A man (William Bendix) visits a psychoanalyst, complaining about a recurring dream in which he imagines waking up in Honolulu just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Rod Serling wrote a teleplay intending for it to be the pilot episode of a new series called The Twilight Zone. Although it ended up airing on a different show, Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse S01E06, it is still considered the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone.
"This is Mike Wallace with another television interview in our gallery of colorful people. In television drama few names have the prestige of that of our guest. Rod Serling is the only writer to have won three Emmy awards, for Requiem for a Heavyweight, Patterns and The Comedian. We'll talk to him about censorship in television, his fight to say what he believes, and we'll learn what he means by the price tag that hangs on success. We'll learn all that in just one minute."
Mike Ferris finds himself in a town strangely devoid of people. But despite the emptiness, he has the odd feeling that he's being watched...
A street salesman cleverly eludes Death. But if he lives, a little girl must die in his place.
A has-been, drunk gunslinger finds his fast-draw abilities magically restored.
An aging, former movie star lives and dreams in the past, constantly watching her old movies alone in her room.
Martin Sloan, driving through the country, leaves his car and starts to walk toward his hometown, Homewood. He finds things exactly as they were when he was a child. He soon realizes he's gone back in time.
A hypochondriac exchanges his soul for immortality and indestructibility.
Corry, a man stranded on an asteroid after being convicted of a crime, receives a present of a robot who looks and sounds like a real woman.
A bank teller, obsessed with reading, finds himself alone after a nuclear blast.
A man is terrified of falling asleep for fear he might die.
In 1942, a German wonders why he's on the deck of a British steamship, with no memory of how he got there, and an overwhelming sense of impending doom.
Three astronauts have returned from this first space flight. Major Gart is hospitalized with a broken leg. The other two, Colonels Harrington and Forbes head for a bar. Harrington gets a strange feeling.
A two-bit thug thinks he's found the key to a better life in an old sidewalk salesman who has the uncanny ability to tell people what they need the most.
A man who can change his face to resemble others gets into hot water with gangsters.
With all-out nuclear war about to ignite, a scientist and his pilot friend plot to escape on an experimental spaceship.
Three astronauts believe they have crashed on an asteroid.
Alone on a cross-country trip, a woman continually sees the same hitch-hiker everywhere she looks.
Tight fisted Franklin Gibbs is not pleased when his wife wins a trip for two to Las Vegas. But things change when he falls under the spell of a slot machine that calls his name.
A World War I flying ace flies through a mysterious cloud - and lands at a modern U.S. air base in the year 1959!
Lt. Fitzgerald has found his own special wartime hell. Looking into the faces of his men prior to battle, he has the disquieting ability to see who is about to die.
Three astronauts land on what looks like Earth 200 years before they left--only all of the people seem frozen in time.
Millicent Barnes sees her double at a bus terminal.
Paranoia strikes the residents of Maple Street when they believe human-looking aliens have invaded the neighborhood.
Businessman Arthur Curtis finds his phone dead. He is then surprised to hear a voice yell, "Cut!" and see that his office is just a set on a sound stage. Everyone tells him that he is Jerry Raigan, a drunken movie star on the decline, and "Arthur Curtis" is a character he is playing in the movie "The Private World of Arthur Curtis".
Walter Jameson is an excellent history teacher who talks about the past as if he had lived it.
When a space exploration crashes on Mars, the surviving passenger is surprised to find that Martians are human-looking, very friendly and apparently just like us...
Just before being hanged for shooting a man in the back, a man in 1880 is transported into the future.
Even though Jackson breaks his hand prior to the fight, he wins because Henry - a boy who adores the fighter and believes in magic - made the "big, tall wish." After the fight the boxer refuses to believe in magic.
After being shot to death, Rocky Valentine encounters the amiable white-haired Mr. Pip, who gives Rocky everything he wishes for.
Schoolteacher Helen Foley finds a strange and very serious little girl on the stairs outside her apartment. The little girl seems to know her, and tries to jog her memory about a man she saw earlier that day. The man arrives at Helen's door.
