There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man... It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity... It is the middle ground between light and shadow... Between science...

...and superstition... And it lies between the pit of man's fears... And the summit of his knowledge... This is the dimension of imagination... It is an area which we call…

—Rod Serling's original voiceover to The Twilight Zone (October 2,1959)

The Twilight Zone FOREVER

On the 50^th Anniversary of The Father of American Popular Culture, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone

Fifty years ago, at 10:00 pm on Friday, October 2, 1959, CBS Television broadcast the pilot episode of a new series, Twilight Zone. Fifty years later, we can still ask the simplest of questions: what, exactly, was The Twilight Zone?

The answers were right there in the beginning. The copy in CBS' newspaper ad for the debut episode "Where Is Everybody?" enigmatically declared, next to an extreme closeup of, atypically, not the episode's star, but instead, for the first (and only?) time in the young medium's history, its writer/creator ("one of television's most famous playwrights"), Twilight Zone (without the "The," though the article was prominently featured in the show's distinctive on-air logo) was "...defined by the author as: ‘The land that lies between science and superstition, between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. You will find the bizarre, but the believable; the different, the shocking that is yet understandable.'" A fine definition, to this day, of good science fiction literature—but the ad's next line can be read indirectly as a pre-post-modern justification of television itself as being on par with any literary genre or visual narrative, like film—while superceding the medium that preceded TV, radio:

"Its tales must be shown; they cannot be told."

The ad concludes, "And each carries with it its own special surprise," a foreshadowing of the O. Henry-esque twist endings that are among The Twilight Zone's most memorable trademarks—along with its eerie, eternal theme music (French composer Marius Constant), and the sound and vision of the series' only true star in a who's-who of Hollywood actors, its multiple-Emmy Award-winning creator, head writer, on-air host and narrator, possessed with perhaps the most singular, dramatic broadcast voice of the 20^th Century, Rod Serling (1925-1975).

Top 10 Twilight Zone movie stars:

Charles Bronson ("Two," 1961); James Coburn ("The Old Man in The Cave," 1963); Robert Duvall ("Miniature," 1963); Dennis Hopper ("He’s Alive," 1963), Lee Marvin ("The Grave," 1961); Roddy McDowell ("People Are Alike All Over," 1960); Robert Redford ("Nothing in The Dark," 1962); Burt Reynolds ("The Bard," 1963); Cliff Robertson ("The Dummy," 1962); Gig Young ("Walking Distance," 1959).

Top 10 Twilight Zone television stars:

Carol Burnett, 1960 (The Carol Burnett Show, 1967); Peter Falk, 1961 (Columbo, 1968); Jack Klugman, 1960 (The Odd Couple, 1970); Martin Landau, 1964 (Mission: Impossible, 1966); Burgess Meredith, 1959 (Batman, 1966); Elizabeth Montgomery, 1961 (Bewitched, 1964); Bill Mumy, 1961 (Lost in Space, 1965); Telly Sevalis, 1963 (Kojak, 1973); William Shatner, 1960 (Star Trek, 1966); Dennis Weaver, 1961 (McCloud, 1970).

Introduction to The Twilight Zone
episode "A Thing About Machines," 1960.

Serling firmly places in the 20^th Century pantheon of great American-Jewish humanist liberal writers—from Arthur Miller to Marvel Comics' Stan Lee, from Budd Schulberg to Mad Magazine's Harvey Kurtzman—who, though toiling in commercial entertainment mediums from Broadway to Hollywood, nevertheless produced great and lasting art that has transcended its genre entertainment origins—like Serling's The Twilight Zone.

Rodman Edward Serling was born in Syracuse, New York, but raised downstate in Binghamton, which lay somewhere in that twilight zone between large town and small city, urban and suburban, endemic of the northeast United States in the early part of the century, replete with perfectly-kept parks, town centers with vintage carousels and gazeboes, homes with front porches and back yards—enough bucolic, Rockwellian Americana to give the adult Serling such pangs of nostalgic longing that it brought forth two of his greatest Twilight Zone episodes, "Walking Distance" and "A Stop at Willoughby," both from the Hall-of-Fame first season of 1959-60 (a startling quantity of 36 original half-hours of anthology drama of unparalleled quality, depth and breadth in the history of television).

