Always observed on May 11, National Twilight Zone Day is that mysterious day highlighted with eerie background music and unexplainable occurrences.
The television show The Twilight Zone was created, written and narrated by Rod Serling. It premiered on October 1, 1959. The episodes were wildly popular, stretched the imagination, and captivated viewers. The show aired from 1959-1964.
- Serling narrated for the show, first through just his voice and then on camera during the second season. Serling’s first choice for that role was not himself, but Orson Welles. It never came to pass as the producers could not meet Welles’s salary demands.
- ‘Star Trek’ actors appeared on the series. William Shatner appeared in two episodes, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Nick of Time.” Leonard Nimoy appeared as a soldier in the Philippines during WWII in the episode “A Quality of Mercy.” George Takei played a Japanese-American man in the infamously banned episode “The Encounter.”
- There were almost six dimensions. While recording the opening to the pilot episode in 1959, Serling exclaimed there was a sixth dimension to explore. When a network executive overheard the introduction, he asked Serling what happened to the fifth dimension. Serling assumed there were already five dimensions, not four. Luckily, the mistake was corrected before the episode aired.
- Only one actor appeared in all five seasons. Many actors have appeared multiple times on the program, but only one has the distinction of appearing in all five seasons. In total, Robert McCord appeared in 67 episodes, most of them as an extra.
- “Submitted for your approval” was only uttered three times. The phrase that has become synonymous with the show was only uttered three times over the course of five seasons. Serling used the signature phrase in the introductions to the episodes “Cavender is Coming,” “In Praise of Pip” and “A Certain Kind of Stopwatch.”
- The Episode That Won an Oscar. When Serling’s budget for the series tightened in the fifth and final season, he decided on an unusual cost-cutting measure: the writer paid $10,000 (by some accounts, $25,000) for the rights to broadcast An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a French short based on the Ambrose Bierce story about a Confederate sympathizer who escapes the hangman’s noose at the end of the Civil War. No dubbing was needed: the short was virtually silent, and its haunting cinematography was a perfect fit for the show. The year prior, it had won an Oscar for Best Short Subject. Bierce’s story was also adapted into an episode of the other popular anthology of the day, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, marking the only time the two series used the same source material.
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