The Show
By its sophomore year, The Twilight Zone was a bona fide hit, but rather than bask in his own success, creator Rod Serling and his team dug in to dream up some of the most memorable episodes in Season 2. Who can forget the unmasking of the hideously deformed patient in "The Eye of the Beholder," the sacrifice one man will make to win a half-million-dollar bet in "The Silence," or the interplanetary battle of wills at a local diner in "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"
There's mind-reading, time travel (both directions), telekinesis and a lot of folks stuck in the desert, sometimes funny but almost always thought-provoking, a specialty of this series. Stylistically, it's quite different from what we see on the small screen today. There are a lot of one-man shows ("Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" comes to mind), and by Season 2, Rod was doing his now-famous on-camera intros and outros weekly, and even the occasional plug for cigarettes. Whatever happened to Oasis smokes?
The Picture
The high-def remasters of the these filmed episodes again boast incredible detail, evident in the textures of the sets, the weave of the costumes, the barely-there shadow of some steam creeping up a wall in the background. We can also clearly discern the front page of The Wall Street Journal at the newsstand in "Penny for Your Thoughts." I noted some instances of damage and dirt, and the level of grain varies, sometimes hardly noticeable, with a bit of video noise, particularly on shots of sand.
A handful of Season 2 episodes, including the Christmas-themed "Night of the Meek," were shot on 1960s-era videotape instead of film and don't fare quite as well in the high-def age, seeming overly bright and lacking the natural look of their filmed counterparts.
The Sound
Both the original audio and a painstakingly restored, highly recommended alternate version are here in a high-quality Linear PCM left-channel/right-channel mono presentations. (The disc defaults to the restored mono audio.) It's clean and effective certainly, with a pleasing balance of voices and effects in an episode such as "A Thing About Machines" where a house full of appliances gone mad is turning against their owner, or of course the footsteps of "The Invaders." The off-camera laughter of an unseen audience in "The Obsolete Man" also makes its point. Nothing fancy, but nothing to complain about, either.
The Extras
This set is graced with 25 new audio commentaries, by The Twilight Zone Companion author Marc Scott Zicree, author/historians Gary Gerani, Steven C. Smith, Martin Grams Jr., Jon Burlingame, Scott Skelton and Jim Benson, along with writers and TV/filmmakers George Clayton Johnson, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Matthew Weiner, Michael Nankin and Joseph Dougherty. These are joined by archival DVD tracks from actors Donna Douglas, Dennis Weaver, Don Rickles, Bill Mumy, William Idelson, Cliff Robertson and Shelley Berman.
Radio dramatizations for 15 of these tales have also been performed by stars such as Jim Caviezel, Fred Willard, Jane Seymour, Michael York, Henry Rollins and Adam Baldwin. Add to these the 22 isolated music scores and a given episode could have as many as seven different audio options. There are also on-camera interviews with actors Joseph Ruskin and H.M. Wynant as well as vintage audio interviews with director of photography George T. Clemens and makeup artist William Tuttle.
In addition to rare bits such as the original productions slates ("Scene One, Take One!") in HD, Image Entertainment has dug up "Nightmare at Ground Zero," the episode of the pre-Twilight Zone anthology series Suspense written by Rod Serling. This 29-minute drama from 1953 is in standard definition, with Linear PCM audio marred by a lot of shrill feedback, but it might be most memorable for the painfully quaint Auto-Lite batteries commercials throughout.
Final Thoughts
Image set the bar high with their first-season set, and The Twilight Zone Season 2 doesn't disappoint, maintaining the amazing high-def film transfers, cleaned-up audio, and a treasure trove of new and old supplements.
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