THE TWILIGHT ZONE: A TRIBUTE IN SONG, CONCLUSION

Welcome back for the conclusion of our musical tribute to the 50th anniversary of The Twilight Zone. Here’s another session’s worth of songs based on some of TV’s most memorable half-hours.

KICK THE CAN by George Clayton Johnson. In which a resident in a senior citizens’ home intuits an unexpected way to get a second lease on life. Sung to the tune of “Young at Heart”.

If the truth should be told, you don’t have to stay old

If you kick the can.

All the seniors agree, it works magic, you see

When you kick the can.

You can moan, you can sigh, like you’re ready to die,

Or be fresh and be spry and be ready to fly.

It’s better to look forward to your frisky days,

Not stuck there in a home where you’re set in your ways.

If you frolic and hoot, you won’t stay an old coot.

Just play Kick the Can.

You’ll get back all your fire while your children retire.

Just play Kick the Can.

And if you should endure to a hundred and four,

It’s okay, for you’ll score as a youngster once more.

You won’t stay an old man, and you’ll know it began

When you played a rousing game of Kick the Can.

TO SERVE MAN by Rod Serling from the story by Damon Knight. In which we find the alien Kanamits have a real, ahem, appetite for good deeds on behalf of humanity. Sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.

Humans by nature we know are suspicious.

But we assure you our plans are delicious.

We know your problems; we’ll take them in hand.

This is our promise: We’ve come to serve man.

We’ll stop your wars and we’ll cure your diseases.

Famine and suffering, we’ll make sure it ceases.

All human wishes will be our commands.

This is our mission: We’re here to serve man.

We’ll leave our book here; we don’t mind you looking.

Once you translate it you’ll know just what’s cooking.

Our tasty menu we’ve carefully planned.

Come to our planet; we love to serve man!

For our wisdom, altruism, you can take our word:

We’re all dedicated to serving mankind

And you’ll be our just dessert!

NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET by Richard Matheson. In which William Shatner plays a recovering mental patient who finds he has unwelcome company on the flight home from the sanitarium. Sung to the tune of “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”

I once had a breakdown, but I’m better.

And now with my wife I’m flying home.

You would just love to make me crash, that’s your way.

You’re an obnoxious little gnome.

So now I’m the one who gets the weird looks,

While you are the one who flits away.

And I try to warn them, but the crew won’t believe

That you’re out there tearing up the plane.

My wife thinks that I still have a screw loose.

The crew thinks that I’m a ding-a-ling.

Yes, I’m a recovering mental patient

And you are the monster on my wing.

You’re floating so smug outside my window.

When anyone comes, you disappear.

The Captain pretends he knows the truth; of course he doesn’t.

I’ve got to get you out of here.

Now everyone thinks that I’m still crazy,

That I should be in the loony bin.

But I’m gonna plug you with this pistol

And bump off the monster on my wing!

(Repeat.)

Oh die...die...die...die...die, you beast...!

NIGHT CALL by Richard Matheson. In which a lonely old woman’s persistent phone caller is dialing person to person--or something like that--from the Twilight Zone. Sung to the tune of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”.

I’d never shut up until I got my way.

Whipped my boyfriend Brian every day.

Didn’t care for how my lover feels.

Wouldn’t let him get behind the wheel.

When we crashed, no one could save

My poor Brian from an early grave.

And now I heard it through the phone line:

You’re the ghost of who was once mine.

Said I heard it through the phone line,

And I’m just about to lose my mind. Honey, honey, yeah...

(Heard it through the phone line, you’re the ghost of who was once mine, baby...)

So I paid a call out to Mama Bell.

Asked the operator, “What the hell?”

She told me the wire had fallen from the pole,

And had got the number of your soul.

Onto your grave the wire had gone,

Person to person from the beyond.

That’s how I heard it through the phone line:

You’re the ghost of who was once mine.

Said I heard it through the phone line,

And I’m just about to lose my mind. Honey, honey, yeah...

(Heard it through the phone line, you’re the ghost of who was once mine, baby...)

How long has it been since the accident

When my fiance through the window went?

Now I’m an old lady sitting all alone

Hearing voices on my telephone.

And so I’m stuck here in my bed

Getting long distance from the dead.

That’s how I heard it through the phone line:

You’re the ghost of who was once mine.

Said I heard it through the phone line,

And I’m just about to lose my mind. Honey, honey, yeah...

(Heard it through the phone line, you’re the ghost of who was once mine, baby...)

NUMBER TWELVE LOOKS JUST LIKE YOU by John Tomerlin from the story by Charles Beaumont. The tale of a future in which everyone is beautiful because the government requires people to be made over during adolescence into a range of specific physical ideals--and they’re considerate enough to think all your thoughts for you too! Sung to the tune of Madonna’s “Material Girl”.

One is all and all is one; that’s what our life’s about.

Drink your Instant Smile ‘cause we don’t like to see you pout.

When you turn 19 they’ll make you perfect; wait and see.

I was once a mess, now Number 12 looks just like me!

‘Cause we are living in an identical world and I am an identical girl.

‘Cause we are living in an identical world and I am an identical girl.

Once they said that beauty was as deep as just the skin.

That’s the kind of profound talk that really does me in.

Differences and intellect, from these we are now free.

What’s the need of pesky individuality?

‘Cause we are living in an identical world and I am identical girl.

‘Cause we are living in an identical world and I am identical girl.

We’re hooked in an identical world. (Identica-al!)

Same looks in an identical world.

No mind in an identical world. (Identica-al!)

We’re blind in an identical world.

Into deeper meanings I no longer want to delve.

Life’s a cabaret now I look just like Number Twelve!

‘Cause baby, we are living in an identical world and I am an identical girl.

You know that we are living in an identical world and I am an identical girl.

‘Cause baby, we are living in an identical world and I am an identical girl.

You know that we are living in an identical world and I am an identical girl.

An identical...an identical...an identical...an identical world.

And that wraps up our musical journey into Rod Serling’s Fifth Dimension. I hope you’ve enjoyed our little suite of macabre melodies and this tuneful look back at one of the best TV series ever produced. Until our next Quantum Blog, never forget: Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child who’s got his Zone!

THE TWILIGHT ZONE: A TRIBUTE IN SONG, PART 2

If you don’t know The Twilight Zone...well, my first response is, “And you call yourself a culturally literate American?” My next response is, “There’s no better time to learn the show!” That’s because we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the classic Rod Serling series here at The Quantum Blog, and we’re doing it in song! Continuing our musical montage of Zone episodes, here are more tuneful treatments of unforgettable stories...

THE HOWLING MAN by Charles Beaumont. In which a man traveling through Europe has a Devil of a time when he falls ill and recuperates in a monastery. Sung to the tune of “Leave a Tender Moment Alone” by Billy Joel.

I was hiking through Europe. And there in the dark stormy night,

I was ready to throw up, but that was when I saw the light.

Found an old monastery, where I thought I’d shake off the flu.

But the monks were so wary, of what I just hadn’t a clue.

This was more than an abbey, built out of mortar and stone,

But I wasn’t so savvy...to leave a howling Devil alone.

He was making a racket, there in the cell where he lay,

And I just couldn’t hack it, when all that the monks did was pray.

This poor bastard was seeming to be like a regular guy,

But they called him a demon who’d put on a pleasing disguise.

So I blew off the warning that I got from Brother Jerome,

And I learned by the morning to leave a howling Devil alone.

And he wasted no time, when I let him get out of the door.

Soon as I turned him loose on the world, he had started the Second World War!

(Leave a howling Devil alone...

Leave a howling Devil...leave him alone....

Leave a howling Devil alone.)

Now myself I am hating. I curse my mistake all the time.

‘Cause I couldn’t see Satan, and the world has to pay for my crime.

No, the truth I was missing, the good word of Brother Jerome.

How I wish I had listened: Oh, leave a howling Devil alone!

Oh...oh...oh... Leave a howling Devil alone.

Leave a howling Devil alone...

Leave a howling Devil...leave him alone...

Got to leave a howling Devil...leave him alone...

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER by Rod Serling. In which Donna Douglas, the future Ellie Mae Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, goes through a dozen plastic surgeries in hopes of looking “normal” in a world full of...well, you should know this episode. Sung to the tune of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady.

We simply can’t accept your face.

It makes us want to gag and retch.

The operations didn’t work, the surgeries you chose.

Your eyes, your lips, your cheeks, your nose

Are still repulsive to us now.

We swear they make us want to heave.

You know we’re hung up on conformity; that’s why we make a fuss.

We think the world should be a bunch of gargoyles just like us.

We simply can’t abide your pan. We can’t live with your mug.

We can’t accept your face.

THE SILENCE by Rod Serling. Not one of my favorite episodes, this is really among the less impressive ones, but I couldn’t resist the idea when it came to me. At a posh gentleman’s club, a young boor drones on and on until one of the senior members makes him a wager he can’t refuse. Sung to the tune of “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady.

Noise! Noise! I’m tired of his voice.

A peaceful evening we will never get.

Blab! Blab! I’m fed up with his gab.

Could I stop his prattle with a bet...?

He could have talked all night. He could have talked all night,

Until my nerves were gone.

He could have blown his breath and bored me half to death,

The way he’d babble on.

You never heard so much ado for nothing,

Enough to make your eardrums bleed.

I only wished that lout would shut his flapping mouth.

He could have talked, talked, talked all night!

The man’s so dull, Sir. He numbs your skull, Sir.

Can this fool please...shut...up?

He could have talked (they made a bet) all night (for half a mill).

