Trivia / The Twilight Zone (1959)

• Acting for Two:
  • Richard Kiel played all of the Kanamits in "To Serve Man".
  • In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", Suzy Parker played all the Number 12s, Richard Long played all the Numbers 17s and Pam Austin played all the Number 8s.
  • In "Mr. Garrity and the Graves", Stanley Adams played both Jensen and his resurrected brother.
• Actor-Inspired Element: In "Cavender is Coming", Agnes Grep being fired from her job as an usherette was inspired by the same thing happening to Carol Burnett.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Rod Serling uses the phrase "Submitted for your approval" during his opening monologue in just three of the show's 156 episodes ("Cavender is Coming", "In Praise of Pip" and "A Kind of a Stopwatch"). In contrast, "In just a moment" occurs in the opening monologue 25 times, which makes it Serling's most-uttered phrase outside of "Twilight Zone" itself. "In a moment" also occurs quite often.
• Completely Different Title: In Spanish, La dimensión desconocida (The Unknown Dimension). In French, La Quatrième Dimension (The Fourth Dimension). In Brazilian Portuguese, Além da Imaginação (Beyond Imagination).
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: No episode of the show involves an actual Eldritch Location called the Twilight Zone. Said zone is actually just a metaphorical way that the narrator describes the show itself as a program.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Richard Matheson didn't like how some of his episodes turned out, like "Young Man's Fancy" and (surprisingly, given how highly regarded it is) "The Invaders"). Matheson did prefer the Twilight Zone adaptation of his short story "Night Call" over his original story, as he felt the original ending was too flat, and the ending created for the Twilight Zone episode added more emotion and depth. That said, some fans actually prefer the original story's ending, finding it much creepier, and find the ending to "Night Call" too tacky.
  • Rod Serling also admitted that several of the episodes — including some of his own — could have been better ("I guess a third of the shows are pretty damned good. Another third are passable. Another third are dogs").
  • In an interview with the Archive of American Television, Earl Hamner, Jr. admitted that he thought that "Black Leather Jackets" was a bad episode.
• Creator Couple:
  • The producer Buck Houghton's daughter Mona played a little girl in "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" while his son James played Jerry in "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank".
  • In "Kick the Can", Charles Whitley's son David is played by Ernest Truex's son Barry.
  • In "The Bard", Gerald Hugo's secretary is played by Marge Redmond, the then wife of Jack Weston, who played the protagonist Julius Moomer.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Rod Serling named "A Stop At Willoughby" as his favourite episode from the first season.
• The Danza:
  • Burt Mustin as Burt the Bum in "The Night of the Meek".
  • An In-Universe example in "Showdown with Rance McGrew". The conceited actor Rance McGrew plays a heroic character named after himself in a Western TV series.
  • Martin Balsam played Martin Senescu in "The New Exhibit".
  • Bill Mumy played Billy Bayles in "Long Distance Call".
  • Mary LaRoche played Mary in "A World of His Own".
  • Patricia Breslin played Pat Carter in "Nick of Time".
  • Robert Hogan played Robert Blake in "Spur of the Moment".
• Dawson Casting:
  • In "The Hunt", Hyder mentions being about seventy years old, and he and his wife, Rachel, have been together for fifty years. Both actors (Arthur Hunnicutt and Jeanette Nolan) were in the neighborhood of fifty to fifty-two, making them about twenty years younger than they should have been.
  • In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", Collin Wilcox was 29 when she played the 18-year-old Marilyn Cuberle.
• Descended Creator: Rod Serling as the Narrator.
• Dueling Shows: With The Outer Limits (1963) during 1963-64, the only season both series were in production. While the original Twilight Zone did much better than The Outer Limits, and is better remembered in popular culture, neither of its first two revivals lasted as long as The Outer Limits (1995), which ran for seven seasons.
• Edited for Syndication: The Christmas Episode "The Night of the Meek" features a holiday greeting from Rod Serling at the end of his wrap up narration that was generally edited out. Also, the fourth season hour-long episodes were generally ignored until the Sci-Fi Channel started running the show. Between the sixties and the nighties they were mainly shown only as edited together two-hour "movie" specials.
• Executive Meddling: During production of season two, CBS forced the production staff to shoot six episodes — "The Lateness of the Hour", "Static", "The Whole Truth", "The Night of the Meek", "Twenty-Two", and "Long Distance Call" — with videotape rather than 35mm film stock as a cost-cutting measure. However, the results ended up providing little financial benefit, in part because they still had to be transferred back to 16mm film for broadcast, resulting in the show immediately switching back to film for the remainder of its run.
• Fake Irish: Jackie Cooper as Jonathan West in "Caesar and Me".
