I like the part where Valentine says, "I thought this was for only like school teachers and like that." And PIP says, "Oh, we have some school teachers here."
@@AnneMolly56 if there is some place similar to heaven and hell then immortal beings would likely be beyond our comprehension like on the good place. He's likely just an immortal being doing his job and no real "devil" exists.
A scared, angry little man who never got a break. Now he has everything he’s ever wanted. And he’s going to have to live with it, for eternity, in the Twilight Zone.
He tired to break it to him easy but valentine didn't want to listen an drew his own conclusion. Fats just let him go deeper down rabbit hole making the reveal that much sweeter to him.
Funny thing is.. If you pay attention Mr. Valentine’s “angel” was trying to tell him the whole time what was really going on, but Mr. Valentine kept cutting him off
What I learned: There is no value without scarcity, there is no accomplishment without challenge and there is no freedom without risk. Welcome to paradise, get a helmet.
Fun fact, in the Twilight Zone ride in both Paris and Orlando, look at the book, it says that exact phrase - "You can check out any time you like, BUT you can NEVER leave!"
@@monicaguerra4079 theres also another one. If you go to the bit with the lettering, you will notice that there are letters missing, look down to where they have fallen and it spells out "USE THE STAIRS!!"
I LOVE this episode, this actually pulls the viewers into the episode like Rocky had actually gone to Heaven and not the other one, but then when Pip actually says "WHAT gave you THAT idea Mr Valentine? THIS IS the other place!", we all realize that we were suckered in by Satan himself as Pip/Satan laughs maniacally at Rocky whilst he's trying to escape.
@@bored1ca The greatest trick that man ever played was convincing the world that the devil does exits. And the Great Pumpkin arrives every Halloween to renew our spirit.
@@handsomeman-pm9vyOh look. Another edgy know it all who, of course, has absolute proof that the Devil, and God, do NOT exist and can show it. Right? Right? Of course you can't, any more than anyone can absolutely prove that they do. You keep right on with your bad self, though, pretending you're OH! so much smarter than anyone else.
+Non Sequiturs The weird part is, other episodes of TZ used the word "Hell". Like the one where the 6 characters were stuck in a circular tube (they turned out to be dolls). The guy in that episode says "I figured out where we are. We are in Hell".
This episode is awesome because it is designed for him personally. So if you do the same things over and over again. You will get bored fast. You don't want to live your life where you always win and now you can get anything you want. There is no drive or ambition to do anything
When we think of heaven, all we can imagine is having everything that makes us happy now temporarily. Perhaps its because we know that it will eventually end. If you're a Christian, being with Jesus is the only way to be happy eternally. We can't imagine heaven because we haven't gone yet. It's a different kind of happiness.
I love this interpretation of Hell, because in a sense it very well be what Hell is actually like. Eternal gluttony and vice, which may sound like paradise, but the torture comes from boredom of everything being predictable and not meaning anything.
No, he didn't lie. He didn't tell Mr. Valentine that he was in heaven even though Valentine assumed he was in heaven. He just didn't correct Valentine's mistaken impression and tell him he was actually in HELL....well, at least not right away
I own a book entitled, "The Twilight Zone Companion". It's a great and thorough book, where the author examines each and every episode. In relating to this particular episode, the author wrote that the actor who plays "Rocky Valentine' was miscast, and over acted the role to a point of being a B movie gangster. I respectfully have to disagree. I think "both" actors played their roles perfectly. I also think that this is one of those underrated episodes which gets less than it deserves. The very end, where "Pip" laughs demonically over Valentine's horrific revelation, was chilling. One of my all-time favorites.
+LATVERIAN1 Hey, did you know that PIP means Prisoner in Purgatory. So PIP has a real chance to get out of hell after a few centuries or perhaps millenniums. But Rocky is stuck in hell for all eternity.
+LATVERIAN1 I agree with you man this episode is a classic. That laugh Pip made also creeps me out to this day and I'm 28 years old! The twist at the end even fooled me. This is one of my favorite episodes.
I knew he was in the "other place" the whole time and was wondering when the idiot would get it. I laughed right along with "fats" it was so satisfying.
