Inside The Twilight Zone

From the opening main title of The Twilight Zone (1959-64 version), circa 1959-60.

   It remains one of the most famous anthology series in TV history, as well as part of the overall legacy of one of the greatest and most influential writers to grace the entertainment industry: Rod Serling.  The Twilight Zone offered tales of science fiction and fantasy, but with a major difference: they were, in most respects, superior to what the television industry offered at the time, in terms of quality.  And just as important, the series also had a social and moral conscience, due in part to the subject matter that played a key role in many of The Twilight Zone’s best episodes, as a number of TV series of the late-1950’s and 1960’s reflected the changing times in the real world that would help to define both decades.

   Today, The Twilight Zone is regarded as a major benchmark in TV history, and more popular today than it was when the series’ first incarnation first aired fifty years ago.  It should be pointed out that despite winning critical acclaim and three Emmy Awards during most of its original network TV run, The Twilight Zone, though a modest ratings success, never made the Nielsen ratings’ Top 20 list of highly-rated TV shows during its original run –- perhaps partly because of the misconception that science fiction and fantasy TV shows of that time appealed only to and were produced for younger audiences and/or die-hard sci-fi fans (and until The Twilight Zone came along, many were), and one that would linger on for decades to come, even when The Outer Limits and Star Trek helped to raise the bar of excellence for that particular genre.  Fortunately, in the long run, and thanks in part to reruns in both syndication and on cable TV, The Twilight Zone’s popularity and legacy remains intact, because of not only Rod Serling’s creative vision, but also a shining example of TV at its very best.

Writer/producer and Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling.

   By the mid-1950’s, Rod Serling had won both critical and popular acclaim as one of the most famous scriptwriters of television’s Golden Age, thanks in part to his scripts for NBC’s Kraft Television Theater and CBS’s Playhouse 90, including two Emmy Award-winning plays that remain two of the best in the medium’s history: “Patterns” (1955) and “Requiem For A Heavyweight” (1956), both containing not only intelligent plotting and dialogue, but also the social commentary associated with Serling’s writing talents that set high standards in quality that would — and continues to inspire today’s generations of writers, producers, and directors.

   But with his success as a TV scriptwriter, Serling also faced a major problem in his position as one of Playhouse 90’s writers, and perhaps one also faced by many of his colleagues at that time: namely, the series’ commercial sponsors who wanted changes in his TV scripts to please them more than Serling, thus hampering his creative freedom to a certain degree.  For example, Serling was forced to remove the word lucky from one of his scripts, because one of the sponsors, a cigarette company, thought that it was promoting one of its rivals.  By 1957, Serling quit his job at Playhouse 90, determined to create and produce his own TV series — by using science fiction and fantasy to address not only social and moral issues, but also the human condition, and without getting further criticism from both network TV censors and commercial sponsors.  As Serling himself once pointed out as far as using The Twilight Zone to address such issues, “A Martian can say things that a Republican or Democrat can’t” — an idea that has, more often that not, inspired the best works of some of the greatest science fiction authors of all time.

William Bendix and Martin Balsam in a scene from the 1958 Desilu Playhouse episode “The Time Element.”

   Reworking an old script, Serling decided to sell it to CBS as the pilot for his proposed TV series — but the network wasn’t interested in it.  Fortunately for Serling, Bert Granet, one of the producers of CBS’s Desilu Playhouse (named after the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz), was interested in Serling’s script, and decided to film it.  Serling’s script — “The Time Element” — which aired on the November 24, 1958 episode of Desilu Playhouse, focused on a psychoanalyst’s patient (William Bendix) complaining about a recurring dream in which he found himself in Honolulu, Hawaii prior to the Japanese military’s attack on the U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a dream that he believes is the result of not his own imagination, but time travel, which the psychoanalyst (Martin Balsam) believes is impossible.  But near the story’s end, the patient disappears without explanation, both surprising and confusing the psychoanalyst — which leads to an even bigger surprise, when the psychoanalyst visits a nearby bar, and not only spots a picture of his patient on the wall, but learns that he once worked there as a bartender until he was killed in Honolulu on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack!  “The Time Element,” which established the winning formula that would help define The Twilight Zone almost a year later, was a hit with both TV critics and viewers — and soon convinced CBS network executives to green-light Serling’s pet project for the 1959-60 TV series.  (A decade before The Twilight Zone debuted on TV, the term that inspired the show’s title originally referred to a “gray area” — in this case, a foreign country — by U.S. intelligence analysts in the early years of the Cold War if there was no definite government policy on whether to send military forces to defend it; later on, in the 1950’s, the U.S. Air Force used the term twilight zone as another name for the terminator, the imaginary border between “night” and “day” on a planetary body [like Earth].  Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, one of TV’s first science fiction series during the early-to-mid-1950’s, also used the term twilight zone to describe the habitable area of a planet.)

