Perhaps you’re a writer who finds his work inspiring. In fact, you may have even gotten into writing in the first place because of Rod Serling. I hear from a lot of people who say that.
Maybe you’re an actor or a producer whose imagination was sparked by The Twilight Zone, and your career path was lighted years ago by the man who penned such classics as “The Midnight Sun”, “Eye of the Beholder”, and “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, to name only a few of his many beloved scripts.
Or, like so many others, you could be a fan of science fiction and fantasy stories, and you can trace your love of the genre back to watching the Zone.
Whatever your particular circumstances, we share that bond: a love of Serling’s work, and a deep and abiding respect and admiration for the man himself. So let me ask you: Do you think he deserves to have a statue dedicated to him in his hometown of Binghamton, NY, home of the carousel that we see in “Walking Distance”?
It’s one of the most iconic images in the whole run of The Twilight Zone: the carousel in “Walking Distance“, Rod Serling’s bittersweet valentine to his upbringing in 1930s’ Binghamton, New York.
Most of us enjoy a good scary story. Something inexplicably draws us in and makes us enjoy being frightened — at least if it’s in a controlled environment, like a book, a movie, or a TV show. The question is, why?
“The Fear”
It’s a question that Rod Serling pondered as well. Check out the introduction to “Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves”, a collection of 12 short stories (by other authors) published in 1963. It’s no longer in print, so I thought I would share his words with fans who might enjoy hearing his insights into the nature of fear:
I am unabashedly and admittedly an admirer of horror tales. If this makes me psychiatrically suspect, my guess is that I share an almost universal affliction. Of all human responses to stimuli, there is probably none quite so commonplace (and so difficult to admit) as the very human fascination for the weird, the grotesque, even the horrible.
Assuredly, it must be this fascination that grips the 10-year-old child watching a spooky movie, forces him to plaster small hands across eyes at particularly horrendous moments but then pries two fingers apart for a quick peek at the very thing that frightens him most.
“Night Call”
Our responses to this kind of “fright motive” seem to undergo a metamorphosis as we take on years. The child is afraid of the shadowy attic and the gloomy cellar. He is wary of the dark corner and the closed closet. His is the formless fear of the unknown, the unexpected; the indistinct wraith that waits to pounce. Read the rest of this entry →
Headlines are supposed to catch your eye, and this one certainly did: “He’s one of the only humans at work — and he loves it”.
I’m sure any fellow Twilight Zone fan can imagine what episode I immediately thought of. Images of Robby the Robot behind a desk in the closing shot of “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” suddenly filled my mind.
The article in question focused on Zou Rui, an engineer at a factory in Shanghai, China, and one of the humans mentioned in the headline. He works for JD.com, an e-commerce company that is “one of the most automated in the world,” the writer tells us.
“Analysts say it’s a peek at the future of manual work in China and beyond — a place where a chosen few tend to the machines, while most workers have been rendered obsolete.” Um, “obsolete”? Now I’m really getting a TZ vibe. And not in a good way. Read the rest of this entry →
Commencement means beginning. Those robes you now sweat under will soon be replaced by lab aprons, business suits, and whatever are the working uniforms of your chosen profession. And some of those professions will prove to be back-breaking impossibilities.
For some of you, the frustrations are only beginning. For all of you, the world society beyond this campus is going to prove tough, competitive, demanding, unforgiving of error, and full of rebuttals to the things you most earnestly believe.
So first – and most important – cherish what you believe. Don’t job off one single value judgment because it swims upstream against what appears to be a majority. Respect your own logic, your own sense of morality. Death and taxes may be the only absolutes. It’s for you to conjure up the modus operandi of how you live, act, react and hammer out a code of ethics. Read the rest of this entry →
Got a sibling? If so, did he or she ever make trouble for you? Did you ever get into arguments? Maybe even engage in some physical fights?
It’s almost silly to ask. If you have a sibling, the answer to my other questions is a resounding yes. Even if you get along now, you probably didn’t at one time, at least not when you were growing up.
Well, no matter how bad things were, I can practically guarantee that you had it better than Steve and Tony Sinclair. They’re the oil-and-water duo at the heart of “Saddle the Wind”, a 1958 feature film written by Rod Serling.
This western is about as far away from the fifth dimension as you can imagine. Instead of stark black-and-white images on a TV set, we get the panoramic open plains and mountains of the Wild West, shot in sharp, wide-screen Technicolor.