The sister episodes each had thirtysomething ad men—Serling's doppelgangers—burned out from years in the Madison Avenue trenches, looking for some kind of respite; one finds it in a literal return to his childhood home ("Homewood" in "Walking Distance"), the other even further back, to a 19^th Century idyll ("Willoughby"), which turns out to be an illusory 't go home again."

Leaving Binghamton and entering World War II as a paratrooper in the Pacific theater—and surviving—was a loss of innocence Serling, like his entire generation, never really recovered from, but instead, channeled into a creative, compassionate consciousness and an empathetic, wizened worldview as a writer; the specters of war and time, good and evil, mortality and immortality, hover over and through Serling's entire body of work, but especially in The Twilight Zone, with two episodes taking place specifically where Serling saw action, the Philippines.

"The Purple Testament," also from the remarkable first season, is the purple glow of death Lieutenant Fitzgerald (William Reynolds, later of The FBI, a Quinn Martin production) can clairvoyantly, preternaturally see on a doomed soldier's face before his death; in the third season's "A Quality of Mercy," Dean (Blue Velvet) Stockwell is a callous American lieutenant who, in the final days of the war, is about to bombard the last, holed-up Japanese, when suddenly, in classic, ironic Twilight Zone juxtaposition, he's transformed into a Japanese soldier, and experiences the same mercilessness towards trapped American GIs from his cruel commanding officer. "We have met the enemy and it is us," indeed.

Serling was at the right place at the right time after the war ended, at the transition between radio and the new media kid on the block, television. While attending Antioch University on the GI Bill, Serling first broke into radio writing scripts freelance, then, after graduation, took a staff writing job for a station in Cincinatti. Soon after, he crossed over into TV, and never looked back: by 1955 he had written over 70 scripts for live television anthology drama—the forerunner of The Twilight Zone—eventually moving to the East Coast (Westport, Connecticut, where Luci and Desi "moved" to in 1957, where ‘68's The Swimmer and ‘75's The Stepford Wives were filmed, was Serling's model for the suburban/commuter milieus of episodes like "Willoughby" and "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street") to be closer to live TV's production home, New York City.

"My future is unquestionably in TV.
Television is much more intimate. You're looking at people close up, both physically and psychologically." —Serling, 1955.

Closeups from the anarchic conclusion of
" The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," 1960.

Early Emmy Award-winning triumphs like ‘55's "Patterns," about ageism and office politics, and ‘56's "Requiem for a Heavyweight," about mortality and prizefighting (Serling himself was an amateur boxer), which CBS Chairman William Paley proudly announced had "...advanced TV by 10 years," established Serling, along with peers Reginald Rose ("Twelve Angry Men") and Paddy Chayefsky ("Marty"), as a new commodity on the cultural scene: a "television playwright."

Serling's "television playwrighting" had been heavily influenced by Norman Corwin, a major figure during the Golden Age of Radio in the 1930s and 40s, who was one of the first producers to regularly use entertainment to tackle serious social issues. But by the mid-Fifties, when McCarthyism and the Cold War chilled the broadcast air, Serling's Corwinesque scripts, tackling controversial subjects like race, war and politics, put him at loggerheads with the censors of the nascent industry, and its de facto censors: TV's financial sponsors, the advertisers and their agencies who exerted an inordinate amount of control over the content of its clients' programs like Kraft Television Theater and United States Steel Hour, named for their patrons like today's stadiums bear the names, and logos, of their corporate benefactors.

Their creative interference ranged from the sacred to the profane—a coffee maker didn't want characters drinking tea; a gas company demanded references to concentration camps' gas chambers removed. After they gutted his ‘57 Capitol Hill drama "The Arena," Serling maintained he would have had a more "adult" play if he had transposed the setting 100 years in the future and peopled the Senate with robots. Cue The Twilight Zone theme...

The years of constant clashing had worn Serling down—on the eve of The Twilight Zone's premiere in ‘59, Serling told The New York Times that he was "not a meek conformist but a tired nonconformist"—and, through his new vehicle The Twilight Zone, "...through parable and allusion, he could make social comment and confront issues," his widow Carol wrote in 1990. "Speaking in the phraseology of fantasy and within the perimeters of his own show—it was the only time in his TV career that he had complete creative control—Rod could comment allegorically on universal themes. His avuncular presence calmed the viewer while suggesting that there were things in the world that needed a course correction. The TV censors left him alone, either because they didn't understand what he was doing or believed that he was truly in outer space.”

The writing was on the wall, anyway: by the end of the decade, live TV, proving too expensive to produce in New York, uprooted like the Dodgers and Giants and moved to Los Angeles, downsizing to cheaper filmed series that could be shown in perpetuity—modern television as we know it. Rather than be caught slumming in the new, déclassé format, the Chayefskys and Roses moved "up" to writing films, but Serling chose to remain in filmed TV, in The Twilight Zone, much to the feigned chagrin of middlebrow critics crying crocodile tears over the loss of live, pseudo-prestigious productions like Playhouse 90.

In a televised interview with CBS' own Mike Wallace ten days before The Twilight Zone debuted, Wallace opened with a whopper of a backhanded compliment: "Now that you're doing The Twilight Zone," he addressed Serling, "does that mean you won't be writing anything important for television?"

His measured, thoughtful response to his host's (in-?) direct insult reveals Rod Serling to be not just a thinking man's writer, but a true visionary, a pre-pop artist and avatar of the explosion in commercial creativity—modern American popular culture as we know it— that remains the dominant artistic legacy of The Sixties:

"The exciting thing about our medium is its potential, the fact that it doesn't have to be imitative. What it can produce in terms of novelty and ingenuity has barely been scratched. We want to prove that television, even in its half-hour form, can be both commercial and worthwhile. This is a medium that can spread out, delve deep, probe fully and reach out experimentally to whole new concepts. The horizons of what it can do and where it can go stretch out beyond vision."

Sixty minutes: CBS promotional ad, 1959. Serling's vision, The Twilight Zone, would go beyond making Wallace and his ilk eat their words; it became not only one of the most revered and remembered television shows of all time, but a conceptual catchphrase that would enter the lexicon, a touchstone that would profoundly influence a wide spectrum of American artists, actors, writers and filmmakers—today's science-fiction, fantasy and horror genre creators, from Steven Spielberg to Stephen King (and all their

From Joan to Jaws: Spielberg gets first pro break directing Crawford in the 1969 pilot of Serling's Twilight Zone knockoff, Night Gallery, in the new 90-minute "TV movie" format; leads to directing '71 TV movie Duel, written by TZ veteran Richard Matheson, about a man—another TZ vet, Dennis Weaver— being chased by a monstrous Mack truck, whose driver we never see; leads to directing minor film in '75...

contemporaries and descendents)—all of whom owe a debt to Serling and his dark masterpiece The Twilight Zone for lighting the imaginative sparks that ignited their greatest works.

King's Danse Macabre (1981); his Christine (1983); the driverless car from "A Thing About Machines," 1960.

"The Twilight Zone is damn near immortal," wrote prolific horrormeister King in Danse Macabre, his idiosyncratic 1981 non-fiction survey of the science fiction, fantasy and horror fields. "Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different," he said of the series, and of Serling, "who finally answered H.P. Lovecraft, who showed a new direction. For me and those of my generation, the answer was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities."

Those possibilities include the productions of not only the most obvious TV knockoffs The Outer Limits (1963), Serling's own Night Gallery (1969), George Romero's Tales From The Darkside (1983) and two titular syndicated TV revamps of recent vintage (both in wrong-headed full color and utterly dismissible)—or the Spielberg-produced turkey The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)—but practically every example of modern science fiction, fantasy or horror that can trace its roots back to Serling and The Twilight Zone in less than six degrees of separation.

Star Trek would have simply been a glimmer in Gene Roddenberry's eye without Serling and The Twilight Zone tackling many of the same socio-political themes Trek would become known for; its first episode was entrusted to veteran Twilight Zone sci-fi scribe George Clayton Johnson, and Roddenberry himself delivered the eulogy at Serling's funeral (after his premature death at the age of 49 in 1975):

"No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves. He dreamed of much for us, and demanded much of himself, perhaps more than was possible for either in this time and place. But it is that quality of dreams and demands that makes the ones like Rod Serling rare...and always irreplaceable."

Twilight Zone 3^rd season title, Pacific title, Pacific Title, 1961: William Shatner in Richard Matheson's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," 1963; Star Trek title graphic, 1966; Shatner as the "evil" Kirk in Matheson's "The Enemy Within," 1966.

One of the greatest endings in modern movie history—the Statue of Liberty scene that concludes 1968's Planet of The Apes—most are unaware of was the creation of Serling, (who co-wrote the screen adaptation), a big-screen revamp of a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, "I Shot An Arrow In to the Air," in which an astronaut, crash-landed on a desert planet, discovers—after murdering his two crewmen—that he's been on earth the whole time (suggested by an acquaintance of Serling's at a cocktail party!), foreshadowed by a dying astronaut's telephone pole-scrawl in the sand.

"People Are Alike All Over," starring Roddy McDowell, 1960; McDowell starred as Cornelius in Planet of The Apes, 1968; the iconic ending by Serling; its antecedent, "I Shot an Arrow into The Air," 1960.

"The Invaders," 1960; 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968.

1968's other sci-fi masterpiece, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, contained numerous Twilight Zone tropes, from the robot HAL's autonomy ("The Lonely") to the film's Spaceship-in-baroque penultimate scene, as surreal a juxtaposition between future and past as The Twilight Zone episode, "The Invaders," that preceded it by seven years. George Lucas and Star Wars? Lucas' first film was the 1971 Francis Ford Coppolafinanced sci-fi THX 1138, a dystopian-future vision equal parts Orwell and Serling, starring a pre-Godfather Robert Duvall, then a veteran of The Twilight Zone (1963's "Miniature"). Ridley Scott's (and Philip K. Dick's) Blade Runner? About "replicants" wanting to become human? Hello, Twilight Zone?

The series' impact is felt more obliquely in the edgier, darker works of directors like David Lynch, whose 1977 debut film, the undergroundy, black and white Eraserhead, his revealing of the seedy underbelly of suburbia in ‘86's Blue Velvet, and his meditation on dreams and reality in his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive, all reveal his own private Twilight Zone.

The enigmatic Austrailian director Peter Weir, whose first breakthrough films, ‘75's Picnic at Hanging Rock and ‘77's The Last Wave, are like beautifully filmed, full-color, down under Twilight Zone episodes, directed 1998's The Truman Show, about a man (Jim Carrey) who comes to find that his life, his reality, is a massive fabrication for television—a big screen blowup of Richard Matheson's 1960 Twilight Zone episode, "A World of Difference," about a man who finds that his reality is a movie being filmed (the filmmakers think he's an actor off his nut).

M. Night Shyamalan's entire career (and Tim Burton's, to a lesser degree) can be seen as an ongoing homage to The Twilight Zone; the smash hit that made him, 1999's The Sixth Sense (also the name of a short-lived 1972 supernatural TV knockoff of The Twilight Zone), is a derivation (and conflation) of two classic first-season Zone episodes, "A Passage for Trumpet" and "The Hitch-Hiker."

The high contrast, graphic black and white cinematography of modern cult films, from Romero's original Night of the Living Dead (1967) to Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Darren Aronofsky's 1998 Pi to Frank Miller's Sin City (2005)—to mainstream classics like Raging Bull (1980)—all betray a strong Twilight Zone influence; see the series' two boxing episodes, "The Big Tall Wish" and "Steel," for the same stylized staging and less-is-more compositions of Scorsese's black and white masterpiece.

"Living Doll," 1963; Night of the Living Dead, 1967; Raging Bull, 1980; the set of "The Big Tall Wish," 1960.

"...Wish," another episode from Twilight Zone's exceptional first season, is most notable for Serling's absolutely daring casting—in 1960—of a black actor (Ivan Dixon, later one of Hogan's Heroes) in a starring, dramatic role on American television. Like Jack Palance's palooka in Serling's "Requiem for a Heavyweight," Dixon's an over-the-hill boxer who finds winning dependent not just on a young boy's supernaturally wishing it so, but on his own willingness to believe it—Serling's subtle Civil Rights pep talk. "...Wish" aired in April, months before another triumphant, smiling, African-American boxer came to prominence on TV, in the Summer Olympics in Rome: Cassius Clay.

More TV and The Twilight Zone: Chris Carter's The X-Files? ‘Nuff said. JJ Abrams' Lost? Serling had a brief (17 episode) post-Twilight Zone series in the Fall of '69 called The New People, about a group of young people...survivors of an airplane crash...on a deserted island! His new hit Fringe is as much Twilight Zone redux as X-Files, as he said so himself in Rollingstone, which presented its 2009 "Most Shocking Season Finale" award to Fringe, enthusing "Not since The Twilight Zone has a twist ending inspired so many goosebumps," to which Abrams responded, "It felt exactly like the kind of thing Rod Serling would have done."

Beyond movies and television, beyond good-natured yet rote impersonations and parodies of Serling's iconic presence and clipped, clenched vocal delivery, beyond sound bites of the equally-iconic theme music, beyond mentions of the series in everyday usage, Serling and The Twilight Zone are an almost invisible—yet pervasive—influence on modern art and the wider popular culture. Twilight Zone's spinning black and white vortex from its 1961 opening predates the Op Art movement by a year (and was the model for Irwin Allen's The Time Tunnel TV series in 1966, to boot).

Twilight Zone 3^rd season vortex, 1961; Bridget Riley, Blaze I, 1962: The Time Tunnel, 1966.

"The Dummy," 1962; George Segal, The Photo Booth, 1966.

George Segal's plaster-cast sculptures of people in commonplace poses have an eerie aura that evokes the many mannequin, robot and dummy episodes of The Twilight Zone.

"Five Characters in Search of an Exit," 1961; Untitled, 1985, by Cindy Sherman, a creator of images that are "...psychologically disturbing—they project a vague anxiety readable as a mixture of desire, anticipation, victimization and suffering."—anonymous art critic, circa 1980s.

Cindy Sherman's photographic self-portraiture, from her earliest black and white Untitled Film Stills to her current work, conveys a Twilight Zone-ish concern with the duality of appearance—as did Diane Arbus' photographs before her.

In the December '87 issue, New York City's Metropolis design magzie credited early episodes, like "The After Hours" (1960), starring Anne Francis, as "sources for our continued fascination with mannequins"; Diane Arbus, Blonde Girl with Shiny Lipstick, 1967: "I wanted to see the real difference between things," Arbus said, "between flesh and material"; "After Hours" mannequin; 1^st DEVO album, 1978.

Chris Van Allsburg's children's books' surreal-in-the-everyday stories, and especially their meticulously-studied illustrations, eventually made into movies (Jumanji, The Polar Express), are straight outta Twilight Zone.

"The Jungle" 1961; Chris Van Allsburg, Jumanji drawing, 1982.

And you may find yourself In a beautiful house With a beautiful wife And you might ask yourself Well, how did I get here?

—from "Once in a Lifetime" by David Byrne and The Talking Heads, 1980.

And the possibilities continue: the name of the latest Vampire rage, Twilight, wasn't exactly pulled out of a hat; a new show for ABC's Fall '09 season, Flash Forward, in which "the world's population is given a glimpse of their future due to a mysterious global event," is yet another conflation of Twilight Zone episodes of similar concept, "A Most Unusual Camera" (1960) and "What's in the Box" (1964); and Leonardo DiCaprio's production company is currently working on a feature film based on Serling's brainchild. On the occasion of its 50^th Anniversary, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone can legitimately be called a true Father of American Popular Culture.

Still, the question remains: what, exactly, was The Twilight Zone?

"The Invaders" end title graphic, 1960. Although it shared conceptual concerns with—and adapted stories from—the cream of the science fiction field, featuring original scripts by science fiction luminaries like Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and George Clayton Johnson, The Twilight Zone cannot be wholly considered a science fiction television series. It wasn't horror, either—yet many episodes, and their shock endings, are among the most horrific ever filmed for television (or films).

"Perchance to dream," 1959; "The Eye of the Beholder," 1960; Cindy Sherman, circa 1980s.

And it would be unfair to pass the series off as pure fantasy, for it was grounded in a reality far more real and true for its day—and ours.

Good evening, Vietnam: "My kid is dying in a place called South Vietnam...there isn't even supposed to be a war going on there..."—Serling, "In Praise of Pip," September 27, 1963,Twilight Zone's debut episode of its last season, and the first mention of the Vietnam War, in a fictional context, on American television.

