Product Description

All 36 episodes of the first season of Rod Serling’s classic, groundbreaking series, now presented in pristine high definition for the first time ever!

Loaded with new and exclusive bonus features not available anywhere else including extremely rare, never-before-released unofficial pilot “The Time Element” written by Rod Serling and hosted by Desi Arnaz – the episode that started a cultural phenomenon – presented in glorious high definition!

All new 1080p high-definition transfers have been created from the original camera negatives, as well as uncompressed PCM audio, remastered from the original magnetic soundtracks.

Season One Episodes:
Where Is Everybody?, One for the Angels, Mr. Denton on Doomsday, The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine, Walking Distance, Escape Clause, The Lonely, Time Enough at Last, Perchance to Dream, Judgment Night, And When the Sky Was Opened, What You Need, The Four of Us Are Dying, Third from the Sun, I Shot an Arrow into the Air, The Hitch-Hiker, The Fever, The Last Flight, The Purple Testament, Elegy, Mirror Image, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, A World of Difference, Long Live Walter Jameson, People Are Alike All Over, Execution, The Big Tall Wish, A Nice Place to Visit, Nightmare as a Child, A Stop at Willoughby, The Chaser, A Passage for Trumpet, Mr. Bevis, The After Hours, The Mighty Casey, A World of His Own.

Season 1 included such stars as Anne Francis, Burgess Meredith (eventual veteran of numerous TZ episodes), Ida Lupino, Jack Klugman, Richard Conte, Gig Young, Nehemiah Persoff, Sebastian Cabot, Claude Akins, Earl Holliman, Roddy McDowall, Kevin McCarthy, Ed Wynn, Murray Hamilton, Vera Miles and Ron Howard, all featured in classic episodes. Before the season had even finished, it was hailed by the critics, named by Daily Variety as "the best that has ever been accomplished in half-hour filmed television,” a new phrase had entered the pop-culture lexicon and its success and impact is still felt today – fifty-one years after its debut.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9999 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2010-09-14
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 5
• Formats: Black & White, Full Screen
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 933 minutes

Features

• Condition: New
• Format: Blu-ray
• Black & White; Full Screen

Amazon.com
Submitted for your approval: The Twilight Zone's inaugural season, all 36 episodes complete with Rod Serling's original promos for the following week's episode, not seen since their original broadcast. To discuss television's greatest anthology series whose title has become pop culture shorthand for the bizarre and supernatural is to immediately become like Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd in Twilight Zone: The Movie; a can-you-top-this recall of famous shocks and favorite twists. Several essential episodes hail from this season, among them, "Time Enough at Last" starring Burgess Meredith as a bespectacled bookworm who is the lone survivor of an atomic blast; "The After-Hours" starring Anne Francis as a department store shopper haunted by mannequins; and the profoundly disturbing "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," in which fear and prejudice turns neighbor against neighbor (and, by the by, whose alien observers inspired Kang and Kodos on The Simpsons).

From an unsettlingly persistent hitchhiker to a malevolent slot machine, The Twilight Zone's first season did plumb "the pit of man's fears." One forgets how moving the series could be. Three of this season's most memorable and enduring episodes are the poignant and primal "stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off fantasies, "Walking Distance," "A Stop at Willougby" and "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine," in which desperate characters seek refuge in a simpler past. Serling's few stabs at comedy ("Mr. Bevis," "The Mighty Casey") have not aged well, but the series finale, "A World of His Own," starring Keenan Wynn as a playwright whose fictional characters come to life, has a brilliant capper. The episodes are more deliberately paced than one might remember. Less patient younger viewers might be anxious to get to the payoffs, but once they settle into the rhythm, they will savor the literate writing and the performances by such veteran actors as Ed Wynn, Everett Sloan, and Ida Lupino, and newcomers such as Jack Klugman. The extras, including the unaired version of the pilot episode, "Where is Everybody?", audio commentaries and recollections, and a Serling college lecture, truly take this six-disc set to another dimension. --Donald Liebenson

Also on the Disc
Dedicated visitors to the fifth dimension will find an impressive array of extras in the season 1 set, drawing from both the Definitive Edition DVDs as well as a wealth of new material unearthed or created especially for this presentation. For many, the inclusion of "The Time Element," a 1958 episode of The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse penned by Rod Serling, will be among the key selling points; never legally available in any format prior to this set, the hour-long story, which stars William Bendix as a man who suffers from a recurring nightmare of being at Pearl Harbor before the attack, has been widely regarded as the unofficial pilot for TZ, and it fits perfectly with the tone and quality of the established episodes. For others, the 19 new commentary tracks created for the Blu-ray set will be the draw; anchored by Twilight Zone Companion author Marc Scott Zicree, and featuring talents ranging from director Ted Post to historian Gary Gerani, the new tracks are informative and flesh out the six provided on the Definitive DVDs. There's also an early version of "What You Need" from the '50s anthology series Tales of Tomorrow; a 1978 interview with cinematographer George T. Clemens, who was responsible for the series' signature look; and 13 isolated music scores featuring the work of Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith, among others. All of these features, plus 12 additional Twilight Zone radio adaptations, join the exceptional material from the DVDs, including an unaired version of the pilot episode, "Where Is Everybody?," with Serling's sales pitch to networks; commentary by actor Martin Landau, among others; interviews with producer Douglas Heyes and actor Burgess Meredith; recordings of Serling's lectures; original sponsor billboards; and footage of the show's Emmy wins. --Paul Gaita