   Adding to the formula that would make The Twilight Zone a TV classic was Rod Serling hosting and narrating the series — but it should be noted that Serling wasn’t the first choice for that position.  The show’s producers had originally considered actor/director Orson Welles and Westbrook Van Voorhis (who narrated the March Of Time movie newsreels of the 1930’s and 1940’s) for the job of narrator — but both would end up out of the running due to a number of circumstances, which was why Serling ended up as the series’ host/narrator.  Yet, during the series’ first season, Serling didn’t appear on-camera except before the closing credits to introduce a preview of next week’s episode — the sole exception was the 1960 episode “A World Of His Own.”  Starting with The Twilight Zone’s second season in 1960-61, Serling appeared on-screen to introduce each episode for the rest of the series’ run.  Of course, it wasn’t easy for Serling when he had to appear before the camera — which was the main reason why he brought along a supply of extra shirts with him every time he was being filmed on-screen; Serling sweated through one shirt every time the cameras were rolling.  As Serling later said, “Only my laundress knows how frightened I (really) am.”

   The first Twilight Zone episode, “Where Is Everybody?”, which aired on October 2, 1959, focused on a man (Earl Holliman) wearing a U.S. Air Force jumpsuit who’s not only suffering from amensia, but also finds himself in a town devoid of people — or so he thinks.  By episode’s end, we learn that the amensiac is in reality a NASA astronaut-in-training who was confined to an isolation room within an aircraft hangar for almost a month, to see if he could remain sane while traveling in a NASA spacecraft to the moon — and that the town he thought he was in for most of the episode was nothing more than a hallucination.  What was notable about this very first Twilight Zone episode was the musical score by film composer Bernard Herrmann (best remembered for his collaborations with legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock), who also composed the series’ theme music for most of its first season (which would be replaced mid-season by French avant-garde musician Marius Constant’s celebrated “Twilight Zone Theme,” a combination of Constant’s ”Etrange 3 [Strange No. 3]” and “Milieu 2 [Middle No. 2]“) as well as the fact that it was filmed at Universal Studios.  Beginning with the second episode, and with few exceptions, the majority of the later Twilight Zone episodes during its original run was filmed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where Serling and his production team would use the studio’s backlots to film many of them.  A number of later Twilight Zone episodes would employ the talents of make-up artist William Tuttle, who headed that particular department for MGM from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

   During The Twilight Zone’s first three seasons on CBS, a crack production team was responsible for helping Serling bring the series to life, including veteran TV producer Buck Houghton and veteran motion picture and TV cinematographer George T. Clemens (a distant relative of legendary author Samuel Clemens, best known as Mark Twain), who would photograph more episodes of the series than any other cinematographer (as well as winning an Emmy Award for his efforts in 1961).

Burgess Meredith in a scene from the 1959 Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last.”

   Many of the first season episodes of The Twilight Zone remain some of the series’ best, written and/or adapted by Rod Serling — among the best were “One For The Angels,” in which a pitchman (Ed Wynn) faces Death, and outthinks him when a young girl’s life hangs in the balance; “Time Enough At Last,” based on Lyn Venable’s 1953 short story, in which a bespectacled bank teller (Burgess Meredith) who’s an avid book reader who’s ridiculed by virtually everybody because of that particular passion ends up the sole survivor of a nuclear explosion that devastates the Earth; and “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” in which alien observers turn the residents of a suburban neighborhood against each other by manipulating their basic fears.

