Rod Serling was the coolest guy when I was a kid. Unfiltered cigarette in hand, neatly tailored suit, fresh haircut. He looked like one of the Rat pack. Frank, Sammy, Dean, and Rod has a nice ring to it; like John, Paul, George and Ringo. There is one big difference though, Frank, Sammy and Dean didn’t scare me shitless, Rod did.
The Twilight Zone was an anomaly. It was an exercise in intellectual sophistication that was almost nonexistent in the late fifties, early sixties. Serling’s scripts had deeper meaning than the surface story. He dealt with issues of racism, bigotry, and intolerance in a subtle manner. You never felt preached at, and it was entertainingly scary too.
To this day I can’t watch It’s A Good Life without looking away when Billy Mumy turns that guy into a jack in the box. The first time I saw it, I had nightmares for a week. It’s not that the scene is so scary, the image is shown only in shadow, its how my imagination made it more horrendous than the actual image would have been. I’m sure Serling knew this and that just shows what an artists he was. Of course Jerome Bixby’s script was great too.
Night Call is the episode that made my butt pucker. When you’re seven and your parents tell you not to watch something, you should listen. I sneaked into my older brothers room, where there was a small TV, and watched anyway. I actually peed myself because I was too afraid to go into the dark hallway where the bathroom was. Many years later, my mother told my wife about this incident. So my wife, having a rather sophomoric sense of humor, set the ring tone on her phone to the old style, like in the show, and gets special amusement setting it off in the middle of the night. Guess I’ll never live that one down.
All things considered, I think it was worth the trauma of personal humiliation at the hands of people I love, and the inability to sleep in the dark until I was eighteen to experience this one of a kind Television show.
Gnostic Science Fiction 