Music in Science Fiction Television

Tuned to the Future

K.J. Donnelly, Philip Hayward, K.J. Donnelly, Philip Hayward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135124830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The music for science fiction television programs, like music for science fiction films, is often highly distinctive, introducing cutting-edge electronic music and soundscapes. There is a highly particular role for sound and music in science fiction, because it regularly has to expand the vistas and imagination of the shows and plays a crucial role in setting up the time and place. Notable for its adoption of electronic instruments and integration of music and effects, science fiction programs explore sonic capabilities offered through the evolution of sound technology and design, which has allowed for the precise control and creation of unique and otherworldly sounds.

This collection of essays analyzes the style and context of music and sound design in Science Fiction television. It provides a wide range of in-depth analyses of seminal live-action series such as Doctor Who, The Twilight Zone, and Lost, as well as animated series, such as The Jetsons. With thirteen essays from prominent contributors in the field of music and screen media, this anthology will appeal to students of Music and Media, as well as fans of science fiction television.

Chapter 1
Music in The Twilight Zone

James Wierzbicki

Introduction

The Twilight Zone is certainly not the only weekly series of “bizarre” dramas to have captivated American television viewers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But it is the only such series to have several of its screenplays resurrected for the sake of a feature-length film,¹ to have its name and formula applied twice to brand new television series,² to have virtually all of its original scripts re-enacted verbatim as radio plays,³ and to have its aesthetic essence concretized in an amusement park attraction.⁴ Why should The Twilight Zone (1959–64)—in contrast to such worthy competitors as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), Science Fiction Theater (1955–57), One Step Beyond (1959–61), Thriller (1960–62), and The Outer Limits (1963–65)—be so honored?

Quick answers might attribute The Twilight Zone’s enduring status as a pop culture icon to the sheer infectiousness of the four-note ostinato that dominates the show’s theme music, or to the audio-visual quirkiness of the show’s host. Both of these, however, would put the cart quite a bit before the horse. In fact, neither Marius Constant’s musical cue nor Rod Serling’s on-screen appearances figured into The Twilight Zone until the start of the second season; by that time the show was already a spectacular success, attracting 500 fan letters a week and soon to spawn such commercial by-products as a board game, an LP recording, and several books of short stories.⁵ To be sure, the theme music and Serling’s mannerisms are nowadays associated with all that comes to mind with a mere mention of The Twilight Zone. But they are symbolic of The Twilight Zone only because of their use in four of the show’s five seasons; they did not make the show what it was (and what it continues to be), and fortune could just as easily have smiled on some other tune or some other host. A more considered answer to the question, of course, would focus on The Twilight Zone’s writing.

Involved with broadcasting since 1949 but having virtually no experience before microphone or camera, Serling was loath to perform as off-screen narrator for The Twilight Zone’s debut season and, later, as its on-screen host.⁶ But there can be no doubt that Serling, from the moment of The Twilight Zone’s inception, thought of himself as the star of the show. Only thirty-two years old when he first approached network executives with the idea for an anthology series that he cryptically described as “science fiction, but not really science fiction,”⁷ Serling by this time was already one of television’s most lauded authors of screenplays.⁸ His impressive track record notwithstanding, Serling had to struggle to make his case, first with an extended script for what on The Twilight Zone eventually became the episode titled “The Time Element,” and then with the pilot for “Where Is Everybody?”. Eventually Serling signed with CBS, and one suspects that the network inked the deal not because of faith in the show’s idea but because Serling agreed to write, personally, most of the show’s scripts.

