You unlock this door with a key of imagination
One sees a lot of television over the years. Most of it, probably 90% if we are to believe Sturgeon’s Law*, is crap no matter which way you look at it. Of that which remains some we like, some we even love (24 would be the most recent example of the latter for me).
But I believe you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of television series that were actually important to you. Important, meaning they strongly affected you, changed your conciousness one way or another, even, god help us, taught you lessons. And not in that namby-pamby Afterschool Special way either.
For me, one of these few series was CBS’s 1985 revival of Twilight Zone, sometimes known as The New Twilight Zone. The first season of which is newly released on DVD, and I’ve just completed watching it.
It was far and away the greatest of the spate of anthology series revivals we saw in the middle eighties. In particular, it showed up Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories for the adolescent series it was.
And it remains for me, one of the most special viewing experiences of my life. Why special? Well, let’s start with the fact that its first episode introduced me to the work of a man who was to become one of my artistic heroes. An adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s “Shatterday” (starring a then little-known Bruce Willis) led to my picking up his book of the same name. Twenty years and a bookshelf groaning with something like 47 volumes later, he remains one of my very favorite writers, and the one I’m most sure will somehow find out and kick my ass if I’m ever untrue to my own writing.
Then there’s the way that stories and images from the series have stayed with me even though I haven’t seen them in years, and some of them I saw only once. From the commentaries and interviews on the DVDs, as well as other sources, I gather I’m not alone in this. The writers, producers and directors of the series make reference to the many people who have come up to them over the years and recounted a beloved episode.
You can see one or two of these people on the internet. But to name a very, very, very few of my personal favorites…
There’s the incredibly romantic “A Message From Charity,” adapted by Alan Brennert from a story by William M. Lee. In this tale, two New England teens separated across a couple of centuries find a connection that at first charms and beguiles them, but then leads one into danger before replenishing and reaffirnming them both.
Or Ellison’s “Paladin of The Lost Hour,” first conceieved as an original script, then turned into one of his best prose stories before being adapted in turn for the screen. The episode as filmed isn’t everything it could have been, for reasons that Ellison goes into in his commentary, but it’s a hard story to beat. You’d have to really be selfish, incompetent and careless to screw it up too badly. Danny Kaye stars, in his last role, as an old man charged with the necessary responsibility of protecting a most important secret.
And then “The Shadow Man,” directed by Joe Dante and written by Rockne S. O’Bannon. This is the story of a young boy who finds that the monster under his bed is real, but will not harm him even as it terrorizes his classmates. What he does with this knowledge culminates in an ending that is scary as hell. How scary? Well, a few years back, driving my friend George (now Stefon) back to his home one night, I told him the story as best as I could remember. Which, I now realize having had my memory refreshed for the first time in 20 years, was not much apart from the basic framework and the last line. Didn’t matter. It still gave him the creeps.
Speaking of, also creepy was a quick, memorable original tale by Ray Bradbury with the deceptively bland title of “The Elevator.” Two brothers search for their missing scientist father in a darkened wherehouse, where they find the remnants of his mission to feed the world. If the giant rats, each one larger than the last, came in first and ate the food, and were followed in by the cat who also ate the food, became giant and killed them, what killed that cat? And the dog? Something bigger.
For sheer scare-the-hell-out-of-you, “The Shadow Man” is rivaled by Ellison’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “Gramma.” A young boy is left alone with his dying grandmother, who he’s afraid of…and for very good and sufficient reasons. This is another one of those that has visual moments that stayed with me for years after I saw it, and if you see it, they’ll stay with you too. How the hell do you make a hallway that scary?
Robert Silverberg’s touching “To See The Invisible Man,” adapted by Stephen Barnes, is the story of a society where high emotional crimes are punishable by being branded with a mark. This mark means all others must ignore you, on pain of suffering a similar fate.
This has rambled on for longer than my usual blog entries, and I haven’t even mentioned what has to be one of the greatest opening credits sequences of the past 20 years and maybe of all time. Or the adaptation of the famous theme score by, of all people, The Grateful Dead. Or that a number of the New TZ’s were directed by Wes Craven, who appears on a number of the commentaries and in an interview on the DVDs. But I wanted to make another one of my Public Service Announcments. I strongly urge you to look for the New Twilight Zone DVDs for rent at your local video store. Take them home. Try them, you’ll like them.
I won’t tell you they’re all gems, this Twilight Zone had its mountains and valleys like anything else. I won’t even threaten you, as Craven does here, with Freddy if you don’t. But watch any two of the stories I listed above. If you’re not hooked on them like popcorn, and don’t want to watch as many of the others in one night as you can? Then George Bush really is a compassionate conservative who has the best interests of the nation at heart.
That signpost up ahead…
*This holds that 90% of everything is crap. Coined by the late writer Ted Sturgeon.
