In
which we take a closer look at each issue of the magazine. For our capsule
history, go here.
Volume
1, Number 4 (July, 1981)
Editor:
T.E.D. Klein
Cover
Art: Linda Lippa
*Leon Garry assumes role as Publisher
and Co-Executive Vice President
TZ Publications, Inc.
President
& Chairman: S. Edward Orenstein
Secretary/Treasurer:
Sidney Z. Gellman
Executive
Vice Presidents: Leon Garry &
Eric Protter
Executive
Publisher: S. Edward Orenstein
Publisher:
Leon Garry
Associate
Publisher/Consulting Editor: Carol
Serling
Editorial
Director: Eric Protter
Editor:
T.E.D. Klein
Managing
Editor: Jane Bayer
Contributing
Editors: Gahan Wilson & Theodore
Sturgeon
Design
Director: Derek Burton
Art
and Studio Production: Georg the
Design Group
Production
Director: Edward Ernest
Controller:
Thomas Schiff
Administrative
Assistant: Eve Grammatas
Public
Relations Manager: Melissa
Blanck-Grammatas
Public
Relations Asst: Jeffrey Nickora
Accounting
Manager: Chris Grossman
Circulation
Director: Denise Kelly
Circulation
Assistant: Karen Wiss
Circulation
Marketing: Jerry Alexander
Western
Newsstand Consultant: Harry Sommer
V.P.
Advertising Director: Martin Lassman
N.Y.
Advertising Manager: Louis J. Scott
Advertising
Production Manager: Rachel Britapaja
Advertising
Assistant: Marina Despotakis
Contents:
-In The Twilight Zone by T.E.D. Klein
-Other Dimensions: Screen by Gahan Wilson
-Other Dimensions: Books by Theodore
Sturgeon
-“Camouflage” by Stanley Schmidt
-“Smiley” by Steve Rosse
-“Corn Dolly” by Eileen Roy
-“Papa Gumbo” by Ron Goulart
-“Silver” by Charles L. Grant
-“Luna” by G.W. Perriwils
-TZ Profile: Richard Donner by Robert
Martin
-TZ Profile: Donner as Filmmaker by
Robert Martin
-“A Thousand Paces Along the Via
Dolorosa” by Robert Silverberg
-“The Dump” by Joe Lansdale
-“Escape” by John Keefauver
-“The Swamp” by Robert Sheckley
-“Summer Heat” by Carmen C. Carter
-“Summer Heat” by Carmen C. Carter
-“The Rules of the Game” by Jack Ritchie
-Show-by-Show Guide: TV’s Twilight Zone, Part Four by Marc Scott
Zicree
-“The Eye of the Beholder” by Rod
Serling (TZ Classic Teleplay)*
-Looking Ahead: In the August TZ
*This episode aired under the title "Eye of the Beholder" but is reprinted here under the title "The Eye of the Beholder." The titles seem to be used interchangeably. The episode also aired under the alternate title "The Private World of Darkness."
*This episode aired under the title "Eye of the Beholder" but is reprinted here under the title "The Eye of the Beholder." The titles seem to be used interchangeably. The episode also aired under the alternate title "The Private World of Darkness."
--In
The Twilight Zone by T.E.D. Klein
Subtitle: “Extraordinary circumstances .
. .”
-This
column serves as the monthly editorial from Klein, who generally uses the space
to introduce the issue’s contributors. A baffling aspect of this issue is that
several of the thumbnail images of the contributors are erroneously attributed.
The image of Jack Ritchie is attributed to Ron Goulart and Goulart’s image to
Ritchie. Charles L. Grant’s image is attributed to Marc Zicree. The other two
images which I can personally identify, Joe Lansdale and Marc Zicree, are also
misattributed.
--Other
Dimensions: Screen by Gahan Wilson
-Wilson
examines Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) and generally liked it, praising the filmmaker’s awareness of the
cultural history of the werewolf film and saying that “this is 1981, and we
have moved on from stop-motion jerkiness and silly little hang-ups about how
much hair we should have on our face.”