He could have talked (if he could keep) all night (his flapper still),

Until we made a deal.

(The wager said he couldn’t say a word until the time was up and everybody heard.)

If he would still (he couldn’t make) his gums (a single peep),

I’d pay a generous (then half a mil-) sum (-lion he would reap)

And then he’d be well-heeled.

(We didn’t think the boy could keep it zipped without a single slip.)

When bad investments took away my fortune,

I was afraid the bet was lost.

But then I learned (we’re so relieved) that lout (we all rejoice)

Had cut his larynx (we’ll never hear) out (his droning voice)!

He’ll never talk, talk, talk...all night!

It’s awfully sad, Sir. It’s gone so bad, Sir.

But now the deed...is...done.

He could have talked all night. He could have talked all night,

Until my nerves were gone.

He could have blown his breath and bored me half to death,

The way he babbled on.

When bad investments took away my fortune,

I was afraid the bet was lost.

But then I learned that lout had cut his larynx out!

He’ll never talk, talk, talk...all night!

NEXT POST: And still more episodes come in for lyrical lunacy, including “To Serve Man” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”!

THE TWILIGHT ZONE: A TRIBUTE IN SONG, PART 1

Heavenly shades of night are falling: It’s Twilight time. Or, more to the point, it’s the beginning of our musical tribute to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. I’ve been preparing for this ever since I realized this is the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Rod Serling’s masterpiece. For the next few posts, we’re going to be singing the stories of The Zone to the tune of a diverse program of tunes. If for some reason you don’t recognize any of the melodies we’ll be singing, or need a refresher on them, I suggest you do as I did to make sure I got them right: For whatever I didn’t already have in iTunes (which I used as one reference source), I went and looked it up on YouTube or Googled the lyrics to make sure I got the meter and rhythm right. There are ways of doing these things!

And now, without further ado, the curtain rises and our program begins:

MR. SERLING. A tribute to the man himself. Sung to the tune of “Mr. Sandman”.

(Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum-bum.

Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Mr. Serling, write us a dream. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Make it the weirdest that we’ve ever seen. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Spin us a yarn of things too strange to mention (bum-bum-bum-bum).

The kind you conjure from your Fifth Dimension.

Serling, give us a fright. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

We hear you beckon from your Zone of Twilight. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Make us shake and make us scream.

Mr. Serling, write us a dream.

(Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.

Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Mr. Serling, tell us a tale. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Give us an ending that makes us go pale. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Tell us of mannequins who turn to shoppers (bum-bum-bum-bum)

And neo-Nazis played by Dennis Hopper.

Serling, you really are (bum-bum-bum-bum)

The master teller of tales so bizarre. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Make us shake and make us scream.

Mr. Serling, write us a dream.

(Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.

Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Mr. Serling (“Yes?”), fill us with fear. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Make Finchley’s gadgets tell him, “Get out of here.” (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Tell us of Martians playing tricks in diners (bum-bum-bum-bum)

And haunted cars that get the truth from liars.

Serling, we love your show. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Your signpost tells us right where we want to go. (Bum-bum-bum-bum.)

Make us shake and make us scream.

Mr. Serling, write us, Mr. Serling, write us,

Mr. Serling, write us a dream.

(Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.

Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.)

WALKING DISTANCE by Rod Serling. In which a world-weary advertising executive takes a walk back to his home town, through the Twilight Zone, and into his own childhood where he meets himself as a boy. Sung to the tune of “The Longest Time” by Billy Joel.

(Boom, boom, boom...) Oh, whoa, oh, oh,

On a walk through time.

Whoa, oh, oh,

On a walk through...

I was feeling tired and stressed out.

My achievements left me filled with doubt.

(Ah-ah-ah...)

I missed my boyhood, so I hiked back to Homewood

And spent the day there on a walk through time.

There I was, myself as just a kid,

Carving on that post just like I did.

(Ah-ah-ah...)

How I was wary, because of how I scared me

The day I met me on a walk through time.

Whoa, oh, oh, oh,

On a walk through time.

Whoa, oh, oh,

On a walk through...

Then I went to see my Mom and Dad

In that cozy home that we once had.

(Ah-ah-ah...)

But I confused her, telling Mom I’m from the future

And that I’d come there on a walk through time.

Dad said I had better hit the road.

He didn’t want to see the proof that I showed.

I just wanted them to see the truth,

I’d come to find my youth; that was all that I hoped for.

So I made my way back to the park

And the fun I had there after dark.

(Ah-ah-ah...)

And I tried calling to myself and saw him falling

And changed my childhood on my walk through time.

My leg got caught in the carousel.

Got ground up mighty bad; it hurt just like hell.

Now I know one summer’s all we get,

That in this life I’ve led, that is all I could hope for.

For the past no longer will I beg,

As I walk back on my limping leg.

(Ah-ah-ah...)

