Now he’s about to ask a question that will be about the twilight zone

February 23, 2019 7:29 PM

Which original Twilight Zone episodes haven’t influenced another show yet?
posted by michaelh to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Maybe you want to elaborate on this question a little? Because while the Twilight Zone definitely influenced many shows and movies and books, individual episodes were not necessarily influential. It’s not like there was a spate of movies about people seeing a gremlin on the wing of their plane, or a slew of shows in which post-apocalyptic survivors broke their glasses.

But I do remember one episode that had a twist that I haven’t seen repeated a whole lot, which could qualify. A band of criminals steal a million dollars worth of gold, and put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years, figuring that when they awaken they can sell the gold with impunity. When they awaken, they turn on each other out of greed and kill each other, and the one survivor finds out the hard way that in the last hundred years gold has become worthless.
posted by ejs at 8:02 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Well, there was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation based on revived frozen people from our time where one of them discovered his extensive financial holdings had no value.
posted by traveler_ at 9:34 PM on February 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Interpreting "influence" to mean "referenced by", those aren't the best examples -- the plane gremlin showed up in the movie version as well as countless parodies, and the broken glasses guy was parodied in one of Futurama's "Scary Door" segments off the top of my head.

Your best bet is probably to trawl through the episode lists on both Wikipedia and the Twilight Zone wiki and keep your eyes peeled for ones without any other "inspired-by" media credited to it. Picking a random season 2 episode, "A Most Unusual Camera", TZ cites a Goosebumps book as an influence-ee and Wikipedia cites a Simpsons episode and a short story, so this may actually be pretty tough.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:32 PM on February 23, 2019

Look at the episodes that were an hour long. They were out of syndication for years and they're generally regarded as not being as good as the half-hour ones, so they haven't had the same impact on pop culture.

This is going to be one of those situations where someone posts a really intriguing, enigmatic question and then we never find out what it was about, isn't it?
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:29 AM on February 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

Cavender is Coming
Mute
Ring-a-Ding Girl
posted by Rash at 12:50 PM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Simpsons have done a lot on their Halloween specials, so you can weed out a bunch right there.
posted by 445supermag at 12:32 PM on February 25, 2019