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The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits , and TV Political Fantasy 1959-1965
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11060739 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rick Worland (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | Part 1 |
| Pages | 103-122 |
| Publication date | 1996-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Fiction Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-7729 • E-ISSN: 2327-6207 |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1525/sfs.23.1.0103 |
| OpenAlex | W4408953498 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
The historical and political implications of the science-fiction/fantasy anthology television series The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and The Outer Limits (1963-65) in the Kennedy era are considered. Science fiction is usually a politically reverberant genre, frequently given to social allegory. These two fondly remembered programs often presented speculative and unsettling political visions of American society. The article considers the issues, events, and ideology represented in these programs in the early 1960s as the nation gradually slid from global Cold War into a hot war in Vietnam. A marked transition in the portrayal of Cold War themes in popular culture from the 1950s to the 1960s is illustrated by segments of each show that explicitly take contemporary issues as their subjects. The episodes surveyed both build on themes from cinematic science fiction of the 1950s and depart from them in important ways. The programs’ treatment of such themes, for example, the portrayal of the nuclear war threat before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, yields historically intriguing equivocations and textual contradictions in sharp contrast to the categorical anti-communism of such McCarthy era programs as I Led Three Lives (1953-56). (RW)
Art · Astronomy · Fantasy · Literature · Physics · Political science · Politics · Sign (mathematics) · Twilight · Cinema and Media Studies · German History and Society · Law · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Mathematics
| Citations per year | 0.1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2016 - 2016 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |