Customer Reviews

The Twilight Zone: Vol. 2

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

No matter how many DVDs they put out with episodes of "The Twilight Zone," they cannot put out one with better episodes that Volume 2. This is not just because it has the quintessential "Zone" episode as the first one on the DVD, but also two of the other three episodes are outright classics and the final one is still an above average episode from Rod Serling's celebrated television anthology series. That is why when I started picking up choice volumes in this collection to own forever Volume 2 was number one on my list.

Episode 8, "Time Enough at Last" (Written by Rod Serling from Lynn Venable's short story, First aired November 20, 1959), stars Burgess Meredith, in what was surely his most recognizable role, plays Henry Bemis, a mild-mannered, myopic bank teller who only wants to read, but can never get away from this shrewish wife and demanding boss. But then Henry has the fortune of being in the bank vault reading a book when the world is destroyed by a nuclear war. Directed by John Brahm, no "Twilight Zone" episode ever backed a more unforgettable ending. I am even more impressed by the fact that this classic was such an early first season episode. Meanwhile, Burgess would appear in three more "Zones," although lightning never struck twice for him.

Episode 22, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (Written by Rod Serling, First aired March 4, 1960) finds neighbors turning on each other as unexplained events fuel their fear that human-looking aliens have infiltrated Maple Street (filed on MGM's "Andy Hardy" street). Claude Atkins as Steve Brand and Jack Weston as Charlie head a strong cast that features Anne Barton as Mrs. Brand and Burt Metcalf as Don. Sheldon Allman and William Walsh are the aliens having fun with the human test subjects. This one is an excellent example of a first season morality play from Serling.

Episode 123, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (Written by Richard Matheson based on his short story, First aired October 11, 1963) stars William Shatner as poor Bob Wilson, who has left a sanatorium only to take a plane flight where a gremlin keeps trying to sabotage the engine. Of course nobody believes Bob when he tells them what he sees on the wing of the airplane, and he has to doubt his own sanity. But what if he is right? (a recurring question in the series). "Nightmare" was directed by Richard Donner, who went on to be a film director of some note. Shatner is best remembered for this particular "Zone," but I have to say that I think his "Nick of Time" is even better. The episode was the final chapter of "Twilight Zone: The Movie" in 1983, dircted by George Miller and with John Lithgow in the Shatner role, now renamed John Valentine.

Episode 54, "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (Written by Rod Serling, First aired February 24, 1961) is the only sub-classic episode on this disc. The story is about an airplane that picks up a freak tail wind that sends it back in time. John Anderson as Captain Farver leads the excellent cast that makes this rather far-fetched idea utterly believable. I remember reading once that Serling researched the talk in the cockpit and that it got points with real pilots for being so accurate. Final note: the sequence with the dinosaurs is from Jack Harris' 1961 film "Dinosaurs."

When purchasing a DVD on any of the "Twilight Zone" episodes, I think it is safe to say that in the majority of cases the buyer knows those stories by heart. The main concern is one of quality. How does the picture measure up? In this case I have never seen better transfers. The images are excellent. They are sharp, clear and maintain consistent contrast. The laserdisc versions had a problem with black & white contrast. That problem has now been corrected.

Volume 2 contains THE MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET, NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET, THE ODYSSEY OF FLIGHT 33 and TIME ENOUGH AT LAST. William Shatner gives a brilliant performance in NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET from the 5th season This is one of my favorites and still holds up to repeated viewing because it is so well crafted. THE MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET is a good parable of human paranoia and mass hysteria.

Rod Serling was a man of great literary and social intellect, somewhat ignored because of the genre he worked within and was famous for. "The Twilight Zone" frequently bordered on the edges of science fiction if not immersed in it. Society's values being what they are, science fiction has never been thoroughly embraced by conventional thought as a legitimate literary or cinematic art form. That is society's loss and Serling's heartbreak. However, "The Twilight Zone" still endures.

Four great episodes are included in this Twilight Zone Volume. Also included is some background information about the six seasons of The Twilight Zone, as well as a biography of Rod Serling. Like many who have reviewed The Twilight Zone, I became an instant fan of the show and think it still is one of the most intelligent and creative shows ever created.

My favorite episode of all time is "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," so I had to check this out just for that. In this episode, after residents on a block see something mysterious fly overhead all sorts of unusual events begin to happen and the people, suspicious of one another, begin to make accusations and lose their patience. This episode is so intelligent because it really draws on the whole idea of mass hysteria and mob thought, and what can happen when it takes over a community, even a peaceful one.

The other episodes are all classics as well...