As much as, doubtless, he would have liked to, Serling on his own could not produce all of the inaugural season’s screenplays. But of the first season’s thirty-six half-hour episodes, no less than twenty-eight were penned by Serling himself; Serling wrote the screenplays for twenty of the second season’s twenty-nine episodes, and twenty-one of the third season’s thirty-seven episodes. For the other episodes Serling relied on various freelance contributors, but the majority of the “outside” scripts came from just a handful of science-fiction and fantasy authors who were loosely banded together as the Southern California Group of Writers (SCGW). Approached as the network deal for The Twilight Zone was still taking shape, most of them were at first skeptical of Serling’s project, bothered both by what some of them took to be an encroachment on their specialized turf by the award-winning Serling and by fears that the proposed television series would have too low a budget to amount to anything worthwhile. Just as he had with the network, Serling used his own writing to sway his eventual colleagues. At an initial meeting he presented nine of his own scripts and asked if any of the SCGW members might be interested in producing material along the same lines; the gambit was enough to win commitments from Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, and even—for a single episode aired during The Twilight Zone’s third season—the group’s unofficial mentor Ray Bradbury.⁹

The writers who joined with Serling were impressed not just by the high quality of his writing in general and by his treatment of dialogue in particular but also—and significantly—by the format that seemed to govern all of the sample scripts that Serling had offered them. The simple yet brilliant format was at least attempted in almost all of The Twilight Zone’s half-hour episodes.¹⁰ But to the chagrin of Serling and his producers, CBS decided to expand The Twilight Zone in its fourth season to hour-long episodes. The original half-hour format was restored for The Twilight Zone’s fifth and final season, and certainly it was realized to perfection in all those episodes that connoisseurs today rank as Twilight Zone “classics.” This format had nothing at all to do with an episode’s subject matter or setting or overall mood. Rather, it had to do with structure and pacing and dynamics. And in its best exemplars, the format had very much to do with the deployment of music.

Format

It was Serling who invented the format that, even when filled with widely varied content, gave The Twilight Zone its singular identity. But it was producer Buck Houghton who turned Serling’s screenplays, and those of others, into actual television programs. A former script editor for CBS’s Schlitz Playhouse of Stars (1951–59) and then a producer for such character-based television series as Man with a Camera, China Smith, Meet McGraw, and Wire Service, Houghton worked closely with Serling for The Twilight’s Zone’s first three seasons. As Don Presnell and Marty McGee note, Houghton was “responsible for taking the words in a script and translating them into fantastic images on film. His approval was needed on almost every decision, including casting, scoring, editing, and the purchase of outside scripts.”¹¹ Although photography during The Twilight Zone’s formative seasons was mostly under the direction of George T. Clemens, Houghton—according to director Douglas Heyes— figured importantly in the post-production process and “was a major factor in the look of the show.”¹² And certainly Houghton was a major factor in the show’s all-important format.

In a memoir, Houghton recalled that

The Twilight Zone was shaped by Rod Serling. In his first few scripts his instincts led him to a pattern that he and I agreed upon as the bottom-line basis for buying stories for adaptation and for his own originals. That pattern became the rigid standard by which I did my judgmental work on story submittals.¹³

Houghton spelled out the guidelines of this pattern, or format, or literary scheme:

Find an interesting character, or group, at a moment in crisis in life, and get there quickly; then lay on some magic. That magic must be devilishly appropriate and capable of providing a whiplash kickback at the tag. The character(s) must be ordinary and average and modern, and the problem facing him (her, them) must be commonplace. The Twilight Zone always struck people as identifiable as to whom it was about, and the story hang-ups as resonant of their own fears, dreams, wishes. Allow only one miracle or special talent or imaginative circumstance per episode. More than one and the audience grows impatient with your calls on their credibility. The story must be impossible in the real world. A request at some point to suspend disbelief is a trademark of the series. Mere scare tactics will not fill the bill. A clever bit of advanced scientific hardware is not enough to support a story. The Twilight Zone was not a SF show.¹⁴

Houghton’s last comment warrants discussion, especially in an essay that is part of a collection devoted to music in—specifically—science-fiction television series.

