Bizarre Facts About 'The Twilight Zone'

Video Transcript

"Intriguing facts about the "Twilight Zone", my personal favorite TV. series of all times. First let?s talk about the episode "Nightmare At Twenty Thousand Feet" starring William Shatner as an ex mental patient who sees a Gremlin tinkering with the works on the wing. And no one will believe him, not his wife and not the stewardess. Finally the navigator is called over. And it turns out the actor is Ed Kemmer. What's important about this? Well Ed Kemmer had been Commander Buzz Cory of the Space Patrol on TV. and he was now encountering William Shatner who would become the future James Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise. An intriguing meeting between those two stars. Now let?s go to another episode, the one that was voted the most popular among readers of the magazine "The Twilight Zone". It's the episode entitled "The World of Darkness" in which a woman is enshrouded in bandages undergoing her eleventh operation because she's so hideously ugly. The actress, Maxine Stewart, did a superb job behind those bandages. Excellent dialogue, superb acting. However we never saw her because once the bandages are removed we saw a beautiful blond, Donna Douglas, future star of the "Beverly Hillbillies". The idea was that this woman was really beautiful and that the doctors and nurses, everyone in that society, hideously ugly as we finally saw. They were always shown in shadows first. To make sure that you did not realize a different actress was being seen, Donna Douglas only had one brief line, as she's running through the hospital corridors trying to escape from these so-called creatures. Now the idea of the beauty being in the eye of the beholder was of course mentioned. And some people think that's the title of this particular episode, eye of the beholder. Indeed, I saw an episode premier of this in which Rod Sterling said, "Stay tuned next week for the episode of Eye of the Beholder." But when you see it on TV. it always says "The Private World of Darkness", a phrase also used in this. Either way a superb episode and Maxine Stewart deserved an Emmy for her performance under the bandages."