Announcer: ( as the title appears ) " Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, will tell you about next week's story — after this word from our alternate sponsor.

This is the only episode in the first season in which Rod Serling appears on-screen and breaks the fourth wall ( in a rare humorous scene ).

This is also one of only two episodes of the entire series where Serling appears on camera at the conclusion of the episode ( the other episode was the last broadcast episode of the second season " The Obsolete Man ").

Burgess Meredith, who starred in four episodes of the original series, took on Serling's position as narrator ; unlike Serling he did not appear on screen, nor did he receive screen credit, though his name appears in the end credits.

The wraparounds are based on Rod Serling's television series Night Gallery, in which Serling appears at an art gallery and introduces each episode by unveiling paintings depicting the stories.

A brief resurgence of production beginning in the early 1970s yielded the Mutual Broadcasting System's The Zero Hour ( hosted by Rod Serling ), National Public Radio's Earplay, and veteran Himan Brown's CBS Radio Mystery Theater and General Mills Radio Adventure Theater, later followed by the Sears / Mutual Radio Theater, The National Radio Theater of Chicago, NPR Playhouse, a newly produced episode of the former 1950s series X Minus One, and works by a new generation of dramatists, notably Yuri Rasovsky, Thomas Lopez of ZBS and the dramatic sketches heard on humorist Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion.

Rod Serling, who had gained fame from an earlier series, The Twilight Zone, served both as the on-air host of Night Gallery and as a major contributor of scripts, although he did not have the same control of content and tone as he had on The Twilight Zone.

Serling wrote many of the teleplays, including " Camera Obscura ", " The Caterpillar " ( based on a short story by Oscar Cook ), " Class of ' 99 ", " Cool Air " ( based on a short story by H. P.

This episode originally aired on September 2, 1942, and was later adapted for television by Rod Serling as a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone.

Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen and helped form television industry standards.

Sam Serling built a small stage in the basement, where Rod ( with or without neighborhood children ) often put on plays.

Serling sometimes went exploring on his own, against orders, and got lost.

Serling returned from the successful mission in Leyte with two wounds ( including one to his kneecap ), but neither kept him from combat when General Douglas MacArthur used the paratroopers for their typical purpose on February 3, 1945.

In addition to earning $ 45 to $ 50 a week at the college radio station, Serling attempted to make a living selling freelance scripts to radio programs, but the industry at that time was involved in many lawsuits, which affected willingness to take on new writers ( some who had scripts rejected would often hear a similar plot produced, claim their work had been stolen and sue for recompense ).

Realizing the boxing story was not right for Grand Central Station, Serling submitted a lighter piece called Hop Off the Express and Grab a Local, which became his first nationally broadcast piece on September 10, 1949.

Serling submitted an idea of a weekly radio show in which the ghosts of a young boy and girl killed in World War II would look through train windows and commentate on day-to-day human life as it moved around the country.

Serling said of his time as a staff writer for radio: “ From a writing point of view, radio ate up ideas that might have put food on the table for weeks at a future freelancing date.

According to his wife, Serling " just up and quit one day, during the winter of 1952, about six months before our first daughter Jody was born – though he was also doing some freelancing and working on a weekly dramatic show for another Cincinnati station.

Serling modeled the main character on his former commander, Colonel Oren Haugen.

A New York Times television reviewer added this editorial note at the end of a glowing review for A Town Has Turned to Dust, a show about racism and bigotry in a small Southwestern town: "' Playhouse 90 ' and Mr. Serling had to fight executive interference ... before getting their play on the air last night.

Serling working on his script with a dictating machine, 1959

Serling drew on his own experience for many episodes, frequently about boxing, military life, and airplane pilots.

In his book, The Evolution of the Weird Tale, S. T. Joshi titled his chapter on Serling " The Moral Supernatural " and spoke of how difficult it is to categorize Serling's writings.

Joshi comments that Serling has used pacing well, each correct for the medium and that " in spite of Serling's own doubts on the matter – he mastered the short story technique in every way.

Mr. Serling conceived his playlet in imaginative terms and underscored his point that science cannot foretell what may be the effect of total isolation on a human being.

" Escape Clause " was one of the three episodes-in-production mentioned by Rod Serling in his 1959 promotional film pitching the series to potential sponsors, the others being " The Lonely " and " Mr. Denton on Doomsday " ( referred to as " Death, Destry, and Mr. Dingle ").

In an interview with Mike Wallace on September 22, 1959, Serling said, " We changed, in eighteen scripts, Mike, we have had one line changed, which, again, was a little ludicrous but of insufficient basic concern within the context of the story, not to put up a fight.