More than anything else, The Twilight Zone was surreal. Compare Serling's original, 1959 voiceover definition of The Twilight Zone to the definition of surrealism itself by its French poet founder, Andre Breton, from his Second Surrrealist Manifesto exactly thirty years before:

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind From which life and death The real and the imaginary

The past and the future The high and the low The communicable and the incommunicable Will cease to appear contradictory

spot in mind" identified by French surrealist Breton was branded The Twilight Zone by American pop-surrealist Rod Serling. He put surrealism on television.

Serling and Company's twenty-three-minute meditations on a wide spectrum of philosophic concerns, from the political to the metaphysical, core concepts and pop philosophies that are the zeitgeist of The Twilight Zone, have so penetrated the mass culture that now, almost fifty years since its debut, "The Twilight Zone," as a concept, has become a psychological buzzword, unearthing automatic associations of the existential and the surreal in the commonplace. When people hum those iconic opening chords of Constant's Twilight Zone theme, they are acknowledging a moment of surrealist experience as intended by the first surrealists.

"Rod Serling's Twilight Zone scripts are, in a word, surreal," concurred 8-time Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson in an interview in 2006. "As an art form, surrealism tries to banish the distinction between the real and the unreal to provide an infinite expansion of reality. When Serling created The Twilight Zone television series, he took a job working on the frontiers of the limitless, searching for a foolproof unity of opposites."

Though he might not have considered himself a surrealist, Serling does fit the criteria of enchanter, set by the surrealist poet Novalis, as "an artist of madness." In episode after episode of The Twilight Zone, Serling's characters maddeningly questioned the very nature of their realities, both internal and external, fulfilling the surrealist desire to find a truer reality, a synthesis of the interior and exterior worlds.

Andre Breton by unknown photographer, circa 1920s, CBS newspaper ad 1959.

Howard Duff in "A World of Difference," 1960; Inger Stevens in "The Hitch-Hiker," 1960; Richard Conte in "Perchance to Dream," 1959.

This synthesis of opposites was at the core of The Twilight Zone as it was in surrealism, described by poet Pierre Reverdy in 1918 as "the bringing together of two realities which are more or less remote. The more distant and just the relationship of these realities, the stronger the image—the more emotive power and poetic reality it will have."

Man Ray's photograph, circa 1920s, illustrating another description of surrealism by Breton: "As beautiful as the unexpected meeting on a dissection table between an umbrella and a sewing machine." Or a spaceship on your rooftop ("The Invaders," 1960)...

...or a lion in your living room (Magritte, Untitled, 1955: The Jungle," 1961). Johnson elaborated, "To the mind of the surrealist, both the real and the imaginary can be equally ‘real' if, when reflected into each other, both realities make sense and mutually support each other to reveal a greater truth. When you believe both realities simultaneously your awareness of the paradoxical nature of the cosmos is intensified. You can come away from this glimpse of infinity changed, and with Rod Serling's highly-developed moral compass pointing the way, usually changed for the better."

Indeed, Serling's surrealistic concept of alternate realities—the "what if...?" quality of The Twilight Zone—paved the way for, and influenced the turbulent 1960s to come, by implicitly (and often explicitly) stating that things don't have to be the way they are, that authority and the status quo must always be challenged and questioned—and bettered. "A whole generation is able to associate the Serling program with the budding of The Sixties," acknowledged King in Danse Macabre, "at least, as The Sixties are remembered." Johnson agrees: "The Twilight Zone played just as much a part in the renaissance transformation of The Sixties as bright-colored clothing, rock music and marijuana did. It helped to jack people up to a higher level."

Between surrealism and psychedelia: One of Magritte's many doors, Victory, 1939: Twilight Zone's door, from the 4^th season opening graphics, 1963, designed by producer Herbert Hirschman, to Serling's voiceover: "You unlock this door with the key of imagination..."; Doors poster, 1967.

A lot of those people were children, according to Buck Houghton, Twilight Zone's original producer (1959-62). "The appeal to children was a complete surprise to us," he recalled to Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion in 1981. "We got a lot of nasty notes from parents saying, ‘You're keeping the kids up.'"