-Wilson
looks at the film in the context of older films of transformation (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Wolf Man, etc.) and notices a change not only in the
social and political messages behind the new style of horror film of the 1980’s
but also in the radical and innovative improvements in special effects makeup. The
special makeup effects for The Howling were
initially handled by Rick Baker who left the production in the early stages of
filming due to a prior commitment to provide the makeup effects for John
Landis’s similar film An American Werewolf in London. Baker won an Academy Award (the first of many) for his work on Landis’s
film. The effects for The Howling were
taken over by Baker’s protégé Rob Bottin and were stunningly visceral and
original. Wilson notes the opportunity for horror films to say something more
profound about the culture in which they were made beyond the tepid fantasies
of the 1930s and 1940s. The Howling was
followed by seven sequels, the most recent of which, The Howling: Reborn, was released in 2011.
--Other
Dimensions: Books by Theodore Sturgeon
-After
spending the previous two book review columns trying to cram as many brief
reviews in as he could, Sturgeon settles back to take a deeper look at a smaller
selection of books.
-Sturgeon
reviews the following:
-The Techno/Peasant Survival Manual by Colette Dowling (Bantam).
-Sturgeon
says: “There has never been anything quite like this, and it isn’t easy to
present its nature and impact without strapping you to a board and reading you
the whole thing.” Sturgeon heaps praise upon the book, which is an attempt to
explain in layman terms the emerging technologies of the time which affect the
lives of the everyman.
-A Storm Upon Ulster by Kenneth C. Flint (Bantam)
-Sturgeon
says it is “splendidly structured and paced, full of brilliant scenes, smells,
sounds, conflicts, adventure, magic; and is recommended most highly.” It is the
“retelling of the myth of the mighty Irish hero Cuculain, the warrior from
Ulster who, single-handed, held back all the armies of the southern kingdoms
for the better part of the week.”
-The Changing Land by Roger Zelazny (Ballantine)
-“Here
are all kinds of magic, here anything can happen and a good deal of anything
does.”
-Under the City of Angels by Jerry Earl Brown (Bantam)
-A
“full package of fascinations – so full, in fact, that it overflows.”
-The Steel of Raithskar by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron
(Bantam)
-“For
all its derivatives, however, the book is entertaining and well-paced.”
-Sturgeon
briefly notes two anthologies and an author collection:
-Dream’s Edge edited by Terry Carr (Sierra Club)
-What If? by Richard Lupoff, a collection of short stories (Pocket Books)
-Terra SF: The Year’s Best European SF edited by Richard D. Nolane (DAW Books)
-Sturgeon
concludes the review column by sharing a bit of graffiti he found written on
the wall of a men’s room while he was on his way to the podium at a convention:
“The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will go out to space.”
--“Camouflage”
by Stanley Schmidt
Illustration by Bob Gale
“The
battleship, the battle, the commander – surely they were figments of a
nightmare.”
-A
college student wanders into a secret section of a school building and
discovers an alien plot to take over the Earth.
-The
gimmick in Schmidt’s story is that the alien threat is masquerading as
nightmares so that people will dismiss what they see as belonging to a dream.
The story ends with the main character awakening fully to the threat. The story
is slight and rather ludicrous and includes such elements as an alien leader as
a talking rat. Schmidt was the editor of Analog: Science Fiction, Science Fact at the time this story was published. He began editing that magazine in
1978 and continued until March, 2013. Schmidt is also a novelist, short story
writer, and anthology editor. Schmidt continues to publish fiction, mostly in
the pages of Analog.
--“Smiley”
by Steve Rosse
Illustration by E.T. Steadman
“He
was just a harmless little man with a harmless little hobby. So why was the
woman so frightened?”
-A
Jewish deli owner relates the story of a mute man named Smiley who frequents
his deli and whose hobby is taking pictures of beautiful women he meets on the
street. Smiley become infatuated with a young married woman taking up residency
above the deli. It is suggested that Smiley is an incubus who visits the
sleeping woman in a dream and impregnates her.