There isn’t an alien or time-travel machine in sight. This tale is set strictly in the real world (or as real as anything we ever get out of Hollywood). No specific year is given, but it clearly occurs shortly after the Civil War. Indeed, one’s former allegiance to either the North or the South comes heavily into play more than once. Read the rest of this entry →
Four days after the April 4, 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Los Angeles Times published a letter from Rod Serling:
There is a bitter sadness and special irony that attends the passing of Martin Luther King. Quickly and with ease, we offer up a chorus of posthumous praise—the ritual dirge so time-honored and comfortable and undemanding of anything but rhetoric. In death, we offer the acknowledgement of the man and his dream that we denied him in life. In his grave, we praise him for his decency—but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own.
When he suggested that all men should have a place in the sun—we put a special sanctity on the right of ownership and the privilege of prejudice by maintaining that to deny homes to Negroes was a democratic right. Now we acknowledge his compassion—but we exercised no compassion of our own.
When he asked us to understand that men take to the streets out of anguish and hopelessness and a vision of that dream dying, we bought guns and speculated about roving agitators and subversive conspiracies and demanded law and order. We felt anger at the effects, but did little to acknowledge the causes. We extol all the virtues of the man—but we chose not to call them virtues before his death.
And now, belatedly, we talk of this man’s worth—but the judgment comes late in the day as part of a eulogy when it should have been made a matter of record while he existed as a living force. If we are to lend credence to our mourning, there are acknowledgements that must be made now, albeit belatedly.
We must act on the altogether proper assumption that Martin Luther King asked for nothing but that which was his due. He demanded no special concessions, no favored leg up the ladder for his people, despite our impatience with his lifelong prodding of our collective conscience. He asked only for equality, and it is that which we denied him. We must look beyond riots in the streets to the essential righteousness of what he asked of us. To do less would make his dying as senseless as our own living would be inconsequential.
I’m not sure why I’m highlighting this foreward that Rod Serling wrote for cartoonist Johnny Hart. Probably because it’s such a departure from what we normally think of when it comes to our TZ tour guide. It’s neither serious nor spooky — just fun.
Hart was the creator of the “B.C.” and “Wizard of Id” comic strips, both of which ran for years in many newspapers. Apparently he and Serling were pretty good friends, judging from what Serling wrote for the 1974 paperback collection “B.C. Strikes Back”: Read the rest of this entry →
One day in 1966, Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” entered the offices of the American Nazi Party and spoke at length with the man in charge, George Lincoln Rockwell.
No, really. That may sound like fiction, but it actually happened. Haley was there to interview Rockwell for Playboy magazine, which subsequently published the entire discussion.
You might think that Serling, a man so vehemently outspoken in his opposition to Nazism that he heaped scorn on “Hogan’s Heroes,” would be outraged that Haley and Playboy would give someone like Rockwell a public platform. If so, you’d be wrong.
Indeed, he wrote a remarkable letter of support to the magazine — a letter that I believe deserves a careful reading in this hyper-political, ultra-sensitive age of ours: Read the rest of this entry →
I was looking through my Twitter archive the other day when I came across this:
#WhenIRuleTheWorldI will create a streaming 24-hour channel available to all with uncut, commercial-free episodes of the Twilight Zone.
— The Twilight Zone (@TheNightGallery) May 7, 2015
I still think that would be a great idea! (Big surprise, I know.) But with an important change: I’d make it an all-Serling channel, not simply an all-TZ channel.
To me, that means airing not only episodes of The Twilight Zone, but of Night Gallery and The Loner. It means broadcasting the teleplays that first brought him fame, and the movies he scripted. It means showing interviews with the people who knew him best, along with other special material that celebrates his legacy.
“The Fear”“Night Call”
Quickly and with ease, we offer up a chorus of posthumous praise—the ritual dirge so time-honored and comfortable and undemanding of anything but rhetoric. In death, we offer the acknowledgement of the man and his dream that we denied him in life. In his grave, we praise him for his decency—but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own.
And now, belatedly, we talk of this man’s worth—but the judgment comes late in the day as part of a eulogy when it should have been made a matter of record while he existed as a living force. If we are to lend credence to our mourning, there are acknowledgements that must be made now, albeit belatedly.
Shadow & Substance 