Classic Horror, Suspense and Sci-Fi Host… Rod Serling

Rod Serling in his role as host of the Night Gallery.

Consider the case of .. A tall thin soft spoke man in a dark suit. He appears on your old black and white TV screen. He speaks in prose and magically opens a door to strange and scary worlds… You sit in your recliner chair, pinned to your seat, eyes fixed on the tube, holding your breath… And you are now entering….. THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

The famed Twilight Light Zone TV series occupied the best evening time slot on Television. A special zone called “prime time”. The time in which the light of day and the dark of night meet.. A place called Twilight.

Prime time shows aired in our Midwestern cities here on planet earth, in the central time zone between 6pm and 9pm in the evening. This was the magical time in which families sat down together after moms homemade dinner, or threw a ready made TV dinner into the oven. And we ate in front our cathode ray tubes and ate dinner off of our handy dandy TV trays. Yes.. Glorious days.

The Host of The Twilight Zone was a producer and Writer by the name of Rod Serling. His dry whit and monotone voice would set the stage for some of the most ingenious and cutting edge suspense based sci fi programs to ever hit the TV screen.

The Zone was not only a bit strange and scary, but one could also find many lighted corners of realm in which important lessons and irony could be found. The Zone was a place which could challenge your intellect and try your human ethics.

The Zone gave us many fearful scenarios. Like the episode “To Serve Man” in which seemingly benevolent aliens befriend us gullible earthlings into believing the title of a book that they give us as a gift “To Serve Man” only to find out it was a cook book and earth folks were the main course to be shipped off planet like cattle.

One personal favorite is the episode “Nightmare at 20,000” Feet with William Shatner, Who plays an unsuspecting airline passenger, who while sitting at the window of the jet aircraft seat in which he rides, sees something he can’t reconcile.

what he sees as looks out the small porthole out to wing of the aircraft is  a freightening and perplexing site. A large humanoid figure is  on the wing of the plane trying to take down the aircraft. This same episode was recreated in The Twilight Zone Movie which came out in 1983.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone:_The_Movie

 

An Airline passenger.. Played by John Lithgow freaks out after seeing a monster on the wing of an aircraft. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone Franchise churned out over one hundred and fifty episodes and spanned over three seasons. The Zone is still on TV in syndication til this very day. We still sit at the edge of our seats and contemplate the deeper meaning of the dark corners of the Twilight Zone.

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