-This
story is longer than is necessary to expound its basic narrative
aspects. The build-up to the story is neither unsettling nor suspenseful and
the ending is anti-climactic as it is related secondhand. Needless to say, the
story certainly doesn’t capture the feeling of The Twilight Zone nor
is it a successful work of speculative fiction on its own. The editorial by
T.E.D. Klein states that the story is highly autobiographical which may go some
measure to explain why it is not successful. A recounting of memory does not
a story make.
-Rosse is described in Klein's editorial as the production stage manager for Theater Memphis, then-largest community theater in the country. He later moved into the film industry working on such films as Homeboy (1988) and Heaven and Earth (1993) in such capacities as Set Dresser and Prop Manager. Rosse was the set decorator for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). Rosse later found success in the burgeoning publishing industry of Thailand where his essays and articles were featured in high-circulation English-language periodicals.
Note: Biographical information in this review has been amended from details provided by the author. -JP
-Rosse is described in Klein's editorial as the production stage manager for Theater Memphis, then-largest community theater in the country. He later moved into the film industry working on such films as Homeboy (1988) and Heaven and Earth (1993) in such capacities as Set Dresser and Prop Manager. Rosse was the set decorator for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). Rosse later found success in the burgeoning publishing industry of Thailand where his essays and articles were featured in high-circulation English-language periodicals.
Note: Biographical information in this review has been amended from details provided by the author. -JP
--“Corn
Dolly” by Eileen Roy
Illustration by A.G. Metcalf
“The
settlers were wise in the ways of science, but they’d forgotten the oldest
wisdom of all – the wisdom of the blood.”
-A
pioneering team of interplanetary explorers learns the cost of survival when a
young woman must be sacrificed to make the ground fertile to grow life-saving
crops.
-I
really enjoyed this brief, stark exercise in science fiction horror. Roy plays
on the old custom of fashioning a straw doll, a Corn Dolly, as part of a
harvest custom in early European farming communities. This was a way to give
the spirit of the corn a place to reside during the harvest. Roy combines the
inherently unsettling nature of this old custom with Ray Bradburyesque touches
of the weird and uncanny in interplanetary travel and exploration. Roy
published only three short works of speculative fiction in the early 1980s,
also making it into Damon Knight’s Orbit
21, though she appeared to have some
talent which could have been fashioned into a successful career. At the time of
writing, Roy was a graduate student at the University of Connecticut.
--“Papa
Gumbo” by Ron Goulart
Illustrated by Steven Gaurnaccia
“Even
in the Deep South, a good zombie’s hard to find.”
-The
creator of a television sideshow gets a tip on a real life zombie in the
Louisiana bayou country and ventures down there to retrieve said zombie with
surprising and amusing results.
-Like
Goulart’s previous effort for the magazine, issue one’s “Groucho,” this tale is
a film/television industry comedy with horror fiction overtones, though the
story never tips over into actually frightening. It’s played strictly for
laughs. Goulart is content to spoof the genre and play his over-the-top
characters against each other in overblown dialogue, including an appallingly
insensitive and inaccurate portrayal of an African American, along a threadbare
plot to a rushed conclusion. As such, the story cannot stand up under its own
weight and merely comes off as slight and only marginally diverting or amusing.
At least Goulart’s writing style is built for speed, for the story does not
drag.
--“Silver”
by Charles L. Grant
Illustrated by Robert Morello
“It’s
hard to outrun a memory – especially one with four legs and fangs.”
-A
writer is haunted by the vengeful spirits of a young boy and the boy’s large
dog whose deaths the writer inadvertently caused.
-This
is probably the story in the issue which most suits a magazine bearing The Twilight Zone name
(it shares the style of Charles Beaumont’s third season episode “The Jungle”).
It’s no surprise that it comes from a reliable professional like Charles L.
