Watching old episodes of "One Step Beyond" takes me back
to childhood, Saturday afternoons and the spooky unknown. This
was dead-pan serious television for us kids in the 60's and early 70's and we found every episode not only thought-provoking, but literally hair-raising... Ah, the innocence of youth.......
ANYWAY.....I digress.....
Delta Entertainment does a good job with the packaging and formatting of their 12 DVD set as well as the best possible transferring of available 16mm prints.
My only issue ? Delta uses old syndication prints that were cut, spliced, recut and respliced as commercials were inserted and removed over and over. As anyone who ever worked in a television station editing film knows, frames are lost with every commercial insertion and removal, eventually consuming not only the short fade-outs but dialog as well. It is particularly noticeable in these prints at the splice connecting John Newland's final comments with the ending credit sequence. In several episodes, this results in the viewer missing that last little "sting".
But it's of minor consequence. "One Step Beyond" is truly
a nostalgic "step back" in time, and anyone old enough to remember watching it all those years ago will certainly enjoy the memories invoked by watching it again.....
(and I, too, hope Delta releases the rest of the series soon!)
OSB
This collection is outstanding considering the difficulties in the acquisition and reproduction of all the episodes involved. These are not only Classics, they are SciFi History. Remember,before X-Files and Quantum Leap,there was One Step Beyond.
One Of The Scariest Shows On Television
...was One Step Beyond, hands down. I first saw this show as a kid and it scared the bejesus out of me. It must be a psychological thing but old black-and-white films have an eerieness that is lost on color film, and to turn up the chill factor even more was that spooky Harry Lubin score that usually played in the background just at the climax of a scary scene.
This show didn't have to rely on a lot of special effects to scare a person witless since most of the terror came from the fact that all of the episodes were based on true stories. Also, John Newland did a splendid job setting up the show and lended, as others here have noted, a sense of creepiness to the proceedings.
BTW, you'll recognize many an actor and actress in these shows, many before they became famous. So sit back, prop your feet up, and break out the popcorn. Just don't turn off the lights!
Okay, so some of the prints aren't the best in world, but so what? It's "One Step Beyond" and we are finally getting to see more than a scattered episode here and there on DVD. VCI Entertainment did an excellent job of putting this DVD package together and I love the spooky DVD "landscape" created by VCI between the episodes. It's not just your average cheapie compliation of "here's the episodes with no money spent to set the mood." "Ordeal on Locust Street" is worth the price of admission alone, and John Newlands deadpan intos and outros run a close second to Rod Serling's. Sure, "One Step Beyond" has always been considered to be the poor man's "Twilight Zone," but that's part of it's charm. It's like a night of cheap thrills at a 1950's drive-in. I just hope VCI... More Info about this DVD Director(s): John Newland DVD Release Date: Released the 29 July 2003 Usually ships within 7 to 13 days
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Not long ago, I had only heard about the television show Tales of Tomorrow just twice: once as a passing reference as an inspiration of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone in his PBS documentary, and once more when I saw the episode "All the Time in the World" at the Museum of TV and Radio in NYC when I visited there last August. I had always liked TZ and I was happy to see one of it's predecessors which had left the air before my parents were even born. I was not disappointed as the episode was another example of intelligently wielded suspense and science fiction, the kind of show that they just don't make any more (well UPN tried, but let's not talk about that right now). There were other available episodes, but my family and I had to leave the museum, but imagine my happiness when I heard... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Don Medford - Franklin J. Schaffner - Charles S. Dubin - Leonard Valenta DVD Release Date: Released the 07 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Despite forced changes in executive and creative personnel, plummeting ratings and the constant threat of cancellation, the truncated second season of The Outer Limits (1964-65) yielded some of the series' finest episodes. While The Twilight Zone was fading fast on CBS, the bean-counters at ABC used focus groups and ratings statistics to enforce their previous mandate for a "monster of the week" format for their flagging science-fiction series, and after a few promising episodes early in the season, Outer Limits settled into a regrettable routine of reduced budgets and rubber-suit creatures that wouldn't pass inspection at a drunken Halloween party. A former network executive with minimal creative input, Perry Mason producer Ben Brady struggled to keep the... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 02 September 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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From the moment Vic Perrin's omniscient "Control Voice" first proclaimed, "There is nothing wrong with your television set," on September 16, 1963, The Outer Limits was destined for greatness. The dazzling, long-beloved series was a daring experiment in "omnibus" TV, trading the speculative fantasies of The Twilight Zone for farther-out sci-fi concepts. Producers Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano had risen as gifted writers from (respectively) Broadway and Hollywood; Stevens rebounded from his previous canceled series, while Stefano had scripted Hitchcock's Psycho and was eager to expand his creative horizons. With an executive order for scary monsters and cold war thrills, their fruitful symbiosis was preceded by the superb Stevens-directed pilot "Please Stand By,"... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 03 September 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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I had never heard of this program before I found the DVD an Amazon, and decided to order it. When I finally viewed the programs, I was quite surprised at a number of things.
1. The prints are very high quality, especially considering that this was a 1950's made for TV series.
2. The series was never broadcast. This is amazing considering that the episodes could have easily been in One Step Beyond or Twilight Zone if you blinked and missed the opening credits. More to the point, The Veil predates both of its more well remembered cousins.
3. They made 10 episodes as opposed to a pilot and one or two other shoots. As such, there is enough material here to really give the viewer a feel for what this series would have been had it been picked up by one of the networks at the time.
