Terminalcoffee discussion

Is this show even on anymore? I remember when I was a kid it was rerun all the time. I've only seen the new version recently (but didn't watch it).

I loved the one where everybody was afraid of the little kid that could wish them into the cornfield. And the one with Burgess Meredith, where all he wanted was to be alone so he could read. Then there was some sort of massive extinction of mankind (but I don't remember exactly what happened) and he got his wish--but then his glasses broke.

Oh! And the one where the old couple go to get new young bodies but they could only afford one. So the old man goes and comes out all hot and is bouncing around, and he takes one look at his wife, and goes back and gets his old body back. Awwwww....

Number 12 Looks Just Like You

Aynge, they have TZ marathons on the Sci Fi channel on some holidays. I think they had one Labor Day weekend. Maybe Veterans Day?

Anyway, this is my favorite show of all time, but I always have a hard time choosing specific episodes. I guess for a long time my favorite was the one where Robert Redford is Death. The old lady knows who he is, he gives her comfort and escorts her out of this life. Some others will probably come into my mind just as good.

I can't remember the Robert Redford one. Did he look like himself or was he in a black robe with a scythe?

He was himself, as a young soldier. Very young and handsome he was, too. He was injured and outside her door wanting to be brought in, but she had been waiting for him and was sure that's who it was. He talks her into it, they have a long philosophical talk, and then she looks in the mirror and he has no reflection. "It IS you!!" She's also being thrown out of her tenement because it's being torn down.

Scyfy or whatever has a marathon every New Year's. To Serve Man is awesome. Love the Burgess Meredith one also, but couldn't he just find the optometrist store and make do or a magnifying glass? The one where the girl is hideously disfigured - really she's pretty but the rest of the planet has pig noses or something.

Well, what woman isn't going to let a young Robert Redford in? That's just cheating.

When you think about it, dying as an ancient but still able-bodied woman, the day you're getting kicked out of your home and have no place to go, ushered out painlessly by Robert Redford, sounds like pretty good scheduling.

Yes,New Year's is when it was!

Carol wrote: "Scyfy or whatever has a marathon every New Year's. To Serve Man is awesome. Love the Burgess Meredith one also, but couldn't he just find the optometrist store and make do or a magnifying glass? Th..."


I like the disfigured girl episode a great deal. It's one of my favorites.

My favorite is Nightmare at 20,000 Feet with William Shatner and the gremlin on the wing of the plane.

I can't remember any episodes anymore, but I do remember loving it when the reruns were on!

The one where the guy broke his glasses.

The one where the people were picking out what they were going to look like in the catalog and the girl ran because she didn't want her looks to be changed (reminds me of this book I want to read called Uglies). I think it's the episode Britt mentioned.

The one where the guy is sent to another planet for incarceration and he's pretty much there by himself until they send him a fembot for company. Years later, they come to send him home because he's being set free, and he refuses to leave because there's no room on the ship for him and the robot. He started to believe she was real.

I didn't like the pretty girl/everyone else was ugly episode. Not sure why.

my favorite episode is the same as Angye's: burgess meredith had a nagging wife who did not like him to read and would not let him read much so he would read labels on the back of cereal boxes, canned goods etc.etc. He worked in a bank and took his lunch hour in the bank vault to munch and read. while he was there, nuclear war broke out. the library and books survived and he went and sorted out what he wanted to read. then he dropped his glasses, they broke and when he picked them up the lenses fell out. so then he could not read all the books. I could really identify with this one because that is a true nightmare to someone who enjoys reading. and because later I had a husband who limited my reading and I ended up reading labels.

Dan wrote: "My favorite is Nightmare at 20,000 Feet with William Shatner and the gremlin on the wing of the plane."

Written by Richard Matheson!

Twilight Zone scares me, so I don't watch it. *hangs head in wussy shame*

Jammies wrote:

Written by Richard Matheson!

Oh yeah. Richard Matheson wrote most of the good episodes.

Twilight Zone was a favorite of mine. The Burgess Meredith episode where he broke his glasses was excellent.

The episode where the young boy (played by Billy Mumy of 'Lost in Space') was "It's a Good Life" based on a story by Jerome Bixby.

Also, the New Twilight Zone did an excellent adaptation of Tom Goodwin's "The Cold Equations".

I liked a lot of the episodes but do not remember all the names. A great series, overall!

I like the one with the Confederate widow waiting for her husband to come home from the war.

And the one where the spaceship lands on a planet and finds the same spaceship, but with everyone dead.

And the one with the bus that stops at a smalltown diner and they're trying to figure out if anyone could be an alien.

Oh! And the one where the three astronauts come back, but then they are gradually erased because they weren't meant to have come back!

I love the Twilight Zone!

You know, I think it might have been the Burgess Meredith one that scared me so much I couldn't watch the show any more.

The one with the masks freaked me out for years and years.

Michele wrote: "my favorite episode is the same as Angye's: burgess meredith had a nagging wife who did not like him to read and would not let him read much so he would read labels on the back of cereal boxes, can..."

Man, that makes me want to sob. I don't remember his nagging wife. The poor guy had to read labels!? That's so messed up!

Yeah, she didn't want him to read. She needed to be nuked.

