Moving from the sublime To Serve Man to the rather silly The Fugitive, The Twilight Zone was certainly a varied and often unpredictable show.
Susan Gordon, daughter of giant monster movie director Bert I. Gordon, plays Jenny, whose best friend is kindly old man Ben (J. Pat O'Malley), who has the ability to transform into almost anything he wishes, from a space monster to a house-fly. When two strange men turn up at Jenny's home, enquiring about Ben, Jenny informs her elderly friend, who tells her that he is a fugitive from another world.
These days, if an old man befriended a little girl, he'd be put on a register, but this story hails from more innocent times. That said, the ending of this tale definitely doesn't sit right with me, regardless of the era in which it was made: the elderly man turns out to be a millennia-old alien king who, in reality, looks like a man in his twenties; he whisks Jenny away to his home planet and ultimately makes her his queen. Can anyone say 'grooming'?
Susan Gordon, daughter of giant monster movie director Bert I. Gordon, plays Jenny, whose best friend is kindly old man Ben (J. Pat O'Malley), who has the ability to transform into almost anything he wishes, from a space monster to a house-fly. When two strange men turn up at Jenny's home, enquiring about Ben, Jenny informs her elderly friend, who tells her that he is a fugitive from another world.
These days, if an old man befriended a little girl, he'd be put on a register, but this story hails from more innocent times. That said, the ending of this tale definitely doesn't sit right with me, regardless of the era in which it was made: the elderly man turns out to be a millennia-old alien king who, in reality, looks like a man in his twenties; he whisks Jenny away to his home planet and ultimately makes her his queen. Can anyone say 'grooming'?