Grant, the ambassador of the “quiet” form of horror story, in which suggestion
is favored over explicit violence. Grant’s fiction was none the weaker for this
approach and he enjoyed a long and successful career beginning with the horror
boom of the late 1970s. He is most well-known as the creator of the novels and
stories relating the happenings in the fictional town of Oxrun Station. Grant
was hugely prolific, however, writing dozens of novels and short stories over
the course of his career. The best of his short fiction was collected in Scream
Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant in
2012 by P.S. Publishing. Grant was also an accomplished editor with the Shadows
series of anthologies and the shared
universe series of anthologies exploring the haunted town of Greystone Bay.
Grant died in 2006.
-“Silver”
is typical of Grant’s style: muted, understated, building inexorably toward a
tense and frightening climax. Grant never included “Silver” in any of his collections
and the story has not been reprinted. Perhaps he felt it was too generic a
ghost story though it is a fine example of its type, with a particularly
pitiful protagonist and a suitably frightening ghost.
--“Luna”
by G.W. Perriwils (Georgette Perry and William J. Wilson)
Illustrated by José Reyes
“His
muscles knotted with agony, and the chill air seared his heaving lungs like
fire.”
-A
lunar astronaut falls under the wrath of the moon’s version of Artemis, the
goddess of the wild places and of the animals. After his return to Earth, she
stalks him through his dreams, in which her hounds ultimately capture and kill
him.
-The
astute viewer of The Twilight Zone will notice that this story bears a passing resemblance to Charles Beaumont’s first season episode “Perchance
to Dream” with its idea that a recurring dream based on prior experience can
prove fatal, and with its setting in modern psychoanalysis. Perry and Wilson
take the story in an interesting direction, tying it into mythology and
presenting a striking, if rushed, ending. Karl Edward Wagner thought the story good enough to include in The Year’s Best Horror Stories X (DAW Books, 1982). Here's what Wagner had to say about the story: "It struck me while reading 'Luna' that not too many years ago this story would have been considered science fiction as well as fantasy. Instead, it is fantasy within a contemporary framework, and proof that a high tech society is no barrier to the supernatural." T.E.D. Klein reprinted the story in the Fall,
1985 issue of Night Cry. Perry and
Wilson collaborated on a handful of short stories in the 1980s and 1990s. Both are scientists by profession (Wilson having worked with NASA, giving "Luna" a degree of verisimilitude) and also widely
published poets.
--TZ
Profile: Richard Donner by Robert Martin
TZ
Alumnus Makes Good
-The
first of a two-part profile of the famed director focuses on Donner’s early
career, which included a brief acting stint and his emergence as a television
director, moving from local television productions to working on some of the
biggest shows of the 1960s, including, of course, The Twilight Zone. Donner
directed six episodes of the series, all in the fifth and final season of the
show. These are: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “From Agnes – With Love,” “Sounds
and Silences,” “The Jeopardy Room,” “The Brain Center at Whipples,” and “Come
Wander with Me.” Donner speaks about each episode with the exception of “Sounds
and Silences.” Donner’s entry into television, and later film, direction is
largely presented as a charmed set of circumstances in which Donner found
himself in the right place at the right time with several quality projects
landing in his lap. Donner speaks at length about working on “Nightmare at
20,000 Feet,” which was a challenging production due to the technical aspects
of the production, as well as my own personal favorite among his Zone episodes, “The Jeopardy Room.”
--TZ
Profile: Donner as Filmmaker by Robert Martin
A
Flair for the Larger-than-Life
-The
second part of Martin’s profile of Donner focuses on Donner’s Hollywood career,
beginning with his first feature film, X-15
(1961), featuring David McLean, Charles
Bronson, and Mary Tyler Moore, and moving through his now-classic work on such
films as The Omen (1976), Superman
(1978), and concluding with his departure
from Superman II (1980) after
completing 80 percent of the filming. Superman II was the last film Donner was involved in at the time of the article.
--“A
Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa” by Robert Silverberg
Illustrated by José Reyes
“You
can spend a lifetime running after God – but what will you do when you find
him?”
