It's a Good Life (The Twilight Zone)

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The Twilight Zone original series Season three (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) Fall 1961 – Summer 1962 List of The Twilight Zone episodes
Episodes: Two The Arrival The Shelter The Passersby A Game of Pool The Mirror The Grave It's a Good Life Deaths-Head Revisited The Midnight Sun Still Valley The Jungle Once Upon a Time Five Characters in Search of an Exit A Quality of Mercy Nothing in the Dark One More Pallbearer Dead Man's Shoes The Hunt Showdown With Rance McGrew Kick the Can A Piano in the House The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank To Serve Man The Fugitive Little Girl Lost Person or Persons Unknown The Little People Four O'Clock Hocus-Pocus and Frisby The Trade-Ins The Gift The Dummy Young Man's Fancy I Sing the Body Electric Cavender Is Coming The Changing of the Guard

“It’s a Good Life” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

[edit] Details

Episode number: 73
Season: 3
Production code: 4801
Original air date: November 3, 1961
Writer: Rod Serling from the story “It's a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby, first published in the 1953 collection Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2.
Director: James Sheldon
Music: Stock

[edit] Cast

Anthony Fremont: Billy Mumy
Mr. Fremont: John Larch
Mrs. Fremont: Cloris Leachman
Dan Hollis: Don Keefer

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Six-year-old Anthony Fremont looks like any other little boy, but looks are deceiving. He is a monster, a mutant with godlike mental powers. Early on, he isolated the small hamlet of Peaksville, Ohio. In fact, the handful of inhabitants do not even know if he destroyed the rest of the world or if it still exists. Anthony has also eliminated electricity, automobiles, and television signals. He controls the weather and what supplies can be found in the grocery store. Anthony creates and destroys as he pleases, and controls when the residents can watch the TV and what they can watch on it.

The adults tiptoe nervously around him, constantly telling him how everything he does is "good", since displeasing him can get them wished away "to the cornfield", where they are presumably met by a less-than-happy ending. Finally, at Dan Hollis' birthday party, Dan, slightly drunk, can no longer stand the strain and confronts the boy, calling him a monster and a murderer; while Anthony's anger grows, Dan begs the other adults to kill Anthony from behind---"Somebody end this, now!"---but everyone else is too afraid to act. Before he is killed, he is shown, indirectly by his shadow, transformed into a Jack-in-the-box. His widow breaks down, but no matter what happens, the people of Peaksville make sure to think only good thoughts and repeat "That's a real good thing that Anthony did!" and "It's a good life."

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Trivia

On Serling’s never-realized plans to make a feature-length version of this episode:

“Back in 1974, one year before his death, Serling told an interviewer that he was working on a third draft of the screenplay for Alan Landsburg Productions, for whom he had narrated Chariots of the Gods? and other documentaries. The script was essentially an elaboration of the award-winning teleplay, according to Joe Dante, who has read it. Unlike Bixby’s story, however, “the screenplay starts with the child being born,” Dante recalled in Fangoria magazine. “He can talk right away. He’s very smart and dangerous...It falls upon the townspeople to get up enough courage to do something about Anthony. It’s a little like a more sophisticated version of what It’s Alive turned out to be.”

“It’s possible that the screenplay included scenes from the original story too grotesque for television: Anthony’s making a rat eat itself, from the tail up; his turning some of his neighbors into truly horrific creations; and the actual process of his “wishing someone into the cornfield,” i.e. executing someone—although Dante claims that the script contained no “exploitation.” —James H. Burns, excerpt from “It’s a Good Life: Rod Serling’s Forgotten Screenplay” published in the October 1984 edition of The Twilight Zone Magazine.

The episode was reimagined in Twilight Zone: The Movie by Joe Dante (in which Bill Mumy had a cameo role).

In the story it is implied that Anthony is very strange looking, so awful that his mother's physician tried to kill him at birth.
The episode was spoofed in The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror II" in 1991.

In early 2003, a Twilight Zone revival series on UPN showed a sequel called “It’s Still a Good Life” in which Bill Mumy reprised his Anthony Fremont role. His on-screen daughter was played by his real-life daughter Liliana Mumy. Cloris Leachman also returned as his mother.

In 2006, the anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya borrows certain similar themes of a petulent, emergent post-human like Anthony Fremont. A character even paraphrases the line from the TV/movie version "It’s good that you did that...It’s real real good!"

In the cartoon series Johnny Bravo, a spoof was made as one of three episodes in which Johnny explores The Zone Where Normal Things Don't Happen Very Often. The title of the episode was "Johnny Real Good", and featured Bravo babysitting a small boy whose parents, much like the people of the town, are always overly happy and positive. As a reference to Anthony's wishing people into the cornfield, every time Johnny did something to annoy or displease him, the boy would teleport him into a thick cornpatch just outside the home. The episode concludes with Johnny waking up in bed, only to find himself once again in the middle of an immense cornfield.