As noted above, when he first pitched his proposed series to network executives, Serling described the project as “science fiction, but not really science fiction.” Jon Kraszewski suggests that this vague description—which befuddled its first hearers—had something to do with Serling’s frustration that a few of his more recent teleplays had certain of their details altered by network executives, or by sponsors, because as originally written they rubbed too much on societal sore spots. Setting his new screenplays in obviously “unreal” locales and time periods, Kraszewski suggests, was a means by which Serling relieved himself of at least a few irritants.¹⁵ From the start a writer with a strong conscience, Serling was determined that with his proposed series he would at last be able to make his often profoundly philosophical and/or moralistic points—about “skepticism in its various forms, the ethics of war and peace, the nature and value of privacy and personal dignity, the nature and value of knowledge (and of ignorance), the nature of love, the objectivity of judgments of value, the nature of happiness, of freedom, and of justice”¹⁶— without interference. By 1959 Serling was a savvy player in network politics; he knew that the palliative for network anxiety involved little more than shifting his stories from the mundane world into “another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind, … a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination,” “a dimension as vast as space and limitless as infinity, … the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, … between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”¹⁷

Some Twilight Zone episodes indeed fall into the category of science fiction, i.e., they are fictions in which arguably “scientific” objects or concepts figure not as mere decorations but as elements more or less crucial to the plot. For example, the very first episode (“Where Is Everybody?”) hinges on the fact— revealed only at the end—that the protagonist’s perceived “empty world” is the result of hallucinations brought on by prolonged confinement in an isolation capsule designed for the training of astronauts. Other first-season episodes that clearly qualify as science fiction are “The Lonely” (about an asteroid-imprisoned criminal who forms an emotional bond with a female-like robot companion); “Time Enough at Last” (about a bookworm who finds the time to read only in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust); “And When the Sky Was Opened” (about a crew of test pilots who, after crashing, discover that one of their mates is inexplicably missing); “Third from the Sun” (about an attempt by scientists to escape an impending nuclear war by fleeing in a spaceship); “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” (about astronauts who crash to Earth yet believe that they have landed on a barren asteroid); “Elegy” (about a trio of astronauts who land their ship on an asteroid that turns out to be “the after life”); “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (about a neighborhood’s alien-instigated panic over what the residents eventually conclude was only a false alarm); “People Are Alike All Over” (about a space traveler who discovers that his apparently hospitable Martian hosts have put him in a zoo); and “Execution” (about an 1880s criminal who is saved from being hanged only by the chance operation of a futuristic time machine).

When producer Buck Houghton insisted that “The Twilight Zone was not a SF show” he was not referring to the obvious fact that only ten of the inaugural season’s thirty-six episodes featured SF plots.¹⁸ Rather, he was pointing to the perhaps less obvious fact that Serling’s project was never a series based, even in part, on SF subject matter. What the series was based on is a narrative formula in which an arguably weird yet logical enough situation is solidly established and then, just before the story’s end, somehow ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Music in The Twilight Zone
• 2 Time Warp: Sonic Retro-Futurism in The Jetsons
• 3 John Williams’s Music to Lost in Space: The Monumental, the Profound, and the Hyperbolic
• 4 Hearing the Boldly Goings: Tracking the Title Themes of the Star Trek Television Franchise, 1966–2005
• 5 Whimsical Complexity: Music and Sound Design in The Clangers
• 6 Schizophrenic Chords and Warm Shivers in the Stomach: The “New Astronautic Sound” of Raumpatrouille
• 7 Television’s Musical Imagination: Space: 1999
• 8 The Sound of Civilization: Music in Terry Nation’s Survivors
• 9 Rematerialization: Musical Engagements with the British TV Series Doctor Who
• 10 Babylon 5: Science Fiction, Melodrama, and Musical Style
• 11 The Work of Music in the Age of Steel: Themes, Leitmotifs and Stock Music in the New Doctor Who
• 12 Lost in Music: Heidegger, the Glissando and Otherness
• 13 Visual Effects in Sanctuary: The Reparative Function of Sound in Low Budget Science Fiction Series
• List of Contributors
• Index