The Twilight Zone

I still can't get enough of the original series. It is and was a classic, not to mention damn hard to compete with. The Twilight Zone that was resurrected was pretty good in it's own right. The stories I remember most was the Nightcrawlers episode and Cat and Mouse. The same sense of horror, dread and irony filled this series as well. It was pretty good and enjoyable. It was just too bad that it was taken off. It was one of the better of the redone television series.

I remember the "new" series of The Twilight Zone with much fondness. I grew up with them. I don't remember many films/TV programs from childhood, but one episode from this series stood out for me more than any other. It was called "The Burning Man" and it was the most eerie piece of film making I had ever witnessed as a kid. In fact it first inspired me to start film directing.

I know now that this short episode came from a book by Ray Bradbury, but it was the way the short film was shot that awe-inspired me. I seem to remember it featured a young Danny Cooksey as the kid. Had Piper Laurie in it too.

Please CBS, bring them out on DVD. (And do it proper with extra features!)

I honestly don't understand why someone would give a negative review for this show. To say it was "garbage" -as one commenter stated- is very inaccurate. I watched this show as a child...in fact, I grew up on it. The story lines were dark and original. The acting was actually pretty good in my estimation. Especially in comparison to the overabundance of bad acting in that day. The stories were so eerie and unique that they stayed in my head decades after I saw them. I actually had the pleasure of watching several episodes at a friends house recently and loved the nostalgic feelings they brought back. They were even more enjoyable now that I am older. I was able to pick up on the stuff that I had missed as a kid. My faves are the one about the man that was court ordered to be "invisible" for a year, the woman that had a magic necklace and could freeze the world by saying "shut up!", the woman that got offered a box with a button in it...and if she pressed the button she would win a large sum of money...but then a stranger had to be killed and SO many others!

While many whill claim this as the superior series or vice versa, the reality of the matter is that this series tends to stand on its own two feet. With darker and more modern stories, the regular Joe who might have felt alienated by the original series. One could relate to the power and delicious eeriness of this new collection of nail biting stories and haunting epithets of fear. Very few shows these days put the same amount of passion into a series like this one did for the longest time. Hopefully, the newest incantation will be just as good as the first two. I will state this though, the 1980s version of the theme song and the opening was much better than the original.

Here's hoping that the 1985 and 1986 versions of The Twilight Zone will one day be released on DVD as it was an outstanding series with well written episodes. The beginning titles have a half-second animation of Rod Serling in them as a salute to the originator of the series. The episode "Nightcrawlers" was directed by William Freidkin and is brilliant. One episode called "Shatterday" features the TV debut of Bruce Willis. There is also a small budget third season which was made after cancellation to make up the numbers for syndication,but it's budget was small and apart from one good episode,where a man is possessed by what looks like Christ,it is a poor third season. But the first two seasons are brilliant.