Neatorama |
- The Last Library Card Catalog Cards
- The Hickory Horned Devil
- Beautiful Landscapes Painted on Fallen Leaves
- Where We Got the Word
- Living Nightmare: Woman Swarmed by Baby Otters
- Magic! - The Cheesiest Wizard In The Universe
- Green Fire Jack O’Lantern
- Dog Plays Jump Rope
- DeepDream Makeup
- Baby Turtles in Swimsuits
- DeLorean Golf Cart Can Probably Hit 88 MPH
- Pets vs. Technology
- No Regrets
- Gold Rush California Was Much More Expensive Than Today’s Tech-Boom California
- RuPaw's Drag Race Is Home To The Fiercest Feline Model On The Interwebs
- Spider-Man Rescues Stranded Family
- Alien Roller Coaster Rider - Use The Force Stitch! Oops, Wrong Series...
- How Do Stardates Actually Work In <i>Star Trek</i>?
- Halloween with Liz Climo
- 12 Super Powered Facts About Dragon Ball Z
- Cat Hates Flute Music
- Concept Art For An Animated Version Of <i>Dune</i>
- 10 Foreign Rip-Offs Of Popular Hollywood Films
- Gear Up For A Ghoulishly Good Time With These 25 Halloween Themed T-Shirts
- Black and White: <i>The Twilight Zone</i>
| The Last Library Card Catalog Cards Posted: 03 Oct 2015 04:00 AM PDT
OCLC stands for Online Computer Library Center. It's a huge non-profit organization in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio that provides library computer support services. Among them, OCLC catalogs books and other items owned by libraries around the world. When you search a library's catalog, the call numbers and subject headings are often selected not by the local library, but by OCLC. For decades, one way that OCLC provided cataloging services was by printing card catalog cards for libraries. Over the years, it's produced 1.9 billion cards. Now that service is over. The Columbus Dispatch reports that OCLC has printed its last card catalog cards:
-via Jessamyn West  | ||||||||
| Posted: 03 Oct 2015 02:00 AM PDT The Hickory Horned Devil (Citheronia regalis) is the largest caterpillar in North America. It will eventually burrow into the ground to metamorphose into a regal moth, which has a 6-inch wingspan, but is much less bulky than its caterpillar form. The caterpillar molts four times to become this big (up to six inches long), and is bright green only in its final phase.
The caterpillar is harmless, and only looks scary to protect itself while its this big and easy for predators to see. This one was recorded in Dothan, Alabama. -via Daily of the Day | ||||||||
| Beautiful Landscapes Painted on Fallen Leaves Posted: 03 Oct 2015 12:00 AM PDT When autumn arrives and leaves fall to the ground, Polish artist Joanna Wirazka gathers them and uses them as canvases. On these leaves, she paints elaborate and mystical landscapes of seemingly magical lands. Her night scenes and cityscapes are particularly effective as swirling forms of light and line. -via Lost at E Minor | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 11:00 PM PDT It was a stroke of genius, or maybe just keming, which is a term for bad kerning. Makes plenty of sense as to that squiggly thing on the ground. The comic is from Joseph Faill at A Pleasant Waste of Time, inspired by a Tweet from FronkenVo. -via reddit | ||||||||
| Living Nightmare: Woman Swarmed by Baby Otters Posted: 02 Oct 2015 10:00 PM PDT Stephanie Arne, a wildlife conservationist, is--or was--the host of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. She has not been heard of since making this horrifying video. Unfortunately, though she was a wildlife expert, she waded into a pool of baby Asian Small-Clawed Otters without wearing body armor or taking other necessary protective measures. The video cuts out before we can see her fate, but that's probably for the best. -via Uproxx | ||||||||
| Magic! - The Cheesiest Wizard In The Universe Posted: 02 Oct 2015 09:00 PM PDT Skeletor has spent decades trying to master the mystical arts, but every time he starts to get somewhere with his spellcasting that He-Man shows up and ruins his research. That's why Skeletor has decided to move away from the realm of combat magic and focus his studies on the funny arts, so he can become a hilarious master of illusion and crush He-Man once and for all. However, it's hard to be taken seriously when all of your henchmen are laughing their beastly heads off, and all you can manage to conjure up is a rainbow and some slices of pizza! This Magic! t-shirt by Hillary White is sure to cast a spell on those who enjoy rainbows and unicorns, pizza and Skeletor's not-so subtle art of seduction! Visit Hillary White's Facebook fan page, official website and Tumblr, then head on over to her NeatoShop for more delightfully geeky designs:
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama! | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 09:00 PM PDT A chemistry teacher did this fiery jack o’lantern inside, but if you want to try it, outdoors would be better. You can get that green flame by burning boric acid and methanol together. Geekologie has the instructions. This will cook your pumpkin, but it won’t be edible because of the boric acid. Then there is the remote chance that such experimentation could summons the demons of hell. Your mileage may vary. | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 08:00 PM PDT
This is Bolinha, a stray dog that lives in a slum of Rio de Janeiro. She appeared in the neighborhood about a year ago and is a good neighbor. She plays with the children actively. Recently, the kids gave her the end of their jump rope. She joined in their game! -via Nothing to Do with Aborath | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 07:00 PM PDT Jennifer Culp designed a Halloween face based on Google’s DeepDream technology, which produces nightmarish images by finding and enhancing any hint of pareidolia in an existing image. Culp imitated DeepDream images you’ve seen by adding eyes, plenty of them, all over her face, on her neck, and even in her ears and nose! Top the nightmare with a crown of images of her dog, and you’re ready for Halloween. Not only do we get the bizarre result, but she’s posted a tutorial just in case you want to duplicate the look yourself. And if you think this image is disturbing, Culp them ran a picture of her finiahed makeup through the DeepDream algorithm. You’ll have to go to the tutorial to see that. -via Boing Boing | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 06:00 PM PDT
It's a stylish one piece suit with pair of stripes across the midriff to accentuate the body's lines. Why is this baby loggerhead sea turtle wearing it? Owen Coffee, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland built this swimsuit in order to hold a diaper on it. This is how Coffee and his colleagues will collect fecal samples, which are usually difficult to acquire from wild sea turtles. ABC News reports:
Coffee and his colleagues are using these fecal samples to study the diets of the loggerheads. | ||||||||
| DeLorean Golf Cart Can Probably Hit 88 MPH Posted: 02 Oct 2015 05:00 PM PDT That's my bet. After all, you wouldn't build a time machine in a vehicle that wasn't capable of hitting the necessary speed. David Heykants, a hot rod builder in Red Deer, Alberta, would have taken that detail into account while designing his DeLorean Back to the Future golf cart. Lucas Evanochko made the electronic components. As you can see, his time selector is a touchscreen--a far more modern interface than that which was available in 1985. In addition to lights, Evanochko rigged a sound effects push button panel into the cockpit. You can watch a complete walk-through here. -via Technabob | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 04:00 PM PDT I’ve never seen a pet pay the least bit of attention to TV when all we had were cathode-ray tubes. Flat screens are a completely different story. Cats and dogs actually watch flatscreen TVs, computer monitors, tablets, and phones. But that’s not all that featured in this compilation from The Pet Collective. Critters here are dealing with the mysteries of printers, scanners, treadmills, sprinklers, and other unfathomable contraptions that humans use. -via Tastefully Offensive | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 03:00 PM PDT You can live a long, fulfilling life without money, prestige, or power. But who's kidding who? If you had a choice, you'd take it. It's when we have no choice that we become satisfied with what we have, since the alternative is frustration. This comic is from John McNamee at Pie Comic. | ||||||||
| Gold Rush California Was Much More Expensive Than Today’s Tech-Boom California Posted: 02 Oct 2015 02:00 PM PDT We hear horror stories about how much someone is paying for a one-room apartment in San Francisco, and we have to cringe. Houses in the fancy suburbs are even more expensive, particularly in Silicon Valley. Has it always been that way? Maybe not, but in the early days of the city, which became a city thanked to the Gold Rush of 1849, things were even worse.
