Talk:The Twilight Zone

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This article is part of WikiProject The Twilight Zone, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to The Twilight Zone on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

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[edit] Formatting

Do you think It would be appropriate to instead of having everything across so many pages, condense the data a little bit. like for example, The twilight zone is a........ The show ran for a ttal of X seasons. and then at the bottom have

List of episodes

Season 1
Season 2

Oh and maybe have the season's pages also have some brief info, you know like, Which was the first color season, or if they changed writers, or producers, or anything like that?

Sorry, been doing other things than this Twilight Zone thing. I guess a quicklink type thing to each season listing would be ok, but I think we should keep the current format for list of Twilight Zone episodes, and I agree information about each season should be added, but there's a hell of alot of information that could be added which I haven't had time to. Smelialichu 20:39 Nov 7, 2002 (UTC)

[edit] First Sentence

Can't the main article be rearranged so the table of contents comes up closer to the top of the page? New readers coming to this entry in Wikipedia will be served better if the table of contents is not buried under an unnecessarily long, lengthy paragraph. It is easier to read if a section heading is created right after the first or second sentences.

[edit] Introductory paragraph

(deleted entry) The information has now been returned to the main page, just in a new format. Ryan Anderson 23:57, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm planning on continuing my work on this page, adding a section on each season for the two revival series, splitting the radio/book/comic section off into seperate pages, adding a section on syndication and re-release and another on the colluqial use of "twilight zone", but at the moment I'm bogged down by semester finals. Good to see that, apparently, this page and the episode pages are getting more traffic since I started revamping it; there's been a significant increase in my watchlist events lately. Thanks, everybody Ryan Anderson 07:02, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Size concerns

I'm running awfully close to 32KB and I still have a lot of info I want to add, so I broke off the part about the books/comic books and the radio revival and made them independent stubs. This (below) is the only thing I cut which is not reproduced elsewhere, I add it here because I haven't decided what to do with it yet and I don't want to insult the contributor by removing it outright. I don't want to break up the original series and its revival series, but I'll probably have to. I'm considering options. Any help is appreciated.

How about creating a seperate page for all the famous people who've been on the show? As it is, it's to hard to read, anyway.Metalrobot 14:53, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cultural References

The Simpsons Halloween episodes usually have one segment which spoofs a classic Twilight Zone episode.

Episodes spoofed
- To Serve Man
- Nightmare at 20,000 feet
- It's a Good Life
- Living Doll

Additionally, there are countless references buried within Futurama. I won't add them because I'm biased, and I think there's a policy somewhere on that... So someone else can. Buddy13 11:33, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Some day, when I have several hours to spare, I'd like to create a The Twilight Zone in popular culture page, move all of the spoofs and cultural references from each episode's page, to that page, and provide a See also link for each page with a pop culture reference. Some pages (like Nightmare at 20,000, or It's a Good Life) have so many, and they're starting to get duplicated here. Some pop culture sites and shows (like the Simpsons, or the Tower of Terror ride) apply to several episodes. If someone else wants to do this before I get to it, please do. Travisl 20:06, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wow, this page has been royally screwed up

I guess that's what I get for working on Wikipedia. I tried to add some order and method to the mania a couple years ago, by creating all the seperate pages found on the disambiguation page, giving each series its own page and eliminating the fanboy Trivia sections (which are explictly against Wikipedia rules). But somehow, all of that clutter ended up back on the page, and what was supposed to be an introduction to the series has somehow become a complete list of guest stars!

I would dig in there and clean it all out again, but I'm afraid I don't have the heart... or the stomach, for it anymore :)

Ryan Anderson 06:12, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Talking about screwed up, some of the Twilight Zone episodes were mixed up. I would frequently ask "What happend next?". On the other hand some episodes like "The Howling" needed a begining. How did they catch the devil? "Obsolite" bordered on the rediculous. Overall, Twilight Zone was one of the greatest shows ever made.

I'm going to start a major overhaul on the episodes page starting in session 2, wish me luck -wikimindless

[edit] Guest stars

For years I have been guessing at the well-known actors who did the most episodes on the TZ. My guess was Burgess Meredith and Jack Klugman. Both of these were verified by the current page (July, 2006). Also, I found out that John Anderson also did 4 episodes. I just thought that this fact (3 actors at 4 episodes each) might be a good trivia/almanac/breakout suggestion. You have all done a great job on this subject. Thank you, Jeffrey

[edit] Updates

I finished the Nick of time page (02:42, 1 December 2006 (UTC))

[edit] Notable Guest Stars

I moved the Notable Guest Stars to the main article referenced The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series), its better suited there as it is about that specific incarnation of The Twilight Zone. this article is lengthy already and about The Twilight Zone as a whole, not each specific incarnation. Chad 08:11, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

I have done a major overhual on this screwed up page taking out and intergrating most trivia, into a Popular Culture segment, shortening information found on separate pages regarding specific incarnations of The Twilight Zone, info in this article is stated independently in those pages and theres no need to state things 2-3 times, I have condensed alot of info and redid/reworded various info, to help to make a more complete and to the point article, hopefully this will be to everyones liking and people can stop re-adding info that has been stated elsewhere and/or is non-relevent to this particular page. Chad 08:39, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Second Revival

The Second Revival section references the episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" which is referred to and explained somewhat earlier in the article. Additionally, the title of the updated episode is referred to as "similarly titled" and then referenced as the same title. This article seems to require major clean-up overall.Megyn 11:09, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pop. culture

Moving it here (see WP:AVTRIV), going to be a job and a half to integrate it :-\..

