Rod Serling

Sure.

Rod Serling, as most people know, was the creator and host of The Twilight Zone, among other things.

He was actually hugely famous as a TV writer even before that.

He was kind of the Aaron Sorkin of the 1950s and then later on wrote movies like Planet of the Apes and Seven Days in May and another show called Night Gallery.

But there's sort of a distinctive Rod Sterling character, and he was really good at writing for himself and other people performing it.

But yeah, he understood exactly his own concerns and his own thoughts on humanity, and that comes through.

and there have been a lot of Twilight Zone reboots over the years, and some of them have done really good episodes, but it's not Twilight Zone because you don't have that thing of, here is Rod Serling, and this feels like a deeply personal work, even though it's being made by hundreds of people, and it's touching on all of these wild concepts about time travel and the devil and everything else.

Yeah.

When we come back, we will welcome in Tracy Asteria.

We are going to look back at the recent Rod Serling Fest that took place in nearby Binghamton.

And then we'll have some fun answering some letters and emails in our monster mailbag.

Stay with us on the Ghostly Gallery Podcast.

podcast episode presented to us by Tom Elliott.

Then after that, there was an interview via Zoom with a guy that I've never met, Mark Scott Zickrey.

And he is considered one of the leading experts, if not the leading expert, on The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling.

He wrote a book years ago, The Twilight Zone Companion, which is really considered the definitive episode by episode guide.

Your neighbors are trying to kill you.

I mean, if you think back to what we were doing in 21 and 22, it's almost like a Rod Serling script for the Twilight Zone.

Your neighbors are trying to kill you.

Which ones? We don't know.

Burgess Meredith as your neighbor on one side and Billy Mummy on the other side.

Black and white screen, you sitting there looking terrified on your porch with the woke mask over your face.

The camera zooms in on the terrified eyes like Rod Serling was always good at doing.

It's a Twilight Zone episode.

Yeah.

There are many Twilight Zones by Rod Serling that are utterly brilliant, and some that just fell flat

flatThat's the nature of the beast.

Sometimes something will look great on the page and fall flat on the stage.

I think it was channel 5 at the time.

And the Twilight Zone with Rod Serling came on at 1 p.m. You didn't.

And we would rig it so that everyone could watch Twilight Zone episodes.

Now, this common area rarely had more than 10 people in it.

[laughs]

You know, if you remember the, and I'm not even comparing us, but the Rod Serling shift from angry young man to, um, dude who just-

[laughs]

... enjoyed his Twilight Zone success.

I'm now, like, jumping off a bridge.

and then the final issue which I won't lie it's hard for me to talk about deals with somebody that lives like the same traumatic moment like over and over again like I think it's like a 60 second fragment of time she keeps moving it over and over again and nobody believes her that she had to live it like a ton of times in a row and it causes her a lot of problems later on in life and like she doesn't end up well And then there's this guy who's like the Rod Serling, like the, like the Twilight Zone dude.

He's got like weird hair and ripped jeans and he's walking around in the backpack and maybe Chad can unpack that guy.

Cause like, he just shows up.