I had a dream I was watching the Twilight Zone marathon, and every episode was one I hadn't seen before. Which is impossible.
They were all definitely real original episodes, though! Not after-the-fact fakes with the same bold b & w style and cocky, jazz-infused sensibility steeped in an age when thinky, intellectual, science-fiction scribes felt pretty secure about telling us all what-for using the most transparent allegories possible. No way. There's no faking that. These were clearly real episodes of the Twilight Zone, that I'd never seen. Crazy!
Another way you could tell was, you kept seeing people like Burgess Meredith and Jack Klugman. Back when they were young and sexy.
Anyway, I was going out of my mind with these episodes! Normally, you watch a Twilight Zone marathon and it's a tour through a dimension of nostalgia. Occasionally you'll see one that is unfamiliar, and you're pretty psyched! But usually, the reason it's unfamiliar is kind of apparent - it's not one of the finer examples. So just imagine sitting there after episode after episode plays out for you - every one completely new-to-you, and every one a disconcerting gem! If anything they were probably even more confusing and weird than the real ones.
In retrospect, with waking light shed upon what few details I can remember, I'm sure there were plenty of flaws I failed to notice in these episodes. I'm sure if I could play them all back on a real tv, sit there and watch (how cool would that be?) I'd be pretty critical of them. I doubt they hang together too well - one dude's otherwise lazy-ass subconscious suddenly working overtime to pass itself off as the creme de la crop output of some of the golden age of television's brainiest writers! Forget it - it can't stand the light of day. But in that extra-receptive state we enter whilst dreaming, these episodes seemed dead ringers for top-notch Twilight Zone fare!
I wish I could share them with you. I tell you, it was all like some uncanny dream.
I remember a few of the episodes. In one, Burgess Meredith kept bossing people around. His mind had the ability to make you see this really big, ugly, crappy special effects monster suit thing, accompanied by a loud brassy blast of discord on the soundtrack. Nobody wanted to mess with that, so they pretty much did what they were told.
In another episode, Jack Klugman is the hero of the world because he saved the entire planet, and all of humanity, from a huge alien invasion that was totally imminent and going to happen - the saucers were already filling the skies! But Klugman's character, a moderately successful science-fiction writer, managed to somehow convince the aliens why to not invade. Maybe they liked his books. The public clamors for him, and he's evasive about the details - but as he basks in the adulation, he's clearly torn on the inside. The reason? Because it turns out he knows that really, he only convinced the aliens to come back later. Like in a couple years.
There was another episode with a kid in it, a real Dennis the Menace type. I don't want to get into the grisly details, but let me assure you: he gets his.
No comments:
Post a Comment