The 80's re-boot of the THE TWILIGHT ZONE

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 4/23/14 at 9:50pm

Not as good as the original, of course, but better than you might expect. "Gramma" and "The Shadow Man" were particularly awesome.
Never quite caught on, but...

[CATSNYrevival]

Posted: 4/23/14 at 10:29pm

I think I have memories of watching this with my parents when I was a kid. I can't say for sure that it was an episode of this Twilight Zone reboot or if I'm confusing it with something else, but I think it was. I vaguely remember a vampire and a man putting forks in the vampire's coffin for some reason and it was my first introduction to vampires and blood sucking and I was legitimately frightened. I did not sleep at all that night and my mom had to stay up with me most of the night. Needless to say it was quite some time until they allowed me watch anything like that again.

[SNAFU]

Posted: 4/23/14 at 11:09pm

It was a really great try. I particularly liked "It's a Good Life" with a grown up Billy Mumy. I also really enjoyed the episode where a down and out couple were given a box with a button that if was pushed, would bring them a fortune but someone they didn't know would die. Of course the show revolved around the moral dilemma. Finally the button was pushed, they received their money however the box was collected and they were told it would be sent to someone they didn't know or didn't know them.

[bobs3]

Posted: 4/24/14 at 2:22am

There was a good episode with Melinda Dillon as a harried wife and mother who just wants some piece and quiet and she discovers she is able to yell "stop" and everything in the world comes to standstill. When she says "go" everything goes back to normal. At the end of the episode she goes to the supermarket does her shopping and takes the bags out to her car and is about to yell "go" when she looks up and there are nuclear missiles frozen in the air ready to crash down in her town.

[best12bars]

Posted: 4/24/14 at 6:28am

I started watching (and became obsessed with) the original Twilight Zone in the early '80s when I was in college. It was on every night around 10 or 11, and I would watch two episodes back-to-back each night (or one, if it was an hour-long story from Season 4).

Just a few years later while I was still in love with the original show, the movie came out, then the rebooted TV series. Both paled in comparison. I didn't like that most of the episodes were just rehashing the old ones. Very few were new or original stories. That didn't help it any. I watched for a few weeks, then tuned out. I haven't seen it (or the film) since.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 4/24/14 at 3:39pm

Unlike the Spielberg film, the 80s reboot actually had a lot of great episodes, actors, writers and directors--as that link attests to. (Much better than the UPN reboot :P Which isn't saying much, or the Alfred Hitchcock Presents reboot.) It did have a larger slant on horror, I felt, than the original did--sorta a mix of Twilight Zone and Sterling's Night Gallery.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 4/24/14 at 7:03pm

I'm particularly fond of Button, Button which, as the link says, feels like it WAS based on an original TZ episode but wasn't--and, as they also say, the change in the original short story's ending that the author objected to still works in its own way. It's also miles better than the beyond bizarre feature based on it, The Box. I also have a soft spot for Her Pilgrim Soul which, I admit, seems kinda shmaltzy and dated now (but so do some of the original series' episodes,) but I find oddly touching, and of course became Act II of the Alan Menken/David Spencer off-Broadway musical Weird Romance with a particularly touching performance, at least on the cast album, by Ellen Greene. Both are on youtube. Some of the Wes Craven episodes are pretty strong too.

Besty, I'm not saying by any means you should like it (and truth be told, I think I may have seen the remake series first, as a small kid,) but you're simply wrong if you think very few were original stories. A good half or so were original stories by a fairly strong team of writers.

[Playbilly]

Posted: 4/24/14 at 10:26pm

Hated them. Every original was better. You can't supplant Cold War, post-Hiroshima, technology phobia in the 1980s.