Goodbye to sorrow. I’m living for tomorrow

‘Cause that was the lesson of my walk through time.

Oh, whoa, oh, oh,

On a walk through time.

Whoa, oh, oh,

On a walk through time.

Whoa, oh, oh,

On a walk through time...

THE MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET by Rod Serling. In my favorite episode, a friendly suburban neighborhood descends into paranoia and violence because of a UFO and oddly selective power failures. Sung to the tune of “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady.

Things were lovely here in our neighborhood.

But since something went by overhead it’s not so good.

Now we’re nervous wrecks, for we all suspect

Monsters lurk on the street where we live.

Lights go off and on at our neighbors’ place

And we think our friends are really spies from outer space.

We’re all looking out, for we have no doubt

Monsters dwell on the street where we live.

And oh, the shocking discovery

That we shot the guy down the street.

And no, there’ll be no recovery

From this riot now we’ve let fear take the lead.

We’re the aliens, watching from afar,

And we can’t believe what suckers these fool Earthers are.

It’s come down to this, with their prejudice:

Soon we’ll own all the streets where they live!

NEXT POST: The musical mayhem continues!

SAY IT ISN'T SO, ROD!

I spent this past Friday in one of my favorite places: The Twilight Zone.

For the morning and afternoon of October 2, SyFy (the former Sci Fi Channel) ran a day-long marathon of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, one of television’s true acknowledged masterpieces and one of the few TV series that are considered genuine literature. (Don’t believe me? The Twilight Zone is taught in schools in the “Cable in the Classroom” program, and there are more than a few colleges where it’s taught as well.) The SyFy marathon commemorated the 50th anniversary of The Zone’s premiere on CBS. If you really know your history, you’re aware that The Zone, like Star Trek, owes its existence to Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. The de facto initial pilot episode of the series was “The Time Element,” a play by Rod Serling that was presented on The Desilu Playhouse. It’s true; I’ve looked up “The Time Element” at The Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan and watched it. This was the program that interested CBS in Rod’s concept for a fantasy anthology program. (And this was what enabled Rod to overcome his aggravating problem with network censors and sponsors leaching everything that Rod found meaningful out of his stories so that they wouldn’t distract the audience from the toilet-paper and cigarette commercials. By telling his stories of the human condition as fantasies or light science-fiction stories, Rod got to say everything he wanted to say under the radar.) The rest, as the cliche goes, is history.

So this was my first Friday in October (and Friday has always been the traditional day for this show). As I’ve done so many times and will do so many times more in the future, because this show never wears out its welcome, I viewed “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, “Death’s Head Revisited”, “Nothing in the Dark”, “To Serve Man”, “Hocus Pocus and Frisby”, and “The Changing of the Guard”. They and the other classics of The Twilight Zone never get old. That’s what a classic is.

Sometimes I go out onto the Web, just to kill some time, and do a random surf. I pick a topic and just see where on the Internet it takes me. One afternoon this past spring, I did a surf to see what’s out there about the second Twilight Zone, the Zone of the 1980s, another truly literate and artistic series that people should know as well as they do Rod’s original show. I came to a Blog called Postcards from the Zone (http://postcardsfromthezone.blogspot.com), which is devoted to the 1980s show, and had a look around to see what they had to say about the episodes. And when I came to their coverage of one of my favorite episodes, “Dead Run,” I discovered something that I found as shocking and horrifying as anything that any character in the Twilight Zone has ever experienced. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It just couldn’t be! Could it...?

By way of preface, “Dead Run” is based on a short story by science fiction writer Greg Bear. Greg is the author of one of my favorite books, The Forge of God (which I discovered when it was excerpted and previewed in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine!) I ran into him a couple of times at San Diego Comic Conventions. He’s a very nice guy; he shared with me that Forge had been optioned as a motion picture. That was some years ago and I’ve never heard anything about the Forge of God movie since then. I assume the picture is in what Hollywood calls Development Hell, a state of eternal pre-production that may well be likened to purgatory. Anyway, “Dead Run” stars Steve Railsback as a down-on-his-luck truck driver who takes a new job for the trucking company of the Afterlife, whose business is the shipping of the “souls” of the damned to Hell as toxic freight. (The Twilight Zone was made for metaphors like that; you’ve got to love it.) But what he discovers is that this company is run by what I in my less charitable moments call the Religious Reich or the Christian Taliban (and I only wish I had coined those expressions), people who decide who goes to Hell by their own oppressively pious, Bible-thumping standards. The company’s cargo is full of draft dodgers, librarians who stood up for banned books, and (gasp!) homosexuals. (You also have to love it that the CEO is played by John DeLancie, who was later just as judgemental when he played the omnipotent Q in Star Trek; and that one of the unjustly damned is Brent Spiner, the future Data.) Anyway, our young trucker sees the wrongness of what the company is doing, and our story ends with him secretly starting to winnow out the people who shouldn’t be going to Hell (like that gay guy) and sending them up “the high road.”

