The Twilight Zone/Trivia

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  • S1
    • E01 Where Is Everybody?
    • E04 The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine
    • E15 I Shot an Arrow in the Air
    • E22 The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
  • S2
    • E41 The Howling Man
    • E65 The Obsolete Man
  • S3
    • E66 Two
    • E79 Five Characters in Search of An Exit
    • E84 The Hunt
    • E88 The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank
    • E89 To Serve Man
    • E90 The Fugitive
  • S5
    • E123 Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
    • E126 Living Doll
    • E144 What's in the Box?
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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".
• 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:

• Author Existence Failure / Fatal Method Acting: The death of Vic Morrow in an accident during filming resulted in his segment being changed to have a Downer Ending.
• Game Show Appearance: Brief footage of the original Art Fleming Jeopardy! (specifically April 24, 1974) appears in the "Kick the Can" segment of the movie, which is pretty much the only thing that dates those particular events.
• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Bruce Willis stars in "Shatterday" [1980s Revival].
  • On the writing side, Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski contributed to the 80's revival.