MickeyThe Outer Limits
"There is nothing wrong with your television set..." Even today, the haunting words of the Control Voice (Vic Perrin) stirs the nightmares in the back of my soul. The Twilight Zone is known as the sci fi anthology series, but in fact many if not most Twilight Zone episodes were outright fantasy (Nothing wrong with fantasy, so long as it's a good story). By contrast, The Outer Limits always grounded their stories- no matter how far out- in sci fi settings.
In addition, the producers insisted that each story had to include a "bear," some thing or element to induce awe and wonder. Quite often the thing in question was a monster (or at least monstrous in nature), and while Twilight Zone very often strayed into bright sunshiny happy happy comic outings, as a small second-grade kiddie catching reruns on Sunday afternoons I could always depend on The Outer Limits to scare the living Hell out of me.
One critter that has stayed in my subconscious all this time was a parasite from the episode "The Invisibles." Of course my adult eye can see it's a foam rubber creation pulled along by fine strings... but still, the thought of this thing crawling up into my spine and taking over my whole body, using me as its puppet is still a lot more disturbing than over 99% of the "Let's spray strawberry syrup at the camera!" stuff that passes for horror these days.
And it wasn't just the scares; there was some real meat on those stories. Even today, chopped to hell to include another ten minutes of commercials they're still fine viewing when SciFi (very) occasionally runs a marathon of the original Outer Limits. Harlan Ellison wrote two stories, "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand," both of them solid action thrillers that still leave us with something solid to think about.
Given the revival of Twilight Zone, it was inevitable that the Powers That Be would bring back Outer Limits for the modern, high-tech special effects in color world. I was even excited to hear that for the premiere they were filmingGeorge R. R. Martin's "Sandkings," a truly unnerving horror tale. For whatever reason they decided to water down the story, and while the screen version was spooky enough by TV standards, I can't imagine anyone who had read the story to be that impressed.
The original Outer Limits was from a different time, when TV couldn't even pretend to compete with movies for production values and special effects. The best producers, like Stevens and Stefano, made up for it with solid writing and stars (Like Robert Culp and Martin Landau) who could make even the farthest-fetched concept real and believable to the audience. We could really be drawn into those old stories... even when we were desperately afraid of what was lurking in there.
In addition, the producers insisted that each story had to include a "bear," some thing or element to induce awe and wonder. Quite often the thing in question was a monster (or at least monstrous in nature), and while Twilight Zone very often strayed into bright sunshiny happy happy comic outings, as a small second-grade kiddie catching reruns on Sunday afternoons I could always depend on The Outer Limits to scare the living Hell out of me.
One critter that has stayed in my subconscious all this time was a parasite from the episode "The Invisibles." Of course my adult eye can see it's a foam rubber creation pulled along by fine strings... but still, the thought of this thing crawling up into my spine and taking over my whole body, using me as its puppet is still a lot more disturbing than over 99% of the "Let's spray strawberry syrup at the camera!" stuff that passes for horror these days.
And it wasn't just the scares; there was some real meat on those stories. Even today, chopped to hell to include another ten minutes of commercials they're still fine viewing when SciFi (very) occasionally runs a marathon of the original Outer Limits. Harlan Ellison wrote two stories, "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand," both of them solid action thrillers that still leave us with something solid to think about.
Given the revival of Twilight Zone, it was inevitable that the Powers That Be would bring back Outer Limits for the modern, high-tech special effects in color world. I was even excited to hear that for the premiere they were filmingGeorge R. R. Martin's "Sandkings," a truly unnerving horror tale. For whatever reason they decided to water down the story, and while the screen version was spooky enough by TV standards, I can't imagine anyone who had read the story to be that impressed.
The original Outer Limits was from a different time, when TV couldn't even pretend to compete with movies for production values and special effects. The best producers, like Stevens and Stefano, made up for it with solid writing and stars (Like Robert Culp and Martin Landau) who could make even the farthest-fetched concept real and believable to the audience. We could really be drawn into those old stories... even when we were desperately afraid of what was lurking in there.
