2010-2011 New Year's Twilight Zone Marathon

Here's the line up for the latest New Year's Marathon. I'm late on posting, so this is well underway. Rod Serling fans also had a chance to see the cinematic adaptation of his Requiem for a Heavyweight on TCM on December 30, 2010. A few hours before the Marathon started, Syfy aired the episodes "The Mind and the Matter" and "The Whole Truth." Even though, it's been a year since the last marathon, Syfy isn't airing any of the hour long episodes. Plus, either the marathon is wrapping up with an episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone, or Syfy is running one immediately after the marathon's end. This is the episode, "The Last Defender of Camelot."

#	Time	Episode
1	8:00 AM Dec. 31	Perchance to Dream
2	8:30 AM	The Four of Us Are Dying
3	9:00 AM	The Fever
4	9:30 AM	A Thing About Machines
5	10:00 AM	What’s in the Box?
6	10:30 AM	And When the Sky Was Opened
7	11:00 AM	Ring A Ding Girl
8	11:30 AM	Escape Clause
9	12:00 PM	Mr. Garrity and the Graves
10	12:30 PM	In Praise of Pip
11	1:00 PM	Queen of the Nile
12	1:30 PM	A Nice Place to Visit
13	2:00 PM	The Last Flight
14	2:30 PM	Mr. Bevis
15	3:00 PM	The Old Man in the Cave
16	3:30 PM	A Penny for Your Thoughts
17	4:00 PM	The Hunt
18	4:30 PM	Walking Distance
19	5:00 PM	A Hundred Yards Over the Rim
20	5:30 PM	A Most Unusual Camera
21	6:00 PM	I Sing the Body Electric
22	6:30 PM	It’s a Good Life
23	7:00 PM	The Eye of the Beholder
24	7:30 PM	The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
25	8:00 PM - 10:00 PM	WRESTLING
26	10:00 PM	The Hitchhiker
27	10:30 PM	Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
28	11:00 PM	The Howling Man
29	11:30 PM	The Masks
30	12:00 AM NEW YEAR’S!!!	The Midnight Sun
31	12:30 AM	Third from the Sun
32	1:00 AM	Long Distance Call
33	1:30 AM	One for the Angels
34	2:00 AM	The Night of the Meek
35	2:30 AM	Nightmare as a Child
36	3:00 AM	Night Call
37	3:30 AM	Probe Seven Over and Out
38	4:00 AM	The Rip Van Winkle Caper
39	4:30 AM	I Am the Night, Color Me Black
40	5:00 AM	The Grave
41	5:30 AM	The Fear
42	6:00 AM	Judgment Night
43	6:30 AM	Long Live Walter Jameson
44	7:00 AM	The Arrival
45	7:30 AM	A Quality of Mercy
46	8:00 AM	The Fugitive
47	8:30 AM	The Gift
48	9:00 AM	Black Leather Jackets
49	9:30 AM	A Piano in the House
50	10:00 AM	The Shelter
51	10:30 AM	A World of His Own
52	11:00 AM	A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain
53	11:30 AM	Mr. Denton on Doomsday
54	12:00 PM	I Shot an Arrow into the Air
55	12:30 PM	The Little People
56	1:00 PM	A Kind of Stopwatch
57	1:30 PM	The 7th is Made up of Phantoms
58	2:00 PM	Mr. Dingle, the Strong
59	2:30 PM	People are Alike All Over
60	3:00 PM	Stopover in a Quiet Town
61	3:30 PM	A Game of Pool
62	4:00 PM	Number Twelve Looks Just Like You
63	4:30 PM	Nick of Time
64	5:00 PM	The Bewitchin’ Pool
65	5:30 PM	The Dummy
66	6:00 PM	Little Girl Lost
67	6:30 PM	Kick the Can
68	7:00 PM	The Invaders
69	7:30 PM	Five Characters in Search of an Exit
70	8:00 PM	The Odyssey of Flight 33
71	8:30 PM	Where is Everybody?
72	9:00 PM	To Serve Man
73	9:30 PM	Time Enough at Last
74	10:00 PM	Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
75	10:30 PM	Living Doll
76	11:00 PM	A Stop at Willoughby
77	11:30 PM	The Obsolete Man
78	12:00 AM JANUARY 2ND	The After Hours
79	12:30 AM	Death’s Head Revisited
80	1:00 AM	Two
81	1:30 AM	Mirror Image
82	2:00 AM	The Changing of the Guard
83	2:30 AM	Twenty-Two
84	3:00 AM	The Lonely
85	3:30 AM	Dead Man’s Shoes
86	4:00 AM	Hocus Pocus and Frisby
87	4:30 AM	Nothing in the Dark
88	5:00 AM	Ninety Years with out Slumbering
89	5:30 AM	The Last Defender of Camelot (From the 1980s series)

The Twilight Zone vs The Greatest American Hero: A Tale of Two Marathons

Weighing in on Syfy’s clueless decision to replace the traditional July 4th Twilight Zone marathon with The Greatest American Hero, Matt Clark asks which is better shown on Independence Day, The Twilight Zone or The Greatest American Hero? Unfortunately, Clark gets it totally wrong when he makes his argument about which show is more relevant to the holiday.

