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TWILIGHT ZONE creater Rod Serling.
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In the ZONE with Zicree

While the Sci Fi channel continues to air reruns, catching up with the series on DVD required a hefty investment with only four episodes being released per single disc when the DVD boom first began. Now, with TV on DVD being a steadily growing business, Image Entertainment completely digitally remastered the original series and repackaged each season in reasonably priced box sets, with a plethora of extras filling them out.

"I've worked on every video/home video version of the Twilight Zone," explains Twilight Zone Companion author Marc Scott Zicree. "When Image contacted me that they were doing the definitive sets, I was pleased, because prior to that Twilight Zone was released in such a random order that being able to put it together as a complete set was impossible."

Zicree says he whole-heartedly endorsed the concept of putting out the series on season-by-season discs.

"For years, companies have tried to figure out how to release TV on DVD and video," he explains. "Before you ended up paying $20 or $30 dollars for two episodes, and it would cost thousands of dollars for any series. Finally, someone came up with the brilliant idea of releasing a box set of an entire season, which sells for $100 or less. That way people could collect TV series with all the extras available in one set."

Since Zicree had a wealth of research material and interviews collected over the years to aid in the writing of Companion, he was finally able to dust off some of this valuable assets to include on the DVD sets.

"The key was I had a hundred hours of interviews with actors, writers, producers and directors of The Twilight Zone," says Zicree. "All the interviews I conducted when I researched the book were on audio tape. In addition, I tracked down video and audio tapes of Rod Serling teaching various classes on writing both in Los Angeles and on the East Coast, where he would bring an episode of Twilight Zone on 16mm and screen it to the class and talk about it. I also had a tape of Serling talking about creating many of the key episodes of the Twilight Zones, office memos, censor reports from the era. So we basically started working together to choose which material would be on the set."

One of the more interesting memos Zicree found were from CBS network censors at the time, which dealt with not offending mental patients.

"They would say things like 'Be careful of words like 'crazy' so as not to offend mental patients who are watching the show,'" says Zicree. "They were also concerned not to offend heart attack patients. Those were weird notes, but Twilight Zone was pretty immune from that stuff. It was nothing compared to what happened with Serling on Playhouse 90 and Studio One."

To Zicree's surprise, Image was also very interested in including his Twilight Zone Companion book in the Season 1 set.

"They were going to usurp it for each season, and they finally came to a point where they said, 'Why don't we reprint the whole thing?'" says Zicree. "It was still in print, but they needed to make a smaller edition so it could fit in the DVD box. I thought it was a great idea because the Twilight Zone Companion is the perfect companion book to the Twilight Zone series. It just seemed natural."

All five seasons of The Twilight Zone will be available by year's end: Season 1, 2, 3, and 4 are currently available, and Season 5 will be out December 27th. But Zicree is hard pressed to pick any one season as the best, though he admits the first three are very strong.

"I think over its entire run, every season had, 'Wow these are some great episodes here,'" reveals Zicree. "Even in the fifth season, when Serling was really tired, they had 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,' 'In Praise of Pip' and 'Living Doll.' Those were shows that are fresh and really comment on the modern day world in a very powerful way."

In many ways that's why Zicree feels the series has held up so well over the years it deals with the human condition and uses the genre as metaphors for greater issues.

"Serling was a great writer of mainstream drama in the '50s in TV, and he loved to write about politics, race, social tensions in America and the world," explains Zicree. "Censorship incredibly forced him to find some outlet that would not be the mainstream dramas he had been writing. So he turned to sci-fi and fantasy not as escape but rather as a way to cloak what he had to say in terms the censors wouldn't catch and that worked. It also made him speak universally about these issues, and that I think made the series more timeless. I think if he had been writing very specifically about people like [former president Dwight D.] Eisenhower and [former Russian leader Nikita] Khrushchev it wouldn't have had the legs." With Serling on board, it also attached a rich bounty of talent in terms of actors and behind-the-scenes talent that kept the quality of the series always at the highest level.

"Serling brought in brilliant writers like Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Charles Beaumont, and that drew the best directors and actors working in the field, and composers like Bernard Hermann and Franz Waxman," says Zicree. "These were brilliant talents and it all came together for that one series, so it's not surprising it's lasted because even when you know what the twist ending is, you watch these things and just enjoy them for the sheer brilliance and artistry of how they were made."

Twenty-five years after Twilight Zone originally aired and after the troubled Twilight Zone: The Movie hit theaters in 1983 CBS resurrected the series for a whole new generation. Image has also dusted off all three seasons of that run (that lasted in some form from 1986-1989) in two separate box sets. The newer series may have had trouble finding an audience, but it did offer up one of the better modern-day anthology series of the past 20 years, thanks to an equally powerhouse writing staff, including author Harlan Ellison, and top directors such as Wes Craven, John Milius, Joe Dante.

"To me the original Zone, not unlike our Zone, had some outstanding episodes, and you can watch them a trillion times," says Rockne S. O'Bannon, who served as story editor for the first season and executive story consultant for the second. "We had some good ones and some real clunkers, but I think the two Zones were pretty similar. I think for me, where our show in the '80s had a harder road to hoe than the original Zone, is that the original series was the first of it's kind to do those kind of stories and to present twist endings that people weren't lying in wait for."

While episodes like "Shatterday," "Message for Charity" and "Shadow Man" certainly rank up there with the classic episodes, O'Bannon admits one of the pitfalls of the new series was its hour running time and the varying lengths of some of the stories. In some instances, three stories would stretch out over the course of a given hour some only lasting a few minutes.

"I think there was an audience frustration because there were varying length stories and the viewer never knew which was going to be a long one and which was going to be short one," says O'Bannon. "If an episode was really good and was real short, that would be frustrating if there was another episode after that which wasn't quite one of our best."

Nonetheless, director Wes Craven in particular feels his work on the '80s Twilight Zone is some of best and most underrated work of his career. He's happy his fans can finally see them on DVD.

"It was one of the best experiences I ever had," says Craven. "I came in, and they had a lot of scripts and I asked, 'Which one can I do?' and they said, 'You can do as many as you want.' How often do you get that? They had great writers, decent schedules and a great cinematographer with Bradford May. Over the first season, I shot six and I was literally told by a very helpful crew member who had a great taste for scripts of which ones to look for. None of the young people who I work with now were old enough to watch them back then. There was a lot of good work in there by a lot of great directors, and I count them as some of best work."

Ultimately, Zicree feels that most anthology series, including the UPN incarnation of Twilight Zone (also available on DVD), also seem to "aspire for the wrong things," which is why some similar series have never done as well.

"Serling loved twist endings and surprise endings, but that's not what made them work," says Zicree. "It's that Serling had a lot to say about life and death and the world we live in. They were parables about our world. That's why these stories still work. They touched upon a human level with their characters and are marvelously written and delineated so we recognize our common humanity, and that's what people respond to. We want to see how things turn out, and hope they turn out okay."