Today in TV History: ‘The Twilight Zone’ Put a Freaked-Out William Shatner on an Airplane

Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone. 

IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: October 11, 1963

PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (season 5, episode 3). [Stream on Netflix.]

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The Twilight Zone is one of those shows whose stories and style have been copied and parodied and borrowed so many times over the years that it can be surprising to go back to the original episodes. I first saw the story in The Twilight Zone‘s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” parodied on The Simpsons in one of their “Treehouse of Horror” episodes. In that one, Bart Simpson spied a gremlin on the side of the school bus, though nobody believes his increasingly unhinged rantings about it. After that, I saw the Twilight Zone movie, in which John Lithgow plays an unhinged man on an airplane, who spots a gremlin on the wing and is driven mad by it. This, I assumed, was what The Simpsons had taken as inspiration. NOPE! Just a remake of the 1963 episode that told the same story … and told it with William Shatner.

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is a great Twilight Zone episode because it plays like an urban legend, a story passed on down from person to person. It’s elemental: are you just paranoid or are they really out to get you? And is that really some kind of mannimal out there on the wing? What The Twilight Zone then did was graft a classic urban legend onto modern technological/political concerns of the day. So many Twilight Zone episodes hinged on atomic-age and Cold War fears. And it’s probably worth noting as well that commercial jetliners were only about 15 years old when this episode was made. And people still need to pop two Xanax before they fly in 2016. Shatner’s character being a quivering mess of nerves on a plane isn’t exactly hard to swallow.

Yes, the monster looks like a straggler from a Furry convention, and yes Shatner’s legendary hammy acting style is on full display, but these affectations are part of why we love The Twilight Zone as an artifact of its era. This is classic spooky TV that has aged quite a bit since it first aired. And that’s perfectly fine.

[You can stream The Twilight Zone‘s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” on Netflix.]