Old Movie Perspective

I watched the first episode of The Twilight Zone tonight on a whim, and it was awesome, not because of production values or because the plot was unique, but because of the historical perspective.

The episode, called Where is Everybody, is set in 1959, it's black and white, and it's set in a town called Oakville, which was created on the courthouse square set which is the same one used in a lot of movies and tv shows, but most famously, Back to the Future and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Warning: spoilers ahead!

At one point, the main character, who finds himself in an abandoned town, wanders into a cafe and shouts out that he is a hungry man with 2 dollars and 85 cents in his pocket. His tone implied that was more than enough money to fill a man's belly.

I was curious about how much that is in 2017 money, so I found a site that makes that conversion. In 1959, $2.85 would buy you the same amount of stuff as $23.88 would today.  

In the end, it turns out that he's been hallucinating because he had been in a capsule with no companionship of any kind for a couple of weeks.  It was all an air force experiment set to determine if a man could be alone for long enough to fly to the moon and back.  When he starts screaming in his tin can, they call it and uniformed men haul him out on a stretcher.

As he leaves, he looks up at the moon and says, "Don't go away up there. Next time... next time it won't be a nightmare or a dream. Next time it'll be real. So don't go away... We'll be there in a little while."

Ten years after this show was broadcast, we made it to the moon.

In the end, Rod Sterling narrates the first of his iconic outros:

"Up there... up there is the vastness of space, in the void that is sky... up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting... waiting with the patience of eons... forever waiting... in the Twilight Zone."