Warbird Phoenix - It is pretty predictable but the heart of the twist is in his reaction when he realises that he's gonna spend the eternity in this everlasting boredom.
+ertznay Sebastian Cabot (Pip) voiced Sir Ector in disney's THE SWORD IN THE STONE (1963) and Bagheera the Black Panther in disney's THE JUNGLE BOOK (1967). He also narrated the Winnie the Pooh classics.
Wow. I cant get past that part where PIP says " this is the other place". The look on that guy's face, the shock, the realization of where he is. That music as he has that shocked stare then, he cant open the door to get out. And then that LAUGH, something runs all the way from my lower back to my neck. I did not see this coming at all when i first saw it. It still gets to me at age 68! It still bothers me!
What a great episode. It reminds me of Hollywood movie stars that are rich and famous but still puking miserably into gold toilets. Fame and wealth don’t do a thing for them.
Wow what an idiot, you missed the whole point of this episode. The point of the episode is that if you don't work, fight or suffer for something it's not worth having
@@grkpektis in a way he's right. The episode is multi faceted. Bojack horseman is the perfect example of you can have everything in the world and not be happy, which this episide displays.
@@SeraphSeph A quote from a Star Trek episode:"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true".
Great episode. I remember watching it the first time and it stuck with me. I love great twist endings. I assume they say "the other place" because they weren't allowed to say "hell" on TV in those days. Times sure have changed since then.
Can't be that. In the episode where everyone is trapped in the big metal pit, one of the characters outright says that they're in hell. I think you could say hell as long as it wasn't a "swear".
I think it was some theologian who said= Hell is being cut off from God. Valentine has everything he wants in the world, but no spiritual connection. Thus he is in Hell.
-@@MastaSmack I consider myself a Spiritual Person, not a Religious Person. I don't know the Bible that well. I think it was Aquinas or one of the other Christian Philosophers who talked about the Dark Night of the Soul and being cut off from God. Can you please give me the Reference in the Bible where it says you can't be Cut off from God.
I don't feel like looking it up, but you can google the line "if you make your bed in hell, I am there" The idea is, there is no place that God is not, or else it couldn't even exist.
It's Psalm 139 from KJV of the Bible. God is in Hell, he is in Heaven...he even says at one point in the bible that he will never leave or forsake you.
As a person that has watched episodes of The Twilight Zone thousands of times over the last 60 years (I'll be 70 next month) I pride myself on being able to find little things that fans of the show may not be aware of. Look closely at the cop at the end of the first casino scene. You'll realize it's Max Baer Jr., aka Jethro Bodine from The Beverly Hillbillies. He wasn't credited but I've looked at the scene closely and it's definitely him.
This episode reminds me of a lady that went onto a radio show, to talk about her NDE experience. She said she visited different planes of "reality" in one of theses places she encounter a place that was so perfect so peaceful and beautiful beyond belief she felt alarmed that she needed to leave right away because she was overwhelmed in the presence of perfection perhaps that it's what hell is like.
@@samhank Basically, she ended up being in a Perfect place and it alarmed her and she wanted to nope out of there quickly. Basically, the place was so perfect, it creeped her out. Imagine going to a place where EVERYBODY had a creepy cult like smile. 😁 Imagine seeing this smile 500 times in a row.....
@@MarySmith-lv3mo I read a lot about NDE and I think people can be overwhelmed when they’re not used to perfection. Others have explained that’s why we are born to experience opposition on earth. With this episode, it just shows us that if you have no opposition there is no reason to be better and to help others. Perhaps there wouldn’t even be any crime. Makes me wonder when enough is enough if you have everything you ever wanted?
The first Matrix movie mentioned something like this-- to enslave humanity the machines made a VR world that was free from hunger and pain and misery-- and the humans jacked into it kept waking up because their minds rejected it
Great episode, one of the better ones IMO. I think an important factor is mentally accepting your fate, and Valentine probably cannot do that. He'll instead go mad. Someone else in his shoes may be like ok, well this certainly beats that "burning in hellfire forever" thing I've always heard about. Even if he just relaxes, enjoys the women, etc., there's much worse ways to spend eternity. I'm curious to see what else there is in his "world," places to explore, maybe even finding some secrets.