Chances are, if you were ten years old in 1960, and staying up to watch The Twilight Zone's episodes about racism ("The Eye of The Beholder"), prejudice ("The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street") and nuclear war ("Third From The Sun"), then eight years later you were probably marching against the Vietnam War, taking part in social change, countering the culture and the status quo—just as The Twilight Zone itself countered the status quo of the network television programming of its time, which then-FCC Chairman Newton Minow infamously described in 1961 as a "vast wasteland" of wall-to-wall westerns, cookie-cutter cop shows and bland family sitcoms.

"Five Characters in Search of an Exit," 1961.

Twilight Zone episodes like "Five Characters in Search of an Exit," which takes place in a literal twilight zone, a circular white void, and "The Obsolete Man,"

"The Obsolete Man," 1961. filmed on an outsized German expressionist set, must have seemed like broadcasts beamed from alien planets compared to the void of white bread programming surrounding them.

The surrealism of Twilight Zone episodes like those was telegraphed by their opening graphics, with their liberal borrowings from established surrealist masters: Daliesque landscapes, objects suspended Magritteolike in space.

Eyes without a face: Salvador Dali design Hitchcock's Spellbound, 1947; Twilight Zone Condition, 1933; Windows on the world: Magritte, The Human; 4^th season opening, 1963. late-1^s season opening, 1960.

Coupled with Serling's voiceovers and Constant's theme music, these incredibly unique animated and still graphics made for memorable television show openings, unlike any in television history, while stealthily foreshadowing the series' arresting interior photography.

"CBS didn't want it to be science fiction, they wanted something a little broader than that," said Sam Clayburger, artist of the first Twilight Zone opening graphics for UPA, 1959, in a 2007 interview. "Something weird, very strange, maybe a little touch of science fiction. But not much—because it wasn't going to be any one of those. They wanted something a little spooky and scary; the cave might have something to do with my claustrophobia." Down into the Tunnel of Love: "Perchance to Dream," 1959.

Daliscape, circa early 1930's. Clauburger: Iwasn't trying to do lunar landscapes. I was trying to go places not discovered yet." Joe Masserli, designer of the Twilight Zone logo in 1959: The jumble of sizes of letters was a vogue thing at the time. A lot of times it was kind of ridiculous. I was trying to be classy and in vogue at the same time. Someone once said of the logo, ‘You'll notice, the whole thing is slightly off.' To this I say, ‘Thank you.'"

The distinctive photographic "look" of The Twilight Zone operated on two levels: the first, as visual interpretation of its subjects' inner torment, suspended between reality and unreality; the second, as metaphor for the television image itself.

By utilizing graphic close-ups, angular cropping, and chiaroscuro lighting to reduce images to their most basic, iconic forms, and placing actors in sparse, simple set designs (like the props they often turned out to be), these pared-down, stark elements made the television set work as a kind of electronic puppet theater, befitting the essentially stagelike nature of The Twilight Zone productions: a series of two-act plays filmed for television.

"The Obsolete Man," 1961; "Where is Everybody?," 1959; "Judgment Night,” 1959.

"The Four of Us Are Dying," 1960; "A Passage for Trumpet," 1960; "The Invaders," 1960.

This surreal quality of television theater, like that of a shadow box within which images are

played, is also most dramatically evident in "Eye of The Beholder," a classic Serling script capped by perhaps Twilights Zone's most unforgettable shock ending.

Magritte, The Lovers, 1928: "Eye of the Beholder," 1960; "The Middles ground between light and shadow..."

The chiaroscuro lighting designs by Director of Photography George T. Clemens and the stylized, carefully cropped and choreographic direction by Douglas Heyes demonstrate that, as the surrealist artists, painters and photographers gave plastic form to the visions of the surrealist poets and writers, the visual architects of The Twilight Zone—its directors, set designers and makeup artists—provided a perfect stage for Serling's literary netherworld.

And, like their contemporary, Ernie Kovacs, these imagists understood how best to exploit the limitations of the television medium. Unlike the larger-than-life movie screen, where saturated color and lush location photography served to reinforce the illusion of reality, the small screen required simpler imagery and even less background detail (hence the supremacy of the close-up and its correlative, the talking head).