   Rod Serling may have been the chief writer of The Twilight Zone, but he was smart enough to let others write specific episodes, including two of the most famous science fiction authors of all time: Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who would prove to be no slouches when they wrote some of the series’ best episodes.  Other writers who would pen later Twilight Zone episodes included George Clayton Johnson and Earl Hamner, Jr. (who would later create The Waltons and Falcon Crest).  The series would also prove to be a great training ground for future film directors like Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke), Ted Post (Magnum Force), Ralph Nelson (Lillies Of The Field), Eliot Silverstein (Cat Ballou, A Man Called Horse), and Richard Donner (The Omen, Superman, Lethal Weapon), as well as giving work to established pros like Norman Z. McLeod, Don Siegel (Dirty Harry), and Ida Lupino (who appeared in the 1959 Twilight Zone episode “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine”).  In addition, a number of Twilight Zone episodes during its five season-run featured original musical scores by well-known film and TV composers like Franz Waxman, Leonard Rosenman, and Jerry Goldsmith.  A wide array of actors and actresses appeared on The Twilight Zone during its original network run on CBS, including not only well-known and established stars like Burgess Meredith, Ed Wynn, Buster Keaton, and Mickey Rooney, but also up-and-coming actors who would become famous in the decades to come, including Jack Klugman, Cliff Robertson, William Shatner, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Robert Redford, and Burt Reynolds.

   By the time The Twilight Zone was renewed for the 1960-61 TV season, it was already a hit with critics and viewers.  As a tribute to its success, Rod Serling won an Emmy Award for his writing efforts, while producer Buck Houghton won a Producers Guild Award; the series also won the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation.

   Among the best episodes that marked The Twilight Zone’s second season included Rod Serling’s “The Eye Of The Beholder,” (retitled “The Private World of Darkness,” when it was rerun on CBS in the summer of 1962) in which a young woman (Donna Douglas) whose facial features are supposedly disfigured, has cosmetic surgery to repair them in order to fit in with everybody else — but with a twist: near the end of the episode, the woman is revealed as beautiful following the unsuccessful surgery, while the facial features of the hospital staff tending to her care (and several government representatives) are physically disformed, on an alternate world where ugliness is the norm; Serling’s “The Night Of The Meek,” in which an alcoholic department store Santa Claus (Art Carney) finds a magical sack that can conquer up any Christmas parents and ends up becoming the real thing (and one of six Twilight Zone episodes that were videotaped, when the TV industry was starting to use this just-emerging technology); Richard Matheson’s “The Invaders,” in which a woman (Agnes Moorehead) isolated from civilization is visited by aliens from outer space, an episode that’s best remembered for having almost no dialogue (and the one Twilight Zone episode that Matheson wrote that he considered to be his least favorite); and Serling’s “The Obsolete Man,” in which a librarian (Burgess Meredith) is condemned as a criminal by a totalitarian government in a possible future.  By the end of The Twilight Zone’s second season, the series would not only win two more Emmy Awards (one for Serling, the other for cinematographer George T. Clemens) and a second Hugo Award, but also a Unity Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations.”

Susan Cummings and Richard Kiel in a scene from the 1962 Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man.”

   By the time The Twilight Zone started its third season in the fall of 1961, Rod Serling was starting to feel exhausted, as far as his creative talents were concerned — a fact that several TV critics started to notice when reviewing some of the third season’s first episodes, as they wondered if the series as a whole was starting to lose its creative steam.  Even so, there were a number of great episodes during The Twilight Zone’s third season, including George Clayton Johnson’s “A Game Of Pool,” in which a pool hustler (Jack Klugman) challenges a long-dead pool great (Jonathan Winters) to a game to see who’s the best; Serling’s adaptation of Jerome Bixby’s 1953 short story “It’s A Good Life,” in which a young boy (Billy Mumy) possessing terrifying mental powers has an entire town under his control, as its terrified residents must pretend to be happy in order to placate him; Serling’s “Deaths-Head Revisited,” in which a Nazi SS officer (Oscar Beregi) who escaped Allied justice at the end of World War II returns to the infamous Dachau concentration camp and confronts the ghosts of its prisoners who are determined to punish him for torturing and killing them; Johnson’s “Kick The Can,” in which a retirement home resident (Ernest Truex) seeks out a way to regain his youth; Serling’s adaptation of Damon Knight’s 1950 short story “To Serve Man,” in which a technologically advanced alien race comes to Earth, promising to serve its population — but that promise hides a darker truth, when, by episode’s end, the alien race takes a number of Earth passengers back to their planet, to eat them (the episode’s title is also that of the aliens’ book — a cookbook!); and legendary science fiction author Ray Bradbury’s adaptation of his short story “I Sing The Body Electric,” in which a widower buys a humanoid robot resembling an elderly woman to help take care of his children.

