I've long been a fan of The Twilight Zone, and have been looking to expand my range of science fiction in film and television this summer, so it seemed only natural to seek out The Outer Limits (1963-1964). I know Harlan Ellison's script Soldier was part of the basis of James Cameron's The Terminator, and Steven King has heavily praised the original series. Both items have caught my interest and convinced me to watch this series. That said, I've now finished the first two episodes and have been less than impressed. Since I have the discs free of charge from the local library, I'll continue watching for a while. I hope it gets better. The Galaxy Being writer: Leslie Stevens director: Leslie Stevens What immediately strikes me about this series is its beautiful black and white photography. In just these two episodes, it has stood out as the best thing about this series, and the pilot episode sets the tone for a look that is comparable to film noir. The series opening is rather well put-together, although it lacks the catchy theme music of The Twilight Zone, which I think was a mistake. Iconic all the same, though ("do not adjust your television set..."). The visual effects here are quite good for their time as well. The alien seems to simply be an actor in a suit with the film printed as a negative instead of a positive (could have those mixed up), but it is very effective. When the being goes berserk around the town the effects are nice as well. But I must say...the writing was awful. Two-way communication is somehow possible between Earth and the Andromeda Galaxy using only period technology. On a similar point, the 1963 computer can somehow translate the alien's speech into perfect English instantaneously. I wish my 2009 computer could do that with known languages! And then, somehow, the communication becomes a form of teleportation for this nitrogen-based being, who rampages around the town. It doesn't make a lick of sense. Sexism is pervasive. The character of the wife is portrayed as unreasonable and irrational, as if that excuses the way men talk down to her in the episode. Hell, even the military blasts away at her without a second thought, but pauses when the male lead emerges. I suppose it was the early 1960s (pre-Star Trek, even), but it's annoying. A Hundred Days of the Dragon writers: Allan Balter and Robert Mintz director: Byron Haskin This one was absurd from start to finish, a cheap television knock-off of The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer's adaptation was released 11 months prior to this film) with half the imagination and none of the budget of the film version of that book. Somehow the ambiguous Asian doctors (Chinese? Korean? The episode doesn't make it clear, preferring to talk about the "orient.") come up with a serum that makes skin malleable. Well, not exactly. Apparently, it only works on the face and fingerprints, since there are no impressions left on the subject's hands after they've held the mold tightly against their own face. The cinematography is again good, although there is some really poor rear-projection in a car scene or two. A shot of the candidate's hand on the bible followed by some stock footage of an inauguration is a clever way of covering up for the tiny budget, though. The security present around the candidate is simply absurd in this episode, from start to finish. A Presidential Candidate nearly on the eve of an election (all the language indicates this is November, not a primary race) all alone in a hotel room, with a foreign espionage team able to book the room right across the hall, and not a secret serviceman in sight anywhere? A gun goes off and there's no immediate commotion? They must have booked a hotel in an awfully seedy part of town. Even more silly, the Ambiguous Asian Leader comes to the White House, carrying big glossy photos of everyone he plans to replace with doubles? The VP's home is entirely unguarded, and an agent (played by James Hong, proving he must be in everything) almost captures the VP by sneaking through the bushes? And then they expect to be able to capture him while he is in a motorcade, a plan that only goes wrong because the VP decides to add security (as if he would have a choice in the matter)? Silly, silly, silly. Luckily the episode can hammer home a quick and unrelated message about avoiding nuclear war in the final minute, when the VP (now President) proclaims that he will not respond to the Ambiguous Asian plot at all (the same guy who wouldn't withdraw from Southeast Asia after the Ambiguous Asians did). Heavy handed stuff like this wouldn't work with Rod Serling, and Vic Perrin doesn't come close as the "control voice." What do other people think of this series, and these two episodes?
"Hundred Days of the Dragon" is a low point for the series. Rest assured it's not typical. (For one thing, it doesn't have a monster. The producers didn't want a monster in every episode, but the network insisted.) "The Galaxy Being" wasn't bad, though. Try not to dwell too much on the technical issues; SF in TV and film have never been strong on those points, whether in the '60s or the 2000s. Even to this day, you routinely see SFTV stories treating the Andromeda Galaxy as a next-door neighbor, and rarely get any reference to smaller but far closer galaxies such as the Magellanic Clouds. As for "period technology," at the time, it was state-of-the-art. There was a lot of optimism at the time about what technology could achieve. People were enthralled by the ability of television to capture live images from incredible distances, and computers in particular were seen as capable of almost anything. Sure, those potentials got hugely exaggerated in the fiction of the day, but no more than present-day SF exaggerates the potential of nanotechnology or the likelihood of a technological Singularity. And of course, the stories were more about characters, emotion, and ideas than technical specs. "The Galaxy Being" is a commentary on openness and optimism versus prejudice and fear.
