TJ and I have been binging episodes of the original incarnation of The Twilight Zone which ran in glorious black and white from 1959 to 1964. Not on SyFy or MeTV, or streaming, but through five DVD box set “Collections” of the series.

At one time running $120.00 a pop when there was such a thing as Suncoast Video (remember those chain home video emporiums?), then down to $99.99 (marketing is everything, including shaving a single penny from a retail price). Nowadays, people stream or check in for multiple hours on three-day Twilight Zone extended weekend marathons, but TJ and I are content to roll through one disk of 3-4 commercial-free episodes in one sitting. On our time. Usually with ice cream or a cup of tea.

Now I wasn’t even a thought when the series first aired, but during the 1980s, an independent UHF station my family was able to get out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania from Hampstead, Maryland used to run Twilight Zone every weeknight at 10:30 p.m. Whatever I was doing during my teens, whether it was hanging in the living room with my folks for t.v., gabbing with friends on a land line phone, spinning heavy metal and punk rock albums in my bedroom, reading comic books and Stephen King novels or rolling horror movies on my VHS player, I always landed each time for Twilight Zone.

I looked forward to it as much to listening to my mom and stepfather tell me stories from their youth while watching the show and especially watching their anticipation glancing at me to see my own reaction to these gems on my first pass-through of each mind-altering nugget from The Fifth Dimension. No, not the soul group (whom I do love), but Rod Serling’s fantastical phantasmagoria and alternate world escapades.

This is my absolute favorite television show of all-time and I can watch these shows on repeat without ever growing bored, even with the show’s repeated use of certain backlot studio sets (also used in the original Star Trek and Batman ’66, amongst others). In fact, I always find something different from repeat viewings, usually some clever bit of snark from host Rod Serling, who may not have had an upper lip and who couldn’t make his narrative appearance without a lit cigarette, but whose voice remains an imprinted icon. When something’s just a little weird in life you can’t explain, it’s Rod’s low-pitched monotone laced with snappy sarcasm you hear, isn’t it? Followed by the trademark do-da-do-dooo show theme.

Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson wrote the majority of the Twilight Zone’s original half hour format shows (with commercial breaks) before expanding to a full hour in the final season due to public demand. These authors of the strange, along with Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and EC horror comics, are my immediate pantheon in writing who taught me and continue to teach with every spin through their seminal works.

My favorite Twilight Zone episode ever is “The Eye of the Beholder.” For me, the greatest “gotcha!” ending ever penned. Right on its heels being the final gasp and weep from Burgess Meredith as sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust in “Time Enough at Last.” Watch either and become a believer.

It’s hard for me to rank my favorite episodes beyond those two because nearly every show was genius level until the hour format. I would rank as upper echelon “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” “Living Doll,” “Black Leather Jackets,” “The Invaders,” “It’s a Good Life,” “From Agnes With Love,” “A Game of Pool,” “A Kind of Stopwatch,” “Caesar and Me,” “King Nine Will Not Return,” “The Hitch-Hiker,” “Dead Man’s Shoes,” “A Stop at Willougby,” “Steel,” “Where is Everybody?” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “You Drive,” “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” “Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” “Will the Real Martian Stand Up?” and everyone’s favorite demon-on-a-plane-or-is-it? dramarama featuring William Shatner, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Especially precious is The Honeymooners’ Art Carney as a drunken Santa Claus getting his one night of gift-giving comeuppance in “Night of the Meek.”

The Twilight Zone came back in three other reboots, not including Rod Serling’s Lost Classics from 1994. Following the success of 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie (great stuff, but really just a then-contemporary spit shine upon four of the original classics), there was a redux running from 1985 to 1989 which had its moments. None of it compares to the original, the reason we wanna hang inside for a little while and maybe stay up half the night all Memorial and Labor Day weekends. After I hit publish to this post, TJ and I have “Long Distance Call” from Season 2 cued up in the player.

What is your favorite Twilight Zone episode?

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.