The few who struck gold became wealthy, but the people who sold goods to miners and prospectors raked in the cash, too. Read about the hyper inflated early days of San Francisco at Smithsonian. | ||||||||
| RuPaw's Drag Race Is Home To The Fiercest Feline Model On The Interwebs Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:00 PM PDT RuPaul's Drag Race has proven that fierce divas rockin' major style can still have a sense of humor about themselves, and the show features some of the most flamboyant drag queens in the world. It's a good thing RuPaul and the Drag Race squad have a good sense of humor because the Instagram feed RuPaw's Drag Race is rivaling their fierceness and proving that furry can be absolutely fabulous. RuPaw's Drag Race features a feline model with lots of moxie dressed in the finest "handmade kitty queen couture", and if the RuPaw's crew ever land a series on Animal Planet RuPaul is in trouble! -Via Cheezburger | ||||||||
| Spider-Man Rescues Stranded Family Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:00 PM PDT Stephen Grant and Lucy Day of East Sussex, UK, were having a bad day. Grant cut off his finger in a lawnmower accident. They couldn’t get an ambulance. The couple put their 3-year-old daughter in the backseat and took off toward a hospital. On the way, their car burst into flames. They pulled off to the side and exited the car. That’s when Spider-Man showed up to save the day.
Doctors were able to successfully reattach Grant’s finger. Fire officials do not know why the couple's car caught fire. -via Arbroath | ||||||||
| Alien Roller Coaster Rider - Use The Force Stitch! Oops, Wrong Series... Posted: 02 Oct 2015 11:00 AM PDT Alien Roller Coaster Rider by Tinkerpen Most human surfers don't dare risk their lives to ride those mega-curls breaking off the coast of Oahu, but to Stitch they look like breaks for beginners. He rides them all like a roller coaster, throwing his arms up the whole time and totally diggin' the ride, and poor Lilo is left all alone on the beach watching her alien friend shredding waves. Stitch has offered to show her how he makes ripping curls look so easy, but Lilo would rather leave the dangerous stuff to that silly little critter and live to see her ohana another day. Add some alien awesomeness to your geeky wardrobe with this Alien Roller Coaster Rider t-shirt by Tinkerpen, it's the cowabunga way to show love for that four armed alien misfit Stitch! Visit Tinkerpen's Facebook fan page, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr, then head on over to her NeatoShop for more geek-tastic designs:
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama! | ||||||||
| How Do Stardates Actually Work In <i>Star Trek</i>? Posted: 02 Oct 2015 11:00 AM PDT The voyages of the Starship Enterprise are logged via stardates, and these seemingly insignificant set of numbers are meant to mark the episode's place in the series' timeline. They sound like serious business, but how much thought and effort is put into continuity in the Star Trek series' in terms of stardates? Well, as Chris Higgins of mental_floss discovered, the stardate system used in the original Star Trek series was "totally bogus" by design. Here's a snippet from the series bible:
However, the writers and directors of Star Trek: The Next Generation were given an updated system that actually worked, and with the updated system we discover that one season of the show amounts to 1,000 days:
Of course they still goofed here and there, but that's a way better system than "pick four random numbers and a percentage point". Read more about Star Trek's Stardates system at mental_floss | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 10:00 AM PDT It’s hard to believe we’re already into October- I’m still in summer mode. Maybe you need to get your October vibe going with a taste of Halloween. How about a compilation of Liz Climo’s Halloween comics? There’s a bunch of them in a post at her website, compiled by Tastefully Offensive. | ||||||||
