Life Lessons From The Twilight Zone

Mark Dawidziak is the television critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer,  and is a serious scholar on Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Rod Serling, and, as such, he is an unabashed devotee of Serling's landmark television series, The Twilight Zone.

He has converted that knowledge into this interesting book of life lessons, as delivered from that place between shadow and substance, the fifth dimensional land whose boundaries are the limits of the imagination - The Twilight Zone.

Here are just some of the fifty life lessons that Dawidziak tells us about:

• Follow your passion
• Nobody said life was fair
• Don't live in the past
• When nobody else believes in you, keep believing in yourself
• You're only truly old when you decide you're old
• Make the most of the time you've got
• Remember the people who got you where you are
• The grass is always greener...or so you think
• The universe does not revolve around you
• Angels are all around you

I could go on, but you get the idea.  Dawidziak then uses classic episodes from The Twilight Zone to illustrate each of these fifty life lessons.  Many episodes illustrate more than just one of these lessons.

This book is not an episode-by-episode compendium of all of the series' episodes. There are the books like that out there if that is what you want.  However, you will be reminded on many, many classic TZ episodes such as Walking Distance, Time Enough to Last, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, Eye of the Beholder, The After Hours, Terror at 20,000 Feet and over one hundred of the 154 total episodes that were produced.

So maybe these life lessons are not necessarily new or especially profound, but it never hurts to be reminded of them, and this book, submitted for your approval, illustrates them in a new and different way.  Reading the book may remind you that perhaps you have forgotten some of these lessons in your journey through life, and you will welcome the refresher course.  It may also cause you to go to that DVD Box Set of The Twilight Zone you own and rewatch some of these great stories - never a bad thing - and view them in a new and different way.

Four stars from The Grandstander for this book.

A Visit to the Twilight Zone

The Grandstander recently noted the death of writer Earl Hamner, Jr., the creator of, among other things, the television series, "The Waltons".

http://www.grandstander.blogspot.com/2016/03/to-absent-friends-joe-garagiola-ken.html

I had read in Hammer's obituary that as a young man he befriended another young writer, Rod Serling, and that that friendship led to Hamner writing scripts for eight episodes of Serling's landmark television series, "The Twilight Zone".  The internet made it very easy to find out which episodes Hamner wrote, and a walk to my DVD box set of "The Complete Twilight Zone" gave me the opportunity to once again enjoy these show and these episodes in particular.

Here were the shows that Hamner wrote and when they first aired:

Season Three

The Hunt (1962)

A Piano in the House (1962)

Season Four

Jesse-Belle (1963)

Season Five

Ring-A-Ding Girl (1963)

You Drive (1964)

Black Leather Jackets (1964)

Stopover in a Small Town (1964)

The Bewitchin' Pool (1964)

It was most interesting and entertaining viewing.  Three of the stories, The Hunt, Jess-Belle, and The Betwitchin' Pool contained settings among country folk, similar to the kind of people Hammer wrote about in "The Waltons".  Some were in contemporary settings, some had real science fiction overtones, and some were spooky, and almost all of them had some real message to deliver.

The star of Jesse-Belle was one of my favorites, Anne Francis, who also starred in a more famous TZ episode called The After Hours.  Other notable actors in these shows included Edward Andrews, Barry Sullivan, and Mary Badham.  Badham is famous for her role of Scout in "To Kill A Mockingbird" and her role in The Bewitchin' Pool was one of only five other roles that she did after Mockingbird, and The Bewitchin' Pool was, in fact, the final episode of "The Twilight Zone" series.

More remarkable was observing how good these episodes - and most episodes of "The  Twilight Zone" -  were and how well these shows hold up over fifty years after they were initially produced and aired.  The production values, and by that I mean the sets and scenery, may appear cheap and chintzy by the television standards of 2016, but the stories, the acting, and, above all, the excellent writing all make these shows still good and still worth watching all these years later.  This makes that TZ boxed set one of the highlights of my own personal  DVD library.

Submitted for your approval.....