How Tower of Terror Keeps Rod Serling's Legacy Alive, According to His New Biographer

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror opened on July 22nd, 1994, at the Walt Disney World Resort, and was later expanded to the Disneyland Resort (where it was replaced by Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!) and Disneyland Paris Resort. "People who have never seen the show, have never heard of the show, that is their first exposure to it," Alan Sepinwall said of the attraction at the ATX TV Fest panel to promote his upcoming book, Serling: Journey into the Twilight Zone, TV's First Visionary, due out October 13th. The largest section of the memoir focuses on Serling’s legacy, including interviews with the Imagineer who led the attraction's design team and the voice actor behind the in-ride Rod Serling impression, making it a fun read for fans of the attraction who found themselves venturing into The Twilight Zone after experiencing Disney’s original ride-through episode.

The panel opened with a screening of "Walking Distance," the fifth episode of the original series. Moderated by Daniel Fienberg, author and critic Alan Sepinwall explained why he chose to screen this particular episode, which follows a 36-year-old advertising executive who literally walks back into his idyllic small-town childhood. Serling grew up in Binghamton, New York, which inspired the town in the episode. His idyllic upbringing ended abruptly when Serling enlisted at 18, experienced what Sepinwall called "truly horrific" combat, and returned home to find his father had died while he was overseas.

"Almost everything he wrote was him trying to deal with the trauma he went through in the war, and lamenting the person he used to be," Sepinwall said. The episode's protagonist shares Serling's age, his hometown's character, his love of carousels, and even acquires a limp, just as Serling did. The father-son conversation at the heart of the episode, Sepinwall noted, is the conversation Serling never got to have.

The book project came about when an editor at Grand Central Publishing reached out with the premise that the time was right for a new Serling biography. The existing ones took a harsher, more tragic view of Serling than Sepinwall felt warranted. The opportunity gave him what he described as the only good excuse he has anymore to watch old television: it counts as work.

Over two years, he watched nearly everything Serling ever wrote across The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, his 1950s live television plays, and his film work. He supplemented that with Serling's voluminous personal papers, held at the University of Wisconsin and UCLA, along with a wide array of interviews, including Serling's daughters, younger cast members like Billy Mumy, and late Night Gallery director Jeannot Szwarc, who died three weeks after Sepinwall spoke with him.

The book's legacy chapter, he said, is by a comfortable margin its longest, populated by an unlikely roster of contributors: Guillermo del Toro, JJ Abrams, Vince Gilligan, David Chase, Ryan Johnson, Steven Spielberg, Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror, and Rob McElhenney of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, who cornered Sepinwall at a panel and insisted on being included.

One of the animating questions of the book, Sepinwall said, is correcting Serling's own pessimistic view of his legacy. Before his death in 1975 at age 50, Serling gave an interview declaring that no one would remember him or care about the show. He had already sold his half-ownership of The Twilight Zone back to CBS for roughly $400,000 (about $5 million in today's terms) because he couldn't imagine that a television series would still generate revenue decades later (CBS has since made tens of millions on the property, if not more). "Rod, you didn't get it," Sepinwall said. "Look at what you accomplished."

Serling: Journey into the Twilight Zone, TV's First Visionary is available for pre-order, with a release date of October 13th. Stay tuned for more coverage from ATX TV Festival.

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