Old stories and new ideas

Time flies, doesn't it?  I see now that it was back in June 2010 that I first mentioned my wife bringing home some Twilight Zone (the original TV series) DVDs from the Council library on the hunch that I liked the show.  I did, and watched a few episodes with my kids (my son in particular.)

Well, my wife recently repeated the exercise, with a different set of DVDs, and my son remains quite keen on watching it with me.  It pleases me that he likes it, given that I think it still stands up as intelligent entertainment with a substantially more literary aspect to it than what passes for most family friendly TV entertainment today.  Reading the Wikipedia article about the franchise,  I see how important Rod Serling was, not just as producer, but as a writer for the show.   Apparently Warner Brothers still has the rights to 92 episodes written by him, and Leonardo DiCaprio has expressed interest in making a full length movie from one or other of them. By co-incidence, my son also recently saw for the first time the original Planet of the Apes movie, and I spotted Rod Serling as a co-writer of it.  The Wikipedia account of his life indicates he was a pretty interesting character. 

(By the way, another old show, of a decidedly different character, which my son and I have been watching together over summer are the repeats of Red Dwarf on ABC2.  I had not realised how old the original series is - it started in 1988.  I always thought the show was pretty good in a cheerfully low brow science fiction comedy way, and I was annoyed that the new series shown by the ABC just before Christmas seemed to arrive with no fanfare at all, so I missed some of it.  Anyway, happily, my son finds the old series very entertaining.)

But back to the main point:  I have nearly always enjoyed anthology TV series.  I am not sure when TZ was shown on Australian TV; as the first series was made in 1959, it is possible they aired before I was a TV viewer.  In fact, there may not even have been a TV in the house at the time.  (Talk about making me feel old, telling you this!)  Broadcasts in magnificent black and white only started in Brisbane in about 1959,  and my mother has told me that my father resisted getting a TV initially.   Her ordering one without prior approval from the (now long defunct) Waltons Department store caused a bit of a scene at home, with Dad telling her that he would tell the delivery man to take it back.   He didn't live up to the threat, however; the delivery went smoothly, quickly followed by my father becoming the most dedicated television viewer in the household. 

So, the first anthology series I can recall is The Outer Limits, which had a more consistently science fiction bent than TZ.  While I remember it creeping me out quite a bit, no particular story sticks in my mind from my childhood viewing.

Fast forward to the 1980's TV revival of Twilight Zone, which I see now followed the movie (which itself was really only worth watching for the brilliant remake of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.)   But I remember enjoying much of the revived TV series.  The 1980's then also brought us Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories, some of which really were excellent, even if the series had a tendency to indulge too often in whimsy.

All in all, I miss such series, and presume that it is a combination of expense and the difficulty of coming up with consistently good and novel stories which prevents them from ever lasting more than a few seasons at a time.

Speaking of story ideas, I recently stumbled across Writepop, which claims it has more than 1,000 story ideas for science fiction which anyone is welcome to use.   While there are only one or two lines that explain the premise, if I were a student who had a fiction writing assignment, I think I would find this a very useful starting point. (A recent half baked idea of mine featuring time travel and the Bible does not seem to have been covered before, I am happy to say.  Now I only need another 91 ideas to match Serling.)

I see that the site io9, which I think I have only ever briefly seen before, has many articles on writing science fiction, and seems to be a generally interesting place to spend time.   It's good to find new corners of the web for a change.