Been watching the sixties Outer Limits lately. The old episodes are on Dailymotion, which is handy despite the randomly placed ads.
An inevitable point of comparison is The Twilight Zone. Their runs overlap, if only just. The Twilight Zone ran its last season the same year as The Outer Limits ran its first. Episodes of Rod Serling's show play like allegories that can take place any time, any place, and don't depend on each other. Outer Limits seems more to take place in a single universe, even though the episodes don't connect. (They sometimes did in the so-so nineties remake.) One's not a better approach than the other, they're just noticeably different. The intros are different too, less personal for the later show.
"The Man with the Power" is quite good. Donald Pleasence plays a man with a frightening degree of telekinetic power, who still manages to get bullied by nearly everyone. Strangely enough it's the first time I'd really noticed his piercing blue eyes, even though it's of course shot in black and white.
An inevitable point of comparison is The Twilight Zone. Their runs overlap, if only just. The Twilight Zone ran its last season the same year as The Outer Limits ran its first. Episodes of Rod Serling's show play like allegories that can take place any time, any place, and don't depend on each other. Outer Limits seems more to take place in a single universe, even though the episodes don't connect. (They sometimes did in the so-so nineties remake.) One's not a better approach than the other, they're just noticeably different. The intros are different too, less personal for the later show.
"The Man with the Power" is quite good. Donald Pleasence plays a man with a frightening degree of telekinetic power, who still manages to get bullied by nearly everyone. Strangely enough it's the first time I'd really noticed his piercing blue eyes, even though it's of course shot in black and white.
2 comments:
Between light and shadow, between man's fears and knowledge..
There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not adjust your set. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical..
When you were young it's very likely we watched some of these shows together, but it's been so long now I certainly don't recall episodes. Was it the Twilight Zone that had the small neighborhood that people couldn't leave and it turned out they were now part of a child's toy somewhere else in space? I think it was that - sounds about right for a Rod Serling production.
Then there were the tiny invaders attacking a lone woman in a farmhouse who turned out to be nasa astronauts..
As I recall too The Outer Limits was edgier and had more of a hard sci-fi feeling to the shows. The stories were often somewhat scary and featured monsters - like the one with the alien soldier ants.
Good usually won out in the Twilight Zone while Outer Limits was more likely to present moral dilemmas that left you to think about their meanings.
Yes, those were both memorable Twilight Zone episodes. The couple in the play set neighborhood were unhappily married and hung over, so it almost seemed like being trapped with each other was worse than having some giant kid playing with them. The one with the woman on the farm had almost no spoken dialogue, which made it a little more credible that she turned out to be a native of an extraterrestrial planet. Pretty effective, overall.
I do remember seeing some bits of the Outer Limits in North Vancouver. Like I remember seeing a guy finding out that his wife was actually a queen bee. And something with William Shatner going through some kind of transformation, but I was already thinking of him as Captain Kirk. Yeah, it was a mix of things being scary and me not quite following them.
Good did tend to win out in the Twilight Zone, with a few exceptions.
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