[ad_1]
“Eye of the Beholder” is one of the most iconic episodes of The Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY) and it features one of the show’s best twist endings. Perhaps it’s fitting then, that even the name of the episode has a twist, because there are actually two different official titles for the Season 2 episode, which was rebroadcast under the name “The Private World of Darkness.” The reason? The twisty-turny American legal system.
“Eye of the Beholder” — which was originally broadcast with that title on November 11, 1960 — tells the story of a woman whose face is totally covered by bandages, the result of an eleventh and final attempt to fix what we’re led to believe is a grotesque facial disfigurement. We’re with the woman, Janet (Maxine Stuart), for the entire episode as she anxiously wonders whether this treatment will finally work. Conspicuously, although lots of doctors are attending to her as she recovers, we never see their faces until the very end, when Janet’s bandages come off. She’s conventionally beautiful, and the twist is that all the doctors — and everybody else on whatever world this is — has a gross, misshapen face. Here, it’s Janet (who is played by a different actress, Donna Douglas, without the bandages) who is the ugly one. Beauty, as the title goes, is in the eye of the beholder.
Why The Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder” is also called “The Private World of Darkness”
Except “Eye of the Beholder” wasn’t always the episode’s title when it was rebroadcast. As the book The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic details, The Twilight Zone creator, Rod Serling, faced a legal threat because of the title. Television producer Stuart Reynolds had created an educational film of the same name in 1958 that he sold to public schools. His Eye of the Beholder had no Twilight Zone-esque twists; it followed an artist who appeared to be involved in a murder, and the film shows how five different characters (his mother, a waiter, a cab driver, his landlord, and a cleaning lady) perceive him, and how their view of him is different from what actually happened. The moral of Reynold’s educational film? Don’t rush to judge people, because people see things in different ways.
As a result of the legal threat, when CBS rebroadcast the episode, it had a different title: “The Private World of Darkness.” Over the next several decades, both titles would appear in recirculation because CBS turned to different prints for various syndication packages on different TV stations. Amusingly, an original DVD release of The Twilight Zone featured “The Private World of Darkness” as an “alternate version.” This has to be one of the more underwhelming DVD extras of all time; aside from the title in the closing credits, the two episodes are exactly the same.
For what it’s worth, when “Eye of the Beholder” appears on SYFY, it bears its original title rather than “The Private World of Darkness.”
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
[ad_2]
Source link