-UCLA
psychology professor on sabbatical in Jerusalem learns of an ancient sect who
consume a psychoactive mushroom which supposedly brings one closer to God. With
the help of a local professor, he gains access to the sect’s village but loses
his courage before trying the mushroom. During the Easter celebration in the
city, he is swept along by the large crowds down the path of Jesus Christ’s
conviction and execution (hence the story’s title) and experiences a powerful
moment of ecstasy.
-Silverberg’s
second contribution to the magazine is remarkably like his first contribution.
Both concern scholarly Americans in ancient foreign places who are confronted
with a strange local custom which changes their worldview. This story is
markedly more successful than the first, principally due to the fact that the
climax is not underwhelming. Silverberg manages to sketch out the telling details
of both character and setting in his typical clear and direct style. Judging
from his two stories in the magazine, Silverberg appears to have been very
interested in the way Americans view other countries and the ways in which
these Americans can be changed by a foreign experience. “A Thousand Paces Along
the Via Dolorosa” was collected in Silverberg’s 1984 collection, The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, which also contains his previous story for the magazine, “How They Pass
the Time in Pelpel.” The story was also reprinted in the Winter, 1985 issue of Night
Cry.
-Silverberg’s
1963 short story, “To See the Invisible Man,” was adapted as a segment of
episode 16 of the first season of The
Twilight Zone revival series. It was
adapted by Steven Barnes and directed by Noel Black. It originally aired on
January 31, 1986.
--“The
Dump” by Joe R. Lansdale
Illustrated by Randy Jones
“Living
in a garbage dump, you see some pretty odd things. Just make sure the things
don’t see you first.”
-The
caretaker/resident of a local garbage dump recounts a tale of how he and his
friend Pearly discovered a strange creature born out of the composting refuse.
-This
is a slight and humorous story from the prolific Lansdale who was near the
beginning of his career at this point but who has since established himself as
one of the finest novelists of dark suspense and historical suspense of his
generation. The story has some memorably grotesque imagery and a neat twist
ending. In his introduction to the story in the volume, Bumper Crop (Golden
Gryphon Press, 2004) Lansdale stated that “The Dump” was “a simple little Fred
Brown/Robert Bloch sort of story” and that when he finished it he “thought it
was, to put it mildly, dumb. I didn’t even make a copy. I folded it
immediately, put it in an envelope, so I wouldn’t change my mind, went back to
bed, and next day mailed it off to the then new Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone
Magazine, a magazine I badly wanted to
appear in.” Later, Lansdale writes, “Ted Klein, then editor of Twilight
Zone Magazine, phoned to say he loved it
and wanted to buy it for the magazine. Later it appeared in Best of
Twilight Zone, a magazine anthology. I
suddenly began to like it better.”
-The
anthology Lansdale refers to is Great
Stories from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine (1982), which is a magazine
style anthology of Klein’s picks of the best stories to appear in the
magazine’s first year of publication. The story was reprinted in the Spring,
1990 issue of Cemetery Dance Magazine, and
has been collected across a number of Lansdale collections, including Stories
by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy (1991), Bestsellers
Guaranteed (1993), and the aforementioned
Bumper Crop (2004).
--“Escape”
by John Keefauver
Illustrated by Bob Neubecker
“For
the tourist, Hong Kong was just too close to home. He wanted a ticket to
Dreamland.”
-An
American businessman meets a strange Chinese man in a bar who offers to take
him to a place of escape called Dreamland. When they arrive they are greeted
with song, dance, and revelry. The businessman trades his money for escape
money, which will buy him one day, or one month, or one year of escape. When he
awakens he finds himself sitting against a meter and feeling terribly sleepy.
He is surrounded by others like him. The Chinese man he met in the bar is now
the meter guard and demands escape money from him. The businessman pays, then
goes back to sleep, having achieved his “escape.”
