Shark Bytes

I must say I absolutely loved this show as a kid. I'm 29 now, so I don't remember all of the episodes. There are two episodes that really stick out and scared the hell out of me. Gramma being the first. The second I'm not sure of. I believe it is Personal Demons. From what I remember of it there was a little gypsy midget lady talking to a group of kids outside a school she looks up and sees this man getting in his car. She runs after the car clawing at the side and jumping on it. They both terrified me, but then I was only 6 or 7 at the time.

The Danny Kaye episode is my favorite I cry every time I see it.Then Teresa Golowitz with Gene Barry as the devil.Her Pilgram Soul was very good as well.

Remember the episodes "Her pilgrim soul"??? and "I of Newton"? Danica Mckellar made her acting debut in those episodes.

I have to say that the New Twilight Zone never JTS. I'm not quite sure if the people who voted that it jumped on day 1 are true TZ fans or if they are just comparing it to the original TZ and not judging it on its own merits. Some of the episodes of the New TZ are better than many of the eps of the original. Granted, as great as the original was, it had its share of duds, but like the original, this new version had enough excellent episodes to more than offset the occasional dud.

Many notable artists were involved with this show. The Grateful Dead composed and performed the haunting theme song (although, I've never cared for the Dead, as I have never been a heavy drug user, they do a great job on the theme.) There were also several episodes adapted from short stories by such notables as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison and Stephen King. The New TZ had some excellent ratings when it first aired in a favorable time slot, but then the execs at CBS decided to move the show around a couple of times which usually means many regular viewers can't watch it anymore, or aren't even sure what time or even what day it's on! The second season had more weak shows than the first did, plus the fact that anthology shows are not as popular as they once were (modern TV viewers tend to prefer shows with recurring characters). Those two factors contributed to the New TZ's demise. It's a shame that more people aren't exposed to the show now. The '90s version of TZ was pretty lame, IMO, and I hope that those who said this jumped from day 1 aren't confusing it with that version, because that would be a shame. I tend to believe that may be the case, because this show was much too good for people to actually believed it jumped from day 1. Peace.

Not as good as the first but a billion percent better than the UPN version.

The New Twilght Zone never jumped. At least, not the one in the '80s. There were several very good, if not excellent, episodes. Granted, it wasn't the original TZ, but it had many well written, well directed and well acted episodes. My favorites have been mentioned already. A Message from Charity was a wonderful love story and Her Pilgrim Soul was a classic, I thought. Great stories. One of the funnier stories, in my opinion, was one about four guys playing poker, and one of the guys (Played by the guy who was Nick Tortelli on Cheers) was the devil. Morgan Freeman and Garrett Morris were two of the players, also. The devil kept getting three sixes (666 for those of you scoring at home). They finally catch on that he's the devil, and they play one final hand for ALL THE MARBLES! Not the best episode, IMO, but one of the most entertaining. Just my two cents. I don't think this very good anthology show ever JTS. Peace.

I am 29 so I don't remember all the the ones that people gave much acclaim to such as puritan girl which seems like a good one (someone should recap it for me.) The three that I do remember are: The Shadow Man-I will never forget that boy in the park getting choked off of his feet by the monkey bars in the park and the shadow man telling him he's from "under someone's elses bed". The one with Sherman Hemsley as a math teacher and the Black guy from I think Barney Miller playing a demon. Sherman Hemsley says casually out loud he'll sell his soul to the devil to figure out this math problem and voila a demon appears. The demon's shirt kept changing the sayings it said such as over 1 billion served. The demon tells Sherman that the only way out of having his soul taken from him is to have the demon do or say something he couldn't do. the demon boasts on and on about everything he could do, how fast, and etc. Sherman Hemsley tells him something simple like get lost and the demon was incapable of "getting lost" and he disappears.(I'm sure someone will correct me on that one) The other episode which was phenomenal to my young mind at the time was the one with the lady telling people to shut up and everything stopped. At the end there was a nuclear missle heading for her town and she made it stop a few feet from the ground. Very creepy. I remember thinking at the time that i would've just stopped a few feet from the ground and disarmed it. (As if I was a rocket scientist or something) I also remember most of the shows were pale in comparison to the originals which my parents watched over and over and over so I remember all of those.