   The Twilight Zone won its third and last Hugo Award in 1962, as well as two Emmy nominations (for cimematography and art design).  But by that time, CBS decided to cancel the series, mainly because it failed to land a sponsor for the 1962-63 TV prime time season — as a consequence, Buck Houghton left the job of producing The Twilight Zone to work for Four Star Productions.  As for Rod Serling, he would divide his time between teaching at Antioch College (the Ohio college where he graduated from in 1950) and writing non-Twilight Zone-related projects (like the screenplay for the 1963 film version of Seven Days In May).

   But The Twilight Zone would return for a fourth season, when it returned to CBS in January 1963, replacing Fair Exchange — a hour-long sitcom that, ironically enough, had taken over the time slot that The Twilight Zone occupied when the network cancelled it almost a year before!  There were several major changes to The Twilight Zone, including not only a new producer in Herbert Hirschman (who also dreamed up the series’ new opening title sequence), but also the series expanding to a full-hour in order to fill the time slot, which didn’t exactly sit well with Rod Serling (who still contributed much of the season’s scripts, but whose role as executive producer was somewhat limited) and the series’ production crew.  In the long run, The Twilight Zone as a hour-long TV series wasn’t exactly a success, though there were several standout episodes like Richard Mathenson’s “Death Ship,” in which a spaceship crew ends up on a planet where they encounter a crashed spaceship similar to theirs, as well as the dead bodies of what seems to be their doppelgangers; Reginald Rose’s “The Incredible World Of Horace Ford,” a remake of sorts of Rose’s 1955 teleplay for CBS’s Studio One, in which a toy designer (Pat Hingle) returns to the hometown of his youth; and Serling’s “On Thursday We Leave For Home,” in which the leader of a group of spaceship crash survivors (James Whitmore) tries to maintain his control over them when they’re finally rescued after many years.  By the end of The Twilight Zone’s fourth season, Herbert Hirschman had been replaced as the series’ producer by Bert Granet, who produced the 1958 Desilu Playhouse episode “The Time Element,” which had helped to spawn The Twilight Zone as a TV series — the series won its final Emmy nomination (for cinematography), as well as its final Hugo Award nomination.

William Shatner and Nick Cravat in a scene from the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare At 20,000 Feet.”

   By the time The Twilight Zone started its fifth and final season during the 1963-64 prime-time TV schedule, the series was cut back to a half-hour, one of several changes that would eventually seal its fate on TV a year later.  After producing thirteen episodes of The Twilight Zone’s final season, Bert Granet handed the producing reins over to veteran CBS producer William Froug, who worked with Rod Serling on the network’s Playhouse 90 TV series in the 1950’s — Froug made some decisions that proved to be unpopular, and perhaps unwise, including rejecting a number of scripts for the series, which may have hastened its cancellation almost a year later.  Also, Charles Beaumont stopped contributing to The Twilight Zone altogether, as far as writing actual scripts were concerned, due to declining health, relying on ghostwriters like Jerry Sohl to handle the remaining scripts that bore Beaumont’s name.  (Beaumont died in late-February 1967, almost three years after The Twilight Zone went off the air.)  But nobody felt the pressure more in trying to keep the series on top than Serling himself, who felt that he was starting to lose his creative edge when it came to writing scripts for the series — a fact that became apparant to not only most TV critics, but also many of The Twilight Zone’s loyal fans.  Still, there were some great episodes that aired during The Twilight Zone’s final season, including Richard Mathenson’s adaptation of his 1961 short story “Nightmare At 20,000 Feet,” in which an airplane passenger (William Shatner) recovering from a nervous breakdown spots a creature on the wing of the jet plane (which only he can see) carrying him and the other passengers, with the creature bent on wrecking the jet plane and sending both its crew and their passengers to their doom; Serling’s “The Last Night Of A Jockey,” in which a disgraced horse jockey (Mickey Rooney), banned from horse racing, wishes to be a “big man” and regain his career; Beaumont and Sohl’s “Living Doll,” in which a young girl’s talking doll (voiced by June Foray) expresses a insane hatred towards the young girl’s stepfather (Telly Savalas) whenever he treats her harshly — with the doll ending up killing him; Serling’s “The Masks,” in which a elderly dying man (Robert Keith) invites his family members to his New Orleans home during Mardi Gras, knowing that they only care about inheriting his fortune when he dies, and orders them to wear Cajun masks with magical properties so that they’ll expose their true selves, which they do by episode’s end — but with the usual, yet unexpected Twilight Zone twist; and a 1962 French short film based on Ambrose Birch’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a condemned man during the American Civil War escapes execution, but can’t escape the neck pains that bother him when he heads back to his home — the short film won an Academy Award in 1963 for Best Live Action Short Film, making The Twilight Zone one of only two TV series in the medium’s history to win both an Emmy and an Oscar.