Riding home on the train one day, a man falls asleep and dreams it is 1880, and he is entering a small town called Willoughby.
A man, desperate to win the affection of a beautiful woman, slips her a love potion. He is overjoyed that the potion works so well...at first.
A trumpet player who's convinced he'll never amount to anything attempts suicide and finds himself in a world where no one can hear or see him.
A man (Bevis) meets his guardian angel.
A woman discovers that the floor of a department store, on which she bought a gold thimble, doesn't exist - and that her ""saleslady"" is really a mannequin!
A baseball manager takes his team to the championships thanks to a robot pitcher.
A playwright makes characters come to life.
A WWII captain finds himself in the desert, next to his crashed plane. Where is his crew? And why are futuristic jet planes flying overhead?
A discontented curio shop owner thinks he's finally found happiness when a genie he discovers in an old bottle grants him four wishes.
Ordered to commit a murder he doesn't want to perform, a smalltime hood nervously looks in the mirror and sees the man he could have been--confident, strong...and determined to get out.
A writer feels that the machines in his house are conspiring against him.
A man, on a walking trip of Europe, gets caught in a storm. He finds remote monastery that contains a prisoner.
A young woman undergoes ""experimental treatments"" in an attempt to make her appear ""normal"".
A superstitious newlywed becomes obsessed by a penny fortune-telling machine when he and his new wife are stranded with car trouble.
Dr. Loren enjoys the faultless robot servants he has invented. His daughter, however, feels imprisoned by them--and soon learns how right she is.
Booth Templeton is an aging actor who longs for the old days when his wife was alive. Miraculously, he is given a sobering glimpse of the past he holds so dear.
Chester Diedrich and his wife Paula, after burglarizing a curio shop, end up with a camera that takes pictures of events five minutes into the future.
A down-on-his-luck department store Santa Claus discovers a bottomless sack of toys.
After selling the rope for a hanging, a conscienceless peddler tries to sell the condemned man's father a bag of "magic dust".
It's April 14, 1961. Peter Corrigan and friends are discussing time travel at their men's club, Corrigan suddenly becomes dizzy. When his head clears, he has somehow traveled back to April 14, 1865 - the date of Lincoln's assassination. Knowing what is about to happen, he tries to warn everyone at Ford's Theater before it's too late.
A peculiar Model A automobile compels a used car dealer to tell only the truth.
An old woman in an isolated farmhouse encounters tiny, hostile aliens.
The lucky flip of a coin seems to give a mild-mannered bank clerk the power to read minds. But he soon learns that you can't believe everything you read.
Miss Powell has a recurring nightmare about room 22 in a morgue.
A commercial aircraft mysteriously travels back through time.
Martians give Luther Dingle the strength of 300 men.
Ed Lindsay hates television, so he gets his old radio out of the basement of the boardinghouse where he lives. He soon finds he can receive programs from the past when he's alone.
Ace Larsen discovers his business partner (Buddy Ebsen) has the ability to control objects with his mind. The pair head to Vegas to win big.
A young boy find he can communicate with his dead grandmother through a toy phone.
In 1847 a western settler sets out to find medicine for his dying son - and stumbles into modern-day New Mexico.
Thieves put themselves into suspended animation for 100 years after hiding a million dollars worth of gold bars.
An aristocratic club member bets that a talkative acquaintance cannot stay silent for an entire year.
Trapped in a recurring nightmare, Adam Grant tries to persuade those who are sentencing him to death that the whole scenario is not real.
A book on the power of thought enables an irritable worker (Shelley Berman) to re-create the world exactly as he wants it. But what he wants and what he gets are two different things!
State troopers follow tracks from an unidentified flying object to a diner where they try to determine which of the seven bus passengers stranded inside is really a Martian.
In a future state where religion and books have been banned, a librarian (Burgess Meridith) is judged obsolete by the Chancellor (Fritz Weaver) and sentenced to death.
A man and a woman, on opposite sides of a future war, encounter each other in a deserted town.
A plane lands safely, but all its passengers, pilot and crew are missing!