| 12 Super Powered Facts About Dragon Ball Z Posted: 02 Oct 2015 09:00 AM PDT When the super saiyan slugfest known as Dragon Ball Z hit the airwaves some people found the fighting too over the top and the lack of character development disturbing. But as the show got going and proved it was about more than people beating each other up anime fans of all kinds started going along for the ride. With an epic 291 episodes and dozens of characters getting in to DBZ can be quite a chore, and even those who've seen every episode have probably noticed some inconsistencies and errors. Things like fluctuations in animation quality, sudden character hair and wardrobe changes, and a character's disappearance from the series made viewers feel like their eyes were playing tricks on them. But these are just part of Dragon Ball Z's charm, and if the creator and writer of the manga Akira Toriyama couldn't keep track of all the facts during it's creation we never stood a chance! Read 12 Surprising Facts You Might Not Have Known About Dragon Ball Z at Dorkly | ||||||||
| Posted: 02 Oct 2015 08:00 AM PDT Everyone’s a critic! All this girl is trying to do is practice her flute. The cat is having none of it. He goes from a polite nudge to full-on attack when she doesn't take a hint. Does the cat just not like flute music, or does he think she’s not good at it? Honestly, she’s a pretty decent player. She may have to go practice out in the garage. -via Tastefully Offensive | ||||||||
| Concept Art For An Animated Version Of <i>Dune</i> Posted: 02 Oct 2015 07:00 AM PDT Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the most iconic science fiction series of all time, and yet for some reason the series has never received the animated series adaptation it deserves. So far the book series has received a movie adaptation directed by David Lynch that came out in 1984, followed by two different miniseries covering the first three books that aired on the Sci-Fi channel in 2000 and 2003. But where's the cartoon? Now, thanks to concept artist Matt Rhodes, we have an idea of what the character designs would look like for an animated Dune series, stylistically influenced by the films of Tarsem Singh. See more of Matt Rhodes' awesome Dune concept art here | ||||||||
| 10 Foreign Rip-Offs Of Popular Hollywood Films Posted: 02 Oct 2015 06:30 AM PDT Yes, this is Superman dancing with a woman dressed as Spider-Man in a Bollywood production number. It’s another of the many unauthorized copies of blockbuster movies that were made in countries around the world in order to cash in on a popular franchise. Without the royalties, of course. This list from Screen Rant includes the famous Japanese Spider-Man TV series and the Turkish Star Trek movie. Most of these are based on comic book superheroes, but not all of them. Some are even supposed to be comedies, and the others… well, they are worth a laugh, too. -via Geeks Are Sexy | ||||||||
| Gear Up For A Ghoulishly Good Time With These 25 Halloween Themed T-Shirts Posted: 02 Oct 2015 06:00 AM PDT Halloween is coming! Halloween is coming! Are you as excited as we are? If not, maybe you just need some new Halloween themed tees to get you in the spirit of the howliday, and the NeatoShop is your one stop shop for tees so ghoulishly good they're to die for! Halloweentime is our favorite time of year Hakuna Matata Halloween by Dr.Monekers When we put our costumes together with care A Nightmare Before Pinup by Spicy Donut And can't stop grinning about going out on Halloween night The Dark Fright Rises by Joefixit2 That fall feeling begins with Oktoberfest food, libations, and lots of dancing But then we're soon in high spirits at the thought of preparing for Halloween Ghosts Of Halloween by Daletheskater We carve pumpkins to decorate Green's Halloween by Taylor Rose And make sure we're ready to fit into our costumes Some ghouls even give their makeup a test run before they go out Sugar Skull Series: Deadly Apple Princess by Ellador But most are just happy to throw on any old thing come Halloween night Tanuki Revenge by Vinsse aka Vintz Halloweenies eagerly count down the days until All Hallow's Eve Counts Gratia