It was in the Blog’s commentary on “Dead Run” that the horror struck. I felt like Lloyd Bochner learning that To Serve Man was a cookbook when I read:

“It's probably also worth mentioning that Rod Serling would likely hate this episode - according to the folks in the know from the TZ Café forums, Rod was an old-school homophobe.”

No, that couldn’t be right. Rod Serling--a homophobe? How? It wasn’t possible. My mind reeled with shock and disbelief. I felt stricken and sick in my heart. The world itself seemed to be slipping out from under me as it did Richard Long in “Person or Persons Unknown”. It just couldn’t be true. Not Rod! Please--not Rod Serling!

You have to understand what this revelation meant to me personally. Rod Serling is one of the great personal heroes of my life. He is one of the people who taught me who I wanted to be, a master storyteller who spun forth characters and worlds for the entertainment and pleasure and inspiration of millions. As a boy, I thought there could be nothing cooler in the universe than to be the one who created The Twilight Zone--and later Night Gallery--and wrote them, and got to introduce them on the air. Rod Serling was practically God. And later in life, as I got to know Rod’s work much more intimately through not just casually watching but studying it, I realized that The Twilight Zone was filled with stories about the evils of prejudice and hatred and greed and persecution, and the dignity and worth of the individual. And I loved it that much more. I watched The Twilight Zone until I knew it backwards and forwards. Like its cousin, The Outer Limits, it was far more than just something on television.

How could the man who wrote “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and “The Eye of the Beholder” and “Death’s Head Revisited” not understand that gays are part of the human race, with their own integrity, their own dignity, and the same business in the world as everyone else? To me, this was like Luke Skywalker learning that Darth Vader was his father. I felt sick with anguish at the thought that I had spent my life hero-worshipping a homophobe!

On pulling myself together--slightly--I made a point to go over to the Twilight Zone Cafe Listserv (http://twilightzonewor.9.forumer.com) that Postcards from the Zone had mentioned and put a shout out to its members. I asked them if they could corroborate--or, I hoped, refute--what Postcards had said. I was ready to grasp at any straw I could get.

The Moderator of the Cafe was forthcoming. As he told me in response: “In one of the biographies of Serling, it's reported that Serling used anti-gay epithets to describe at least two actors who were allegedly gay. According to the same source, one of his old paratrooper buddies ended a letter to Serling by signing "Love, (name of old paratrooper buddy)." Serling reportedly wrote back to say how unhealthy he thought that was, and that his old paratrooper buddy should get psychiatric help. I think this all comes from Joel Engel's biography, but I'd need to check. Both biographies of Serling (by Engel and Gordon Sander) have been criticized as being more unreliable than they should be. Even if Serling was anti-gay in the 1950s and '60s, it's very conceivable that his views would have changed over time.”

Well, that didn’t make me feel any better. Nor did this response from another member of the Cafe: “It was definitely in one or both of those biographies, that Rod used the three-letter "f" word to describe gay men. . . “ Wonderful: He was given to throwing around the gay equivalent of the “N” word for African-Americans! Rod, I thought, how could you...?

Further discussion of Rod’s anti-gayness with people at the Zone Cafe, and other people I knew, brought me around to the basic fact of Rod Serling’s place in the continuum of history. Rod was a man born in the 1920s, who died in the 1970s. He lived at a time when the closet for gays was much vaster and deeper and more inescapable than it’s become since Stonewall; a time when gays lived in a self-loathing almost as cruel as the loathing that the rest of the world felt for them, when gayness itself was classified as a pathological disorder. He was like Thomas Jefferson, who believed in the equality of men but couldn’t apply the principle to the African descendants he kept as slaves. His progressive thinking was circumscribed by his times. He was as enlightened as his place in history allowed him to be. Rod Serling’s homophobia, in short...was real, but it wasn’t his fault. It was still a bitter pill to swallow, but understanding that made it go down a little more easily.

In these past few months I’ve made my peace with Rod’s unenlightenment, even as the little aliens who died from the supernova made peace with their fate in “The Star” (1980s Zone Christmas special). In fact, I’ve taken to thinking of it in terms of Gene Roddenberry’s experience. I read in Gene’s biography, Star Trek Creator, that Gene, a former Los Angeles Police Officer, either had borderline-homophobic tendencies of his own, or tolerated them in others. And then, during the 1960s Star Trek and The Next Generation, he became friends with William Ware Theiss, the costumer who created the original Starfleet uniforms. Mr. Theiss died of AIDS, but in his friendship with Gene, he put a human face on gayness for the man who envisioned a future that affirmed all humanity in all its differences and diversity. And Gene learned better. I’d like to think that Rod Serling, had he lived long enough, could have learned better. Rod died of heart disease from his heavy smoking in 1975. If he’d been with us longer, if he could have seen the AIDS epidemic and the courage with which people faced it, and the strides that gay America has taken in its wake, he, like his colleague Gene Roddenberry, might well have broadened his own perception of humanity. Rod could have learned that it is no more right to ostracize gays than it was for “The State” to ostracize a beautiful woman for not being ugly (“The Eye of the Beholder”). Rod could have “gotten it,” just as Gene did. I really like to believe he could.