When a UFO invasion appears imminent, several suburban friends and neighbours fight over control of a single bomb shelter.
On the road home from the Civil War, a Confederate soldier stops at a burned-out house and gets to know the owner, a recent widow.
Championship pool player Fats Brown returns from the grave for one last game.
After a poor but ambitious Central American farm worker overthrows his country's tyrannical leader, he believes he sees assassins everywhere. A look in the mirror reveals his most dangerous enemy.
Before he died, notorious gunslinger Pinto Sykes put a curse on hired-gun Conny Miller. Miller returns to town and is challenged to visit the grave of Sykes, despite the curse.
Little Anthony Fremont controls an entire town with his ability to read minds and make people do as he wishes. Which is a real good thing.
A former Nazi SS Captain returns to the ruins of a concentration camp to reminisce, and is met by one of his victims.
The Earth's orbit has been changed, drawing ever closer to the sun and promising eminent destruction.
During the Civil War, a Confederate scout enters a town to find Yankee soldiers frozen in place.
Alan Richards plans to build a dam in Africa on a tribe's ancestral land. The tribe's voodoo doctor puts a curse on him.
Woodrow, a janitor living in the year 1890, accidentally activates a time travelling helmet which transports him to 1962 - then promptly breaks down!
A hobo, clown, bagpipe player, ballerina and military officer are trapped in a huge cylinder.
A soldier gets a new perspective on war when he is forced to experience it from his enemy's point of view.
A lonely old woman refuses to leave her apartment for fear of meeting ""Mr. Death.""
Paul Radin has invited three people to join him in his bomb shelter.
A vagrant steps into a murdered gangster's expensive shoes and is taken over by the dead man's ghost, who vows to remain on Earth to seek revenge against his killer.
On a hunting trip, Hyder Simpson and his dog Rip dive into a lake after a raccoon. When he gets home he finds that no one can see or hear him.
The egotistic star of a western TV series comes face to face with the real Jesse James.
The senior residents of Sunnyvale decide that the secret to youth is acting young, and in particular playing a childhood game called ""kick-the-can.""
A cynical theater critic takes advantage of a player piano that reveals people's hidden selves.
Jeff Myrtlebank comes back to life at his own funeral and soon begins to act very strangely...
The Kanamits, 9 foot tall aliens, arrive on Earth with one lofty goal: To Serve Man.
Old Ben, who is able to transform himself into anything, tries to help a crippled little girl.
A six-year-old girl rolls under her bed and vanishes into a fourth dimension. Her parents and a neighbor struggle to free her before the hole between the dimensions closes forever.
David Gurney wakes up to find that no one - his wife, his co-workers, his best friend, not even his own mother knows him.
An astronaut declares himself a god when his ship lands on a planet populated by people smaller than ants.
Oliver Crangle is a bitter, prejudiced man. Through unknown means he intends to shrink every evil person in the world at four o'clock. When four o'clock comes around, it is he who shrinks.
A loud-mouthed braggart's boasts attract the attention of some aliens.
An elderly couple visit the New Life Corporation, hoping to transport their personalities into youthful artificial bodies.
An alien who crash-lands into a remote mountain village stirs up the villagers' fears and animosity, but he befriends a little boy and gives him a mysterious present.
A ventriloquist is convinced that his dummy, Willie, is alive and evil. He makes plans for a new act with a new dummy: plans that Willie doesn't support!
When a newlywed couple briefly return to the groom's childhood home, the ties of the past prove too strong to resist.
A widower buys a robot grandmother for his three children.
A clumsy theater worker meets her equally bumbling guardian angel.
A retiring professor contemplates suicide.
A scientist creates an android that has the qualities which he feels he's lacking.
A US naval destroyer investigates a mysterious tapping sound coming from a sunken submarine.
A reporter finds himself trapped in a small town where people can reverse time and do many other amazing things.
Peter Vollmer, a small-time neo-Nazi leader, yearns for more power. Advised by a shadowy benefactor, Vollmer's following grows, as does his ego...
