Review of Twilight Zone, The: Vol 2

Introduction

Well it had to happen - one of the most memorable TV series of the 50s and 60s is now starting to make the migration onto DVD.

The Twilight Zone is now being released four episodes at a time on successive DVDs. This disc, Volume 2 contains episodes from 1959, 1960, 1961 and 1963, so they are being very selective on the episodes they are transferring to DVD, rather than just releasing them in order.

This disc contains probably four of the most well known episodes - including "Nightmare at 20,000 feet" with William Shatner. A very young James T. Kirk plays a nervous flyer who on looking out of his window, sees a monster (resembling a big teddy bear!) tearing open the engine of the plane he is travelling on (which incidentally was remade for the 1983 movie version of The Twilight Zone). Of course whenever he alerts others to what is going on, the thing has disappeared.

The classic `Time Enough at Last` stars Burgess Meredith as a book worm, frustrated that he never gets enough time to read. A nuclear holocaust occurs when he is down the bank vault, and he emerges to be the only person left alive. He finds the ruins of the public library with all the wonderful books for him to read… until an unkind twist in the story puts paid to all that!

`The Odyssey of Flight 33` was one of the best episodes of the second season, and tells the strange story of a scheduled flight on its way to New York that passes through some sort of `sound barrier`. This takes the flight back to the age of the dinosaurs! Terrific stuff.

`The Monsters are Due on Maple Street` is in my opinion, the weakest of the four episodes. The theme is of mob hysteria, focussing on a quiet neighbourhood and the realisation that one or two of the locals have been taken over by aliens. The witch hunts start and social order begins to break down.

Video

We are talking about a TV series that is 40 years old now, and there are many pops and clicks on screen as you would expect. During the "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" episodes some noticeable black vertical lines appeared for a few seconds.

The episodes claim to have been digitally re-mastered, but quite frankly there is only a limited about of `remastering` that can be done to an old TV series such as this. The process has not done anything to reduce the scratches on the picture (virtually all the episodes were shot on 35mm film), although for black and white video the contrast definition is high and the image is relatively sharp.

Audio

Some hiss and noise can be heard on the audio, although the soundtrack has gone through the remastering process also. Some good results have been achieved however, and the episodes are a noticeable improvement over the old TV repeats.

With such an old master, you cannot expect miracles, but interestingly as soon as the disc starts you get a Dolby Digital trailer! Oooh - glorious mono.

Features

The clever and original animated menus are in the shape of the Twilight Zone eyeball, that actually looks at the menu option selected. It blinks and moves around the screen as you select something. Very cool. However, once you have seen it a few times, it can be a bit of a drag as selection can be tedious as you have to wait for the eyeball to reposition itself. Also when testing out on a DVDRom, the menus were a little jerky and the sound broke up occasionally, which was not a problem on a standard DVD player.

The main extra you get is the "Inside the Twilight Zone" section. This is a comprehensive reference section, which includes a biography of the creator of the Twilight Zone Rod Serling, as well as some history on the Twilight Zone. There are also reviews of the four episodes on this disc, cast information and a series by series section.

The Rod Serling stuff although short, is interesting reading, but a problem is that they have chosen to auto turn the pages over after a set time. This is fine for fast readers, but I think most people will have a hard job trying to keep up with the turning pages! This section caused problems in that some of the text broke up on screen.

History of the Twilight Zone, suffers the same problems as the Serling Bio, but contains fascinating information that fans will enjoy.

Season By Season takes you through all five series, which totalled an amazing 156 episodes over a five year period. One wonders if all these will eventually make it onto DVD at four episodes a time - a whopping 39 discs!

Review and Credits relates to just these four episodes, and is useful background information.

Throughout these text based extras you get some funky new `Twilight Zone` music with creepy footsteps and door opening sound effects.

Conclusion

Fans will already know what to expect with the Twilight Zone, and thus the release on DVD will be welcome.

The digital remastering has gone a long way to improve general picture and sound quality but cannot cover the multitude of flaws that film made over 40 years ago contained, due to its technical limitations at the time.

The menus and extras have had a lot of care and attention lavished upon them, with new music having been composed and lots of research done. It is a shame some problems were experienced however, and so I am looking forward to testing another DVD in this series.