lowering the max

[Miles Long]

The Outer Limits? Miles you're showing your age! Joseph Distefano, I still recall the guy's name. The producer. They had great creatures & the stories were usually a message about some current topic.

The distinctive voice of the commentator is what I remember most about the show. I think his name was Rod Serling?
Cheers, medic!

 

[Fire-medic]

Oh, you're toying with me here, Miles! No one can confuse Rod Serling of Binghamton NY with Joseph Distefano!

Two different guys, two producers of terror, horror, and the supernatural. But they both had an ideal: their shows, often with 'unknowns' playing the roles, carried a message for the viewers. Sometimes it was about subjects like the Cold War, disease, exploration and colonialization, progress and technology (or the lack of it), war, god and the devil, prejudice, the topics were usually interwoven skillfully about the message. You often had to wait until the last few seconds of the show to know the outcome, and there were a few nights I didn't want to go to sleep in a dark room right away, as a young adolescent, after viewing the shows. Thankfully, when I recall these were 'first-run' shows, for awhile, you could watch "Home Run Derby" afterwards, which helped to calm you down after seeing some terrible character doing bad things.

There was another great show, not on for very long, but like Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, there was eerie music at the beginning, some graphic and disturbing visuals which led you into the story. It was called Way Out, and a great American author was host, Roald Dahl. He wrote children's stories and also the content for this unfortunately not long for this world show, but it ranked right up-there with Twilight Zone and Outer Limits.

All three announcers had distinctive voices. Serling, I believe died at age 50 from cancer, he was usually seen at the beginning of the show dressed very nattily, and holding a cigarette, which unfortunately may have contributed to his demise. He would have an endorsement in the credits at the end of the show, for whose clothes he wore: Kuipenheimer, Eagle, maybe Hart, Schaffner & Marx. He always looked like an Ivy League professor in those shots.

The unknown actors? Well I recall Robert Redford visiting an elderly woman who was holding out in her rundown apartment, refusing to be displaced, when a developer was trying to evict her so he could raze the building for redevelopment. Redford came to visit the woman.

Or Agnes Moorehead, playing the part of a frontier woman who was all alone in her rustic cabin, who was tormented by tiny robots, who fired weapons at her, causing boils on her skin, as she devised various primitive ways to destroy them. The thing was, during the entire show, you never heard her speak, as she was alone in the cabin.

Burgess Meredith, who survives a nuclear attack because he's in a bank vault, and emerges to find himself The Last Man On Earth, now with plenty of time to read all his books he loves...

Ed Wynn, a sidewalk salesman, making the pitch of his life, to distract The Grim Reaper who came to take the life of a sick little girl, a friend of the salesman.

My personal Twilight Zone favorite, The Howling Man, starring John Carradine, that icon of 1960's horror movies by Hammer Film Studios, England, where a man is on a worldwide search, for what?

So, no, it's not Rod Serling.

The distinctive voice of the commentator is what I remember most about the show. I think his name was Rod Serling?
Cheers, medic!

 

[Miles Long]

Medic, apologies! I was thinking of Twilight Zone, not the Outer limits.
Seems Rod occurred farther back in my memory banks than I had originally thought.
I did Google him to refresh my memory, and came across two episodes that have burned permanent niches in my grey matter.....
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, an adaptation from the short story by Ambrose Bierce. I remember the story itself was required reading/study during grade school, then it was adapted as an episode of the Twilight Zone. Haunting to say the least, and makes one think of the implications at the moment of death.
- Nightmare At 20,000 ft. In the original broadcast, this starred a very young William Shatner. A passenger is freaked out over a demon, that only he can see, ripping apart the wings of a passenger plane. I think this episode was later updated and used in the Twilight Zone movie that was made in the '90's. The same movie that was stuck with lawsuits, over the death of one of actors. Seems he was decapitated by a helicopter blade,(during filming) if I remember correctly.
Cheers!

 

[Fire-medic]

That was Rob Morrow's dad Victor who starred in the 1960's show, "Combat," on tv, who died during the filming.

Yes, there were plenty of good stories in all those shows. I liked the Twilight Zone shows where they made use of Robby the Robot, from the great 1950's movie Forbidden Planet, which was a science-fiction adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

And, that Canadian actor being carried off the plane when it landed in Nightmare At 20,000 Feet.

Medic, apologies! I was thinking of Twilight Zone, not the Outer limits.
Seems Rod occurred farther back in my memory banks than I had originally thought.
I did Google him to refresh my memory, and came across two episodes that have burned permanent niches in my grey matter.....
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, an adaptation from the short story by Ambrose Bierce. I remember the story itself was required reading/study during grade school, then it was adapted as an episode of the Twilight Zone. Haunting to say the least, and makes one think of the implications at the moment of death.
- Nightmare At 20,000 ft. In the original broadcast, this starred a very young William Shatner. A passenger is freaked out over a demon, that only he can see, ripping apart the wings of a passenger plane. I think this episode was later updated and used in the Twilight Zone movie that was made in the '90's. The same movie that was stuck with lawsuits, over the death of one of actors. Seems he was decapitated by a helicopter blade,(during filming) if I remember correctly.
Cheers!