The Twilight Zone: The Hunt

It's been awhile since I did one of these TZTs. I hope to get a few more of them up over the course of 2019. 

A couple of folks have asked when I'm going to do something with the new Twilight Zone currently airing on CBS Access. I definitely look forward to seeing it, and when I do I'll be happy to set a place for it with the others. Whenever they announce a release date for Star Trek: Picard I'll take the All Access plunge. (Last time I did so - for the NFL playoffs - I thought great I'll finally watch Discovery - and ended up watching like 25 episodes of The Price Is Right instead. Go figure.)

For tonight, thought, let's have a look at an episode I've loved for many years:

Aired January 26th, 1962

"An old man and a hound dog named Rip off for an evening's pleasure in quest of raccoon. Usually, these evenings end with one tired old man, one battle-scarred hound dog and one or more extremely dead raccoons, but as you may suspect, that will not be the case tonight. These hunters won't be coming home from the hill. They're headed for the backwoods... of the Twilight Zone."

Hyder and Rachel Simpson are living out their twilight years in an unnamed mountain community where they've lived their whole lives. Over supper, Rachel asks Hyder not to go hunting that night as she has been seeing signs of ill portent all week: blood on the moon, weird birds, etc. He tells her not to worry; he'll be fine.

Whoops.

A raccoon that might've given Old Dan and Little Ann a run for their money leads Hyder and Rip out onto a log over a river with a fast undercurrent. First Rip then Hyder fall into the water and don't resurface.

Hyder and Rip wake up on the side of the river. Worried about what Rachel's going to say about all this, Hyder walks home. As he nears his house, he sees his neighbors digging a hole. They resolutely ignore him when he asks what they think they're doing digging a hole on his property, so he responds in the traditional manner:

He softens, though, once he learns they're digging a grave, and one of them is a little careless with the smaller of the two coffins.

"Have a little care!"
"It's just a dog."

"Not to some folks."

Hyder starts to realize he and Rip didn't survive the hunt once he gets inside and sees his wife in her funeral outfit and when the pastor and pallbearers don't answer his questions.

He follows the throng outside but is puzzled by a fence he does not remember running alongside the road. ("I don't memorize ever seeing this fence" he tells Rip. Rip inwardly rolls his eyes.) They walk along until they come to a gate. A man steps out from behind it and asks Hyder a bunch of questions, before confirming Hyder's suspicions that he has indeed reached the clearing at the end of the path.

"Then I take you would aim at being St. Peter?"
"I keep the gate; that's a fact."

Hyder's about to enter the gates of heaven when he's told he can't bring Rip. No Rip? What kind of heaven is this? This is folks heaven, the man replies; dog heaven's up the road a ways. Without hesitation, Hyder says no thank you. ("Any place that's too highfalutin for Rip is too fancy for me.") The man tries to persuade him otherwise, to no avail. Failing to entice him inside, he gives what sounds like good advice: don't be rash, neighbor, the stakes are eternity; why don't you just sit down and think it over for awhile?

Which he does.

As he waits, another man appears, and this one knows his and Rip's names before Hyder has to tell him. When he tells them he's there to bring them to heaven, Hyder repeats what he told that fella up the road: he has no intention of going anywhere that Rip's not welcome to walk in beside him. The man grows quite concerned - you didn't get messed up with nobody in there, did you? When Hyder says it would be one hell of a place to settle down for eternity with no dogs and no raccoon hunting, the man tells him he isn't far wrong; that place was hell.  

Good thing Rip was there or Hyder might have been tricked. "A man?

Well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open... but even the devil can't fool a dog."

"Travelers to unknown regions would be well advised to take along the family dog. He could just save you from entering the wrong gate. At least, it happened that way once in a mountainous area... of the Twilight Zone."

And off they go to heaven. The End.

The Twilight Zone Vortex speaks for both sides of the fanbase on this one in its review: "Good intentions but the finished product is an incredibly flawed episode. The pacing is slow, the direction tiresome, and the premise derivative. (However) many fans have warm memories of this episode. One such admirer was fellow Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson who regards it as one of his favorite episodes. "With this story, Earl brings a southern country sensibility to The Twilight Zone that is American to the core," Johnson said in an interview, "which assures us that being simple is not being stupid…the story has such a classic feeling that one is tempted to believe that Hamner may not have made the story up but instead borrowed it from some ancient book of folk tales…It has stuck in my mind like fishhooks."

Mine, too. I first saw this when I was 15 or so, with my own dog (good ol' Bandit, R.I.{P. buddy) by my side. Did we used to watch The Twilight Zone together? It'd make a good story, but I don't think we ever had a serious ritual of it. He used to just come in and lay down near me when I was watching anything. Anyway: the regional or afterlife musings of this story aside, it's mainly a story about loving dogs.

"And another thing- don't talk about him like that when he can hear you. Rip's got feelings. I don't want them hurt."

Rachel's response amuses me:
"I'll feed him, but I'll be switched if I'm going to start sweet-talking him."

So yeah just as something to express a simple truth (dogs are awesome and we probably never live up to their intense loyalty and affection for us) in an uncomplicated manner, I like it. Everything else is secondary to that.

Other things I like: Rachel and Hyder, the tenderness shown to one another, primarily through Hyder's dialogue with others (particularly at the end when he makes sure Rachel won't have any trouble with that fella up the road before he follows the angel into heaven) or just through some of the acting.  

Like the looks on his face, not when he discovers the truth of his condition, but when he sees firsthand how it's impacting Rachel and that he can't do anything to comfort her.