I thought the correct answer would be obvious. I guess not.

Let’s see. One show bills a clueless doofus as “The Greatest American Hero.” Wow! Greater than Abraham Lincoln? Greater than Martin Luther King? Greater than George Washington or all our veterans, explorers, pioneers, firefighters, policeman, and scientists? Calling the bumbling, incompetent clod played by William Katt America’s greatest hero is a joke, and it’s obvious that the show’s creators meant it as a joke. More than that, it’s an insult to all the real heroes out there whether they risked their lives for something they believed in or they devoted their lives to making the world a better place. This is the show Matt Clark prefers to see on the 4th?

In the other corner, you have The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling was a real American hero who fought in World War II as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division. Many Twilight Zone episodes incorporate American history into their plots. There are episodes like “The Passersby,” “Still Valley,” and “Back There” set around The Civil War. There’s “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim” which shows us the struggles of the pioneers. “The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms” involves Custer’s Last Stand. “A Quality of Mercy” and “The Purple Testament” feature American soldiers fighting in World War II. Other episodes promote American ideals like freedom, equality, individualism, and dissent.

Consider these:

In “The Obsolete Man” Burgess Meredith plays Romney Wordsworth, a Bible reading librarian who defies a dictatorship that bans books and religion. “The Eye of the Beholder” and “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You” promote individualism and dissent against societies that demand rigid conformity. Next time you watch those episodes listen to what’s happening, and what beliefs the characters espouse. The societies in “Eye” and “Twelve” not only demand that everyone look alike, they also demand conformity in thought and belief. In those two tales, the viewers are meant to identify with the women who stand up against those societies. In “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You,” (adapted from Charles Beaumont’s short story “The Beautiful People”) Marilyn not only resists physical transformation, she expresses non-conformist ideas and reads books banned by the government. In “The Eye of the Beholder” Janet Tyler does desperately wants to look acceptable to everyone else. She doesn’t want to end up being forced into a ghetto, but eventually she reaches a breaking point where she rants against the government which is forcing her to look like everyone else. She shouts, “The state is not God! The state is not God!” For part of the episode, “The Leader” gives a speech extolling “glorious conformity” and demands a single society and a single norm and that we cut out all that is different. Much of this speech plays on after Tyler tries to escape.

Especially important is the Twilight Zone’s style of patriotism. It’s a patriotism of promoting what’s best about America. It’s about striving to live up to ideals like freedom, equality, individuality, dissent, and tolerance, and challenging us to do better in areas where we hadn’t lived up to those ideals. It pits this style of patriotism squarely against the Nazi or “Know Nothing” style of jingoistic patriotism which wishes to stamp out all that is different. See episodes like “He’s Alive.” TZ also pits this style of patriotism against the McCarthyist style of patriotism in episodes like “The Eye of the Beholder.” Or look at the rebuke of jingoism in “No Time Like the Past.,” an episode written by Rod Serling. After time traveller Paul Driscoll fails in attempts to assassinate Hitler, stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, and effect the evacuation of Hiroshima, he goes to the 1880s, deciding to stay in that time and live in Homewood, Indiana. Like Serling, Driscoll served in World War II and experienced the horrors of combat. Once in Homewood, he’s subjected to a lecture by a middle aged banker who’s never fought in a war. The man is prone to lectures about how the country should aggressively start wars from Oregon to Australia and back to South America and “plant the flag, deep, high, and proud.” Echoing sentiments expressed by Hitler decades later, the man claims that a nation’s virility is measured by it’s fighting qualities. When the subject of Indians comes up, the man sneers at allowing Indians to have any land at all. He says that the country needed “twenty George Custers” and a hundred thousand men and they should have destroyed every “redskin” that faced them. Noting Driscoll’s lack of approval, the banker contemptuously asks Driscoll if he’s some kind of pacifist. Driscoll responds, “No, I’m some kind of sick idiot who’s seen too many young men die because of too many old men like you who fight their battles at dining room tables.” When the banker says he takes offense to that remark, Driscoll continues, “And I take offense at armchair warriors who don’t know what a shrapnel wound feels like or what death smells like after three days in the sun, or the look in a man’s eyes when he realizes he’s minus a leg and his blood is seeping out.” After fighting in one, Serling grew to hate war. His attitude toward war wasn’t of total pacifism. It was that people should seek to avoid it, but they should fight when they have to. That’s the attitude we see throughout The Twilight Zone. For example, we see it from the American soldiers in “A Quality of Mercy” and “The Purple Testament” to the moral of “The Passersby.”

The Twilight Zone often delves into American history. It honors the sacrifices of veterans without portraying war as a game to stand up and cheer about. It promotes some of America’s best ideals including freedom, tolerance, and individuality. So, yes, The Twilight Zone is more relevant to The Fourth than The Greatest American Hero is.

Cheer up, Mr. Clark. You’ve got potential. From what I’ve read, you’ve got what it takes to be a Syfy executive.