So, on the occasion of this 50th anniversary, I still love to visit The Twilight Zone. And in the posts ahead, so will you--because I’ve planned a very special celebration. Starting next time, we’re going to pay tribute to Rod Serling’s masterpiece--in song! I’ve been creating a special suite of musical parodies based on episodes of The Zone. We’ll be singing tunes from everywhere from Broadway to Motown, by people from Frank Sinatra to Billy Joel to Madonna, all with lyrics harking back to some of the best stories this series has to offer. This is going to be fun. Till then, I leave you with these words:
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call...THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

MY FIRST LOVE

Before I loved comics...before I loved science fiction...before I wanted to be Rod Serling or Stan Lee or Jack Kirby or Gene Roddenberry...the thing I loved first was science itself.

I still love science. Other than reading Fantastic Four #62 for the first time (my first experience with the real stuff after watching the Saturday morning cartoon), the nearest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience was watching and reading Cosmos by Dr. Carl Sagan in college. It’s true. It was Dr. Sagan who helped me understand why I loved science so much. In fact it was Dr. Sagan who helped me to understand, in a way I never had before, just what my existence meant and what was my place in the universe.

From Cosmos I learned my true origins: not the mythology that they teach you in church, but the actual, physical reality of our being and that of everything around and beyond us. Before Cosmos, I had known but never really understood that all the matter in my body and everything around me had come from space. I had never truly made the connection with the fact that everything that you and I and the lamppost, so to speak, are composed of was cooked and fused in stars ancient beyond our knowledge, and flung across space in supernovae. I had never really considered what the ultimate fate of the world and everything that ever existed on it will be, that the entire mass of the planet will one day be swallowed up in the expansion of the Sun into a red giant star, and that all but the innermost layers of that swollen giant will eventually return to space and go into other stars, other planets, and perhaps other life. (The rest of the Sun will contract into a white dwarf.) That will include every atom and every particle in my body and yours, and everything and everyone that has ever existed on this Earth.

And long before that, at the time of my death, my bodily mass and the energy of my mind will return to the Earth itself, to be redistributed into the soil and the water and the air and the grass and the trees and other creatures, on an on until the Sun swells up and returns me and all of us to the universe from which we came. Death is the redistribution of life. It is nature’s recycling program. The mythologies of the churches will never teach you that. (Probably not even the Unitarians, whom I respect a great deal. Rod Serling was born Jewish and became a Unitarian. We’ll get to him in the next post.)

It’s as Dr. Sagan said: “We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of us knows that this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the Cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.”

There were things that had helped me on my way to my acquaintance with Dr. Carl Sagan. I had gone from being a young, small boy who latched onto his family’s set of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia and read all the science and nature articles in it, to a boy who loved The Fantastic Four and Star Trek (the latter of which has inspired more scientists, engineers, and doctors than anyone will ever know), to a charter subscriber to Omni magazine by the time I was in high school. Does anyone remember Omni, the creation of Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione? I have always marveled at the fact that the man who gave us Penthouse, a magazine couched in straight men’s venery towards women’s bodies, also published Omni, a magazine that revered science fact and fiction and human intellect, and married science to art in the most beautiful, poetic, and inspiring way. It was Star Trek and Omni that helped me turn away from supernatural thinking and towards the beauty, poetry, and romance of science. It was Dr. Carl Sagan and Cosmos that sealed the deal and established my thinking for the rest of my life.

It was a journey that I was truly meant to make. Looking back on my relationship with The Fantastic Four, I realize why Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, had to be my all-time favorite hero. He was exactly what I first wanted to be, a man capable of anything and everything scientific. Reed’s scientific genius is a super-power in and of itself. Reed’s gifts embrace physics, astronomy, astrophysics, quantum theory, chemistry, biology, genetic engineering, geology, oceanography, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The man has a portal to an antimatter universe in his home! I quickly learned that my own gifts lay more in storytelling and art than in hard science, but science was like a palette of colors with which I loved to work, or a toy chest full of the neatest things in the world to play with. (J.A. FLUDD FACTOID: I was also always the absolute worst at math. It was the torment and humiliation of my youth. After just barely meeting the school system’s requirements for math to graduate, I swore never, ever to endure the torture of a math class again as long as I lived. And I never have. It’s the ideas and principles in science that I love, not the equations. I even skipped the mathematical parts of Cosmos. Seriously.)

