I've been watching The Twilight Zone recently. All the way through, all in order. The original series only. I'm not really all that interested in reboots or sequals. One reason I'm watching it is that I've only seen like five epis ever (either in childhood or while house sitting last year). I hadn't even seen that famous one "Eye of the Beholder" until last year, though I'd seen it referenced most of my life. I enjoy watching it because it tells me a lot about life in the 1950s and early 1960s. You might be laughing, thinking that that is absurd, but it's true. I'll explain. You might be thinking, 'But it's just TV! It's not real life' and you'd be sort of correct. I get that Leave It To Beaver wasn't an accurate representation of the 1950s, nor was The Brady Bunch an accurate representation of the late 1960s/early 1970s, but there were things to learn there as well.
These are things that a portion of the population wanted. They connected with it, on some level, or these shows would have not been popular. The actors from The Brady Bunch will tell you that the clothes were way too out there for what was normal, but apparently it was liked by the audience, perhaps like a fantasy of what their lives could be. Or Leave It To Beaver. Watching enough of shows, reading enough history, and seeing the correlations between all the eras, humans are pretty much all the same. Today you have people lamenting for the "good old days", mainly the 1950s of their childhoods and that the world has spun out of control since then. The people of the 1950s felt the same way. They'd just come out of a World War, were threatened with another one (the whole Cold War) and things were dubious with all those "Red Commies" about. They wanted things like the good old days of their childhoods, the 1930s. In the thirties, people felt about the same way. It's a cycle, so it's interesting to see it play out generation after generation. Leave It To Beaver isn't even an accurate representation of the childhood of the adults writing the show, it's an idealized version; an idealized version that the adult audience can latch onto and feel safe. It's not real in the least, but a fantasy shared by most of the population. Just as my dad and mom wish for the good old days of the 1950s, their parents never once wanted those good old days, but instead the ones from the twenties and thirties or the 00's and teens (dependent on which set of grandparents for me). My grandparents weren't fooled by the idyllic view of that decade they were living in as adults. They didn't wish to go back to the things they knew were their realities; communism, the cold war, inequality, getting married even if you didn't want to. They could see that Leave It To Beaver was not what the 1950s looked like, but somehow that was missed on their children. But then they themselves could only look back onto their own childhoods through rose coloured glasses, just as people today also do. See? There's a lot to learn about everyday real life even from such fantastical shows. So, with The Twilight Zone, it's teaching me that, again, people are still the same today as they were then. Namely, they do not like long intro's to their entertainment. For most of the first season, the intro was really long and talky. I even found it rather long. What I loved about it though was the stars and the font for The Twilight Zone. It was very 1950s. Whether that was simply the quality of the technology for that, or they simply liked things softer, it was a theme with television in the 1950s that you'll see again and again. The intro became shorter at the end of season one and by season two it was very short and quippy with the music that you know for The Twilight Zone, and the font for it was very early - mid 1960s. It's what was popular, either because advertisement people and TV execs deemed that's what should be used, or else by audience choice (tuning in or not, making things popular or not). It looks like wood and even breaks and is pointed like broken wood. If you watch enough television from this time period, you'll see that theme played out time and time again (and not even just for westerns). What you will also see, in this show, and others, are nods to the actual time period. The style of acting that was forced or preferred. There's a set style for films and television. They're different, but overlap. It's different from films of the forties and it's different from television later in the 1960s (because by season two we're in 1960). Or you'll see the audience that the show is being written for. The adults in this case. Even if it's a joke you don't necessarily get because time and age, you'll know it's a joke. It's easy to tell the jokes in here, the nods to things in real life that the adults don't like. My own parents think it's a new thing that politicians are crooked or liars. I keep trying to tell them from all the knowledge I've garnered that it's been that way at least since the beginning of the twentieth century (because I can't ascertain prior to that). They won't hear it, my parents I mean. However, in more than one epi of The Twilight Zone they're taking a stab at politicians being unethical, as in you can tell it's a joke, as in all us adults in 1959/1960 can laugh at the truth in this jibe. There's also one about a car where the owner must tell the truth. The big joke is that they sell the car to Nikita Khruschchev. Which