-Yet
another American in a foreign place gets his comeuppance story (Klein must have
loved this type of story). It’s difficult to ascertain what was being attempted
with this story but if it was to achieve a dreamlike, surreal atmosphere, it
was reasonably well attained. The final fate of the businessman is clearly
meant to be a sort of punishment though the character hardly seems to have
deserved it. Keefauver sketches out a very Rod Serlingesque character, a tired business
executive who seeks reprieve from his demanding life by falling into an escape
fantasy. In Keefauver’s hands, however, this seems to be a desire punishable by
a narcoleptic existence in limbo. Klein describes Keefauver as “a
former newspaper man now living in Carmel, California” and “a prolific writer
whose fiction and humorous sketches have appeared in Playboy, Omni, the
New York Times, and various Hitchcock
anthologies.” Keefauver wrote a number of
short horror and fantasy stories beginning in the mid-1960s and appeared in
several prominent anthologies including several volumes of The Pan Book of
Horror Stories, Charles L. Grants Shadows
anthology, J.N. Williamson’s Masques
III, and Joe R. Lansdale’s Dark at
Heart.
--“The
Swamp” by Robert Sheckley
Illustrated by Thomas Angell
“To
play so close to quicksand, a boy had to be stupid – or worse.”
-A
man attempts to help one of a group of boys who has fallen into a quagmire only
to discover to his horror that the entire life-threatening situation was staged
in order to lure him to his death as part of an initiation ritual.
-Robert
Sheckley returns to the magazine with another short-short (he provided three
such tales for the first issue of the magazine) and this one is a sharp,
vicious shocker which is perfectly paced and executed. Were it not so slight I
might have graded it an A. Sheckley was a prolific writer remembered chiefly
for his sardonic and often chilling science fiction stories, the most famous of
which is probably “The Seventh Victim,” memorably adapted for the X Minus One radio
program. The story is not to be confused with the 1943 Val Lewton film of the
same name. Sheckley died in 2005.
--“Summer
Heat” by Carmen C. Carter
Illustrated by Robert Morello
“A
crime – like a child’s cry – can echo for eternity.”
-A
woman moves into an apartment building and, during the height of summer heat,
begins hearing a woman yelling at her misbehaving child. The yelling culminates
in a perceived act of violence and then abruptly goes silent. When the police
are called and the building’s residents gather on the sidewalk it becomes
apparent that the sounds they heard were the spiritual echo of a long ago
crime
-Carter’s
story is essentially a mood piece but a highly effective one at that. The
nature of the “haunting” is quite unique but the strength of the story lies in
the nicely handled character perspective of living in a crowded apartment
building in Brooklyn during a record hot summer. The story also briefly
explores the strained relationships which can develop between rushed, stressed
parents and their bored, misbehaving children, often with dire results. Carter
also notes the casual way by which some people react to domestic violence.
--“The
Rules of the Game” by Jack Ritchie
“What
is it that you wish for, when a wish is guaranteed to come out wrong?”
-A
man walking in the park hears a cry for help and rescues another man from
drowning. The rescued man reveals himself able to grant his rescuer three
wishes. After casually wasting his first two wishes on trivial matters, the
rescuer, a lonely businessman, decides to withhold his final wish due to a fear
that it will turn out wrong. Since the rescued man must remain with the
businessman until he makes his third and final wish they become great friends.
-Ritchie
here attempts to provide a new spin on a very, very old tale with only
marginally successful results. The sentimental ending, although different,
simply doesn’t work. Ritchie was a hugely prolific writer of short stories
dating back to the 1950s. Though Ritchie is remembered for his mystery and
suspense fiction, he wrote a fair number of speculative stories as well. His
most famous mystery story, “The Absence of Emily,” won an Edgar Award and has
been filmed twice. He wrote only a single novel, Tiger Island, published
in 1987. Ritchie appeared in virtually every periodical and book anthology of
crime and mystery fiction in his time, including such hardboiled magazines as Manhunt
and placing more than 120 stories in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine alone. An
episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “What
Frightened You, Fred?” was adapted from a Ritchie story, as were two episodes
of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Several
of Ritchie’s stories were also adapted for Roald Dahl’s anthology series, Tales
of the Unexpected. Ritchie died in 1983.
-The fiction in this issue swelled to an
even dozen and even with the increased story selection nothing stood out as
truly excellent. The magazine did publish some outstanding and now-classic
fiction in its run but not every issue is going to contain one of those tales.
