Opening sequence from the original broadcast of The Outer Limits, 1961. This is being uploaded for an academic presentation I am giving on November 21, 2008, and will remain up on RU-vid as long as there are no copyright issues.
It was a Thursday night, Dad was out playing squash, and us kids were allowed to be scared out of our lives watching this awesome show with Mum....loved it...
This was the best intro. The simplicity was so powerful and the voice-over was compelling. Surely the phrase "from the inner mind to the outer limits" was a high point in TV writing.
If you're old enough to remember having to adjust the "horizontal and the vertical" and rabbit ears, you were probably watching this program on a black and white TV, with 3 or 4 channels at the most, the audio was most likely in mono, not stereo. No such thing as large screens back then, you usually had to fight with your siblings to grab the spot right in front of the TV, then of course you were the one, elected, to reach up and turn the knob that changed the channel.
Actually our parents had a very large black and white console across the room I believe it was about a 25 inch diagonal, but I still couldn't see it at age nine, until shortly after in the fourth grade they finally got me glasses. Then I could see the stars in the sky overhead at night, but this picture of the moon in the intro really sticks in my mind, as it shows the Terminator Line revealing the Sinus Iridum or the Bay of Rainbows feature on the edge, that little hook of light, as a mountain range, that Stanley Kubrick uses the same image in 2001, as they were approaching the moon to land on it. Still today as an astronomy educator and teacher, that's my favorite night of the month when that edge of light at Sinus Iridum appears on the Jura Mountain Range edge, just one night of the month.
If one of your siblings hadn't broken one of the knobs. I was so lucky, being in the middle of bupkis, of standing there forever, moving the antenna around while trying to reach down to stop the roll. Torture.
I grew up in the 1960s.As I look back on it now it occurs to me that watching the opening sequence of these classic shows was a big part of it.I loved the whole spiel at the beginning of The Invaders:"The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found...."Love it.
I saw one outer limits as a kid in the 60's and it so freaked me out that my dad wouldnt let me watch it for a while till i came to grips with the stuff they were shooting at you. Actually that show was extremely deep.
aww yes,the sounds of when I was A kid and after the Outer limits show the TV stations go off for the day and the Indian cross hairs ends the simulcast for the day !!! I'm glad I am from that timeless era I will never forget when times we're simple as back then!!!
One and a half. ABC moved it opposite JACKIE GLEASON and KILLED it. I'm convinced some unproduced scripts for season 2 made their way into "VOYAGE" and "STAR TREK".
I love this show I use to watch it every Saturday morning for about 2 years up until a couple months ago.i don't care if people call me weired for watching it..
You, sir are not weird. I love watching this show, it kind of remind me or the twilight zone the old one, not the new version with Forest Whitaker as host. I love old fashion science fiction films and TV shows like the outer limits and lost in space, which I'm sure you heard of the movie version and saw it, but it was a series in the 1960's. I love watching old movies, which they try to remake over like War of the worlds starting Tom Cruise in 2005.
Glad to know that I'm not the only one enjoying the luxury of old Classic Sifi shows and yes I have watched lost in space,but I still think the outer limits was better just because if the themes and topics that it covered
Agree. But if you watch a few of the outer limits shows you would notice a few well know actors had starred in a few episodes like William Shatner from Star trek and Carol O'Conner from in the heat of the night and all in the family. I loved the episode future solider. The guy from the near future had traveled in the present. He was born in a lab and was Programmed to kill. He had finally opened up and made friends with a man who'd who was a psychologist. The man had brought him to keep him safe from the government. There was also a family cat. He told the man the cats where was from was a great communication to warn him about his enemy. So strange isn't it. The other future solider had came to in the same time zone warp he had traveled to seek him out. In the end he rescued the family from his nemesis.
Horizontal and Vertical hold ,are extinct terms for today's TVs. When the vertical hold went out of whack,it was like watching TV in an elevator with a glass door.
i love the original outer limits intro,it's a classic and one of my favorites.this show had some great stories and some great guest stars like william shatner and robert duvall to name a few.they always had weird and creepy monsters and aliens.