Hamner says that "Hyder and Rachel were actually early versions of Grandma and Grandpa Walton. Around the time that he wrote the episode he was also writing a series of short stories called “The Old Man and the Old Woman” and he decided to use the two main characters, who were fully-developed already, as the main characters of "The Hunt." He continued to write stories featuring the elderly couple and they eventually ended up in The Waltons." There's plenty more on Hamner's career at the link up there - have at it, it's all interesting. I've got some Waltons on tap for one of these days/years.  

Also, I like that the devil is all just-the-facts (name, number, how's-you-die) and this subtly creepy shot of the road into Hell beyond the gate. ("That pasture up there they call the Elysian field. Cross that and you reach the golden street that takes you directly to the Old Master's headquarters.") 

And now, some leftover screencaps.

 ~

Considering the nature of the episode, maybe naming the dog "RIP" was too much? Or is it just the right touch? I've been asking myself that for 30 years ago, someone out there (probably not reading this blog here but hey) even longer.

The Twilight Zone: Ring-a-Ding Girl

Today's selection:

Season 5, Episode 13. (First aired Dec. 27, 1963)

"Bunny Blake is a public figure. What she wears, eats, thinks, says is news. But underneath the glamour, the makeup, the publicity the buildup, the costuming is a flesh-and-blood person, a beautiful girl about to take a long and bizarre journey... into the Twilight Zone."

Movie star Bunny has thirty-five minutes to make her flight from Rome, but as she gathers her things last-minute in her hotel room, her agent hands her a special delivery fan letter from her hometown, Howardville. (Which, Bunny tells her, she'll soon be able to see for herself from the plane. "We fly right over the center of town." "Well, hooray for us.")

Thus begins the pattern which plays out for the rest of the episode. When she looks into the ring, she sees faces from her hometown imploring her to come home.

And to "Help us... help us... help us."

She also sees (closer to the end) evidence of a plane in trouble, and herself and her agent aboard.

From the hotel the story cuts to Bunny's sister Hildy and her teenage son Bud engaged in traditional domestic accoutrements: chores and quips about child labor laws, etc.. Bunny surprises her sister by showing up ("you know me - glamorous, unpredictable, full of surprises - the same old nut") and claims she was inspired to drop in by the gift of the ring. Hildy tells her the entire town chipped in to buy it and send it to her, which echoes the story she told her (bored) agent on how Bunny Blake left Howardville in the first place, when they took up a collection to send her to Hollywood on account of how her talent outgrew the available opportunities. 

"I don't mean that the way it sounded, but I just knew I had a talent and had to find a place to let it grow. Otherwise, it would have died."

Awesome car.

Every time Bunny receives a vision in her ring, she's increasingly disoriented. She becomes convinced, though, that the town picnic, scheduled for the day of her visit and where years before she won its crowning event (the beauty pageant) which got her started on the road to fame, must be cancelled. No one can understand why she wants it cancelled and assume it's just one of her movie star whims. Bunny insists it's about giving back to the town. Eventually, her sister and the groundskeeper at her old school - who agrees to not interfere with her hosting a meet-and-greet-a-Hollywood-star event at the same time as the town picnic - agree not to go. 

As Bunny, her sister, and nephew are about to leave for the performance, they hear sirens and rush to look out the living-room window.

"Goodbye, Hildy."

The radio breaks the news of a horrible plane crash at the town picnic, and as Hildy and Bud absorb the news, a police officer calls to tell Hildy that he identified Bunny among the deceased passengers on the plane. As she struggles to make sense of this, the anchorman on TV relays that several townspeople claimed to have seen Bunny walking around in town that day and to have talked to her. "Until the mystery is unraveled," the newscaster adds, "Only one thing is certain: Bunny Blake is dead." 

The final scene shows Hildy finding Bunny's magic ring, which had fallen to the floor; now chipped and charred.

"We are all travelers. The trip starts in a place called birth and ends in that lonely town called death. And that's the end of the journey, unless you happen to exist for a few hours, like Bunny Blake, in the misty regions of the Twilight Zone."

Okay, so, once again here's an episode I've always really liked that never seems to make anyone else's list of great TZ eps. If it had been a Season One episode, I bet, its reputation would be better, but coming as it does in Season Five, perhaps people feel it's redundant of earlier explorations. Or perhaps this specific type of ghost story (person saves town/family from suffering her own fate) was just too familiar for audiences, then or now.

Me? I think there's a lot to like here. I like how Bunny Blake leaves Howardville with a genuine mystery to solve (how could she have been in town - and on television, to boot, actually recorded - promoting her appearance at the school if she was at the same time flying in the doomed plane in the sky above?). I like her backstory and her agent's disdain for fly-over country (always timely). I like Bunny's ambivalence about her home town even knowing she would have withered there. And I like that at no point is there any explicit explanation given for what a "Ring-a-Ding girl" is. It could be a catchphrase of Bunny's from a show, or she could be the face of a product line. It doesn't really matter, of course, it's just a nice touch. 

And this guy -  

immortalized - well, to those who remember them - on the cover of this Wombats album

who gives the most half-hearted plea for help in the world history of mystical ring pleas: 

"'Ring-a-ding girl' but she don't fool Cyrus Gentry. Miss high and mighty coming back here like she was somebody special. Well, you are special - right now... maybe the most special person Howardville will ever have. So, Bunny Blake ... help us."

Cyrus Gentry was played by Green Acres (among many other things, including two other TZs) vet Hank Paterson. The lead:

Apparently, Ms. McNamara didn't do too much of anything else. For what it's worth, I think she gives a great performance here. I care about Bunny Blake and the arc of her imaginary life and death more than I ever expect to when I hit "play" on this one.

And David Macklin as young Bud Powell.

See you next time.

~