tells me that while a good number of American adults during this time period think their own politicians are crooked, the foreigner is always worse. That was the mentality before this decade and all the way into the one we're currently living. There were also episodes that didn't seem interesting, but only because you realize that, now, the idea has been done into the ground, but then it was either brand new or only one or two other people had done something similar. It's like the fight scenes in The Matrix with the suspended gravity. That was new for The Matrix and if it had been done in some capacity before, it was a one off and largely forgotten. But then after The Matrix, films and telly shows were using that so much so that it got real old, real fast. So there were themes and ideas that have been done a million times, so it's not something you'd want to watch again. However, it's interesting to realize that it was new, or relatively new, at the time. People were watching this in awe just as they did with that iconic Matrix fight scene the first time. So that is also useful knowledge right there. The inception of certain idea's and themes. Here's where they started. If not this show, then during the 1950s or the gap bridging the fifties into the sixties. Fascinating. But beyond all of that, I find the lack of science intriguing. I'm unsure if it's common knowledge or if I'm just a science nerd who paid attention. It's because I would tell The Sister and she couldn't see the inaccuracies and just thought it was funny that I didn't understand that people in the 1950s over-acted. Only I wasn't talking about their acting qualities (& I was well aware of the over-acting bit), I was referring to what they hadn't yet discovered in the sciences, so it's funny and also informative. So, you'll note that photo up there that I took of my telly. That was the second epi to deal with an asteroid. Perhaps you can spot what's wrong? We'll start with Season 1, Episode 7: The Lonely. You'll want to say, "But the desert is an easy & obvious choice for outer space places. Even Star Trek did it." You'd be correct. I understand the real world filming choice for this. However, in Star Trek if they landed somewhere it was registered as Class M, meaning there was an atmosphere suitable for humans to breathe & they went to planets far, far away. It worked for that show. It still holds up today as an explanation, namely because they weren't super specific about where they went (like it wasn't Venus or that asteroid that's near Jupiter, etc) In the epi, The Lonely, Earth is using asteroids, in our own solar system, as solitary confinement for prisoners. The prisoner and the people that visit him in their rocket ship are sweating buckets on that asteroid and are breathing freely. Those are the two glaring inaccuracies. All of our asteroids are about -100 degrees F. Meaning they're beyond freezing. These people wouldn't be sweating profusely like that. Also there is no atmosphere on asteroids (that we know of - aka in our solar system), so these men wouldn't be without helmets pumping out appropriate levels of oxygenated air for them to breath. This tells me that in the fifties, people didn't know anything about asteroids yet, which is confirmed during a search because we wouldn't know specifically anything until we sent NEAR out and it orbited Eros for a year back in 1997. That's 38 years after this episode came out. I'm not knocking them for not knowing, but it is a little amusing since what was thought then (60 years ago now) is the complete opposite of how it is. Perhaps they just shouldn't have been so specific as to where the asteroids were? Also for added set dressing, this prisoner, alone on a super heated and breathable asteroid has a tiny little hut and a broken down Model T out front. I have questions. I know they were just set dressing in the desert on Earth, but if they want to pull me into the world of solitary confinement on an asteroid then how did that Model T get there? Did the guards think the prisoner needed some wheels on that asteroid and then the car just died? Was it left there by aliens? By space traveling mobsters? What the hell is a broken down old car doing on some asteroid? Oh, I laughed. The Sister didn't seem to see the problem with it. o_0 The second one, I Shot An Arrow Into The Air (which is the photo), fits as a story because we know that in the fifties people believed (or felt it plausible) that an asteroid was beyond hot and you could breathe there. Because it turns out the men were still on Earth, but believed they had landed on the asteroid they were seeking to land on. It was a better story overall than The Lonely; I won't give it away but it had a nice twist ending, where The Lonely just fizzled and I was like, "What? That's it?! IMDB.com gives the description as crash landing on an unknown planet, but in the epi we are told it is an asteroid. They haven't done much else sciency that we now know differently. Sure one will say that time travel is impossible or something, but really those are still mystifying and in the realm of "we don't know", so those epi's hold up. If they land on Mars or have a colony set up on Venus, well... then that's a different story altogether.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorA girl from South Mississippi who finds herself in exploration. Archives
November 2019
Categories |