The first image in this post is from the aforementioned Fantastic Four #62, page 8. It is a summation of the entire character of Reed Richards and the core theme of The Fantastic Four (aside from the “family” theme that is the first thing that everyone always brings up). It is also one of the finest things that Stan Lee ever wrote, a soliloquy that Reed gives as he is on his way to what he thinks is his certain annihilation in the Negative Zone (of course, he’s rescued). I keep an abridged version of it on my Palm:

”There is so much yet to learn . . . so much to see, and marvel at . . . But there will be others, those who come after me, and they will unlock the secrets of the cosmos, one by one. For the mind of man is the greatest key in the world, the key which may one day open the door to...immortality! And each of us, in his own way, does what he can for those who will follow. That is the only true legacy we can leave to those we love: that we have made the world a little better than we found it.”

There, my friends, on one page, in one speech, is why The Fantastic Four, in essence, will always be “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!” (Whether they use that epigram on the covers or not.) In a medium filled with Super people and Bat people and X people and Spider people and Wolverines and Punishers and characters of every stripe, nothing, but nothing else, has the mentality and vision of The Fantastic Four.

So it is that my relationship with scientists is akin to that of the guy sitting at home in his recliner chair with his bag of Fritos, watching his favorite football team and rooting for his quarterback. He may not be able to do what the football players do, but he basically gets what they’re doing and cheers them on. (My friend Derrick will appreciate that analogy; his religion is football.) That’s me and the world of science in a nutshell. Hey, don’t be greedy, pass the Fritos back here.

I found this article last week in a Newsletter called Early to Rise, to which I subscribe. I thought I’d share it with you now:

The Literature of Truth

By Alex Green

According to Dr. Jon D. Miller, Director of the Center for Biomedical Communications, the number of scientifically literate adults in the U.S. has doubled over the past 20 years.

The bad news? That only gets us up to 20 percent.

Only 48 percent of Americans know that humans didn't live at the same time as dinosaurs. Less than half know that electrons are smaller than atoms. And few know what DNA is or can define a molecule.

We live in a world highly dependent on the fruits of science. Yet most of us have little scientific knowledge.
Does this matter?

Yes.

Without some minimal scientific understanding, we can't possibly have informed opinions on important issues. We surrender our ability to participate as responsible citizens in society.

Uncle Sam spends more than $100 billion annually on science agencies, university laboratories, and grants for independent research. Most of us know very little about where this money is going or why.
But there is an even more compelling reason to remedy our ignorance: Scientific illiteracy diminishes the quality of our lives.

For most of human history, our ancestors looked up at the night sky and never realized the twinkling lights were suns unimaginably far away.

We created myths to explain the phases of the moon, the appearance of comets, meteor showers, and solar eclipses. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues, and volcanic eruptions were attributed to angry gods. [Some people still do this. --JAF.]

Our ancestors hadn't the slightest inkling that the universe is nearly 15 billion years old or that our sun is one of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. (Which, itself, is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.)

Science has been called the literature of truth. The systematic classification of experience. The antidote to enthusiasm and superstition.

Of course, few scientific truths are self-evident. Many are counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious, for example, that empty space has structure or that everything is made of the same basic elements.

Science writer Isaac Asimov once noted that we are among the tiny fraction of 1 percent of human beings fortunate enough to live in the era where science finally got the big questions right.

Until Einstein worked them out, we didn't know the basic rules that govern the universe.

We didn't realize the universe is expanding before Edwin Hubble discovered it in 1923.

We didn't understand the mind-bending rules that govern subatomic particles until the advent of quantum theory.

Still, science makes no claim to truth with a capital T. All scientific knowledge is subject to revision.

The scientific method is successful, in part, because it acknowledges human failings. With its critical thinking and error-correcting mechanisms, it advances knowledge through reason and evidence, revealing successive approximations of the truth.

Today the basic picture is complete. No future scientist, we can safely say, will disprove the principles of chemistry, the germ theory of disease, or the interrelatedness of all life on earth.

Yet despite all that science teaches us, many smart, talented people can't be bothered to learn.

We appreciate the countless medical and technological advances that extend and improve our lives. But most of us know little about the history of the cosmos... or life on earth.

That can't help but diminish our awareness and understanding.

Fortunately, it isn't hard to change. Here are just a few suggestions:

Subscribe to Scientific American. I read this magazine years ago and found it tough sledding. But the magazine is much improved. It is written primarily for non-specialists. Jargon is minimal. Most articles begin with a short summary of key concepts. And the monthly columns by Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss alone justify a subscription.

Rent or collect the BBC documentaries with naturalist David Attenborough. Especially Planet Earth, The Trials of Life, Blue Planet, Life On Earth, and The Living Planet. Astronomer Carl Sagan's classic Cosmos series too. [And learn the difference between astronomy and astrology. --JAF.]

