Agree. I watched both NBC Spielberg's Amazing Stories and the new CBS Twilight Zone when they debut the fall of 1985. Christopher you accurately described what the viewers discovered.
The Twilight Zone Original Series
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Many thanks for posting the video.
I haven't seen that episode since it originally aired. Forest Whitaker did a decent job as host/narrator (or whatever his role was called).
Did the 80s version of TZ have an onscreen host who appeared at the beginning and end of each episode?
William Devane, in the 1974 TV-movie The Missiles of October, looked more like JFK than any of them. (Martin Sheen played Bobby Kennedy in that one.)
No, just voice-over in 1985-1989.
Forest Whitaker was on screen 2002-2003 host.
Provided by Charles Aidman in the CBS seasons and Robin Ward in syndication. Aidman was a 2-time veteran of the original series, having appeared in "And When the Sky Was Opened" and "Little Girl Lost." Ward's other most notable credit was as a regular in the infamously bad 1973-4 Canadian SF series The Starlost.
Yeah, I know, but when I referred to Martin Sheen, I was referring to the 1983 miniseries KENNEDY. I forgot about Devane.
Yes, I was merely noting that Sheen played two Kennedys.
The only episode I remember of that show (I think it was that show) was the one where a WW2 bomber lost it's wheels and couldn't land so a cartoonist onboard the plane DREW the wheels on and it landed with cartoon wheels.
Amazing Stories was amazingly bad for the most part. As I recall, the only worthwhile episode was the one with Christopher Lloyd.
That was an hourlong Amazing Stories, "The Mission," starring Kevin Costner and plotted and directed by Spielberg himself. It was the fifth episode of the show, and it exemplified what I said before about it -- well-made, but with very elementary, superficial ideas. I remember when the episode came to its climax, my reaction was basically, "That's it? A whole hour building up to the twist, and that's all it is?" Very underwhelming. I think maybe part of the problem was that the ending was telegraphed well in advance and the story just straightforwardly went exactly where I expected, in a very linear and simple fashion. A lot of the show's installments were like that -- very little imagination or depth to their stories, one-joke premises stretched out to a half-hour, or in this case an hour.
Oh. Gotcha.
I hated that episode of Amazing stories and I can't remember any others!
Some real fanatics made a list of the birth dates and death dates for every Original TLZ actor.
http://twilightzonewor.fr.yuku.com/...Birthdeath-dates-990-acto?page=1#.V60ITzb6tZU
Some real fanatics made a list of the birth dates and death dates for every Original TLZ actor.
http://twilightzonewor.fr.yuku.com/...Birthdeath-dates-990-acto?page=1#.V60ITzb6tZU
A big problem with attempts at this sort of show - Amazing Stories and the 2001 Zone - is they tend to think the original TZ was about the twist endings. They might be what's memorable, but they were the bonus after a script that was (when good) about the characters.
It wasn't Lou Ferrigno, though. That was "Remote Control Man," one of its most agonizingly bad, unfunny, overly broad, one-joke "comedy" episodes (the other, equally agonizing one was the show's second episode, "The Main Attraction," about a jock who was turned magnetic and had a bunch of metal objects stick to him). It was about a TV junkie whose magic remote control let him bring TV characters to life, and it was mostly just a bunch of cameos by various TV characters and personages. Most of the real people played themselves (including Ed McMahon and Richard Simmons) and most of the fictional characters were played by their real actors (including Barbara Billingsley, Gary Coleman, and Dirk Benedict as Face), but the Hulk was played by fitness trainer Jake Steinfeld. I've mercifully forgotten most of the ordeal of that episode, but I do remember noting that the Hulk was an impostor.
I. Never saw the "Twilight Zone" until I bought the first season on Blu-Ray. My favorite episodes have to be "Mr. Denton On Doomsday", "Third Planet From The Sun", "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" and "The Night Of The Meek".
"Third From The Sun" is one of my all-time favorite episodes. The ending was cliched even then, but I love it for the cloying, choking, oppressive political atmosphere. Cold-War paranoia distilled into a half-hour TV show. And Edward Andrews was just wonderful.
The plane could have made a belly landing. The problem was that the ball turret malfunctioned and the gunner (who drew cartoons in his spare time) was stuck inside. When the plane hit the runway without its landing gear down and locked, the poor guy would be smeared into Jello.
Yeah, it was a pretty thin concept to stretch into a full-hour episode.
In a 1982 documentary Steven Spielberg stated in disappointment that some television producers talked down to their viewers and then in 1985 he produced Amazing Stories for NBC that had episodes that were just as guilty of having simple stupid scripts that did the same.
Poor video quality, but here is the less than impressive ending to "The Mission".
Come to think of it, maybe part of my problem with the episode is that the guy who made the magic landing gear happen was the same guy whose life was in danger. So it was just a story about a guy saving himself. It would've been better if the magic cartoonist had been someone else, who cared enough about his crewmate to make a miracle happen to save him. Then it would've been driven by more than self-interest.
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