Time Enough At Last-Burgess Meredith plays a bookworm working at a bank. He is dissatisfied with his life at home because he never has enough time to read, so he reads everywhere he goes. He finally gets his wish of having enough time to read, with an ironic twist.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet-This one stars William Shatner, who gives an extraordinary performance as a man who has had a previous mental breakdown, and now must take a flight with his wife. Once the plane takes off, he begins to see that all is not well as he looks outside the window. Is there really someone, or something out there, or is this just his imagination?

The Odyssey of Flight 33-A plane takes off trying to get to its destination, but mysterious things begin to happen when the plane apparently breaks the sound barrier and goes back into time.

The only beef I have with the volume is that, as others pointed out, it is a little thin (only four episodes) in a day and age where we can get an entire season of other shows on DVD. You can get other larger volumes of Twilight Zone on Amazon, but they cost somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty dollars for approximately thirty episodes. If you are looking for a specific episode, I think you are better off getting these smaller volumes for about six or seven dollars.

And this volume is a great way to start!

Two very, very classic Twilight Zones stories are included in this excellent DVD. "Time Enough at last" from the first season, is clearly one of the best episodes in the series. It was the first one I ever saw, and it captured my attention and turned me into a Twilight Zone fan. Burgess Meredith stars as a lone survivor of an holocaust caused by a bomb. He finally has time to do what he likes the most, read... or so he thinks. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" features a paranoid William Shatner (Captain James T. Kirk from Star Trek), terrified when he sees on the wing outside his airplane seat a creature destroying an engine. This very same story was done all over again for "Twilight Zone: The Movie" in 1983, this time directed by George Miller (Mad Max, all three of them). "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (Season 2) is another airplane story, where the craft is lost in time. In "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (Season 1) residents from a suburbian neighborhood believe that extraterrestrials live among them. Also a paranoid story, that clearly refers to the communist threat. A must have DVD for any Twilight Zone fan.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE VOL. 2 includes four episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, three of which are quintessential episodes of the series. "Time Enough at Last" stars Burgess Meredith as bookworm, Henry Bemis, who works at a bank. He's constantly hounded by his wife at home and by his bosses at work. All he really wants to do is spend his life reading. While in one of the underground bank vaults, a nuclear holocaust happens and Henry discovers that he's the only man to have survived the disaster. Henry wanders into a library and thinks he's in Heaven. But our ideas of Heaven often turn out to be more like Hell. "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" revolves around a supposed alien invasion that causes the quiet residents of Maple Street to begin turning on each other and their own humanity. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is an episode that has been rehashed and parodied on countless other shows. "Nightmare" stars William Shatner as, Bob Wilson, a salesman who has just been released from the sanitarium because of a nervous breakdown. Bob is looking forward to a relaxing flight home, despite his anxiety about flying and the turbulant thunderstorm the plane flies into. Unfortunately for Bob, he just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and sees a gremlin trying to sabotage the planes engine. What's a former nut-case to do? The final episode on the disc is "The Odyssey of Flight 33". "Flight 33" isn't quite as memorable as the other three episodes, but it does have its moments. It revolves around a basic passenger jet that gets a boost from a quantum jet stream, pushing it through history. Overall, this is an excellent collection of THE TWILIGHT ZONE episodes that any serious fan or serious writer or filmmaker would probably be interested in owning.

From the golden years of T.V. we get four classics. William ( Priceline ) Shatner gets high and has a BAD trip. Bigotry and paranoia overtake reason and wrecks a neighborhood. Airplane passengers hit a timeshockwave and see the age of dinosaurs. In these episodes we see how people get into trouble when they fail to use Simple Logic.

As others have already commented on the technical features of the set and the individual episodes, I just wanted to make a few comments on the series as a whole and perhaps how it was influenced by the cultural milieu of the time.

It was the drab 50s and then turbulent 60s, and the Cold War, with its threat of possible nuclear annihilation, was in full swing. Perhaps that explains the pervasive film noir ambience and dark mood that often hangs like a pall over many of the episodes. Although the characters are drawn from all levels of society and from all walks of life--from two-bit criminals to the rich and famous--many are just various and sundry low-lifes, riff-raff, criminals, and grifters. And then there are the simply down and out--the bored or emotionally overwrought, middle-aged and overstressed, desperate housewives, the dyspeptic, dispossessed, or depressed, and your average guy just down on his luck.

Almost every human emotion or character flaw or neurosis is explored: loneliness, depression, euphoria, greed, obsession, gambling addiction, hypochrondria, the lust for power, the fear of death, feelings of inferiority, failure, and inadequacy, feelings of ugliness and beauty, the stress of modern life, the old and unwanted, the young and neglected, the dispirited but still hopeful, the dispirited who have abandoned all hope, the highly successful who find their success and fame empty and meaningless, the losers who find their failures just as galling and damning, the boredom of a comfortable marriage, the boredom of the single and lovelorn, the boredom of a respectable middle-class existence, the boredom of grinding poverty, the desire to live forever, and on and on. Modern civilization and its discontents (or more like 20th-century America and its malcontents) seem to march by in all their false and meretricious glory. If this was the dull and malaise-ridden 50s and early 60s, one can only wonder what Serling would make of our frenetic and divided and paranoid post-9/11 world.

