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You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound and mind but of tropes. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Up ahead is a signpost that will lead you into your next destination — your next stop, TV Tropes' official entry on "The Twilight Zone!"

When Rod Serling came up with The Twilight Zone (1959), he couldn't have known that he was creating a multimedia franchise that would endure for decades after his untimely death.

The Twilight Zone maintains a prominent place in pop culture. The original series is the Trope Codifier for the Genre Anthology. Its title and theme music underwent Memetic Mutation long before the term existed. Rod Serling's distinctive delivery as The Narrator, and his on-screen hosting, have been spoofed and homaged countless times. The better-known Twist Endings ("Time Enough at Last", "The Eye of the Beholder", "To Serve Man") have reached It Was His Sled status. The stories and themes presented by Serling and his fellow creators have proven strong enough to support three revivals of the TV series, a movie, a radio adaptation, a pinball game, merchandise such as action figures and prop reproductions, even a Disney theme park ride. It's been a huge influence on pretty much every anthology series that followed it, including its Spiritual Successor Night Gallery, which was also hosted and largely written (but not creatively controlled) by Serling, though that series focused primarily on supernatural and horror tales, rather than the fantasy and science fiction featured in Twilight Zone.

Here's a list of The Twilight Zone's various iterations, including the versions that have pages on This Very Wiki.


    open/close all folders 

Works and creators associated with The Twilight Zone franchise (with TV Tropes articles):

    Television series 

    Feature films 

    Pinball 

    Rides 

    Video Games 
  • The Twilight Zone VR (2022): A Playstation 4 and Oculus Quest three-episodes-long, Virtual Reality adventure game developed by Pocket Money Games Ltd.

    Short stories adapted into The Twilight Zone episodes 

    Creators involved with The Twilight Zone 

    Tropes named after The Twilight Zone episodes 


Works in The Twilight Zone franchise (without their own pages):

    Feature films 
  • Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics: A 1994 film co-produced by Rod Serling's widow Carol Serling, who found some old stories written by Rod in a trunk in the family's garage. James Earl Jones was the host and narrator. The film had two segments:
    • The Theatre: A woman goes to the theater, but the screen shows events from her own life.
    • Where the Dead Are: Set a few years after The American Civil War, a doctor discovers his colleague has found a way to bring the dead back to life.

    Comic books 

    Literature 
The Twilight Zone has been the subject of many books. Some of the episodes have been adapted as short stories and novels by various authors (including Rod Serling himself). Anthologies of short stories adapted for the series have been published. The Twilight Zone Companion, Marc Scott Zicree's 1982 history of the series, became a best seller and has been updated twice. A second history, Martin Grams, Jr.'s The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic, appeared in 2008.

    Magazines 
Between 1981 and 1989, The Twilight Zone Magazine published new short fiction in the same Science Fiction, Horror and Urban Fantasy genres as the show, including stories by prominent writers like Stephen King and Harlan Ellison. It also covered contemporary Speculative Fiction series and movies.

    Radio 
From 2002 to 2012, The Twilight Zone was a Radio Drama series. It adapted all of the original episodes, as well as unfilmed premises for the original series. It even created several original stories.

    Tabletop games 
The original series had a board game.

    Theater 
Anne Washburn's The Twilight Zone is a stage play that weaves adaptations of eight TOS episodes into a unified storyline.

    Toys 
Two toy companies, Sideshow and Bif Bang Pow!, have made action figures (and in Bif Bang Pow!'s case, other merchandise) based on the show.

    Video Games 
  • The Twilight Zone, an Anima/DOS graphic text adventure developed by Gigabit Systems, Inc., and released in 1988.

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