A 12-year-old girl who lost her parents in a fire doesn't speak because she has grown up in a secret telepathic community. The couple who take her in, and her teacher, are determined to help her adapt to their society, no matter the cost.
A three-man spacecraft lands on a planet only to discover the wreckage of a spacecraft identical to their own. Two of the crew are convinced that they are dead, but the captain refuses to see the truth.
Jess-Belle (Anne Francis) enlists the aid of a local witch who casts a spell that makes Billy-Ben Turner (James Best) fall in love with her.
A lonely man falls in love with a mini museum doll, which he believes is alive.
The owner of a failing paper is given help by the Devil.
A man travels back in time to try to prevent some of history's catastrophes.
An astronaut blacks out orbiting the earth and ends up in a parallel universe.
A man considers several possibilities when offered one wish by a genie.
The curator of a murderers' row in a soon-to-be-defunct wax museum persuades the owner to let him keep the figures for awhile. When his wife attempts to destroy them, a new murderous rampage begins...
A bored, wealthy businessman gets a chance to go back in time and start over, armed with all the knowledge he's acquired...an arsenal that's not as powerful as he thinks.
Toy designer Horace Ford spends most of his time reminiscing about his idyllic childhood. But when he gets a chance to go back to those years he gets a bitter taste of reality.
In 2021, a group of space pioneers prepare for a return trip to Earth upon having failed to establish a new society on a distant planet. The group's leader refuses to give up his authority.
To save their marriage, a couple book a cruise on a ship whose other passengers are elderly.
An untalented would-be writer's career takes off when the ghost of William Shakespeare writes his script.
Max Phillips (Jack Klugman) is an alcoholic bookie that regrets that he wasn't a better father to his son, Pip (Bill Mumy), critically wounded in South Vietnam. A visit to an amusement park gives them both a second chance.
Boxing robot "Battling Maxo" breaks down before the scheduled bout, forcing his manager to take its place.
Mr. Wilson believes he sees a gremlin on the wing of his commercial aircraft.
The world's biggest bore and most avid talker gets a magical stopwatch that can stop everything except him.
A disgraced jockey is granted his wish to be "big."
Erich is displeased when his wife buys an expensive doll for his step-daughter. He becomes even more displeased when the doll tells him it doesn't like him!
A mysterious guardian helps a tiny community survive after the Bomb destroys much of the Earth.
Caregiver Barbara Polk receives a surprise after her uncle's death. His will stipulates that she must care for his latest invention - a robot.
The lone survivors of two annihilated worlds are stranded on a distant planet.
Three National Guardsmen explore the site of Custer's Last Stand.
Trying to keep up with his younger wife, Harmon convinces his brother to inject him with an experimental youth serum.
An old man fears that he will die if his grandfather clock stops running.
Bunny receives a ring from her fan club in her home town. In the ring she sees the faces of people from her hometown telling her she's needed there. She arrives in Howardville on the day of the annual Founder's Day picnic and tries to get the chairman of the picnic to postpone it a day, but he refuses. Will she be able to help them when they need her most?
Driving home one rainy evening, Oliver Pope accidentally hits a boy on a bicycle. Pope flees the scene, determined to hide his guilt, but his car has other ideas.
An astronaut falls in love with a woman before going on a 40-year mission into space.
A man finds that he can trade characteristics with others.
In a future where everyone must undergo an operation at the age of 19 to make them identical to everyone else, one woman desperately tries to hang onto her own identity.
Three tough-looking men on motorcycles disrupt a peaceful suburb when they move in. Yet the neighbors could never imagine just how dangerous these men really are.
An elderly, wheelchair-bound lady receives strange anonymous phone calls overnight when she's alone.
A computer technician must deal with the queen of all femme fatales: a computer named Agnes who wreaks havoc on his love life.
After being chased on horseback by a terrifying, unidentified figure in black, Anne Henderson faces the biggest decision of her life.
As a Confederate spy is about to be hanged, the rope breaks and he falls to the water below. Finally free, he races for his home where his family awaits... as does the terrible truth of his future.
