THE 61st ANNIVERSARY OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE with Arlen Schumer

The place is here…the time is now…and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey.” Those are the first words spoken by Rod Serling, the creator, narrator, and head writer of the television series The Twilight Zone at the very beginning of its first episode, “Where is Everybody?” that aired at 10 pm on Friday night, October 2, 1959, which not only introduced the Twilight Zone concept to an unsuspecting American TV audience, but ushered them into what would become “The Sixties,” a question of identity for America itself. Over the course of the next five years and five TV seasons, Serling and Company’s twenty-three minute meditations on a wide spectrum of philosophic concerns, from the political to the metaphysical, core concepts and pop philosophies that are the zeitgeist of The Twilight Zone, have so penetrated the mass culture that now, over 60 years since its debut, “the twilight zone,” the concept, has become a psychological buzzword, unearthing automatic associations of the existential and the surreal in the commonplace. And so many of its greatest episodes have been proven eerily prescient, “predicting” the crises we’re facing now in the 21st Century. In this daringly different multimedia webinar, Twilight Zone scholar Arlen Schumer (author/designer of the only coffee table art book about the series, Visions From The Twilight Zone), traces the show’s roots in early 20th Century surrealist art and ideas, and in turn its influence on psychedelia, movies, television, modern art and popular culture.

www.Arlenschumer.com