I'm 52 in this year 2009, and that still stands as the best TV program ever. When I was a kid, that show was more terrifying than any movie made since. When I saw that sine wave, and heard that orchestra crash, I knew... (still speechless to this day)
I was 10 when it premiered with The Galaxy Being. As kid in 1963 it gave me nightmares but I couldn't wait for the next episode so I could mess up my mind again. The closer to a mental breakdown it got me the more I wanted it. The special effects look quaint today but to a kid in that era they really hit home. I had a good sense of the difference between TV and reality for a ten year old or they'd have had to commit me to the funny farm.
@@sillygoose635 The qualifier: "most of" may be true. I agree with it. Most shows cannot hold any sway with the amazing writing and productions of "The Outer Limits" - "The Twilight Zone" and others from the early era that was Television Broadcasting. Today it is short attention span, post production and during filming special effects, violence and very little thought asked from the audience from "most of" today's offerings.
This show scared the crap out of me. "Galaxy Being" was the first episode I saw when I was all of 3 years old. I remember ads during station breaks that would show a scene from the coming week's episode. One of them, showing a living room much like the room I was sitting in, being trashed by lightning bolts and gale force winds. I thought something would crawl out of our vacuum cleaner, grow larger and larger and attack me. I thought that our carpet would suck me down under the floor and I wouldn't get out, so I kept my feet off the floor, tucked under me in my chair. This was quality television in the early 1960's! I'm very lucky and happy and thankful that I got to watch all of it.
The one with Donald Pleasance as the mild-mannered husband who harbored ill will against his wife, but couldn't control his inner impulses and knocked her off a ladder! Scary stuff for the early 1960's.
The Outer Limits was ABC's (very worthy) answer to The Twilight Zone on CBS. It was a damn good hour of television. I can remember certain episodes, like the one that featured "The Spaceship to Mars" ride, tucked in a dim, distant, obscure corner at the County Fair. A "monster" sold tickets at the booth outside, and the patrons were excited to see what was to come. Ironically, it really WAS a monster, and it WAS a Spaceship to Mars -- great late-nite STUFF !
WOW!!!! I took a chance on finding THE OUTER LIMITS...and it's here! Thank you, chicagosundials for sharing this with us!! I can look forward to revisiting this unique and great series. Greetings from California! I'm happy...Bonnie
This is the opening title from the first season (1963-'64). Originally, in the first few episodes, it was a bit longer in the middle, with some additional lines from the "Control Voice" [Vic Perrin]- including, "We repeat- there is nothing wrong with your television set".
THAT MUSIC,THE BEAUTIFUL HORROR OF IT ALL.i cannot prove this,but later in life,psychedelic world,those writers were right out there,i know!"it takes one to know one",episodes like the one with shirley knight/martin landau-the "man from the future",pure occult vision.the episode of the people who had a "plague",who bonded,and the earth they lived on disappeared,mindblowing.truly masterpiece stuff
In the late 70's worked at a planetarium located on the campus of Santa Ana College in OC CA. Used this intro as the start of a planetarium presentation I developed and presented. Had a slide with the OUTER LIMITS on it.
Imagine what we thought of this in 1963 when it debuted on national TV one night weekly during later prime time hours. We thought it as a warning of harmless science fiction. The opening although appearing as harmless, is actually a joking yet truthful hint that the authority is in control of what we watch on TV. Or as Jerry Mander later said in his Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television book: "The viewer becomes what they watch."
@@AlexDraco Yes, also see a later excerpt of the famous Canadian media specialist Marshall McLuhan being interviewed by Tom Snyder on his Tomorrow Show. It's only a 9-minute excerpt but it's fascinating what McLuhan points out, about the dangers of watching television. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's an actual scientific and medical fact of what happens to TV viewers and especially those that are saturated with too much television viewing. It's actually been shown to shapeshift people's brains, and brainwashes them in a way. Simply watching the television screen is known to cause severe male aggression. It influences the viewers in the worst ways. As McLuhan points out in his interview with Tom Snyder, that television and especially commercialized broadcasting, forces people into a corporate think group. Also see many of McLuhan's other lectures. He speaks of how intelligent people listen to the radio - they don't watch television. I found this fascinating because I was building Crystal radios by age 10 when neighbors gave me an antique Zenith Transoceanic shortwave radio. I began to tune in distant World radio stations and finally when I found something in English that I could understand. It was some British accente gentleman talking about what had gone wrong with America and their hippie generation. I was fascinated as I thought that these people know more about us than we do. I later realized I was listening to the BBC. Then reading more recently about Marshall McLuhan, I understood that he was interviewed by the BBC in the early 1960s, and I believe I heard him, but was probably too young at the time to understand what he was discussing about media. He may have been discussing his The Medium is the Message book. Or the Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media. But listening to the shortwave radio and the BBC was probably responsible for taking me away from television to some degree until by the age of 13, I bought my first astronomy telescope with my own earned berry picking money, during summer vacation starting at age 11. By 1967 I had purchased the telescope and lost all interest of ever watching television again. Who would have known that I would have gone on to work as a background extra actor in movie sets for nearly 20 years now, but I still do not watch TV. I'm out at night on the large public streets and city parks with large telescopes set up to allow the public to observe through these instruments. I also worked in computer technology for nearly 35 years and information and data storage technology. By age 50 I was forced into early semi retirement and was accepted to teach astronomy at a local University, yet having no college degree.