I watched the 60s Outer Limits series and for the most part, I enjoyed it. The series gets a very mixed reaction from those who watch it - some dismiss as dated and more, for others the stories still hold up very well. There was a recurring problem in that some of the stories felt padded, given the length of each episode. A lot of episodes were about man's sense of wonder, and not specifically hard, believable science - indeed, a lot of episodes do feature a far-fetched idea or two that would not convince modern sci-fi fans. "The Galaxy Being" is a pretty good opener, and I agree with you on the positives. The far-fetched elements of the plot didn't really bother me too much, although the alien's language being decoded so easily wasn't too convincing. "Hundred Days of the Dragon" is of course one of the more dated episodes with its yellow peril threat, but I do find it reasonably well-paced and entertaining. My favourite episodes are: "The Man Who was Never Born", a moving tale of sacrifice; "OBIT" a story which felt disturbingly relevant in today's reality TV-obsessed world; "Nightmare", "The Invisibles", "Fun and Games", "The Chameleon", "Soldier", the tense, thrilling "Demon with a Glass Hand", two-part episode "The Inheritors", and "The Preminition". There are a couple of episodes I'm really undecided about: "Don't Open Till Doomsday", a story which is ridiculous on the surface, but has a fascinating subtext, and "The Bellero Shield" which wears its literary influence on its sleeve.
Given the kind of ludicrous stuff that shows up on Heroes, Eureka, and movies like the Star Wars saga and Chronicles of Riddick, I find it very hard to believe that "modern sci-fi fans" have such high standards of credibility. To the best of my knowledge, The Outer Limits never did an episode where a solar eclipse was witnessed everywhere on the planet at the same time, to give just one example. Instant translation is a longstanding fictional trope, a plot device for moving the story along. Very few works of mass-media SF, and not many works of prose SF, dwell on translation issues.
Well, I think that plot nitpicks and technological cavils - like about the communications time with Andromeda - don't really impact the quality of the show. The Twilight Zone suffered from the same sorts of shortcomings; at most criticisms like this and particularly pointing out sexism simply are another way of stating that the series was made a long, long time ago. Which it was. And yeah, judging from what's popular these days it's not that hard to convince "modern sci-fi fans" of anything if they like the theme music and CG.
I do like Outer Limits.. I may be a bit biased. My grandfather worked pretty extensively on the series: IMDB Outer Limits Credits The two part episode The Inheritors and also Wolf 359 are two of my favorites that he worked on.
That episode has a reputation for being a clunker, but really isn't that bad. The idea of an alien intelligance manipulating nature in an attempt to communicate with a world it cannot understand actually does work. The only thing bringing the episode down is the actress playing the wife, who spends the whole episode constantly shrieking.
Well, a key difference between The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits is that TZ was usually fantasy, though also encompassing soft SF and horror, while OL was more specifically an SF show. So scientific and technological consistency were never an issue on TZ anyway.
I gotta go with: Demon With A Glass Hand. Anybody who sits through that episode and not feel shattered by the ending is the sort of person who drowns kittens for fun. Controlled Experiment. Where else can you watch Barry Morse and Carroll O'Conner discuss human foibles? Great stuff. O.B.I.T. Given both a) concerns about personal privacy and b) our voyeuristic culture, this episode is prescient and really creepy. There are other good episodes (yes, and some real stinkers) but these have stuck with me ever since I was six years old, sitting rigidly on the couch on a Saturday afternoon because the Control Voice told me "for the next hour sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear." It was a serious debate whether or not I could go to the bathroom during the commercials. My brother scared the crap out of me with that episode. "After all, he came through that guy's TV set -- he can come through ours and get you!" My six-year-old mind didn't make much of the fact that "The Galaxy Being" was in black-and-white and we were in an In-Color world.
Ellison was so in love with the concept of people from the future with competing objectives both going back in time to the 20th century, that he used the concept for three different TV scripts in the 60s: "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand" for The Outer Limits, and "City on the Edge of Forever" for Star Trek.
The Showtime remake was better overall. I always thought of the original as a TZ wannabe. I know, there are differences, but to me they aren't significant enough.
I own the series. Like all anthology series, there are a fair proportion of dogs. Twilight Zone has them too. Outer Limits being an hour show has never been rerun as much, so it has less nostalgia factor going for it. Like most tv/movie scifi, science is routinely dissed. Some of it is merely outdated. The LSD episode is inadvertently hilarious. Also, it is much more centered upon a monster of some sort. Nonetheless many episodes are excellent, in the leisurely way that shows were written in those days, when there were fewer commercials. Now there are so many commercials that shows tend to front load the action, and stage minicliffhangers to keep the audience. We've gotten accustomed to a frenzied pace. But I think the commercials have straitjacketed television, seriously lowering dramatic quality. Coming to something less narrow has become a minor culture shock. Be patient, I think you'll be rewarded. Behold, Eck! was peculiarly charming.
Stick with the show. It gets much better, and has many memorable episodes. "The Sixth Finger," "Demon with a Glass Hand," "Do Not Open 'til Doomsday," etc. True confession: the opening sequence terrified me as a child. That ominous voice taking over my tv set often sent me fleeing from the room!
I'll definitely be sticking with the show, though my watching of it will continue at an odd pace. It's harder to make time for a 50-minute program nobody else in the house wants to watch. I look forward to the rest of it.
Oh, I was almost screaming at the TV thru that episode! Look, I never said it was fun, but sometimes it's just necessary. What? Anyhoo - I generally looked upon Outer Limits as a (much) lesser version of Twilight Zone. TZ always tried to give us a thoughtful story. OL may have occasionally given a vague nod to "meaningful," but was, for the most part, just a monster-of-the-week show.
I think of the 90's Outer Limits as Tales from the Darkside with a bigger budget...cliched junk with silly twist endings. Just watch the last 10 minutes and save some time. (Oh, no, human race/Earth doomed...again...insert creepy narrator's so-called-moral) I think all post-60's sci-fi anthology show sucks, though. Maybe cheap anthology shows just look cheaper in color.