Trivia

Throughout the years The Twilight Zone has been the subject of many tributes, references, parody, and satire, becoming a mainstay in popular culture and television history.

Music

The vocal group The Manhattan Transfer had a hit-single named Twilight Zone in 1979. In live performance, they used special costumes and lighting-effects appropriate to the theme.
The hardcore band The Number Twelve Looks Like You took their name from an episode of the show.
The Dutch rock group Golden Earring had a top 10 U.S. hit in 1983 with the song "Twilight Zone" about a double-crossed assassin.
In Iron Maiden's 1981 U.S. release of the album Killers and the subsequent 1998 remastered version, the song "Twilight Zone" is about a ghost who "is imprisoned in the Twilight Zone," - somewhere between this world and the next.
On the album 2112 by Rush, there is a song called "The Twilight Zone", a tribute to the show. Lyrics include imagery that would be consistent with the show - e.g. a pleasant-faced man removes his hat and he has three eyes; you wake up in a town to find that you're the pet of a giant boy. Other references include the line "You have entered the Twilight Zone", and lines used in the opening of the show (e.g. "Here where time and space collide", "Enter this world of imagination", and "Now the fourth dimension's crossed".
The Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps's 2005 and 2006 programs, "The Zone (Dreamscape in Four Parts with a Door)" and "Volume 2: Through the Looking Glass," portrayed an episode of the Twilight Zone. The character walks through a door (which is supposed to be 1313 Mockingbird Lane) and finds herself in several situations that could have happened on the Twilight Zone, including a game of human chess. At the end of the "The Zone," she finds her way back through the door back into the real world, but in the beginning of "Volume 2," she has instead found herself in Alice in Wonderland and needs to return through the looking glass to truly(?) return to the real world. The beginning of "The Zone" included the opening monologue from Twilight Zone, and the music for the two shows included the theme to Twilight Zone, as well as music from the movies Dancer in the Dark, Pollock, and Kill Bill: Vol. 1, music by Propellerheads, original music by Chief Arranger Jay Bocook, and the song "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane.

Film and television

Rod Serling's image can be seen in the opening credits of both revival series. In the 1980s version, he appears as a ghostly image just before the title comes on screen, while he can be seen among other images during the opening credits of the 2002 version.
An episode of Garfield and Friends -aka The Lasagna Zone-has Garfield being accidentally trapped within TV set-with Twilight Zone ending.
An episode of Saturday Night Live had a spoof of The Twilight Zone in which Ricky Nelson stars as himself caught in an endless loop of walking home to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Another episode featured a spoof of The Eye of the Beholder, in which the doctors are delighted with the failed results of the surgery to fix the woman's face, since she is the only woman in their world without a pig face. The female nurses do not share the sentiment.
In the Futurama universe, there is a television show called "The Scary Door" which is a parody of The Twilight Zone featuring exaggerated sendups of typical Twilight Zone plot twists. One episode featured no less than five different twists on the simple story of a gambler being struck by a vehicle and experiencing the afterlife, each more irrelevant than the last until finally he is revealed to be Hitler and married to an alien version of Eva Braun.
The first half of the Married... with Children episode Luck of the Bundys ends with the outro of the Twilight Zone theme.
In an episode of Family Guy, Peter goes to the "Beyond" section of Bed, Bath and Beyond to find it a vortex of interesting phenomena and the coffee mugs he was looking for. Rod Serling also appears in the episode "Love Thy Trophy", where he narrates the clash between characters over a trophy before subsequently being pursued by neighbors who think he stole the trophy. Later as he is narrating the outro he is hit on the head with a shovel by Brian. The neighbors' fight over the trophy is a reference to the feuding neighbors in The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. In the last scene of the episode Wasted Talent, the last brain cell in Peter's brain parodies The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last", when its glasses break and it can't read anymore all the books it had.
The Simpsons makes frequent reference to The Twilight Zone, and several of the segments from the Treehouse of Horror Halloween episodes are partial or complete parodies of Twilight Zone episodes. Spoofed episodes include:
- To Serve Man ("Hungry Are The Damned", Treehouse of Horror I)
- It's a Good Life ("The Bart Zone", Treehouse of Horror II)
- Living Doll ("Clown Without Pity", Treehouse of Horror III)
- Nightmare at 20,000 Feet ("Terror at 5½ Feet", Treehouse of Horror IV)
- Little Girl Lost ("Homer3", Treehouse of Horror VI)
- The Little People ("The Genesis Tub", Treehouse of Horror VII)
- A Kind of a Stopwatch ("Stop the World, I Want to Goof Off", Treehouse of Horror XIV)
In an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy,The beginning and ending are a homeage to the Twilight Zone theme.
In the movie The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, as a crowd of people flee a building, one of the villains of the movie holds a book titled "To Serve Man" and shouts hysterically "It's a cookbook!" This actor (Lloyd Bochner) is the same one, in fact, who starred in the original Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man".
In a classic SCTV sketch, John Candy played "Chris Serling," Rod's son, who had inherited the rights to the Twilight Zone and wanted to capitalize on it by producing "Twilight Zonettes," which would skip the setup and get right to the twist at the end.
In the movie Madagascar, a Lemur panics while holding up a cookbook "To Serve Lemur" in reference to the episode "To Serve Man".
In the episode "Lessons" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawn is attending her first day at Sunnydale High and assures Buffy she knows "To Serve Man is a cookbook..."
An episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy has a plot modelled after the Twilight Zone Episode "The Bewitchin' Pool."
An episode of Johnny Bravo had parodied the episode "It's a Good Life" where Johnny has to babysit Timmy, an all-powerful six year-old who can actually make people go to the cornfield
An episode of Jimmy Neutron parodies Time Enough at Last when after a pair of nano aliens zap everyone out of existence, Jimmy's father is left to endluge in his pies.