That one is one of the more frightening ones! Bruce Dern was in that one, and one of my favorite actor-athletes. *The Zanti Misfits* was the title of this episode and it rests so vividly in my mind to this day! Oooh; really scary, kids! So good.
Watched this, Twilight Zone, and Night Gallery in the sixties and seventies on a tiny (my monitor is bigger!) black-and-white CRT set with VHF and UHF knobs. I never even saw a remote until 1982.
This show freaked me out as a kid, especially the one with David McCallum (as a guy that progressed a thousand years into the future and his head became extremely large).
Yes, one of the best episodes. I was about 9 then, this one knocked my socks off then. I lived in the L.A. area at the time, and in the mid 60's that was not bad. Of course I liked McCallum in 'The man from uncle' series also.
When I was a kid in the 2000s there was this channel that would show old tv shows and movies. This used to come on every night and it would scare me so bad.
My Father used to play squash on a Thur night, and Mum would let us watch the ''Outer Limits"".at 10 pm..it scared the crap out of us,,but we wouldn't miss an episode for quids.....
@Swiffers : ) It's funny, I was a child who clearly remembers life during the Gemini program and the moon was not quite in our grasp. For me, what the Outer Limits Open represented were the wonderful, mysterious and possibly dangerous possibilities of the Day After Tomorrow. I guess that's what I meant. (Stephen King once said that childhood was a constant barrage of new wonder after new wonder, or somethng like that! : ) )
First time I've seen this since I was 15, in '84. They used to show the re-runs on Saturday's (early eves) on Spokane, Wash. KREM 2 tv station, which I saw in Alberta, Can. Nothing "computer" slick about it. Just pure, 60's creepiness.
Joe Stephano was a genious. He scared the beejeesus out of me when I was a kid. Horrid nightmares of monstrous ants, creepy crawling crab-like things, lungfish things that would come out of the lake to eat me, monsters in boxes (recall Bette Davis), rocks that were alive. Need I go on?
Yes I noticed a few people here have mentioned what you just did 5 years ago. most other commenters are just talking about how much they liked watching the show or something others similar to this. I be willing to bet that not too many people here watched Marshall Mcluhan being interviewed by Tom Snyder on his famous Tomorrow show in 1976. Search it and just listen to a famous 9 minutes excerpt as McLuhan discusses what happens to the television viewer.
"There is nothing wrong with your Nintendo Switch console... Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. We will control the horizontal; We will control the vertical. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the duration of your gameplay session, sit quietly and we will control all that you see in here. You are about to participate in a great adventure, you are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits!" I'd love for Ian McKellan to narrate that.
Junkers 1337 Can you describe the episode? Maybe we could identify it for you, and you could see it again as many of these are now available in RU-vid.
@luckybob55 That was always the challenge, as a child. You couldn't go to bed without making sure, and yet you dreaded looking, because there was always that slim chance you might FIND something.
@gabbydeb yes a fantastic begining maybe the tv equivalent of orson wells 1930s war of the worlds broadcast that had hysterical people heading for the hills as they thought an alien invasion was imminent. i wasnt allowed to watch this and was sent to bed just before it started. i remember hearing the iconic opening sequence, dialogue,and scary scenes.my imagination worked overtime and it sparked my lifelong love of sci fi. in fact some of the writers like ray bradbury contributed.
What's that, boy? We're in control? Hey, look, I can see my voice! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! Brrrrrr-HEEEE HEEE-blub blub blub blub blub. Thiis....iiiiis myyyyy voooice...ooooonnn teeeeeeveeeee.
