After recently gaining access to all of The Twilight Zone I've watched pretty much every episode. And this is after watching 90% of the sci- fi/horror films & television of the past 40+ years. What struck me most is how most of it draws much of its influence from these amazing stories. For example:
No doubt it's a very dated show (i.e. black & white, very outdated production quality at least by today's standards, acting can be sort of stiff at times, etc), but the stories are timeless and simply amazing compared to the majority of film & television we've got nowadays, and I would take that over a film/show with top-notch acting & quality but a boring, pretentious script and some sort of contrived romance sub-plot. Hell... I would rather just listen to the audio of a Twilight Zone episode than watch an episode of True Blood, one of the "Twilight" films, etc
- Before I saw the episode "A Most Unusual Camera" I had seen the film "Time Lapse". Where three people discover a camera that takes pictures of the future. They use the camera to take pictures of the next days horse races and profit from it until things inevitably go sour; which is the EXACT plot of the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode.
- The episode "The Trade-ins" involves elderly people from the future who pay huge sums of money to have their mind/memories/etc transferred to a younger, genetically engineered body. Traces of this can be seen in MANY different places, the most recent I've seen would be "Self/less" and "Surrogates"
No doubt it's a very dated show (i.e. black & white, very outdated production quality at least by today's standards, acting can be sort of stiff at times, etc), but the stories are timeless and simply amazing compared to the majority of film & television we've got nowadays, and I would take that over a film/show with top-notch acting & quality but a boring, pretentious script and some sort of contrived romance sub-plot. Hell... I would rather just listen to the audio of a Twilight Zone episode than watch an episode of True Blood, one of the "Twilight" films, etc