   By late-January 1964, CBS decided to cancel The Twilight Zone, due to both declining ratings and high budgets, at least according to network executive James Aubrey — the series finale, “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” written by Earl Hamner, Jr., aired on June 19, 1964.  ABC offered to acquire The Twilight Zone from CBS for the 1964-65 prime-time TV season and rename it Witches, Warlocks & Werewolves, but Rod Serling declined ABC’s offer, and soon after, sold his 40% ownership share in his creation to CBS.  Until his death in late-June 1975, Serling continued to divide his time between teaching at Antioch College and writing for both film and TV (including creating two subsequent TV series, including NBC’s Night Gallery, that, in many respects, never matched the success of Serling’s past efforts — including The Twilight Zone itself).

   Following its cancellation in 1964, The Twilight Zone’s popularity would grow even more thanks in part to reruns in syndication and on cable TV (most notably, on SyFy, formerly the Sci-Fi Channel).  It was the original TV series that inspired film director Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind) to produce Twilight Zone: The Movie, which was released by Warner Bros. in 1983, and featured four separate segments directed by not only Spielberg, but also fellow filmmakers John Landis (who also directed the film’s prologue), Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins), and George Miller (the Mad Max films) — three of them were remakes of some of the original Twilight Zone’s best episodes; however, the results were mixed.  But Twilight Zone: The Movie is more remembered for a real-life tragedy resulting from the film’s sole original segment that Landis directed, in which a bitter bigot (Vic Morrow) is transported through time several times, where he’s mistaken for some of the world’s various ethnic and racial minorities that he depises — it was during the filming of one of the segment’s scenes that pyrotechnic explosions caused a helicopter to spin and crash, killing not only Morrow, but also two young child actors who appeared in said scene.  The tragedy would lead to a decade-long legal action against the filmmakers involved in the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie (Landis and his colleagues were eventually acquitted), and led to the changing of several regulations to protect child actors who worked in feature films while shooting at night and which relied heavily on special effects; it also led to an absence of helicopter-related stunts in feature films and TV shows for many years, until the advent of CGI technology in the 1990’s resulted in the creation of digital images of air-crafts that are used in today’s feature films and TV series.  There was also one other consequence of this tragedy: it ended the personal and professional relationship of both Steven Spielberg and John Landis, no doubt forever haunted by what happened to three of the film’s actors, including Vic Morrow.  Twilight Zone: The Movie was a box office success, but it wasn’t the blockbuster that Warner Bros. had hoped for — and proved to be, in some cases, a disappointment for die-hard fans of the TV series, as well as a low point in the careers of those associated with the film, including co-stars Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, and John Lithgow.

Danny Kaye and Glynn Turman in a scene from the 1985 Twilight Zone episode segment “Paladin Of The Lost Hours.”

   In the fall of 1985, CBS revived The Twilight Zone in a hour-long TV series that featured original stories by not only modern-day science fiction writers like Harlan Ellison and George R. R. Martin, but even sci-fi legend Richard Matheson, a frequent contributor to the original TV version; some episodes were directed by filmmakers Wes Craven (Nightmare On Elm Street), John Milius, Joe Dante (who co-directed Twilight Zone: The Movie), and William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist).  Two episodes broadcast during the revival’s brief run were remakes of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone scripts from the early-1960’s, “The Night Of The Meek,” and “The After Hours.”  Among the actors who appeared in the new revival were show business veterans like Danny Kaye, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, Ralph Bellamy, Eddie Albert, and Martin Landau, and up-and-coming stars like Bruce Willis and Fred Savage.  The theme music of the 1980’s version of The Twilight Zone was composed by rock musician Jerry Garcia, and performed by his band The Grateful Dead.  Character actor Charles Aidman (who guest appeared in several episodes of the original Twilight Zone TV series) narrated the revival’s first two seasons when it aired on CBS — Robin Ward would narrate the third season half-hour episodes that were produced in Canada for syndication and aired in syndication in 1988-89.  The 1980’s revival of The Twilight Zone has occassionally aired on cable’s SyFy alongside the original TV version in recent years; come January 2010, Nickelodeon will air it as part of its prime-time Nick At Nite line-up.

