Christmas in The Twilight Zone
Christmas in the twilight zone, or at least for The Twilight Zone, got off to the most tragic start imaginable.
With an eye for the general festive feel of the holidays, Rod Serling prepared a more lighthearted tale than usual, the baseball caper “The Mighty Casey.” But the tragic death of actor Paul Douglas from a heart attack on September 11 convinced Serling to shelve the episode temporarily and bring forward one of the others.
Although why he selected “What You Need” is a question that will probably never be answered.
“What You Need” (First broadcast: December 25, 1959)
Having been bumped off the schedule the previous Friday, The Twilight Zone was back in its accustomed 10:00 p.m. spot on Christmas Day, December 25, 1959, for another adaptation of an outside writer’s work, in this instance the short story “What You Need” penned by one Lewis Padgett (in actuality, a pseudonym for the authors Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), and originally published fourteen years earlier in the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. From there, it graduated to Line to Tomorrow, a 1954 anthology of Padgett’s short stories, while it had also been seen on the small screen once before, when it was adapted for the early ’50s series Tales of Tomorrow.
Like so many of his adaptations, Serling made considerable changes to the original tale, not least of all replacing Padgett’s protagonist, a machine that could see the future, with an old street vendor named Pedott. Who, in turn, comes up against a most repulsive character, a belligerent loudmouth named Fred Renard.
Always on the lookout for a means of taking advantage of someone, Renard fixes his sights on the itinerant salesman—a familiar sight on the streets of the city, selling odds and ends to passersby. Some of which, Renard has discovered, possess the ability to change, and improve, their recipients’ immediate futures.
A natural bully, Renard sets about persuading the old man to give him the things he needs, and the old man obliges. He hands over a pair of scissors, which seem irrelevant until the day Renard’s scarf catches in an elevator. An old pen that turns out to have the ability to pick race winners. And a pair of shoes that . . . oops. Crossing a road on a rainy night, Renard slips and is hit and killed by a passing car. Which is when Pedott realizes his mistake. The shoes were intended for him to wear. Although they still gave him what he needed.
Sobering viewing for Christmas Day, one would think, even with Serling’s trailer the previous week, about this being the season for gift-giving, in mind. At the same time, however, we must remember that, unlike their modern counterparts, networks in the 1950s did not believe their audience really required wall-to-wall Santas and sad-sack sentimentality to remind them it was the holidays. Regular episodes of White Hunter, Frontier Doctor and Rawhide all ran that same night, while the anthology Hotel de Paree gave its festive spread over to a story about boxing.
True, the Desilu Playhouse would present a Christmas special, immediately before The Twilight Zone aired, and if you waited up until 11:15, Miracle on 34th Street awaited. But if you really wanted to know what was tucked in Santa’s sack . . . well, just be careful what you wish for.
“The Night of the Meek” (First broadcast: December 23, 1960)
Twelve months before, on Christmas Day, 1959, the sudden death of actor Paul Douglas forced The Twilight Zone to substitute its most lighthearted tale yet, “The Mighty Casey,” with what was, contrarily, one of its bleakest, “What You Need.”
This year, Christmas was sprayed all over the production, and though Serling later declared himself unhappy with the episode, he admitted that it was CBS’s penny-pinching insistence that it be shot on videotape (one of six episodes so abused this year) that lay at the source of his discontent. The story itself, though almost saccharine sweet, was ideal family festive fare. Or, as The Hollywood Reporter declared, “No matter how they debunk Santa Claus, the jolly old gent still rides high.”
Henry Corwin, long-term unemployed, was one of those gents who could usually bank on work one season a year—or so insists the urban legend (echoed in various movies and TV shows) that claims many of the department store Santas really were homeless, or down on their luck.
Pondering this, it did not take long for Serling to start to wonder what might happen if one of these characters suddenly discovered that he really was Father Christmas, with his thoughts gelling around a Christmas parade that he’d seen a couple of years before. He had, he told TV Guide, been quite astonished at the general dishevelment of the gentleman playing the role of Santa. “His Santa Claus suit must have been dredged out of a canal someplace.”
And so it was for Henry Corwin. This year, however, things have gone badly awry.