: Despite this, Serling did end up producing an idea from an industry outsider when he paid Madelon Champion $ 500 for the idea on which this episode was based, an idea that came up in a social conversation between the two.

* The plot idea of astronauts thinking they had crashed on an unknown planet, only to discover that in fact they had been on Earth all along, would be adapted by Rod Serling in his work on the initial screenplay of Planet of The Apes.

Serling later set several of his scripts in the Philippines, and used the unpredictability of death as a theme in much of his writing.

" Once Renard opens the paper and looks at the racing page, several in-jokes are apparent in the names of the listed jockeys, which include " Serling ", " Clemens " ( referencing director of photography George Clemens ), " Houghton " ( referencing producer Buck Houghton ), " Butler " ( referencing set decorator Rudy Butler ) and " Denault " ( referencing assistant director Edward Denault ).

( 1957 ), written by Arthur Hailey ( who also penned the 1968 novel Airport ) about an airplane crew that succumbs to food poisoning ; and The Doomsday Flight ( 1966 ), written by Rod Serling and starring Edmond O ' Brien as a disgruntled aerospace engineer who plants a barometric pressure bomb on an airliner built by his former employer set to explode when the airliner descends for landing.

The parts set in the 1890s have no sound, silent film intertitle cards ( except, of course, for Rod Serling saying " Mr. Mulligan, a rather dour critic of his times is shortly to discover the import of that old phrase ' Out of the frying pan, into the fire '.

Thus, as Serling says, Bemis has become " just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself ".

In his closing narrative, Rod Serling says that " the Chancellor, the late Chancellor " was wrong about one thing: any state judging its own citizens obsolete is itself obsolete.

In his closing narration, Rod Serling says that Comfort and Jeff are still alive and bore a son who grew up to become a shrewd politician and US Senator.

Serling says that the son is suspected to have earned his education in the Twilight Zone.

This, as you may recognize, is a map of the United States ..." For the attraction video, the Serling footage is used up to the point that Serling forms the sounds " This as you may recognize ..." then cuts away from Serling to just a shot of the elevator as Silverman instead goes on to say " is a maintenance service elevator, still in operation, waiting for you.

this point, Serling, cigarette between his fingers, originally slipped in a plug for " tonight's sponsor ", Liggett & Myers ' " Chesterfield ( cigarette ) | Chesterfield ":

Set in a dimly lit museum after hours, the pilot film featured Serling ( as on-camera host ) playing the curator, who introduced three tales of the macabre, unveiling canvases that would appear in the subsequent story segments ( its brief first season rotated as one spoke of a four-series programming wheel titled Four in One ).

The scripts utilize visual images to show the locations, what the characters look like and emotions they are experiencing ; in comparison, Serling fleshes these all out in the short story with strong nuances, inner dialogue and elaborate memories that are not easily translated to the screen.

" Paul Mandell, of American Cinematographer magazine, wrote: " Distance was the most personal story Serling ever wrote, and easily the most sensitive dramatic fantasy in the history of television.

Rod Serling had previously adapted the episode " And When the Sky Was Opened " from a short story of Matheson's.

Rod Serling cited this as his favorite story from the first season of the series.

This was Carney's only Twilight Zone appearance but, nearly two years earlier, on January 22, 1959, he starred in Rod Serling's semi-autobiographical story, " The Velvet Alley ", the eighth of ten Serling teleplays featured on Playhouse 90, the most prestigious of the many live drama anthology series from the Golden Age of Television.

The story was adapted by Rod Serling from a short anecdote in the 1944 Bennett Cerf Random House anthology, Famous Ghost Stories, which itself was an adaptation of " The Bus-Conductor ," a short story by E. F. Benson published in The Pall Mall Magazine in 1906.

According to Serling, it's " the story of the best pool player living and the best pool player dead.

Under pressure from the White House and his commander, Brigadier General Hershberg ( Michael Moriarty ), to wrap things up quickly, Serling leaks the story to newspaper reporter Tony Gartner ( Scott Glenn ) to prevent another cover up.

But his short story " It's a Good Life " ( 1953 ), adapted as a teleplay for The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling, is arguably his most generally known work to reach the small screen.

A teleplay of this story was written by Bradbury for possible use on the television program The Twilight Zone, but Rod Serling and the producers of the show deemed it too expensive to film on the show's rather tight budget.

Through them he met Rod Serling, to whom he sold his first story (" All of Us Are Dying ", produced as " The Four of Us Are Dying ") and, later, his first teleplay (" A Penny for Your Thoughts ").

This story was based on the Emmett Till case, and Serling had to deal with executive interference and network censors before the show could air.

Contestants ( two in the Serling era, three in the Ludden era, and four in the Armstrong and Boardman eras ) would guess which star was telling the true story.