• lobut@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    I’m an 80s kid but I skipped the old Twilight episodes … so I’m trying to darnest to catch up on them and I’m learning how awesome the ideas were even if the presentation is dated.

    Just a random segue …

    I sound naive but I didn’t realize that Rod Sterling wanted to tell stories about social issues – racism and stuff but the networks wouldn’t let him. If he wanted to tell a story about an alien or an invader then the networks would let it pass through. So it was a way for him to tell harder stories to the general public.

    I think that’s a lot of sci-fi like Invasion of the Body Snatcher and such but I just never thought about it deeply enough.

    There’s the treehouse of horror episode by the Simpsons where Bart is omnipotent and I knew it was based on something but I only recently learned it from: “It’s a Good Life” which is a book and a Twilight Zone episode. I only watched the parody up until this year and I just thought it was a fun concept. Then I watched the original and a breakdown and it was a take on totalitarian regimes.

    • stickyprimer@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      Yeah some of them are little moral parables and some are just setups for a thrill/shock twist.

      This “button” episode was actually from the 80s reboot of TZ, not the Rod Serling original.