apparent reason (a recurring gag is an inability to pronounce a certain name correctly, ha ha).  And third we have the ending which, while sufficiently shocking, seems to come from nowhere (shock endings are part and parcel of the Twilight Zone experience, of course, but they should make sense within the context of the preceding story).  All in all, it's the first Twilight Zone episode that (for me) is a complete failure.  I've gone on at length about my dislike of "Time Enough at Last," but I at least respect that episode from a technical standpoint (the direction and cinematography are frankly amazing).  But "Elegy" is an episode that I hate on every level.  The actors are unappealing, the direction is lacking... even the original music score by Van Cleave (whose work on the series I usually love) is grating.

But hey, this is just one guy's opinion.  You might love it.  Who knows?

Addendum:  Okay, so after watching the episode (as you may or not have guessed, I write these promo entries BEFORE I sit down to watch the episode; oftentimes it's been several years since my last viewing), I don't hate it quite as much as I thought I did.... but I still don't like it much either.  It's not a stinker on the level of, say, "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" or "Mr. Bevis," but it's definitely lower-tier Zone.  As I watched it, I got a really strong Martian Chronicles vibe (specifically, "The Third Expedition," originally published in Planet Stories Magazine as "Mars Is Heaven" in 1948) which, given Beaumont's documented friendship with Ray Bradbury, makes some amount of sense.  Nothing direct in the way of plagiarism, you understand.... just a vague similarity.

Next week:  Things get back on track in a big way with a truly excellent TZ classic.  It's one of my Top 40 favorites, and it stars Vera Miles as a nervous woman in a bus station who is seeing double... quite literally, as it turns out.   Come in from the rain and have a look.