This show was for people who liked to get the willies! It was really intended to be a way to examine man's nature, using sci-fi as the vehicle, however, the writers and producers didn't mind throwing in elements that would give you the heebie-jeebies.
I still remember how my family stopped everything we were doing the first time we heard the "Control Voice" tell us "They" were taking control of our television set. We knew it was a gimmick but it still got our attention.
Another heebie-jeebie element was the music. There were two theme songs for the show, both fabulous scores with full orchestra beautiful, but with a wondrous creepy edge.
It aired in our town a town with only one t.v. station that offered programming from all three networks in various rotation at 10:00 p.m. on Saturday nights so, you had to stay up late to see it. That time made it the creepiest for me as a child. The folks usually went to bed around ten and my sister and I would watch it with the lights turned low and then be afraid to go to bed.
The black and white filming made it even more eerie and other-worldly. The glow from The Galaxy Being and the alien in The Bellero Shield worked better in black and white, I felt.
Many actors who later became famous were featured on this show (Sally Kellerman, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, Carol O'Connor, Robert Culp, Martin Landau, Robert Duvall and Adam West, to name a few) not to mention some who were already well-known such as Warren Oates, Eddie Albert and Ed Asner.
Some of the weirdest episodes to me were, "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," "The Mice," "The Invisibles," "The Guests," "Don't Open Till Doomsday" and "The Duplicate Man." Particularly weird was, "A Feasibility Study" where an entire neighborhood of earth is lifted off the planet and transported to another world where the inhabitants have become like rock unable to perform manual labor and needing slaves to do their work for them. The rock-like beings were extremely scary to me as a child.
With a limited budget, this series came off well, I believe. Not that there weren't some stink-bombs among the episodes, like "The Invisible Enemy" and "The Brain of Colonel Barham." Still, there were so many episodes that made you terribly thoughtful and others that would raise the hair on the back of your neck, like, "Cry of Silence." The biggest thing wrong with the series is, it didn't even complete two full seasons. I've watched these episodes over and over on DVD and continually yearn for more.
I still remember how my family stopped everything we were doing the first time we heard the "Control Voice" tell us "They" were taking control of our television set. We knew it was a gimmick but it still got our attention.
Another heebie-jeebie element was the music. There were two theme songs for the show, both fabulous scores with full orchestra beautiful, but with a wondrous creepy edge.
It aired in our town a town with only one t.v. station that offered programming from all three networks in various rotation at 10:00 p.m. on Saturday nights so, you had to stay up late to see it. That time made it the creepiest for me as a child. The folks usually went to bed around ten and my sister and I would watch it with the lights turned low and then be afraid to go to bed.
The black and white filming made it even more eerie and other-worldly. The glow from The Galaxy Being and the alien in The Bellero Shield worked better in black and white, I felt.
Many actors who later became famous were featured on this show (Sally Kellerman, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, Carol O'Connor, Robert Culp, Martin Landau, Robert Duvall and Adam West, to name a few) not to mention some who were already well-known such as Warren Oates, Eddie Albert and Ed Asner.
Some of the weirdest episodes to me were, "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," "The Mice," "The Invisibles," "The Guests," "Don't Open Till Doomsday" and "The Duplicate Man." Particularly weird was, "A Feasibility Study" where an entire neighborhood of earth is lifted off the planet and transported to another world where the inhabitants have become like rock unable to perform manual labor and needing slaves to do their work for them. The rock-like beings were extremely scary to me as a child.
With a limited budget, this series came off well, I believe. Not that there weren't some stink-bombs among the episodes, like "The Invisible Enemy" and "The Brain of Colonel Barham." Still, there were so many episodes that made you terribly thoughtful and others that would raise the hair on the back of your neck, like, "Cry of Silence." The biggest thing wrong with the series is, it didn't even complete two full seasons. I've watched these episodes over and over on DVD and continually yearn for more.