The Twilight Zone/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The original Twilight Zone provides examples of:

  • Actor Allusion: Buster Keaton in "Once Upon a Time".
  • Beam Me Up, Scotty: The popular "Submitted for your approval" occurs in the opening monologue just three times. In contrast "In just a moment" occurs in the opening monologue 25 times, which makes this the most said four-word phrase that doesn't include "Twilight Zone". "In a moment" also occurs quite often.
  • The Danza: Burt Mustin as Burt the Bum in "Night of the Meek".
  • Descended Creator: Rod Serling as the Narrator.
  • Dueling Shows: With The Outer Limits during 1963-64, the only season both series were in production. While the original Twilight Zone did much better than Outer Limits, and is better remembered in popular culture, neither of its revivals lasted as long as the 1990s revival of Outer Limits.
  • Edited for Syndication: The Christmas Episode "The Night of the Meek" features a holiday greeting from 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 Scifi Channel started running the show. Between the sixties and the nighties they were mainly shown only as edited together two-hour "movie" specials.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!: Almost too many examples to count. (Some are listed on the main page in the show description.) Many of them appeared more than once on the show.
  • Hey, It's That Voice!:
    • June Foray played the Talking Tina doll in "Living Doll", essentially reprising the voice she did for the real life Chatty Cathy. She also dubbed over a child actor's voice in "The Bewitchin' Pool" using her Rocky voice.
    • If Kaa wasn't creepy enough, the creepy TV repairman in "What's in the Box" also has Winnie's voice.
    • Bob Crane, at the time an L.A. disc jockey, provided the voice of one on the radio in "Static".
  • 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 Other Marty: A tragic example in "The Mighty Casey" - Paul Douglas was originally cast as manager Mouth McGarry, but in the rushes he looked like he was drunk. It turned out he looked like he was dying... because he was (he passed away from heart disease after shooting was completed). His scenes in the episode were re-shot, with Jack Warden playing McGarry, at Serling's expense.
  • Reality Subtext: In "The Encounter", where a racist WWII veteran 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.
  • Recycled Script: Kept to a minimum for An Aesop anthology show. When it does happen, you'll frequently find that the moral of the story is a Family-Unfriendly Aesop version of the previous episode's moral.
    • "Steel" is being 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.
  • Write What You Know: Many episodes took place in Upstate New York, where Rod Serling was from. Similarly, Serling was a vet of WWII (as were many of the other writers), which led to many a episode.

The Twilight Zone Movie, '80s revival, and 2003 revival provide examples of:

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