• Marathon Running: A long-standing tradition on the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) is to air three-day-long Twilight Zone marathons over holidays like New Year's and the Fourth of July.
• The Merch: Includes soundtrack albums, action figures, and a pinball game that has its own entry.
• The Other Marty: A tragic example in "The Mighty Casey". Paul Douglas was originally cast as manager Mouth McGarry, but in the rushes he seemed to be drunk. It turned out he looked like he was dying... because he was (he passed away from heart disease three days after shooting was completed). His scenes in the episode were reshot, with Jack Warden playing McGarry, at Rod Serling's expense (because CBS refused to pay for the re-filming).
• Out of Holiday Episode: Although "The Changing of the Guard" takes place at Christmas, it aired on June 1, 1962.
• Prop Recycling:
  • Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot shows up in "Uncle Simon" and "The Brain Center at Whipple's".
  • The crashed spaceship from "Probe 7, Over and Out" was originally created for The Outer Limits (1963) episode "Specimen: Unknown".
  • In "Time Enough at Last", The Daily Chronicle, the newspaper that Henry Bemis is reading while in the bank vault, has the headline "H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction." The same prop newspaper appeared again only four episodes later in "What You Need" when the hotel bellboy delivers it to Fred Renard.
  • In "The Last Night of a Jockey", Michael Grady reads a copy of The Daily Bulletin Sports with the headline "Jockey Banned from All U.S. Tracks" in reference to his being banned for fixing races by doping horses. Bunny Blake's nephew Bud Powell is later seen reading the same newspaper in "Ring-A-Ding Girl".
  • George's smoking jacket in The Time Machine (1960) was later worn by George Grizzard as Roger Shackleforth in "The Chaser".
  • The United Planets Cruiser C-57D from Forbidden Planet is used to represent the spacecraft stolen by the Sturkas and the Ridens in "Third from the Sun", the E-89 in "Death Ship" and the Galaxy 6 in "On Thursday We Leave for Home".
  • In "The Little People", William Fletcher and Peter Craig use the blasters from Forbidden Planet while the giants wear the uniforms from the same film. Said uniforms were also worn by the aliens in the final scene of "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", the crew of the Galaxy 6 in "On Thursday We Leave for Home" and General Larrabee, Lt. Blane and two others in "Probe 7, Over and Out".
  • The slot machine from "The Fever" was later reused in "A Nice Place to Visit" and "The Prime Mover".
  • In "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", George and his wife's futuristic car in 2061 is a reuse of Robby the Robot's car from Forbidden Planet.
  • The astronaut uniform worn by Steve Forrest as Major Robert Gaines in "The Parallel" was worn by Howard Morris during George P. Hanley's fantasy about being the first man on The Moon in the next episode "I Dream of Genie".
  • One of the suspended animation chambers from "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" was reused in "The Long Morrow".
  • The goggles worn by Major French and his men in "The Old Man in the Cave" were later worn by the alien bikers in "Black Leather Jackets".
  • The titular computer from "The Old Man in the Cave" was later reused as the X109B14 in "The Brain Center at Whipple's".
• Reality Subtext: In "The Encounter", where a racist World War II veteran (played by Neville Brand) and a young Japanese man (played by George Takei) are trapped in an attic: Takei spent three years of his childhood in U.S. Japanese-American relocation centers, during the war. His impassioned performance is definitely informed by that experience. As for Brand: he was a WWII veteran who earned several medals, just like his character Fenton. However, Fenton served in the Pacific and Brand served in Germany.
• Real-Life Relative: In "Dust", the director Douglas Heyes' son Doug Heyes, Jr. plays the Rogers boy who speaks to Luís Gallegos through the jail window.
• Recycled Script:
  • Kept to a minimum for an anthology show. When it does happen, you'll frequently find that the moral of the story is a Hard Truth Aesop version of the previous episode's moral.
  • "Steel" was adapted into a feature film. Though it's somewhat subverted, as Real Steel, despite being based on the same story as "Steel", bears almost no resemblance to the story (outside of robot boxers). Additionally, the film is decisively more optimistic than the original story's dystopian setting.
  • "A Most Unusual Camera" is recycled as "What's in the Box". In the former, the key component is a camera that, when used, presents a photograph of what will happen roughly five minutes into the future. The latter features a television that does the exact same thing when it's turned on.
  • For "The Hunt", Earl Hamner, Jr. reused the idea and much of the script from The Kate Smith Hour episode "The Hound of Heaven", which he wrote in 1953. In that version, John Carradine played Hyder Simpson and James Dean played the angel.
