TZ Promo: "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” (4/13/1962)

Season 3, Episode 30 (95 overall)

Cayuga Production # 4833

50 years ago tonight, a notorious teller of tall tales learnt his lesson about fabricatin’ fibs in a most unexpected way. That’s right, naïve aliens kidnap him, believing every bit of bullshit he’s ever espoused about himself. He’s clearly a prime specimen of humanity (he said so himself!), and they’ve got an intergalactic zoo that he’ll fit right into.


The success of “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” hinges on whether or not you can stand Andy Devine and his nails-on-a-chalkboard voice. I find him (and his voice) grating to the point of headache, so I guess that means I don’t find this episode successful. Your mileage may vary, of course.



One thing I do appreciate is the design of Frisby’s extraterrestrial abductors. At first they are simply human-looking stiffs, but as Frisby discovers when he takes a poke at one, their true faces are hidden beneath full-head masks (a nice reversal on the usual “guy in a rubber monster mask” approach). An effective approach by makeup maestro William Tuttle.


In their natural state, they look like nothing else ever presented on The Twilight Zone, with their nightmarish immobile faces and their swinging sixties blazer-and-turtleneck duds. They remind me a bit of the arachnid-faced alien from The Outer Limits’ “The Children of Spider County.” Something about well-dressed aliens just works for me, I guess.




The Frisby alien is another lucky TZ character to be granted plastic immortality by Bif Bang Pow!. The action figure, due out in August, can be preordered (in a two-pack with the nurse from "Eye of the Beholder") over at Entertainment Earth.


Forbidden Planet alert! The alien spacecraft is --- yep, you guessed it --- the United Planets C-57D Space Cruiser, this time playing a much smaller craft but with its enormous three-dimensional transparent navigation ball prominently featured. “Movie prop, ain’t it? Yeah, that’s what it is, ain’t it? One of them Hollywood things, advertising a flying saucer picture or something. Yeah, that’s it, ain’t it?” asks Frisby in a deliciously meta moment as he examines the navigation ball. Act two opens with a wonderful shot of Frisby filmed through the nav-ball.


Ugh. I dunno, folks. It’s by no means the extreme bummer that “Four O’clock” was last week, but Andy Devine is damned tough to listen to (not to mention look at) for half an hour. But we do get those cool aliens, not to mention the most Forbidden Planet eye candy per minute than any episode so far in the series. So it’s kind of a draw, I guess.

Next: “The Trade-Ins” takes us into the near future, where the elderly can swap their weak bodies for fresh, new ones… at a price, of course.

TZ Promo: “The Mind and the Matter” (5/12/1961)

“The Mind and the Matter” (5/12/1961)

Season Two, Episode 27 (63 overall)
Cayuga Production # 173-3659

Rod Serling will forever be remembered as a dramatist of distinction. His greatest works stand among the best that television has ever offered. The Velvet Alley. Patterns. Requiem for a Heavyweight. “Walking Distance.” “The Eye of the Beholder.” The list goes on. Upon cursory examination, his body of work is staggering in its radiant brilliance. However, the guy was human. He worked himself ragged which, coupled with his relentless chain smoking, killed him at the tender age of 50. He took on way too many commitments and, as a result, sometimes turned in work that was beneath him. When examining his body of work with a more critical eye, it’s impossible to deny that some of his stuff, for lack of a better work, stunk. 50 years ago tonight, one of his lesser literary children debuted.


“The Mind and the Matter,” written by Serling and directed by Buzz Kulik, doesn’t quite descend to the depths of past stillbirths “Mr. Bevis” or “Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” but it’s still pretty bad. To sum up: guy hates people. Guy is given a New Age book on mind control, which actually works. Guy makes humanity disappear. Guy gets lonely and repopulates the earth with duplicates of himself. Guy realizes what an ass he really is. Guy puts everything right.


That’s it. Do we care? No. Are we glad when it’s over? Hell YES. Funnyman Shelley Berman tries to make it work, but Serling’s script is just limp. The only interesting sequence -- -when our dubious hero surrounds himself with copies of himself --- is ruined by bad makeup effects (probably the only failure in William Tuttle’s illustrious career… this guy created the makeup for The Time Machine’s Morlocks, fer chrissakes).


Jack Grinnage, playing the sap who spills coffee on our hero and gives him the mystical magical book as an apology of sorts, is shockingly annoying. According to imdb.com, Grinnage turned down a role in Forbidden Planet (thankfully!). It’s pretty thin, but I’m counting is as a Twilight Zone-Forbidden Planet connection.


Berman, meanwhile, has had quite a career as a comedian and actor. He’s still active today, probably most recognizably from his recurring role as Judge Sanders on the late Boston Legal, which starred… William Shatner. There’s your Shatner connection.

Shelley Berman today.

The Twilight Zone does have its share of successfully comedies. Unfortunately, they’re usually written by people other than Serling. I wonder what George Clayton Johnson would’ve done with this story…? Serling will give us a much more interesting enchanted book --- Ye Book of Ye Black Art --- in a much funnier outing called “The Bard” near the end of season 4. We’ll get to that one in a couple of years.

Two weeks from tonight: Another Serling comedy. But wait! This one doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s quite good. Count your eyeballs and tune in.

TZ Promo: "Long Live Walter Jameson" (3/18/1960)

I’ve been waiting for this day since I first embarked on my five-year Twilight Zone anniversary celebration. Tonight marks the 50th anniversary of my all-time favorite episode, “Long Live Walter Jameson.”

Walter Jameson (Kevin McCarthy) and Samuel Kittridge (Edgar Stehli) are college professors, the best of friends. They're so close, in fact, that Jameson is engaged to marry Kittridge’s daughter Susanna. But as the years have passed, Kittridge has noticed something disturbing: as he himself grows older, his friend never seems to age. One evening during a game of chess, Kittridge corners Jameson on the issue. The truth, at once amazing and devastating, is revealed.

“Long Live Walter Jameson” is essentially a two-character drama (which would translate quite nicely to the stage, come to think of it). The script by Charles Beaumont is flawless, and the performances by McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Stehli are top notch, refined and nuanced, utterly believable. In their hands, the fantastic nature of the tale never seems… well, fantastic. Director Tony M. Leder (Children of the Damned) wisely stays out of the way for the most part, allowing the actors to sell the story without much visual flourish, save for the finale, a brilliant technical feat of lighting and makeup (special mention must be made of William Tuttle’s work here; he’d go on do more elaborate work in TZ’s “Eye of the Beholder,” not to mention George Pal's The Time Machine).

The script contains one of my favorite dialogue passages in the entire series, eloquently spoken by Kevin McCarthy as the tragic Walter Jameson:

I was like you, Sam: afraid of death. I thought of all the things that there were to know, and the miserable few years a man had to know them, and it seemed senseless. Every night I dreamed as you dream, of immortality....only if a man lived forever, I thought, would there be any point in living at all...

"Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end."

Several years back, my friend Bill Huelbig met Kevin McCarthy at a convention. He obtained the following for me, which I still display proudly in my office to this day. Thanks Bill!

McCarthy recorded an audio commentary for this episode for the (wonderful) Definitive Edition DVD, in which he states that, aside from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the bulk of his fan mail concerns this episode. He celebrated his 94th (!) birthday last month, and has joked in interviews that he just might be immortal after all. Time will tell....

Next week: Roddy McDowell crash-lands on Mars. He cowers inside his wrecked ship, afraid of who (or what) is awaiting him outside. Are they people? And if they are, are they just like him...?