Corwin is the architect of his own problems, of course, turning up for work on Christmas Eve with more than a few drinks sloshing round inside him. Outside in an alley, though, Henry finds a magic sack that transforms him into the greatest Santa of them all. No sending a list up the fireplace and hoping he might deliver. This Santa hears your request, and he gives you what you asked for.
Of course, such munificence arouses the police’s suspicions, and they accuse Henry of dealing in stolen goods. But when they check the contents of the sack, all they find is garbage, and he is released to continue distributing gifts.
Finally the sack is empty, and Henry heads for home, wishing only that he could make so many people happy every Christmastime. Which is when an elf, with sleigh and reindeer, appears and makes his wish come true. Henceforth, Henry Corwin will be Santa.
Art Carney’s Santa celebrates “The Night of the Meek” in season 2.
CBS/Photofest
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (First broadcast: December 22, 1961)
Yes, it’s that time again, that festive interlude into which The Twilight Zone was either going to drop a tale of almost sickeningly festive proportions . . . or one of absolute darkness and terror. And Rod Serling knew which direction he intended moving in, the moment he set to work adapting a short story written by Marvin H. Petal, ominously titled “The Depository.”
Petal himself was an unknown, making his first steps into screenwriting via his hometown local station. He met Rod Serling when both attended a rally for the Democratic Party at the home of actor Robert Ryan, and he mentioned that he’d written a script that he thought might work for The Twilight Zone.
Well accustomed now to being approached at such events (and anyplace else he showed his face), Serling told Petal to submit the script to Buck Houghton—and then, when he read it, enjoyed it so much that he knew he had to use it.
Five most peculiar characters are locked in a pit together. There is a clown, a hobo, a ballerina, a bagpiper and an army major. Their prison is circular, deep and dark. Looking up, they can see daylight, but it is a long way away, and the walls offer no hand holds. They are trapped.
Jingle bells.
The five are frightened, confused . . . and understandably so. They have no memory of who they are or how they came to be trapped in this pit, and the theories become more far-fetched as time passes—anything from the hull of an alien spacecraft, into which they have been ruthlessly abducted, to maybe even limbo, that empty blank that hovers between life and death.
But that exit remains tempting, no matter how high up it might be. By standing atop one another’s shoulders, an improbable feat of balance and care, they realize they do have a hope of effecting an escape. If one of them could just scramble over the edge, and perhaps find a rope, or even a ladder. . . .
There! The army major reaches the top—but what madness is this? There is an equally precipitous drop on the other side. He falls to the ground . . .
. . . and is picked up by a little girl, who looks at the shabby camo-clad doll and drops it back into the barrel. The Viewpark Girls Home’s Seventeenth Annual Christmas Doll Drive is in full swing, and the barrel is collecting the dolls that their previous owners no longer want.
Inside the barrel, the ballerina sheds a tear.
“Ninety Years Without Slumbering” (First broadcast: December 20, 1963)
The final excursion into the glorious uncertainty of Christmas with The Twilight Zone was the work of scriptwriter Richard De Roy, based on an original story by George Clayton Johnson, writing under the name of Johnson Smith.
It is another examination of the passage of time and the fears that old age can instill in the human heart—represented for clockmaker Sam Forstmann (Ed Wynn) by the ticking of the old grandfather clock that was given to his father when he was born.
It was the great Terry Pratchett who wrote “No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away–until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.”
According to Sam, had he lived to read those words, he believed himself to be their epitome, at least so far as the first couple of clauses are concerned. The day his father’s old clock stops is the day that Sam’s heart will give out as well, and so his life is devoted to tending for the clock.
Which makes it seem most peculiar that he should so readily agree with his family’s insistence that he give the clock to the people next door. And peculiar, too, that those neighbors should then go away on vacation without telling him. The clock sits, slowly running down, and old Sam—thwarted in his attempt to break into the house and wind the thing—believes that he is running down too.
But then a miracle. Rather than dwell on loss, he instead thinks about the child that his daughter will soon be bearing, old Sam’s first grandchild; and suddenly, he realizes that he has something more precious to live for than the ticking of an old clock. And so the grandfather clock winds itself down, but Sam keeps on living. . . .
It was happy holidays in the twilight zone after all.