For a crash course, read The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier. Or -- if you prefer your science served with hilarity -- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

Science is a tool. A window on the truth. Carl Sagan often referred to it as our "baloney-detection kit."

And there are other benefits. Science teaches us wonder, community, oneness ... and humility.
Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that the common feature of all scientific revolutions is the dethronement of human arrogance.

Without natural science, we may also miss great beauty and understanding.

As Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins writes in Unweaving the Rainbow:

"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? ... Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?"

[Ed. Note: Alex Green is the author of The Secret of Shelter Island: Money and What Matters, as well as the editor of "Spiritual Wealth," a free e-letter about the pursuit of the good life.]

Thank you, Dr. Green, and “Up with Science!”

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

I had a dream the other night. In it, I was sad and afraid and heartsick about something. And I found myself in an office, a strange office that I didn’t recognize. In the office there was a curtain. I pulled back the curtain, and at a desk behind it sat Gene Roddenberry. There he was, the creator of Star Trek himself, his presence all the more remarkable for his having died in 1991.

Gene saw that I was sad down to my bones, that I was in pain and sorrow and despair. And do you know what he did? He put his arm around me and said softly, “It’s all right, son. Everything is going to be all right. It’ll get better; you’ll see.” And in the reassuring presence of no less than the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself, I felt better. I had to believe things were going to be better because Gene said so. It had to be true, coming from him. I never had the honor of meeting Gene before he died. As you know, I spent a good deal of time in his real office, but I never actually met him. But for so many years Gene has been one of the people who stood at my shoulder and showed me who I wanted to be. If Gene said I would be all right, it must be so.

Then, all at once, we weren’t in Gene’s office any more. We were in a dining room, having dinner together. I think there were some other people there; I don’t remember them as clearly. Jeri Taylor, the Executive Producer of Star Trek Voyager, may have been there. Brannon Braga may have been there too. Someone was serving the meal; I think it may have been Braga. (Look back over the recent LA Trek posts.) But in the dream, I was comforted, my heart put more at ease. I don’t know why my dream sent Gene Roddenberry specifically to me. It could as easily have been Jack Kirby, who with Stan Lee gave me The Fantastic Four. At the tenth anniversary of his death, Jack appeared to the Fantastic Four, George Burns-like, as God himself, to see them to the end of one of the darkest chapters of their lives. (Fantastic Four #511; look it up.) But I do believe that dreams are the way the mind processes information in a way that it can’t do when we’re awake, and that when we’re dreaming we are communicating with ourselves. My sleeping mind was trying to tell me something, and it got my attention in a way it knew I couldn’t miss. It sent me one of my heroes. Though I never made Gene’s acquaintance, as I said, there must be some important part of him that lives with me so many years after he left Earthly life.


Next: On to another of my heroes, Rod Serling, and the 50th Anniversary of The Twilight Zone!

SEE YOU REAL SOON...

Why? Because I like you!

I couldn't resist that little allusion to The Mickey Mouse Club. As many of you should know, Marvel Comics recently merged with the Walt Disney Company, which makes Reed Richards's laboratory in The Fantastic Four officially a part of the Mouse Factory. The long-term results of the Marvel/Disney merger, once the stockholders have approved it, should be intriguing to watch. (And is there any doubt that it will be approved? In the midst of the vicious killer recession, Marvel's publicly traded stock has actually been seen to go UP. What do you think it's going to do now Spider-Man has teamed up with Mickey Mouse?) Meanwhile, what I hope you will find intriguing to watch is the upcoming posts I've planned for this, The Quantum Blog.

For those who have been wanting to know what happened in my further Hollywood/Star Trek adventures, your answers are forthcoming. I know I've seriously broken my stride in the last couple of months. As a reason I can offer only that I've been quite tired and distracted of late, and that I've been juggling a number of other apples in addition to my blogging, and it's all thrown me off my game a bit. But you will definitely get to find out about the rest of my experience with Star Trek Voyager and all the people I met in Hollywood. You'll also get to see my rewrites of both a classic issue of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four and a Steven Spielberg movie, and my bon mots about another famous monster--this one from the real world, not the movies like the Blob! (If you want to know to which creature I'm referring, think "cryptozoology," one of my side interests, and look up what they do in Willow Creek, CA every Labor Day.) You'll also learn which motion picture I think is "the perfect movie"--and since it's not a science fiction film, it may come as quite a surprise! And for my friend Jason, who's posted some messages about the soap opera Generations in my Cbox, I know I promised to do a retrospective on the show by sometime in the last month, and I'm still planning to do so. That will now be a part of African-American History Month in 2010.

But coming up directly, The Quantum Blog will be launching into a multi-week celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Twilight Zone, and I can't wait till you see what I'm cooking up for this. So start pointing your browsers in this direction again, because we're going to be having a lot of fun in the weeks ahead.