Rod Serling

writer, creator, host, narrator
TV Episode

Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (s01e6)

The Time Element

Serling wrote this one-hour time-travel episode as a pilot for a one-hour anthology show, but after it was filmed, William Dozier at CBS requested a change to a half-hour format. So, “The Time Element” was shelved while Serling worked on a new pilot (which also had a stormy history). Meanwhile, Bert Granet, producer of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, caught wind of the original Serling pilot and quickly snapped up the production for which he had to then fight hard with the Westinghouse bigwigs in order to air.

The story involves a time traveler, Pete Jensen, who couldn’t stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he certainly made his mark as the Twilight Zone precursor.
I have information that the Japanese are gonna bomb Pearl Harbor tomorrow morning at approximately 8am Honolulu time.
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  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Series

The Twilight Zone

Five seasons with many time-travel episodes. Four (marked with ¤) were written by Richard Matheson, one was by E. Jack Neuman (“Templeton”), one by Reginold Rose (“Horace Ford”), and the rest were by Serling (including “What You Need” based on a Lewis Padgett story with prescience only and no real time travel, “Execution” from a story of George Clayton Johnson, “A Quality of Mercy” from a Sam Rolfe story featuring a young Dean Stockwell, and “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville” from Malcolm Jameson’s “Blind Alley”).
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.
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  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s01e05)

Walking Distance

Stopped at a gas station outside of his boyhood hometown, burnt-out executive Martin Sloan decides to explore the town, which surprisingly has not changed at all in twenty-some years. —Michael Main
I know you’ve come from a long way from here . . . a long way and a long time.
Michael Montgomery (as young Marty) carves his name into a post on a bandstand, while Gig Young (as old Martin) looks on.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s01e10)

Judgment Night

Carl Lanser finds himself on a transatlantic voyage of the cargo liner S.S. Queen of Glasgow, in 1942, not knowing much about himself or how he got there, but knowing volumes about submarine warfare. —Michael Main
There’d be no wolf packs converging on a single ship, Major Devereaux. The principle of the submarine pack is based on the convoy attack.
Patrick Macnee (as First Officer McLeod) stands behind a disoriented Nehemiah Persoff (as Carl Lanser) in the bar of the S.S. Queen of Glasgow.
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s01e12)

What You Need

Rod Serling does an admirable job translating the original story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore to the small screen. The story’s two main incidents (the scissors and the shoes) come through with little change. In this version, the curious shopkeeper has become a street vendor, and the man who’s interested in the vendor’s goods is now a darker lowlife than the original newspaperman. Also, the science fiction aspect has been replaced by psychic precognition, solidly in the realm of fantasy, but not quite into weird fiction. —Michael Main
What have you got in there? Some sort of machine? Crystal ball? . . . You can see ahead, can’t you? You can look into the future.
On a city sidewalk at night, Steve Cochran (as Fred Renard) menacingly approaches Ernest Truex (as the street vendor Pedott).
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Time Phenomena
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s01e18)

The Last Flight

World War I pilot Terry Decker flies through a white cloud and emerges 42 years later, landing at an American Air Force Base in France, at which point he proves that a Nieuport 28 biplane is capable of doing a causal loop just as well as he can do an Immelmann Turn. —Michael Main
Kenneth Haigh (as Leftenant Terry Decker) stands in his Royal Flight Corps uniform in front of his Nieuport 28 biplane.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Fantasy
  • War
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s01e26)

Execution

Back in the 1880s, just after a man without conscience is dropped from a lone tree with a rope around his neck, a scientist pulls him into 20th-century New York City.

Serling wrote this script based on a George Clayton Johnson’s bare bones, present-tense treatment for a TV script, complete with an indication of where the commercial break should go. For this episode, Serling filled in the flesh and cut the fat from a bare bones, present-tense treatment by George Clayton Johnson. The treatment appeared in Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection of scripts and stories, and in Volume 9 of Serling’s collected Twilight Zone scripts, Johnson commented that “Rod took my idea and went off to the races with it. He had a remarkable knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work on television, and he took everything that wouldn’t work out of ‘Execution’. He worked like a surgeon; a little snip here, a complete amputation over there, move this bone into place, graft over that one. When he was done, my little story had grown into a television script that lived and breathed on its own.” Serling also added a nice twist at the end that, for us, warranted the TV episode an Eloi Honorable Mention.
Rod Serling wrote this script based on a 1960 Twilight Zone episode of the same name, but I’m uncertain whether the story was published before Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection. —Michael Main
Caswell: I wanna see if there are things out there like you described to me. Carriages without horses and the buildings that rise to—

Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.
Dressed in a tie and black jacket, and holding his trademarked cigarette, Rod Serling stands in front of a time machine.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s01e30)