   In mid-May 1994, CBS aired Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics, a TV-movie narrated by James Earl Jones, and spotlighted two supposedly lost scripts written by Serling before his death (and with one of them adapted by long-time Twilight Zone contributor Richard Mathenson), which featured such stars as Amy Irving, Jack Palance, and Gary Cole — yet, critical response to the TV-movie was mixed, perhaps suggesting that some of Serling’s scripts are somewhat better off left alone.

   Since the 1990’s, The Twilight Zone TV series — in its various reincarnations — have made inroads into the home video market.  During the 1990’s, both 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (in tandem with CBS Video) and Columbia House have released VHS tapes of just about every episode of the original TV version.  In 2001, Image Entertainment acquired the DVD rights to both the 1959-64 and 1985-89 versions and have since various DVD sets, including those devoted to individual seasons of both series and complete series sets.  (Britain’s Cinema Club UK have also released DVD sets of the 1980’s revival for the European home video market.)

From the opening title sequence of The Twilight Zone (2002-03 version).

   In the fall of 2002, a second hour-long revival of The Twilight Zone that was produced by New Line Cinema’s television division, aired on the now-defunct UPN TV network (which, like CBS, was owned by Viacom).  This revival, hosted and narrated by actor/director Forest Whitaker, featured such stars as Jason Alexander, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Jason Bateman; like the 1980’s revival, the 2002 revival featured not only several remakes of classic episodes from the original series, but also a sequel to the 1961 episode “It’s A Good Life.”  Alas, the 2002 version of The Twilight Zone only lasted a single season due not only to less than favorable response from both critics and audiences, but also due to the fact that the UPN TV network wasn’t exactly a powerhouse as far as broadcast TV networks were concerned (the UPN network shut down in mid-September 2006, before merging with the also-defunct WB TV network to form the CW TV network later on that same month); reruns of that revival now air in both syndication and on Fox’s myNetwork TV network.  (In 2004, New Line Video released the series in a DVD boxed set.)

   Since 2002, a radio version of The Twilight Zone has aired on a significant number of U.S. radio stations (and currently, on both Sirius satellite radio and XM satellite radio), as well as Britain’s BBC 7 digital radio network.  Narrated by Stacy Keach, the radio version featured updated adaptations of episodes from the original Twilight Zone TV series — among the actors lending their talents to the radio version were Jane Seymour, Stan Freberg, Kate Jackson, Fred Willard, and Adam West.

   Since 1961, The Twilight Zone has appeared, off and on, in comic book form by a number of publishers — most notably, Western Publishing’s Dell and Gold Key imprints; the Gold Key version was published from 1962 to 1982, when Western got out of the comic book publishing business altogether.  In 2008, art students from the Savannah College Of Art & Design teamed up with Walker & Co. to produce eight graphic novels based on classic Twilight Zone episodes. 

   The Twilight Zone’s legacy would also extend its legacy into other show business mediums, including live theater performances of classic episodes from the original TV version in both Los Angeles and Seattle since 1996, produced by Theater Schmeater (and with the permission of Rod Serling’s estate), as well as The Twilight Zone Tower Of Terror thrill ride at all of Disney Enterprises’ theme parks in Florida, California, France, and Japan (though the Disney theme park in Japan doesn’t use the name Twilight Zone for its Tower Of Terror thrill ride).

   Currently, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Warner Bros. are making plans to produce a new Twilight Zone feature film that will differ from the TV version (and the 1982 film version) in that it’ll be a continuous story based on a number of Rod Serling’s scripts from the original TV series.  How it’ll fare with not only modern audiences, but also die-hard fans of the original TV series — if it gets made, of course — remains to be seen.  One thing remains clear — thanks in part to (or, in spite of — take your pick) past revivals, The Twilight Zone’s reputation as a TV classic remains as intact today as it was fifty years ago.  What made the series not only unique, but also helped it to stand the test of time was best explained by Rod Serling himself: “Sure, there have been science fiction and fantasy shows before, but most of them were involved with gadgets or leprechauns.  The Twilight Zone is about people.”  It was true then — and it remains so today.