I agree with you to a certain extent. I think it would eventually drive anyone mad tho. I heard on a RU-vid video the story of a porn actor and this was a man that got paid to sleep with beautiful women! Imagine that huh? Anyway, it eventually drove him crazy because he was so desensitized to the thrill that it did nothing for him anymore. The man was contemplating suicide and he got out of the business. There’s pleasure in sin for a season. Then the bill has to be paid and so many people pay it with their sanity and even their lives. Just something to think about..that’s all I’m sayin.
Sebastian Cabot was also among voices in Disney. Sir Ector in The Sword in the Stone, Bagheera the black panther in The Jungle Book, and the narrator in the Winnie the Pooh classic shorts.
Eternal life means eternal hell. If you live for ever and ever and ever what are you going to do to fill in that time! Sitting on a cloud playing a harpsichord might not seem so bad for the first ten million years but might look a very boring prospect for the next ten billion! And what about the ten trillion after that! When faced with these kind of eternal life problems non thinking Christians, as well as afterlife believers in general, just tell themselves god, or a higher force, has taken care of this! I'd love to know how.
@@anilomd Thank you for proving my point about non thinking Christians. Try and ponder this question: If life on earth is based around staving off boredom (its a constant search for activities to fill in time to stop us getting restless) and yet even the most adventurous thrill seekers among us still cant avoid getting bored sometimes, then what magical ingredient does an eternal afterlife contain that serves up a perfect 'no boredom' meal? Can you offer speculations (other than God's increasing revelation - what does that even mean) on how an existence of a trillion times a trillion times a trillion years would never produce one moment of boredom! An emotionless machine, like a computer, could survive it!
This episode makes a very, very important truth about humanity very clear, that you should all be fully aware of. Humans need struggle, we need adversity, we crave challenges, we need something that seems impossible to be always on the horizon that we can chase, or we'll go nuts. If humans don't have something to discover, to explore, something to fight for or against, something to conquer, something to overcome, we will be completely unhappy, eventually to the point of suicide. Look at the mice paradise experiment for proof. Work is every bit as important as play for humans. Pray that we never know it, or have built it all.
That and it's important to be grateful for what you have. Rocky is handed a paradise but is never grateful for it. He's still just as surly and angry as ever, on top of not having a tiny mind with no imagination whatsoever. You can have ANYTHING he wants and he just settles for small crap like gambling, money, babes and robbing banks. A flying pig, a flight over rainbows, shrink down to a microscopic size and explore atoms, a parade of pink elephants. Use your brain, dude.
@@funkapotamus86you know, you’re right. It depends on personality which is why “the other place” is customized for each person. To Rocky this is Hell, to someone who is fine with monotony, this isn’t as bad
@PremiumBlank: Why I've been a Cleveland Browns Superfan for 53 years! And there is NO NOTHING in or out of "The Twilight Zone" to compare with that ongoing Misery & Kielbasa Casserole!😂🤣😂🤷♂️🍫🍊🏈B.W.
That maniacal laugh at the end by his Guardian “Angel” sent shivers down my spine whenever I watched this episode as a kid. And I would get this overwhelming sense of dread and of being trapped. Even though he was a hood who didn’t deserve anything better, I felt bad for him. To be stuck in Hell for Eternity. Yikes! 😱
@@zoefang4563 Maybe there is no Hell and there’s nothing to fret about. Ever think of that possibility? In Judaism, there is No Purgatory for instance.
Thing is, is that you gotta remember, Rocky wasn't that smart to begin with, when he realized he was dead, he went "So I'm in heaven!!" and Pip had a curious look on his face like "Okay, I'm gonna play along, see how long it takes him to click on" and it doesn't until the end when he gets sick of the same girls, the same drinks, same food, same winning on gambling etc and Pip just looks at him and sternly says "WHAT made you THINK this was heaven, Mr Valentine? THIS IS the OTHER place!"
@@GenGamesUniverse Yeah, he was happy at first and then he got bored. He was kind of a dim bulb. Imagine gambling and winning all the time? That kills the whole thrill and takes the fun out of it if you know you can’t lose ever. So they ruined it for him. But the piece de resistance was that evil laugh at the end. That really scared me as a kid. The idea that your stuck for all Eternity with this devil torturing you. Now that would be Hell. You’d want it to end at some point. But they won’t let you be. Horrible!
I remember reading Sebastian Cabot needed a lot of convincing to get his hair fully bleached, but they were able to get him by saying how critical it was for him to have an angelic appearance with white hair and a white suit.
@@riverjordan2725 You’d almost think so because there’s no respond from them after he speaks to them but when you look at how he delivers the line, he’s definitely looking at them. Something about what they’re doing (or not doing) caused him to react like that.
I'm surprised that no one mentioned that Mr. Valentine stopped wearing the flashy suit and was now wearing a poor man's white shirt, suspenders, Black corduroy pants. In 1960 this was the equivalent of T shirt and shorts that everyday people wear. That was a clue he was so over his flashy, fun, glamorous and materialistic "Heaven." :)
I think this is a pretty solid episode, one that I enjoyed a lot. As happens in The Twilight Zone, some episode endings are pretty much telegraphed and you know what the ending is going to be. Regardless, even though I figured out the episode’s “twist”, it didn’t take away from the enjoyment of this story!
I used to have this seemingly never ending fear of am eternity of nothing, but I'm aware of it forever! I think it's whatever you want it to be, like your own private existence in immortality, what you choose to experience etc. basically is what you deserve I guess, maybe the afterlife isn't perfect either?!
Great story and acting. Larry Blyden(Rocky) went on to other projects (including another guest role on "TZ" and a stint as a game show host) before his untimely death after a car crash in 1975.
Larry Blyden met a tragic early end. He was vacationing alone in Morocco when he was killed in a car accident. Accounts differ about the circumstances. Some have claimed that it was a carjacking and that he was left for dead by the perpetrators. The official account makes it sound more like was alone in the car and merely went off the road
You know Valentine could’ve easily laid out a whole plan to orchestrate loosing at times for a while, then have Pip erase his memory of him laying out the whole plan, that way it still resembled his life before.
Ironically, this is just what happened in *The Good Place.* And the demons in that series strangely don't seem to realise they got a good thing going with the memory erasures.
I remembered this as a kid and it scared the crap out of me. I don't remember them visiting his records though that was pretty insightful for the 50's. Now with all this new age material thats out there it reminds me of the Akashic records.
Strange as I never saw Pip as the villain of the story. The villain is Rocky, a man who, as is records show, has no redeeming features whatsoever. Eve at the end he shows no remorse for his crimes, only annoyed that he can't commit them with some semblence of a gamble so he can feel like he beat the odds. He is in Hell for the bad man that he is, Pip is merely part of the elaborate trap used for Rocky to pretty much punish himself.
One of the best episode ever i have many favorites but this one show you what happens when you live life bad and proves the point of you reap what you sow
"MR. FRENCH"! 🥰 "It don't make sense, goin' to Heaven with the goodie-goodies; dressed in white, I like black Timbs and black hoodies." -The Notorious BIG
There were some remakes that was done in the 80's -90's episodes...Such as ' Monster are due at maple street '...and ' A game of pool '..just to name a few...I've watched them, and in my opinion the original are STILL the best..
The 1970's show NIGHT GALLERY, with Mr. Serling, did do a '70s version where a long haired dude dies in a car crash and ends up in a nice "pad" that has a HUGE stack of records that can't be shut off...all classical...and an irate maid that appears and vanishes anytime he makes a mess, always berating him... not quite the same idea but the joke is he will quickly go crazy because he's in Hell.
One of my favorite posts on here is something like, "I think I would have went crazy myself if I were Rocky. Those Props were programmed to cheer for everything he did no matter how bad it really is. He could have dropped his pants and his underwear and taken a dump right on the streets and the Props would have cheered since they were programned to do so. And Rocky knew they were programmed to cheer for everything he did. I don't think I would have liked being cheered by programmed Props for everything I did no matter how bad it truly is." Good post. :)
A scared little man who never caught a break. And now he has everything he’s ever wanted and he’s going to have to live with it for eternity. In the Twilight Zone.
Fats saved the best for last. He's probably done that to many souls condemned to "the other place." That's his only enjoyment; being accommodating to them, until the last minute.
Let's put what is happening to Rocky in perspective. This is the equivalent of being forced to eat ONLY your favorite foods and drink ONLY your favorite drinks. You might enjoy your favorite foods and drinks for like a month before you eventually start to get tired of them. You would start to crave other foods and drinks too, but find you are stuck with only your favorite foods and drinks for all eternity. :/
Rocky can technically change anything he wants to, remember the part about Pip arranging for him to lose every so often... so he could eat something else or move on to other activities if he wanted to.
The fact that he wasn’t allowed to see his friends gave it away. If he had been, it wouldn’t have been a punishment, because he would have felt something actually meaningful instead of just hedonistic pleasure.
Mickey Rooney was intended for the 'Valentine' part but wasn't available, nor was Rod Serling, so they chose Cabot (who had to take weeks getting the white dye out of his hair).
Moral of the story: if you keep getting everything you want when you want at a snap of a finger you will eventually find everything will eventually get so uninteresting, boring and predictable that excitement, risk and reward won't exist. You will go crazy as a result.
Serling made a similar episode for "Night Gallery," where John Astin (as a hippie) ends up in a room where all of the music is by Lawrence Welk, the wallpaper is "quaint," and then has to sit through a married couple's slide show of their vacation. It is his version of Hell.
Although this was always meant to be an implication that this was 'hell' I personally feel that it was actually not 'hell' but more of 'heaven' and 'hell' intertwined, and it only became a torture and 'hell' because Valentine made it so during his time there. The famous Eagles song "Hotel California" which was inspired by this interpretation of the afterlife even says in the lyrics "That this could be heaven or this could be Hell". Valentine even said it was always how he imagined 'heaven' to be and which he thought was at first until he started getting bored. It's all based on perception and subjective, and while he doesn't get to see his loved ones again he's not exactly alone with Pip (who isn't a prop and not even really a demon despite the laugh at the end which was merely done for effect of the twist ending) being his guide and someone who he's supposed to talk to as a way to try and redeem himself and his bad deeds and learns from his mistakes while he was alive and make a difference by not indulging in the materialistic and free meaningless wealth given to him on a silver platter even if it's too late. The idea of having eternal pleasure and everything you could possibly want could be torturous enough to the point it becomes 'hell', and I believe a 'Nice Place to Visit' was a prime example of heaven that became hell and not something that was always hell. To an actual genuine greedy person, however, that's often socially distant, looks at women as just sex props, loves wealth, and really loves winning this wouldn't be considered 'hell' and would never become such.
I think you overthoughted. Don’t forget rod serling saying “he’s got everything he’s ever wanted and now he’s gonna have to deal with it” at the end . Basically confirming his suffering
And he literally says I don’t belong in heaven I wanna go to the other place and pip says this is the other place basically confirming that their two different places
and for Rocky, if I were Rocky, I would change things up every once in a while to minimize the boredom. Rocky was free to change up his life if he wanted to. The only real downside is the knowledge none of it is real. For example, knowing my imaginary Supreme Court rules how I want them to every time, I would be pretty upset knowing that the real Supreme Court is still making life worse for everyone in America (provided there still is an America)
Rocky has been informed he can have anything he wants, so I have a proposal for Rocky. If I were in Rocky's position, I would change things up to make it a little less boring; one day, I could spend at the beach, the next at the pool, the next hiking in the mountains, the day after that chilling on my Nintendo Switch, the next day creating a website that goes viral, and so on.
Sebastian Cabot was on 'A Family Affair' in the '60's. He colored his hair for this episode. Those stairs were from another Twilight Zone episode, ' Time Enough At Last'.