Columnist Jordan Herrick is startled to learn that a famous movie actress hasn't aged in years. Intrigued, he investigates... and soon learns a terrifying secret.
A cheating husband sees his secret revealed and it's horrible consequences on his just-repaired TV set.
A dying man demands his family wear masks that he's given them at a Mardi Gras party.
On the day an unpopular idealist is to be executed for the killing of a racist bully, the townsfolk are shocked to see the skies have turned pitch black.
A man's wish to listen to loud noise backfires.
A ventriloquist's dummy goads him into committing burglaries.
Trying to defect, Major Ivan Kuchenko is trapped inside a hotel room with Commissar Vassiloff, a hitman, and Boris, his assistant, in the room across the street. Vassiloff has planted a bomb in the room and Ivan must find it within three hours or be blown to bits.
Bob and Millie wake up to find they are in a strange town. Everything appears to be props - trees, animals and even cars.
A World War II veteran and a Japanese-American gardener battle each other over a war that ended more than 20 years ago.
Jared Garrity arrives in the Old West town of Happiness, Arizona, proclaiming he can revive the dead.
A factory CEO replaces human workers with machines.
A singer searches for an authentic folk song.
Two people in a remote cabin find signs of an extraterrestrial.
Two unhappy children find a happy escape in a swimming pool.
Imagine if you will, a young boy with a monstrous imagination. A lad whose fascination with sci-fi magazines and high school drama kindled a spark that would ignite into one of the brightest creative minds of this century. A young boy by the name of Rod Serling. Embark on a fascinating tour of the life of Rod Serling in this "American Masters" special. Learn the fascinating story of how television's most esteemed and popular writer outwitted stifling sponsor censorship by creating a series devoted entirely to fantasy stories--"The Twilight Zone." While censors looked elsewhere, Serling skillfully wrote "fanciful" tales that dealt with controversial issues of the day. Extensive interviews with key figures such as John Frankenheimer, Jack Klugman, Kim Hunter and Buck Houghton provide a detailed portrait of the man whose innovative work changed the course of television history.
This tv movie features two stories by Rod Serling, who also wrote the stories of the original "Twilight Zone" (1959) series. "The Theater": A young girl goes to the cinema to see His Girl Friday (1940) with Cary Grant. Suddenly she sees scenes from her own life instead of the comedy. The scenes actually took place earlier that day. She is very confused because the other people didn't see those scenes. As she goes to see the movie again, scenes from her future appear on the screen. And that future is very frightening... "Where the Dead Are": Dr. Benjamin Ramsey is professor at the university in Boston in 1868. In front of his students he performes an appendix operation. As the patient O'Neil dies after the operation, Dr. Ramsey discovers that O'Neil suffered from a serious scull fracture twelve years ago. Since no one could have survived such an injury, he travels to the mysterious island where O'Neil came from. There he visits Dr. Jeremy Wheaton who earlier had experimented with tissue regeneration...
Four directors collaborated to remake four episodes of the popular television series 'The Twilight Zone' for this movie. The episodes are updated slightly and in color (the television show was in black-and-white), but very true to the originals, where eerie and disturbing situations gradually spin out of control.
E! True Hollywood Story episode about Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone.
Kraft Theatre: Season 8, Episode 16 According to PBS's American Master's series web site, this drama was so popular that it became the first live drama in television history to be broadcast twice due to popularity. The drama was broadcast as both episodes 16 and 20 of season 8
Rod Serling's early play. The story of the fierce and corrosive competition that exists in the executive branch of Ramsey & Co., a New York industrial colossus headed by Walter Ramsey, its cold, designing and ruthless chief. It is the saga, too, of Bill Briggs, his longtime second in command, who is swayed by human as well as technological values. And, it is the case of Fred Staples, a comparatively youthful industrial engineer brought in by Ramsey to succeed Briggs. The younger man's views and sensitivities are essentially the same as Briggs'. People are not merely units, they feel. But it is Ramsey's calculated pattern not to fire his aging aide but to create such untenable positions that he will be forced to resign