• Recycled Set:
  • The steps outside the Eloi public building in The Time Machine (1960) (which also appeared in the MGM musicals An American in Paris and Kismet (1944)) were used as part of the destroyed library in "Time Enough at Last" and as steps leading to the Hall of Records in "A Nice Place to Visit".
  • The set used for George's house in The Time Machine (1960) was redressed to serve as the Sturkas' house in "Third from the Sun", as Professor Samuel Kittridge's house in "Long Live Walter Jameson" and as Sam Conrad's "native habitat" in the Martian zoo in "People Are Alike All Over".
  • Gart Williams' living room set from "A Stop at Willoughby" was later redressed to serve as Gregory West's study in "A World of His Own".
  • The same office set is used in both "Miniature" and "I Dream of Genie".
  • The cavern where the V9-Gamma survivors take shelter from a meteor shower and have their meetings in "On Thursday We Leave for Home" is a reuse of the Morlocks' lair from The Time Machine (1960).
  • The same living room set was used in "Living Doll", "Ninety Years Without Slumbering", "Ring-A-Ding Girl" and "Black Leather Jackets".
  • Harmon and Flora Gordon's apartment in "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" was later reused as the apartment that Salvadore Ross trades Mr. Halpert for his youth in "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" and as Walter Holmes' apartment in "From Agnes - With Love".
  • The corridor in the space agency in "The Long Morrow" was reused as a hospital corridor in "Number 12 Looks Just Like You".
• Release Date Change: The Season 5 episode "Night Call" was originally supposed to premiere on the night of November 22, 1963, but was pre-empted (along with pretty much all other U.S. network TV programming) by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy earlier that day. CBS wound up airing the episode on February 7, 1964 instead. (Coincidentally enough, the latter was also the day The Beatles arrived in the U.S. for the first time, kicking off The British Invasion. That's right, the episode was thus indirectly connected to not one but two of the most defining events of The '60s for Americans.)
• Sequel Gap: The Twilight Zone (2002) episode "It's Still a Good Life" was produced more than 41 years after "It's a Good Life", making it possibly the longest gap between the original episode and its sequel in television history.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • Richard Matheson's short story "Long Distance Call" was adapted under the title "Night Call" as an earlier episode had been entitled "Long Distance Call".
  • "The Fugitive" does not feature Dr. Richard Kimble, Lt. Gerard or a one-armed man.
  • While "The Invaders" does deal with an alien invasion of a sort, David Vincent is nowhere to be seen, nor do the 'invaders' in the episode have oddly bent pinky fingers.
• Unfinished Episode:
  • In an interview with Variety published before the fifth season premiered, the producer William Froug said that Jack Benny, Lena Horne and Judy Garland were in talks to appear in the series and Garland's episode would be directed by her old friend and co-star Mickey Rooney. None of this came to fruition, although as noted, Rooney starred in an episode.
  • Rod Serling wrote a script for an episode called "The Happy Place", which depicts a seemingly ideal society with a dark secret: anyone who turns 60 gets executed. The story was rejected for being too dark.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the original script for "A Game of Pool", Jesse Cardiff loses to Fats Brown, but he doesn't die and immediately begins practicing for a rematch. The original ending was used in The Remake produced for The Twilight Zone (1985) in 1989.
  • Orson Welles was originally planned to be the narrator but was too expensive.
  • According to the book The Twilight Zone Companion, Charles Beaumont, the writer of the episode "A Nice Place to Visit", wanted Rod Serling to play the main character, a petty criminal who dies and goes to what he thinks in Heaven. Serling laughed off the idea, and the part went to Larry Blyden instead. Mickey Rooney had been the first choice for the role. He later played Michael Grady in "The Last Night of a Jockey".
  • In "Two", the writer and director Montgomery Pittman wanted his stepdaughter Sherry Jackson to play the Woman. The executives vetoed this because Sherry was only 19 while Charles Bronson was 40, which they felt was creepy. The 28-year-old Elizabeth Montgomery was cast instead.
  • Producer William Froug mentioned in The Twilight Zone Companion that he turned down Liza Minnelli for the female lead in "Come Wander with Me", as he wasn't impressed with her upon meeting her, and Bonnie Beecher landed the part.
  • In "The Invaders", Richard Matheson's original script had the closing narration read, "This is one of the out-of-the-way places; until now, one of the unvisited places in our solar system — the planet Mars. Bleak. Wasted. Dying. But not quite dead yet."
• Write What You Know: Many episodes took place in upstate New York, where Rod Serling was from. Similarly, Serling was a vet of World War II (as were many of the other writers), which led to many an episode. Specifically, Serling's experience of fighting in the Philippines inspired both "The Purple Testament" and "A Quality of Mercy".

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