Countis by Ikado Dreaming of costumes and candy and monstrous surprises Slimey: The Gooey Ghost by Donovan Alex And before we know it Halloween night is upon us With frightful fun to be found all around The Guac-Ing Dead by Odysseyroc The dead come back to haunt the living And bring some scary animal companions with them Flaming Animatronic Pony by Julia Sprenz Witches take flight in the night sky Wicked Flight! by AnishaCreations And monsters creep out of every crypt and swamp The Horrific Four by ArtOfCoreyCourts So if you're out trick-or-treating you'd better stick to streets you know are safe Every Town Has An Elm Street by Chip Skelton And watch out for creeps bearing candy The Great Pumpkin Busters by Rivrav On second thought, why not throw a Halloween party instead? Just make sure you have the Monster Mash on hand And plenty of treats for the little Halloweenies who haunt your doorstep No Need FOr Costumes by Boggs Nicolas Be sure to invite all the coolest dudes The Dogtor by Albo And the most fabulous mistresses Mistress Of The Dark by ursulalopez And you'll be left feeling like the king or queen of Halloween! Pumpkin Throne by Aaron Morales Get ready to celebrate Halloween your way by bringing home a super festive Halloween themed t-shirt from the NeatoShop. All sales benefit both the indie artists from around the world who create these ghoulishly good designs and Neatorama (your favorite blog), and you're sure to get lots of compliments from your fellow Halloweenies. So get geared up for Halloween at the NeatoShop today! | ||||||||
| Black and White: <i>The Twilight Zone</i> Posted: 02 Oct 2015 05:00 AM PDT For Rod Serling, TV was the perfect landscape to battle bigotry and corporate censorship. But was the nation ready for it? In the late 1950s, Rod Serling found himself sitting in a London airport tired and ready to go home. As he waited to board his flight, he spotted something eerie. Across the room stood his doppelgänger: a man who looked to be his same height, sporting the same coat and carrying the exact same cowhide briefcase. It blew his mind. As the award-winning TV writer tried to catch a glimpse of his double’s face, a strange thought hit him: What if, through some glitch in the universe, he was watching another version of himself? “I kept staring and staring,” Serling recalled, “with this funny, ice-cold feeling that, if he turns around and it’s me, what do I do?” Eventually, the gentleman did turn around. He was a decade younger and, Serling joked, far better looking. But the experience was too uncanny to forget. As a writer, Serling made his name toying with unsettling concepts, which made him a critical darling. His 1956 teleplay, Requiem for a Heavyweight, had garnered numerous awards, an Emmy among them. But corporate sponsors didn’t find his work appealing. Always looking to skirt controversy, they preferred to work within the confines of formulaic Westerns and bland sitcoms. Serling wanted none of that. He thought TV should probe deeper, believing it could address big concerns: social injustice, bigotry, mortality. In 1959, he got the chance to do just that, using that strange airport experience as the kindling for his legendary science fiction TV series, The Twilight Zone. The series would be a double itself, a serious exploration of politics and ethics disguised as harmless sci-fi. The question was whether he could get away with it.
At home, Serling struggled for direction. “I didn’t really know what the hell I wanted to do with my life,” his daughter Anne quotes him as saying in her book, As I Knew Him. He eventually registered as a phys-ed major at Antioch College and tried to fit in. But he kept noticing discrimination. When he noticed that a local barbershop refused to cut the hair of African-Americans, he insisted that his friends stop patronizing it. Meanwhile, Serling found what seemed to be his calling: manning the microphone of the campus radio station, where he wrote scripts, directed, and acted. By his senior year, he was doing weekly shows. One of his scripts would win a national radio contest.