A Stop at Willoughby

On a snowy November evening during his train commute home from New York City, John Daly falls asleep and, perhaps in a dream, sees a simpler life with bands playing in the bandstand, people riding penny farthings through the park, and kids fishin’ at their fishin’ holes the 1888 summertime of idyllic Willoughby. —Michael Main
Willoughby, sir? That’s Willoughby right outside. Willoughby, July, summer. It’s 1888—really a lovely little village. You ought to try it sometime. Peaceful, restful, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his live full-measure.
A man cycles on a penny farthing in an idyllic city park beside James Daly (as 38-year-old New York City executive Gart Williams).
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Fantasy
  • Debatable Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s02e09)

The Trouble with Templeton

The trouble with aging actor Booth Templeton is that he sees life as useless even decades after his young wife died. The answer to his trouble may lie in the people he meets—including his dead wife, Laura!—in what appears to be his hangouts from some thirty years ago. Actual time travel or something more fantastical? You be the judge. —Michael Main
Laura! The freshest, most radiant creature God ever created. Eighteen when I married her, Marty, . . . twenty-five when she died.
Dressed as a flapper, Pippa Scott (as young Laura Templeton), pushes aside a curtain and strikes a pose.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Fantasy
  • Debatable Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s02e10)

A Most Unusual Camera

Petty thieves Chet and Paula Diedrich are frustrated, angry, and in a bickering mood when they find nothing but cheap junk in the 400-lbs. of stuff they lifted from a curios store in the middle of the night, . . . until that boxy looking camera with the indecipherable label—dix à la propriétaire—produces a photo of the immediate future. —Michael Main
Yeah, it takes dopey pictures—dopey pictures like things that haven’t happened yet, but they do happen.
Jean Carson (as Paula Diedrich) holds up an unusual, boxy camera.
  • Weird Fiction
  • Debatable Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s02e13)

Back There

An engineer in the 1960s slips back to the night of Lincoln’s assassination. —Michael Main
I’ve got a devil of a lot more than a premonition. Lincole will be assassinated unless somebody tries to prevent it!
In a dark alley, Russell Johnson (as Corrigan) pounds on a closed stage door beside a poster announcing the play Our American Cousin.
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s02e18)

The Odyssey of Flight 33

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s02e23)

A Hundred Yards Over the Rim

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s02e29)

The Rip Van Winkle Caper

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  • Undetermined
  • Time Phenomena
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s03e13)

Once Upon a Time

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s03e15)

A Quality of Mercy

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  • Undetermined
  • Debatable Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s04e06)

Death Ship

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s04e07)

Jess-Belle

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s04e10)

No Time Like the Past

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s04e14)

Of Late I Think of Cliffordsville

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  • Undetermined
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s04e15)

The Incredible World of Horace Ford

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s05e04)

A Kind of a Stopwatch

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s05e10)

The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s05e15)

The Long Morrow

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  • Undetermined
  • Time Phenomena
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s05e21)

Spur of the Moment

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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Feature Film

Planet of the Apes

A black-and-white photo of Roddy McDowall (as the ape Cornelius) on top of a cage enclosing ten humans.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Time Travelers

ABC-TV picked up this failed pilot (a proposed revival of The Time Tunnel) and aired it as a made-for-TV movie in which Dr. Clinton Earnshaw and his government-sent sidekick Jeff Adams venture back to 1871 to track down a cure for a modern-day epidemic. —Michael Main
He didn’t tell you that we do time research here? That you’re going to travel back in time to 1871?
ABC Friday Night Movie: A mob races through the Great Chicago Fire.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Film

Twilight Zone: The Movie

Time Out

  • written and directed by John Landis
  • (at movie theaters, USA, 24 June 1983)
The Twilight Zone anthology movie reprises three of the original show’s stories along with one new story, “Time Out” by John Landis, in which disgruntled bigot Bill Connor finds himself as a Jew in World War II German occupied Europe, a black man facing the clan in mid-20th century America, and a man in a Vietnamese jungle during the Second Indochina War. —Michael Main
Ray, help! Larry! It’s me!
Five startled faces superimposed over a starry sky above a logo for Twilight Zone, the Movie.
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Series

The Twilight Zone

Three seasons with 7 time-travel episodes. Harlan Ellison was a consultant on the series that included an adaptation of his “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty.” The series also adapted Sturgeon’s “Yesterday Was Monday’, altering the plot and renaming it to “A Matter of Minutes,” and George R.R. Martin did the script for the time-travel episode “The Once and Future King” based on an idea submitted by Bryce Maritano.
Let the record show that in any age—good or bad—there are men of high ideals: men of courage, men who do more than that for which they are called upon. You will not always know their names. But let their deeds stand as monuments, so that when the human race is called to judgment, we may say, ‘This too was humanity!’
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  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

The Twilight Zone (v2s01e07b)

Paladin of the Lost Hour

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  • Hugo
  • Fantasy
  • Time Phenomena
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v2s02e10a)

Time And Teresa Golowitz

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  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Film

Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics

The Theatre

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  • Undetermined
  • Time Phenomena
TV Series

The Twilight Zone

One season with 4 time-travel episodes.
I reminded them that Adolph Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 60 million people.
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  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s04e18)

The Bard

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  • Undetermined
  • Definite Time Travel