Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

 The Twilight Zone sub on Reddit has really started to turn on "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet". They just don't see what the big deal is. And "It's a Good Life" is another one I'm starting to see negative reaction towards it. I still consider this to be a blast. But any classic will come under scrutiny. The gremlin is often considered a figment of a struggling Shatner, who has recovered from a breakdown, until Rod Serling tells us and the camera shows us otherwise. Shatner is often sited for his overacting but I love everything he does as Bob. I also love how fans often love to look at this episode as a follow-up to how Shatner performed his character in "Nick of Time". Two men fallen prey to mental demons they must work against in order to find peace. "Living Doll" really emphasizes the evil stepfather story, with his insecurities due to not being able to have a child, how he seems incapable of being a good father to his stepdaughter. I n

  Rod Serling introduces The Hunt Yeah, I can see this as an episode that doesn't age well for newer viewers, but it is an old favorite of mine. I have commented aplenty on it. I do remember the last time SYFY did a marathon on the 4th of July, "The Hunt" was the episode that I tried badly to stay awake for. I read on Twitter from a fellow Twilight Zone fan that the last marathon on Independence Day was 2017. "The Hunt" was on later, and I can recall doing my best to keep my eyes open but my brain was sadly tired. And I didn't get to really enjoy the marathon at all in 2017, because we were busy that day. To be honest, 4th of July has often been one of the busiest holidays for me, but this year my mother lost her sister to a prolonged illness so I'm home just lounging around. This would actually be a year perfect for a Twilight zone marathon. I have Paramount+ in use, just making it up my own for the time being before my daughter decides when we watch &q

  I've written about this episode in the past, but watching it yet again, I remembered the effect of it as a teenager in the 90s when it would come on in marathons. Some day I need to pull out my VHS recordings and find them. It would be cool to see if they still play, perhaps even taking some of the footage for posterity. But I think the message remains very potent. That most of us fear death. There is the romantic view of some peaceful afterlife, some ease of passing that allows us something less scary, less frightening that awaits...some cherubic Redford as Mr. Death instead of business suit, Murray Hamilton, with his notebook, leading us towards anything but the agonies of this life. I just lost an aunt who was in abject misery, having endured fractured back issues, oxygen failing, stomach paralysis, and heart out of rhythm. My mother had to be there for her since last November, because she was a widow without any children. And seeing Cooper's fear-quivering Wanda living in

 So this episode was especially special because of Vaughn Taylor as Teague, a decaying and dying man Paradine meets while mapping a town supposedly occupied by "them yanks". Reason I got a good kick out of Taylor is that I watch a lot of "Perry Mason" these days, and he's in like 8 episodes playing various characters. I think he either blackmailed someone Perry would later defend or get killed as a result of blackmail. As Teague, Taylor is barely recognizable. They fit him with lots of scattered white hair, scraggly clothes, and old age makeup. He has a crook back, a pained walk, and crazy eyes (to match all the hair poking out of his brows, head, behind his ears, and out his chin), with a particular glee as he made his claim that in order to defeat "them yanks" Paradine would need to rely on the Devil. It is quite a story, this idea that "the devil's work", in a witchcraft book, could win the Confederacy the war. Teague not doing it baff

One of the great images of The Twilight Zone  This is one of my great joys from The Twilight Zone. It currently sits at #7 on my Twilight Zone ranking ( Read here. ). Pride and ego are bruised as Conny Miller talks up how Pinto Sykes, the feared gunman he was paid by a small town (the hometown of Pinto) to hunt down and kill, never was anywhere he went very long, despite what Pinto said to contrary while dying from a lone gunshot wound despite eight men firing at him. While all the character actors in the episode are just splendid, along with future movie star, Lee Marvin, it is the actress who wasn't in the industry very long (mostly television westerns; though, I did see her in an episode of "Perry Mason" just recently) named Elen Willard, who played the creepy Ione, sister to Pinto, equipped with this unnerving laugh and sinister aura. But Ione is accompanied by the stark atmosphere of the episode, the way the wind just seems to be a menace, how the graveyard is lumpy,

How I felt about the twist of The Arrival  Flight 107 out of Buffalo, lost in the fog, for reasons unknown...that one case Mr. Sheckley was unable to lick. This was mentioned on Reddit as a plane episode, among others, "superior to that overrated Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode". There is a contingent of Twilight Zone fans who just feel Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is way overhyped and ridiculously overpraised. I'm not one of them, but I do see where they are coming from. You see them mention a ton of episodes they consider far better than it which get far less mention. That's far for the course of any fandom. I expected that would eventually be the case for Twilight Zone as well. But I do like when those fans bring up episodes that they consider worthy of evaluation and examination perhaps not focused on as much. Or maybe they might have been in the mid-to-late 1990s if folks like me had an internet similar to today. The Arrival is maddening to me because I feel it had

 There are certain Twilight Zone episodes that sort of give me a grand bit of amusement. They aren't meant to be anything substantially thought-provoking or leave me pondering any deep meaning. A Most Unusual Camera remains one of those delights I catch at around 10PM during long marathons, typically on the first day. You won't glean from this episode much in the way of humanity's inhumanity in a philosophical Rod Serling style. This is about three crooks who happen upon a camera that predicts the future through a taken picture when a button is pressed. Two of the crooks robbed an antique store with items that aren't of any value...the camera just happened to be among the many cheap knockoffs that Chester and Paula Dietrich thought were much more valuable. And the end result is four people taking an improbable flight out a dinky hotel room window... not only does Chet and Paula's dopey brother, Woodward, take a trip out the window while in the midst of a fight, but

  Broke down and got Paramount+ for the month, so I can just access certain parts of the service, mainly for uncut Twilight Zone, and two Godfather movies I plan to watch for my They Shoot Pictures, Don't They Top 1,000 2021 list. I thought about Two for a big third season marathon for Sunday night and early Monday. But after some consideration, I thought I would just start with Where is Everybody? and mix it up. I figure I might work in the classics tomorrow. What makes this episode always work to me is when our bewildered astronaut finds activity but no person. Water on, a cigar still lit, a jukebox on, etc. As if he just missed them. I did go with King Nine Will Not Return , with a cracking up Cummings very similar to Holliman in Where is Everybody? , just desperate to find his crew, stumbling around in the desert all alone, coming apart at the seams, mentally. In both cases, Holliman and Cummings are "rescued" by the Twilight Zone. They wake up with people available

 Today, on the 3rd, I noticed Pluto TV is running the first two seasons of Twilight Zone on Classic TV Drama. I just thought that was cool that another channel is showing Twilight Zone besides Decades, a channel I would need to get an antenna system or streaming that carries it. I still might end up trying out Decades somehow, just for an alternative to SYFY, whose editing is terrible. I have a fuck-ton of episodes from SYFY 4:00 in the morning saved on the DVR so I will be going to those when I'm not interested in episodes on Pluto TV. I revisited the silly episode, "Mr. Bevis", which seems to have its devotees and "The After Hours". "The After Hours", I sort of regret watching at 7:00 PM, since the last time I watched it at 11:00 at night, the effectiveness was off-the-charts. Now "The Mighty Casey" is on. Jack Warden, for me, is a lot of fun in the episode, but this is more of a baseball historian's jam that something I necessarily car