The New Twilight Zone had a few bombs (doesn't every show), but overall it was a very well done show. It usually failed when it tried to be the old Twilight Zone, mimicking episodes or redoing them entirely. Many have mentioned the great episodes, like Her Pilgrim Soul and others, but no one has yet mentioned what I thought was an outstanding episode, called The Cold Equation. A spaceship used to transport critical supplies to outer colonies is given just enough fuel to make its voyage, accounting for the weight of supplies and the pilot. A teenaged girl stows away on a ship, trying to go see her brother on a colony, who she hasn't seen in many years. The pilot discovers her, and then realizes her added weight will result in the ship running out of fuel and burning up in the atmosphere before they can land. They try throwing out all unnecessary equipment, but in the end, the ship, carrying essential medical supplies to handle a plague, is still overweight. The show ends with her voluntarily going into the airlock and jettisoning herself into space. No occult twists at the end, just a very sobering script well acted by the two characters in the episode. The lead actor from Tour of Duty played the pilot, can't recall his name. I wish they'd put this series out on DVD or at least run it on Sci-Fi, as one other writer suggested.

I'll add a vote here for the switch to syndication, but that wasn't the only change. They had new producers (yes, I know one of them is J. Michael Strazynski, the great god of B5, but he didn't have a clue here), they moved production to Vancouver, the wimpy voice of Robin Ward was added as narrator (isn't this the same guy from Ellison's The Starlost?), and the budget was cut by two-thirds. But the real point when the series died: the horrid remake of "The After Hours." Now THAT was pathetic. I think the producers watched the opening of TZ: The Movie where Albert Brooks describes The After Hours. He must have been predicting the new series episode because what he talked about sure had nothing to do with the original. Now, some of the remakes worked. After Hours did not. Only good thing about the syndicated year: "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich," the best and the funniest of the series. A classic. Naturally, it's a Harlan Ellison story. Ellison was the closest thing to Charles Beaumont any new TZ series will ever had. Thank you, Ellison!! You were the best reason for this series staying on as long as it did. And when is somebody going to pop TZ2003 on here? It JTS when Paramount put Pen Densham and Atlantis Productions in charge - you know they produced that wretched, utterly unwatchable Showtime version of The Outer Limits. NOW THAT WAS TERRIBLE. So they were the perfect ones to produce a wretched, utterly unwatchable TZ. How a show can JTS before it even airs is hard to believe, but TZ2003 managed it. I mean Eye of the Beholder? The makeup looked like...makeup. The original was fantastic and you always believed what was happening. And it had Elly May. In the remake, all I wanted was to forward the video to see the pig people - and it didn't even have any pig people! Just leftover appliances from ST: Enterprise and Voyager. Absolute botch all around.

I don't know why this show was so short lived. The first time I saw this show it scared the hell out of me - then I was hooked. Every Friday night I would watch it then not be able to sleep that night. Most episodes had a "final narration" (sometimes to reiterate the moral of the story). However, one of the creepiest episodes of all time did not need the "final narration." An overworked and underappreciated housewife finds a magic necklace. When the necklace is worn all she has to say out loud is "Shut up!" and everyone and everything around her gets frozen in time (except for her). Obviously she loves this because this gives her plenty of quiet, quality time to herself and she's able to get things done without people getting in her way. All she has to say is "Start talking" and everyone and everything resumes their motions. Some anti-nuke people come to her door "Aren't you concerned with this?" they would ask, but she did not want to be bothered with anti-nuke wackos and said "Shut up!" They froze, and she physically drug both of them to the curb. As it turns out, there really is a serious impending threat of a nuclear disaster and everyone in town panics and ransacks the grocery store. The housewife walks into the grocery store and is disgusted at these paranoid people making a last effort to horde food. She is also tired of waiting in the long line at the grocery store and hollers "Shut up!" Everyone freezes and it's quiet. She stuffs a wad of money into the cashier's mouth and says "Here. This ought to cover it!" As she walks out of the store she gleefully says, "Star talking!" Later that night a news bulletin comes on warning of an impending nuclear strike and the air-raid sirens outside begin to wail. The housewives' children and husband begin to panic. Her kids are freaking out and crying and climbing all over her till she can't take anymore, "Shut up!" She then leaves the house and begins to wander the city not quite knowing what to do next. She then sees a man looking towards the sky with a sad, matter-of-fact expression on his face. She looks up to the sky and there is a nuclear warhead frozen in the sky just several hundred feet away from the ground. The End. Made the little hairs on my neck stand straight up.