I don't have the link handy but has anyone else seen the version of the Planet of the Apes someone edited down into a Twilight Zone episode, complete with narration?

Aynge, I do remember that part, and then he broke his glasses and I swear I was traumatized for years!

"Time Enough At Last" with Burgess Meredith, "To Serve Man", "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street", "The Dummy", "The Fever" and "The Invaders" quickly come to mind. Absolutely love that show.

Jammies wrote: "Aynge, I do remember that part, and then he broke his glasses and I swear I was traumatized for years!"

I guess it was the fact that I could relate to him so well. I've always been an avid reader, and I've worn glasses since I was 9. I've broken my share (the frames never the lenses though). And it just sounded like something that would happen to me. I'm the kind of person who falls backward and breaks her nose.

I like the one with Agnes Moorehead. She plays an old woman living alone in a desolate place, and she doesn't speak at all during the episode. We feel sympathy for her as she fights off and destroys tiny alien invaders who attack her. Then we find out that she lives on another planet and that the tiny alien invaders were from Earth. Simple story; complex themes. The really good Twilight Zone stories are timeless.

I liked that one, too, Scout.

Scout wrote: "I like the one with Agnes Moorehead. She plays an old woman living alone in a desolate place, and she doesn't speak at all during the episode. We feel sympathy for her as she fights off and destr..."

Yea, that's "The Invaders" and one of my favorites, too.

I looked this one up, and I've never seen it. I thought I'd seen them all. Maybe next New Year's Eve marathon. Sounds chilling, I agree.

I've seen that one - the jack in the box was very creepy.

Was it Twilight Zone where the ventriloquist had a dummy that was actually coming to life? That scared me shitless as a kid.

Seeing this thread again reminded me that I need to record Twilight Zone episodes again this New Year's Eve.

Night Gallery still gives me the chills. I love Rod Serling..

The guy that was burning up with a fever because the sun was getting too close to the Earth and everyone was going to burn up. But then his fever broke and really, the Earth was moving away from the sun and everyone was going to freeze to death.

The guy that survived the bug getting into his brain thru his ear. No one EVER survives that but the bug came out his other ear. Everyone happy until the doc says the bug laid eggs in his brain. I think about that one everytime a bug gets near my ear.

Those are two memorable episodes, and you described them well, Cheri.

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes was the old lady sitting in her bed and the phone kept on ringing - at first she thought it was a prank call, but it turned out to be her dead boyfriend calling from his grave.

...Next stop, Willoughby...

The New Year's Eve Marathon is coming up.

My new favorite is "The Hunt," in which an old man and his coon dog die and then (because the old man refuses to enter "heaven" without his dog) both enter heaven together.

I think that was probably a real mink stole. Bee-hive hairdos mystify me. I have no idea how that's done.

Zardoz is in the Tardis wrote: "Tons of hairspray and a comb to rat up the hair. I couldn't pull off that look, I'd look like a demented librarian or something much, much worse. I love it though."

I remember my babysitter telling me about the woman that woke up with a bloody face because cockroaches laid eggs in her bee-hive hairdo and the babies bit her head. She was the same sitter that scared the shit out of me with Bible stories so I've always put the two in the same category. Bible. Beehive hairdo bugs. Can't help it.

Okay, so I know I watched them, but I can't remember one single actual episode. I do know that "time paradox" type things have always irritated me and I think it started with Twilight Zone.

(Quantum Leap was my NIGHTMARE of a show.)

Walking Distance.

So bitterly nostalgic...we all long to go back to a simpler time in our lives that we can never experience again...and the bitterness of that nostalgia can be one of the most overpowering emotions we experience - and it probably has my favorite Serling monologue from the show's entire run. It made me misty eyed when I first heard it. Here it is for those who may not remember...

"Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things, but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives - trying to go home again. And also like all men, perhaps there'll be an occasion - maybe a summer night sometime - when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of his past. And perhaps across his mind, there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then, too, because he'll know that it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory, not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind - and that are a part of the Twilight Zone."

Honorable mentions include.....

Printer's Devil
Time Enough At Last
The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
The Howling Man
The Eye of the Beholder
Five Characters in Search of an Exit
Come Wander With Me
Nothing in the Dark
Cavender is Coming

...hell EVERY episode is a classic. I LOVE the Twilight Zone so much.

There was one about the room in which Lincoln died. After being shot in the Ford Theater, he was carried to a rooming house across the street.

For years afterward, moaning and crying could be heard coming from that room. Sadly, that's all I remember.

Been there...no moaning or crying to be heard.

I just looked up the Twilight Zone episode, "I Sing the Body Electric" because I saw it as a tween and remember it somewhat fondly.

Wikipedia lists it as one of the weakest TZ episodes ever. Eh, what do they know?

The Call. Gramma.

Mine would be the one with the doctors who have pig faces. Think it's called Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

One of my favorites also. Beauty on other planets might be defined by the color of your scales or your abundance of back hair. Totally subjective. There was a man I often saw in the local bar when I was in my twenties. I was afraid to talk to him at first because he had been badly burned in an accident when he was driving a gas truck. He had decided not to stay inside, but to brave public exposure. As I got to know him, I grew to like his face, and we became friends. He died due to problems with his lungs, but I learned from him that courage and character can overcome physical limitations.