Ever since I watched “The Twilight Zone” as a youngster living in the projects, I have always admired Rod Serling and his sense of humanity. Along with Walt Disney and Ray Bradbury, Serling as a writer had an often quietly desperate longing to go home again. They wanted to go back to their idyllic childhood set in a small town in upstate New York, or Marceline, MO, or a small town in Illinois. They had a nostalgia for a place where they were allowed to flourish and going back to a simpler time would have been for them a boon.
Clearly, these small towns and idyllic remembrances of childhood were not the only things to define these men of imagination and creativity. These settings and the experiences they had there, however, play a large enough part to infuse and inform their creations. In the case of Disney, it can be seen in the idea for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and on Main Street, U.S.A. For Bradbury, it’s in his stories like “Dandelion Wine,” “Farewell Summer” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” For Serling, it can be seen throughout his series “The Twilight Zone,” including the episodes “Walking Distance,” “Where Is Everybody” and “the Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
I never had that childhood. I grew up in the projects where food was scarce and play was on the concrete and certain amount of fear tinged every interaction. That fear may have been of the stranger or of the question about the next meal or about when the bully of the neighborhood was going to assert his dominance. The point isn’t that there weren’t wonderful times, but those wonderful times weren’t connected to my childhood home for the most part, and nostalgia or drive to go back there doesn’t exist.
Yet, I feel a connection to these three creators and the stories they created. It is the feelings that they stir within the human soul and their belief that mankind could be kinder if people were only given the right tools, if they had places to go, be safe and experience with each other, if people had the opportunity to make a connection with something larger than themselves and with themselves on a personal level. Disney may be the most optimistic of the three, which served him well as a manager. Serling and Bradbury are more realistic realizing that not everyone is redeemable. However, as long as one person is, humanity will not be lost.