"I Sing the Body Electric" | |
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The Twilight Zone episode | |
Episode no. | Season 3 Episode 35 |
Directed by | James Sheldon William F. Claxton |
Written by | Ray Bradbury |
Featured music | Nathan Van Cleave |
Production code | 4826 |
Original air date | May 18, 1962 |
Guest appearances | |
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"I Sing the Body Electric" is episode 100 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone . The 1962 script was written by Ray Bradbury, and became the basis for his 1969 short story of the same name, [1] itself named after an 1855 Walt Whitman poem. [2] Although Bradbury contributed several scripts to The Twilight Zone, this was the only one produced. [3]
They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn't seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone.
Mr. Rogers, the widowed father of three children (Anne, Karen, and Tom), is dealing with the departure of Aunt Nedra, who says the children are too hard to manage. The father takes his children to a factory, Facsimile Ltd., to select a new robotic grandmother. When she arrives, young Tom and Karen are quickly smitten by the magical "grandmother." But older daughter Anne will not accept her; "Grandma" reminds her too much of her own mother, who died and left her a bitter young girl. Anne tries to run away. She runs into the path of an oncoming van which she does not see. Grandma pushes Anne out of the way and is struck, saving the girl. Grandma is stunned, but the sturdily constructed robot soon gets up, and Anne grows to love her when she realizes that Grandma is indestructible and will not leave them like their own mother had. Mr. Rogers also realizes how empathetic Grandma can be when she correctly deduces that he lost his own mother at a young age and, like Anne, never forgave her.
As of this moment, the wonderful electric grandmother moved into the lives of children and father. She became integral and important. She became the essence. As of this moment, they would never see lightning, never hear poetry read, never listen to foreign tongues without thinking of her. Everything they would ever see, hear, taste, feel would remind them of her. She was all life, and all life was wondrous, quick, electrical – like Grandma.
The children grow up and are ready for college. However, it is time for Grandma to move on to another family as she is apparently not needed anymore. Grandma expresses her sadness about leaving, yet reassures the children that they brought her just as much joy as she brought them. She will return to the factory where she will either be sent to another family, or possibly have her mind stored where she and the other grandmothers like her can talk and share their experiences. After repeating this process many times, if she keeps being a good grandmother to other children, she ultimately will be rewarded with the gift of life and humanity. The children say their farewells, and Grandma leaves the house for good.
A fable? Most assuredly. But who's to say at some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love? Fable, sure, but who's to say?
In addition to opening and closing the show as usual, Rod Serling's narration occurs in the middle of the story, to describe how the children spent years happily with their Gynoid grandmother and eventually grow up. Other episodes to feature mid-show narration from Serling are all from the first half of season one: "Walking Distance", "Time Enough At Last" and "I Shot an Arrow into the Air".
This is one of the few episodes of the series where Rod Serling does not mention the name of the show in the closing narration.
In 1982, the hour-long NBC television movie The Electric Grandmother was also based on the short story. [4]
It was also adapted for radio in 2011 in The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas by Falcon Picture Group and starred Dee Wallace.
The Twilight Zone is an American media franchise based on the anthology television series created by Rod Serling in which characters find themselves dealing with often disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone". The episodes are in various genres, including fantasy, science fiction, absurdism, dystopian fiction, suspense, horror, supernatural drama, black comedy, and psychological thriller, frequently concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist, and usually with a moral. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans to common science fiction and fantasy tropes. The first series, shot entirely in black-and-white, ran on CBS for five seasons from 1959 to 1964.
Rodman Edward Serling was an American screenwriter and television producer best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his anthology television series The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen, and helped form television industry standards. He was known as the "angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues, including censorship, racism, and war.
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"Long Distance Call" is episode 58 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on March 31, 1961, on CBS. In the episode, a 5-year-old boy named Billy communicates with his dead grandmother using a toy telephone that she gave him on his birthday. It was one of the six episodes of the second season which was shot on videotape in a short-lived experiment aimed to cut costs.
"It's a Good Life" is the eighth episode of the third season of the American television series The Twilight Zone, and the 73rd overall. It was written by series creator/showrunner Rod Serling, based on the 1953 short story "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. The episode was directed by James Sheldon, and is considered by some, such as Time and TV Guide, to be one of the best episodes of the series. It originally aired on November 3, 1961. The episode was one of four from the original 1959 series which formed the basis of the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie.
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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a 1961 French short film, almost without dialogue. It was based on the 1890 American short story of the same name by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce. It was directed by Robert Enrico and produced by Marcel Ichac and Paul de Roubaix with music by Henri Lanoë. It won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards. The film was later screened on American television as episode 22 of the fifth season of The Twilight Zone on 28 February 1964.
The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series which aired from September 27, 1985, to April 15, 1989. It is the first of three revivals of Rod Serling's acclaimed 1959–64 television series, and like the original it featured a variety of speculative fiction, commonly containing characters from a seemingly normal world stumbling into paranormal circumstances. Unlike the original, however, most episodes contained multiple self-contained stories instead of just one. The voice-over narrations were still present, but were not a regular feature as they were in the original series; some episodes had only an opening narration, some had only a closing narration, and some had no narration at all. The multi-segment format liberated the series from the usual time constraints of episodic television, allowing stories ranging in length from 8-minutes to 40-minute mini-movies. The series ran for two seasons on CBS before producing a final season for syndication.
I Sing the Body Electric! is a 1969 collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. The book takes its name from an included short story of the same title, which in turn took the title from a poem by Walt Whitman published in his collection Leaves of Grass.
The Twilight Zone is an American fantasy science fiction horror anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from October 2, 1959, to June 19, 1964. Each episode presents a standalone story in which characters find themselves dealing with often disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone", often with a surprise ending and a moral. Although often considered predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show much closer to fantasy and horror. The phrase "twilight zone" has entered the vernacular, used to describe surreal experiences.
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The Electric Grandmother is a television movie that originally aired January 17, 1982, on NBC as a 60-minute Project Peacock special, based on the 1969 science fiction short story "I Sing the Body Electric" by Ray Bradbury. It stars Maureen Stapleton and Edward Herrmann and was directed by Noel Black. Bradbury's story was originally written as a teleplay in 1962 as "I Sing the Body Electric", an episode of The Twilight Zone. The film was distributed on VHS by Coronet Video.
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