One funny aspect of the episodes is how unflatteringly writers themselves are portrayed. The episodes starring Keenan Wynn (in the first season) as a America's most famous (but philandering) playwright and Richard Haydn in the second season as a snobbish, effete, arrogant, spiteful, and verbally abusive wine and food writer with a short temper and a sharp wit and tongue, don't exactly portray writers in a positive light. :-)

In fact, overall, the series is notable for how many unsympathetic, unprepossessing, and even despicable characaters where often in the lead roles. :-)

So all in all, a truly unique piece of Americana from a long lost era whose themes and stories have held up better than I expected.

Volume #2 in the series of "Twilight Zone" DVDs is what I consider to be by far the best individual volume. It offers four classic "TZ" programs, including two of my all-time favorites -- the two airplane-related episodes ("Nightmare At 20,000 Feet" and "The Odyssey Of Flight 33").

The other two half-hour shows on this DVD are also extremely good as well -- "Time Enough At Last" and "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street".

The picture quality is very good within the "Twilight Zone" series of DVDs. Audio is good too (in Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono). There are a minimal number of Chapter Stops included on all four programs, too (3 breaks per show), but they certainly could have placed the breaks in more appropriate spots throughout each episode. Some of the chapters begin in mid-sentence. And there's no break right after the opening credits, which would have been nice.

A "Play All" option is also provided, although it's not labelled "Play All". Selecting "Feature Presentation" from the Main Menu will play all four shows back-to-back.

No subtitles are included.

Not much in the way of extra features here. But there are some text-based "Inside The Twilight Zone" items.

Since this second volume is one of the earliest (1999) TZ discs put out by Image Entertainment, you'll have to put up with the annoying "animated eyeball" Menu design (and repetitive "Zone" music that never stops) -- but it's a minor annoyance. The quality of these four episodes overcomes the aggravating and slow-transitioning Menu system. ;)

I have enjoyed nearly all of the TZ volumes, but this "Volume 2" tops 'em all for great episode selection, IMHO. The only thing that could have possibly made this volume better would have been by adding a fifth program to the disc -- that being another William Shatner classic, "Nick Of Time". Volume 9 contains that one.

ALL ABOARD, Twilight Zone Zannies! THIS IS IT (as someone who has seen them ALL three times over) . . . The ONE Twilight Zone DVD with the most value, resale value, and bang for your buck!!! Excellent for the budget minded, cheapskates, or downright frugal (who tape most events but complain about the quality because they didn't bother with Monster cables)! It doesn't include the first or second "best" episodes (you will have to purchase volumes 11 and 26 for that!), but each selection is definitely (and amazingly) in the "ALL TIME TOP TEN"! Indeed, Volume 2 is the humdinger, superstar, Sean Connery as James Bond of them all!!! Each box in the collection comes with welcome words such as "Four remarkable episodes" which provides the purchaser a (in this case, false) sense of security that he or she has brought home the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West. Unfortunately, more in the tradition of the Wizard of Oz himself ("a good man but a very bad wizard"), many in this collection have munchkin-like value since the episodes are put together with rhyme or reason more difficult to ascertain than Dorothy's elusive rainbow! "Time Enough to Last" features Burgess Meredith as a funny but tragic bookworm and dreamer. It is probably the weakest episode but it still makes the likes of Professor Klump look like a mainstream idiot! "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" appears to be a commentary on how certain lower class (thinking) people in our society always need a scapegoat. Therefore, the show (as in real life) results in some chilling possibilities of what happens next. "The Odyssey of Flight 33" reflects creator Rod Serling's first rate, wild imagination! A jet airliner confronts a tail wind with such velocity that it moves into another time barrier! In this script, the "unbelievable" becomes completely believable! "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" has a couple of shocking scenes that will have you contemplating the "what if" question for the remainder of your time on earth. If you are watching in DVD, this is actually the third in the sequence of four episodes. But I recommend watching it last for a truer sense of the "Grand Finale".

This second volume of Collection One might be the best of the entire Collection. "Time Enough at Last" and "Oddyssey of Flight 33" features two excellent stories with amazing and unforgettable endings. Another classic is "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," featuring William Shatner, who plays a man recovering from a nervous break down. His flight with his wife proves to be horrific. "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" is a classic exploration into social psychology and mob mentality when a gang of residents on a quiet street are convinced that an alien invasion has occurred.

This second volume is well written with wonderful acting by Burgess Meredith and William Shatner. Highly recommended!