Despite the censorship, Serling had nabbed three Emmys by 1957. But he was also exhausted by the constant battles for creative control, so he returned to an idea he’d had back in his college radio days. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe and the pulp stories of his youth—writing that couched complex messages in pure fantasy—he wrote an hour-long teleplay called The Time Element, in which a distressed American has recurring dreams that he’s transported to 1941 to warn of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor. He consults a psychiatrist, who tries to diffuse his anxiety. Suddenly, the patient stops showing up and, in one of Serling’s trademark twists, the psychiatrist learns the distressed man died in the attack 15 years earlier. CBS was lukewarm on the script, and The Time Element seemed destined to rot in the network’s archives. But in November 1958, a producer who wanted to air something by Serling plucked the episode from storage. When it ran, more than 6,000 glowing letters flooded in. The execs took the hint. Soon after, the network asked Serling to write more stories like it for a new series. At last, Serling’s dream was coming true: The Twilight Zone was born. The title, aviation lingo for the point where a pilot can no longer see the horizon, had a double meaning. For Serling, it represented the point where executives could no longer see his true intentions. The spooky show would be a smokescreen for exploring themes like racism, government corruption, and persecution. Anne recalls her father musing that “an alien could say what a Democrat or Republican couldn’t.” As he worked 12- to 14-hour days seven days a week, Serling’s ashtray overflowed. His smoking habit made his fingers too stiff and cold to type, so instead, he kicked his feet onto his desk and dictated into a recorder. He made different voices for different characters, reciting camera directions and marking punctuation. The scripts quickly piled up. In the afternoons, Serling visited the set in Culver City and wandered the MGM backlot for more inspiration. The studios housed every setting imaginable, from Martian landscapes to barren wastelands. The 1959 pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?” set the tone for the series. In it, an astronaut finds himself dropped in a deserted town, and the unfolding story slowly reveals that he’s part of an experiment testing whether astronauts can handle the isolation of long-term space travel without cracking. Hours after a private screening, General Foods and Kimberly-Clark agreed to back the series. Serling’s Trojan horse was off to the races.  The Twilight Zonepremiered Friday, October 2, 1959, at 10 p.m. Almost immediately, angry letters poured in—not from offended viewers, but from parents who were irritated that their kids were staying up late to watch the show. “Every week you looked forward to a different kind of realization and shock,” says author Mark Olshaker, who was 10 when the series debuted (he would later consult with Serling on a biography). “You knew you were going to get something that was going to make you think. On Monday morning, that’s what you would talk about.” It wasn’t just kids. Adults were captivated by the fantasies, the themes, and especially the ironic endings that made the series famous. As civil rights debates exploded, the episodes mirrored newspaper headlines. In “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air,” three astronauts crash-land on a strange alien landscape. Without laws or consequences, one of them regresses to animal instincts and murders the others. The survivor’s fate? Accountability. (They had landed in the Nevada desert.) In “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” a neighborhood devolves under suspicion that someone might be an alien invader. In the end, none are—but real aliens observe the chaos from above, musing that mankind is all too quick to destroy itself. Attentive viewers realized the only thing black-and-white about The Twilight Zone was its cinematography. Fan clubs sprang up in most states, with members christening themselves “Zonies.” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow famously dubbed TV a “vast wasteland,” but he made an exception for Serling’s show. The title even entered the popular vernacular: When boxer Archie Moore was KO’d in a 1961 match, he told reporters, “Man, I was in the Twilight Zone!” By 1962, the show had made a huge dent in popular culture. Serling released a collection of short stories based on the series, and it sold more than a million copies. Before long, a Twilight Zone board game, comics, and a record appeared on the market. Despite all the success, the show still hadn’t won over the network. CBS president James Aubrey continued to chop away at the show’s budget, convinced it was eating up too much money. Meanwhile, Serling refused to compromise and often dipped into his own pockets. By season three, Aubrey was pinching so many pennies that he insisted that six episodes be shot on videotape rather than film. The quality would be a jarring contrast to the film-noir feel the crew was careful to keep consistent. Serling was so angry he threatened to resign. (He was bluffing.)  