"Twilight Zone was really designed for the TV set; a lot of shows were not," recalled Heyes, who also directed some of the greatest episodes, "The Invaders," "And When The Sky Was Opened," and "The Howling Man." "Twilight Zone was stylized to be exactly what was going to be on the tube. The compositions that we'd choose, even on the exteriors, would be tight, ones that would carry from across the living room. Clemens, of course, had that instinctive sense also, to make them work for black and white television."

Directed by Douglas Heyes: James Hutton in "And When the Sky Was Opened," 1959; Robin Hughes in "The Howling Man," 1960; Agnes Moorehead in "The Invaders," 1961.

George T. Clemens had come out of retirement in 1959 from a background in cinematography (including the creation of the lighting and makeup transformation of Frederic March in the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde) to become Twilight Zone's Director of Photography throughout its network run (131 out of 156 episodes

A classic Hollywood craftsman, Clemens was painstakingly devoted to the series. "Everything has got to be just right," he told Variety after winning an Emmy in 1961 for his Twilight Zone work. "We shoot 15,000 to 20,000 feet an episode to get 1,800 feet of what we want for the twenty-three minutes on the air." When early in its production there was pressure on Serling to switch Twilight Zone to the new color photography, Clemens objected vehemently. He remembered telling Serling, "I can't give you what we feel is The Twilight Zone feeling in color as I could in black and white."

"Rod's pattern was not only communicable to the people who made his pictures," remembered Houghton when interviewed in 1988, "it was communicable to other writers," chief among them the aforementioned Matheson, Beaumont and Johnson, along with renowned television writers of the time like E. Jack Neuman (Dr. Kildaire, later Police Story) and up-and-comers like Earl Hamner, Jr. (who went on to create The Waltons). They shared a flair for poetic dialogue that was most dominant in Serling's writing—actor Dan Duryea commented that he couldn't remember the last time he had recited poetry without feeling self-conscious about it; Ayn Rand, a writer of stylized dialogue herself, praised Serling at the time, remarking that he wrote "…some of the most beautiful dialogue that has ever issued forth from the mouths of TV characters."

That dialogue spoke of a humanism, compassion, and respect for man's potential (to be both good and evil), and can be compared to that of Frank Capra's (the half-hour fantasy sequence in It's a Wonderful Life, in which Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey witnesses his life had he not been born, isn't so much a throwback to Dickens' A Christmas Carol as it is a proto-Twilight Zone episode). Both men tried to raise the consciousness of their audiences through commercial mediums, and were chided by critics, then and now, for lapsing into sentimental moralizing and soapbox reform.

But if Serling was the Capra of TV, he was also the medium's Orson Welles, for he exercised a Wellesian control over all creative facets of The Twilight Zone, making him the first dramatic television auteur, a forerunner of all the television creator/writer/producers who followed the trail Serling blazed: Roddenberry, Grant Tinker (Mary Tyler Moore), Stephen Bochco (Hill Street Blues), Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick (Thirtysomething), Dick Wolf (Law & Order), Chris Carter (The X Files), David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal), Josh Whedon (Buffy), J.J. Abrams (Lost).

Though crafted by many writers, directors and actors of different sensibilities, The Twilight Zone was ultimately united under one—Serling's—vision. Its totality and cohesiveness make it Serling's magnum opus, an oeuvre that communicated to entire generations. "Rod had some sort of common touch," Houghton said, "whereby a sympathy for the common man and the problems that he dealt with and faced and won and lost was communicated to an awful lot of people." Houghton's personal notes, used as a guide for script purchases, reveal the contents of Serling's "common touch":

"The Twilight Zone is a world that allows for things to happen that do not happen in real life: fantasies operate, wishes are fulfilled, life's loose ends are tied up, frustrations are resolved, discontents are played out, dreams come true, magic asked for is delivered. Unbridled imagination, working to the benefit—or destruction—of commonplace people...the writer is free to pose almost any ‘What if...?' and proceed with it to some conclusion unfettered by the need to mirror real life; but he can never treat far-outness as an end in itself—the conclusion reached must ultimately appeal to our sense of truth, justice, or irony. It must have a crackling resonance in common human experience (emphasis mine)."

Indeed, all the other Twilight Zone writers' works fall under a set of recurring themes of Serling's, a syllabus of The Twilight Zone's 50 greatest episodes in honor of its 50^th Anniversary, selected and herein "submitted for your approval..."

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