In 1959 screenwriter Rod Serling first opened the door to the "dimension of imagination" that is The Twilight Zone, a show quite unlike anything that had gone before, and better than much that has followed in its wake. This original and daring television series ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1964 and still looks as fresh as ever, particularly on DVD. What distinguished the series was the quality of the scripts, many of which were penned by Serling, but with significant contributions from veteran sci-fi authors and screenwriters such as Richard Matheson. Actors of... the calibre of Robert Redford, Burgess Meredith, Lee Marvin and William Shatner gave some of their best small-screen performances, while an unforgettable main title theme by Bernard Herrmann and musical contributions from young turks such as Jerry Goldsmith underlined the show's attraction for great creative talent both behind and in front of the cameras.Volume 4 cherry-picks four of the show's more diverse episodes. In "Mr Dingle the Strong" (episode 55) alien visitors experiment on a hapless human, but instead of sinister X Files horror, Serling plays it for laughs. Despite the sparkling presence of Burgess Meredith (the closest the series came to a regular star), this one-joke plot demonstrates why the Zone only rarely ventured into comedy. "Two" (episode 66) pits a characteristically taciturn Charles Bronson against an even more stoical Elizabeth Montgomery, two soldiers from opposing sides who must rediscover themselves as the last man and woman and play Adam and Eve in a post-holocaust world. "A Passage for Trumpet" (episode 32) casts Jack Klugman (The Odd Couple, Quincy) as a downtrodden trumpeter who, in a jazz rewrite of It's a Wonderful Life, learns to value life. Nice. Finally, "The Four of Us are Dying" (episode 13) employs four different actors to play the same character, a "cheap little con-man" whose ability to change his features at will doesn't prevent his deserved comeuppance (more jazz here, this time in a wonderfully jagged underscore from Jerry Goldsmith).On the DVD: A neat animated menu with a winking eye guides the viewer "Inside the Twilight Zone", which consists of digests of background information on the individual episodes, as well as a general history of the show, season-by-season breakdown and a potted biography of Serling. --Mark Walker [show more]
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