Hidden as it's large. --Matthew.

A job-and-a-half indeed. See my 15 May 2006 comment above -- I'm in favor of a separate Twilight Zone in pop culture page, with every pop culture thing from here, and every pop culture refrerence from each of the individual episode pages, moved into one spot. Thoughts? Travisl 22:49, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Hey Travis, sounds good to me, however people do have a tendency to try and get these pages deleted (e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of references in Dead Like Me). Oh, and 4400 returns soon *yey!*. Matthew 22:57, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of trivia articles, but if all the less important references were left out it might be a decent ist. Things like the Naken Gun reference are highly significant, because it actually involves an original cast member. A list like this could soon become an ongoing list full of sightings of every single mention of the The Twilight Zone in another show, which wouldn't be useful. Croxley 20:30, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Improvements to individual episode articles

I mentioned this at Talk:The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) but it might be useful here as well, regarding articles on List of The Twilight Zone episodes and I noticed some (minor) style errors common to most of them -

1. They have an unusual section at the bottom that is redundant because these articles are already accessed in the Infobox on the right. Back to: The Twilight Zone, Episode List, Season 1

This is sometimes listed under "Twilight Zone links", but is still not needed when the infobox has all the relevant links. This appears to date back to 2002, before the infobox was added.

2. The "External link" section is often placed in the middle of the article, but it should always be placed at the end (and called "External links", even if there is only 1 link)

3. Now a seperate subcategory exists for Category:The Twilight Zone episodes, the episode articles should be removed from the main Category:The Twilight Zone. This is the point of having a subcategory and will make Category:The Twilight Zone episodes much easier to use.

4. Another point: regarding the Themes section in many of the articles; most of these consist of mini reviews which are POV, or theories of what the underlying meaning/message/moral of each story is, which violates WP:NOR. Any type of analasys like this must cite a reliable source. The same goes for statements such as "this episode is similar to another episode called... etc".

Magiclite 21:58, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Theme music?

An article about this series really needs to include some mention of the theme music, which may be the most famous and widely referenced specific aspect of the series. However, I don't know anything about the theme music (who composed it, for example, or whether the same music was used for the entire original run of the show), so I can't write this. Could someone else add that info? --Elysdir 17:11, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:TheTwilightZoneLogo.jpg

Image:TheTwilightZoneLogo.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 05:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Time20.jpg

Image:Time20.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 02:51, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Added rationale. Travisl (talk) 23:45, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Give The Time Element its own page?

Does anybody else think we should give The Time Element its own page? I think it's just as important as an episode. There's a precedent for it, too; the Pilot for ST:TOS (The Cage) has it's own page.Father McKenzie (talk) 02:47, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Opening Narration ?

I was expecting to find the narration from the intro in this article, like the control voice listed in The Outer Limits. I can't remember exactly how it went, but something like:

You unlock this door with the key of imagination ... Beyond it is another dimension ....

(etc)

Does anyone know the rest of this, when it first appeared and can someone put it somewhere in the article ? --Biatch (talk) 04:17, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Season 1's intro is at The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series). The other seasons should probably be updated there, too. I'll see if I can find them tonight. Travisl (talk) 18:12, 29 May 2008 (UTC)