One great thing about the CBS incarnation was the ability to put multiple stories in a one-hour time slot. Scan the posts for the original Zone and you'll see much discussion on a half-hour being too short and an hour too long. The format let the stories get the right timing. Case in point: Broadcast along with the "Nightcrawlers" episode was a short piece with Dee Wallace revisiting the "genie / careful what you wish for" theme. Both pieces were just right.

Any person who can actually sit there and say this show jumped, has got to be smoking dope. And can I have some. Granted...it's not the original Twilight Zone, but it was still good enough. Come on!!!!! What other show at that time was better? All the 80's shows during that time sucked. The person who mentioned in the poster above about the tree huggers (that episode is called Quarantine by the way), that was a killer episode. It would probably be a bit out dated now, but back in 1986, Nuclear War was the big talk and fear. The survivors of a post nuclear war 300 years later didn't want that shit back in the neighborhood. There were so many good episodes. A message From Charity, Button Button, The Call, Stranger in Possum Meadows, To See the Invisible Man, Examination Day, The Shadow Man, Her Pilgrim Soul, I of Newton, Kentucky Rye, The Elevator, The Leprechaun Artist, and Take My Life Please (just to name about 20)were all great episodes, and had that twisted ending. I think it's sad that in order to see these episodes, you have to catch them on TNT at 5 in the morning. I don't know why the Scifi channel hasn't run this show yet. They've already run its competitors of that time (Tales from the Darkside, and Amazing Stories......also both cool shows). I recently had the fortune to find someone on the internet who taped for me, the entire first season. Its only downside is that it was only released on Japanese Laser Disc, and you get the Japanese subtitles on the bottom. But like watching a movie in widescreen format, you eventually don't even notice it anymore after a short time. But with a little luck, hopefully Columbia House will release it on video some day.

When CBS cancelled it and they made 30 cheap episodes for syndication so they would have enough shows to sell for a syndication package.

We all loved the old "Twilight Zone", and I'll be the first to admit that "Tales From The Darkside" was inspired by the old TZ. However, is it coincidence that one year after "Darkside" debuted to a success in syndication, CBS had to attempt to match that show's success? "Okay, since we passed on picking up 'Darkside' as a network series, let's create our own version of 'Darkside'... and call it 'The New Twilight Zone'! We can tone down on the terror and people will flock to it because of the 'Twilight Zone' name!" What crap this was... and the narrator sounded all nasally. Sorry, but Rod had a personality all his own. He didn't suffer from a coke habit like the new guy. This NEVER should have existed... instead, it should have been aborted before someone decided to disgrace the 'Twilight Zone' name.

The "new" Twilight Zone was the best anthology program since, well, the old Twilight Zone. That is, until CBS nixed a Christmas story featuring Ed Asner playing a racist Santa Claus. It would have made a profound and affecting episode condemning bigotry, but the network brass got cold feet and refused to air it. (This is the same network that allowed Archie Bunker free reign 20 years earlier. Go figure.) Creative consultant Harlan Ellison (who picked the stories) got enraged and walked off the show. It never recovered and was cancelled during its second season. In a last ditch effort to make some more money, the producers quickly filmed a batch of cut-rate, low budget episodes in order to pad out the series for syndication. None of them could hold a candle to such first season gems as "Her Pilgrim Soul" and "A Message From Charity" (two very different tales of love), "Nightcrawlers" and "Paladin of the Lost Hour" (two looks at the haunting memories of war), or "Shatterday" and "Wordplay" (a pair of reality puzzles in the best tradition of Serling). A fine show done in by censorship and greed.