The Year of Watching DVDs, Part 28: Still Ill

I watched the entire IMDb top 250 list and now I'm watching everything else. All reviews so far.

Less ill than yesterday or the day before, but iller than tomorrow or the day after.

Selected episodes of the Twilight Zone (1989)
There's an unspoken agreement between you, the SUPERBLOG!! enthusiast, and me, the obsessive SUPERBLOG!! writer, that whatever I start to watch, I have to finish. Well, I broke that rule twice with Twilight Zone. First there was the last season of the 1980s incarnation of TZ. I can't remember if I reviewed them (probably not), but a while ago (it may have been last year) I watched every episode of the first two seasons. Part of it was nostalgia - the 1980s version is the one I grew up with, and some of those shows left something of an impression. So it was fun to rewatch them. Then, some months ago, I discovered that the third season had hit the torrent sites, so I downloaded it and dipped in. Sad to say, it's noticably suckier than the first two seasons. Apparently, CBS just wanted to get enough episodes to be able to sell the series into syndication, and so replaced the original production team with a cheapo team led by J Michael Straczynski. Anyway, I tried six or seven episodes before I gave up.

Selected episodes of the Twilight Zone (1959-1964)
After that, I decided I had to wash the trauma away by finally watching some original Twilight Zone. But there's 156 fucking episodes! So, based on reviews and episodes titles and stuff, I picked out the two dozen or so that seemed most promising and stuck to those. And they're pretty good, for what they are. Obviously they show their age in many ways, most surprisingly in often being overtly religious. The main problem may be that the "twist" endings rarely pack any real punch, since they're so well-known, even if you've never seen the originals (prime example: "To Serve Man", from which the image above was taken). A surprising number of them have even been parodied in Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons (further examples: "Little Girl Lost", "Living Doll").

Anyway. My personal favorites include "It's a Good Life", based on the classic Jerome Bixby story, the Cube*-esque "Five Characters in Search of an Exit", and the French-produced "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". Oh, and the ones starring William The Shat are always good, of course. Look! Here he is. There's something on the wing!!:



I just remembered I also watched most of the 2002 incarnation of TZ, but I'll tell you about that some other time. I'm all Zoned out now.

*Super-important update: Check out my, in hindsight, super-ironic review of Cube in Part 22 and have your little minds BLOWN AWAY!