An interesting aspect of the lack of above average fiction in this issue, and
in other issues, is that the magazine paid high professional rates which
dwarfed the rates offered by magazines such as Asimov’s or Analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
to say nothing of the small press magazines like The Horror Show or 2 A.M. Only
Omni and Playboy, the latter of which had largely stopped publishing
speculative fiction of any kind, offered rates comparable to The Twilight Zone Magazine.
--Show-by-Show
Guide: TV’s The Twilight Zone, Part
Four
By
Marc Scott Zicree
-Zicree
begins his examination of the second season in this issue with a look at an
uneven set of episodes, which includes some drab material, including a couple
of videotaped episodes, along with some of the best work done on the entire
series. The episodes covered include: “King Nine Will Not Return,” “The Man in
the Bottle,” “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room,” “A Thing About Machines,”
“The Howling Man,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” “Nick of Time,” “The Lateness of
the Hour,” “The Trouble with Templeton,” “A Most Unusual Camera,” and “Night of
the Meek.” Three of these episodes, “The Howling Man,” “The Eye of the
Beholder,” and “Nick of Time,” were rated an A+ when we reviewed them.
--TZ
Classic Teleplay: “The Eye of the Beholder” by Rod Serling
-This
episode first aired on November 11, 1960 and is without doubt one of the finest
achievements of the series and perhaps Rod Serling’s finest original teleplay.
His vision of a dystopian society which demands conformity to the point of
shunning those deemed “ugly” or “different” to segregated outlying communities
is still a powerful warning today. William Tuttle’s pig-like makeup designs
remain some of the most indelible images from the series. You can read our full
review of the episode here.
-The
most interesting aspect of the episode is, of course, that none of the
principal actors are revealed until the final five minutes or so. Serling makes
this note at the beginning of the teleplay: “Production note: throughout the
play until otherwise indicated, all characters with the exception of Janet are
played either in the shadows or the camera is on their back, but never
are actually seen face first.”
--Looking
Ahead: In the August TZ
-Next
time we have the usual features along with an interview with famed zombie
filmmaker George Romero (who recently passed away), as well as George Clayton
Johnson’s essential essay “Writing for The
Twilight Zone,” and the first installment
of “Dr. Van Helsing’s Handy Guide to Ghost Stories” by editor T.E.D. Klein (hiding
behind the pseudonym Kurt Van Helsing). Also featured are stories by Lisa
Tuttle, David Morrell, and James Patrick Kelly, alongside several lesser known
talents. Marc Scott Zicree continues his episode guide to the second season and
another Rod Serling teleplay is offered, this time it’s the time travel
nightmare, “The Odyssey of Flight 33.” See you back soon!
--JP
Jordan, you are doing a real service with this series. I enjoy reading the commentary and, while I read every issue when they came out, I don't have the slightest recollection of any of it. Do you have any suggestions for what I could do with my set of the TZ magazines? They're in bags in a box in the basement not doing me a bit of good.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Jack! I'm very glad you're enjoying it. It's a labor of love for me. Reading the entire magazine run through is a long time coming and I figured I might as well record my thoughts on each issue for whomever is interested. Also, there's not a lot of information on the magazine out there so maybe this series will help with that.
DeleteAs for your set of the magazine, of course you could always list them as a lot on Ebay or list each issue on Amazon. Depending on where you live there may also be a local comic book shop or used book store that may be willing to take them off your hands.
I just saw this today and was tickled pink. You're right, "Smiley" is not very good. It is not quite my only published speculative fiction, but close enough to not matter. I eventually became a newspaper columnist in Thailand and published more than a quarter of a million words in publications all over the Pacific Rim. I have four books for sale on Amazon and I'd be pleased to send you one if you provide an address. Thanks again for the civil and accurate review. My e-mail address is shavethemonkeys@gmail.com. Peace, Steve Rosse
DeleteThanks for stopping by, Steve and filling us in on what you've done outside of "Smiley." I found info hard to come by. I would definitely like to read some of your other work. I'll be in touch.
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