It was clear that Serling was losing control. One sponsor called CBS repeatedly, demanding to know what Serling was really getting at: He sensed a deeper layer but couldn’t articulate exactly what it was. Serling, for his part, was making his points more obvious. (In an audacious move for the era, he cast three black actors in leading roles in “The Big Tall Wish.”) As ratings idled and sponsor suspicions grew, the network effectively canceled the show in spring 1962. But then, in a bizarre twist, it was resurrected when CBS realized it had no solid replacement. It renewed the show and expanded its time slot from half an hour to an hour. But messing with the formula was a mistake. At an hour long, the show lost its crucial tension. Ratings plummeted, and though a fifth season was ordered, it was clear the show was running on fumes. When CBS finally let the axe fall in early 1964, Serling held a tongue-in-cheek wake, complete with a tombstone, on the MGM soundstage. “He thought it had run its course,” Anne says. Dejected, Serling told journalists he thought The Twilight Zone would be forgotten in short order. This wasn’t a good prediction. While the void left by Zone was indeed filled with vapid sitcoms— like 1964’s megahit Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.— something about Serling’s ability to weave cultural commentary into popular entertainment would captivate viewers for decades to come. The Twilight Zone’s O. Henry–esque twists became pop culture staples: gut-punch scenes, like the climax in “Time Enough at Last” (in which an introverted bank teller longing to be left alone with his books finds himself the lone survivor of an atomic blast that has mercifully spared most of the books in the nearby public library; unfortunately, he ends up shattering his glasses and can’t read without them) would become timeless TV tropes—even parodied on The Simpsons. The show had proved that audiences were just as willing to consume ideas as they were slapstick, which opened the doors for shows like M*A*S*H, which padded entertainment with rich, powerful messages. “Almost any writer, when you ask who influenced them, will say Rod Serling,” says TV critic Mark Dawidziak. That includes J.J. Abrams, who gushed over Serling’s allegory in Wired in 2007, and Stephen King, who, in a chapter in his memoir Danse Macabre writes: “Of all the dramatic programs which have ever run on American TV, it is the one which comes closest to defying any overall analysis. It was its own thing, and in large part that fact alone seems to account for the fact that a whole generation is able to associate the Serling program with the budding of the sixties ... at least, as the sixties are remembered.” Unfortunately, Serling, who passed away in 1975, wouldn’t live to watch his influence spread. At one point, Serling recalled the incident with his would-be double at the London airport and said that it was typical of “the kind of story you’ll be seeing on The Twilight Zone.” Of course, that was not entirely true. There was no one kind of Twilight Zone story. The thread was simply that each episode held a mirror to society and compelled viewers to question both their own preconceptions and the wisdom of the powers that be. Serling was just reflecting on the era: the tumult of civil rights, the Vietnam War, and a surging counterculture. With Zone, viewers found a show that not only grappled with messy topics, but also tried to provide answers. “To my generation that came of age in the ’60s, the show was amazingly important,” Olshaker says. “[We were] idealistic enough to believe anything is possible and cynical enough to believe nothing is true. Twilight Zone was one of the seminal forces in that realization. It opened up possibilities of imagination, of social consciousness, but also realities of evil and prejudice.” As for the question of the doppelgänger, perhaps Serling realized he could be two people at once: one who could entertain and one who could provoke. Maybe his fifth dimension wasn’t fantasy. Maybe it was a way for television to face reality. __________________________
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Even as a teenager, Serling had been a social activist. Growing up in Binghamton, New York, he was editor of the high school newspaper, injecting social commentary in between box scores. Fighting in World War II only galvanized his mission. Stationed in the Philippines with a demolition platoon, he witnessed horror firsthand. Serling left the island consumed by a hatred for war, and he brought back a souvenir: a piece of shrapnel in his knee that bled spontaneously for the rest of his life.
Writing became Serling’s way to deal with the psychological scars of war. Plagued with nightmares, he wrote and sold scripts to radio companies, which eventually led to television gigs. His early work was taut and uncompromising, doggedly pursuing questions about morality and inequality. He thought that TV, film, and radio should be “vehicles of social criticism.” The trouble was, exploring prejudice on TV was nearly impossible. Corporate sponsors ritually censored and watered down his teleplays. When one script about the lynching of a young black man was turned into a popcorn western, Serling became furious. In his words, all the networks wanted was to showcase “dancing rabbits with toilet paper.”
The above article by Jake Rossen is reprinted with permission from the November 2014 issue of mental_floss magazine.
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