Few television shows have remained relevant in our cultural lexicon for as long as Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone.” Employing elements of science fiction and the supernatural, every episode serves as a timeless morality play exploring some dark corner of the human experience, often with a terrifying ironic twist. Its ability to unnerve generation after generation is a true accomplishment, though it does fall short of presenting a single instance more terrifying than the presidential election just a year away.
Man’s hubris, our tendency toward self-destruction, our fear of the unknown, it’s all on display in “The Twilight Zone” and the punches are rarely pulled, but we would take any of its nightmare scenarios over the 2024 race. We ranked the top 30 episodes of this classic series, and none of them come close to the dread we feel over the next year.
30. “A Game of Pool” (Episode 3.5)
Jesse Cardiff is an ace pool shark, but no matter how good he gets he can never escape the shadow of his legendary predecessor Fats Brown. That is until the ghost of Fats comes down from heaven and offers Jesse a chance to prove himself by beating Fats in a game. Jesse does so, only to find that now he is the legend, doomed to live in limbo until a new challenger can usurp him. It’s not the scariest episode of “The Twilight Zone” but it’s a poignant reminder that when someone big dies, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes their place. Think Trump/Hitler.
29. “Nick of Time” (Episode 2.7)
In the first of two William Shatner appearances, a couple awaiting car repair at a diner begins to suspect that the novelty fortune teller on their table is supernaturally accurate. The man becomes obsessed and begins to unravel until his wife makes a case for the futility of trying to know the future, and they decide to walk away. It’s sort of an allusion to Pandora’s Box where man is spared the curse of foresight. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, this whole existing thing. We would give anything to not know how fucked we’re going to be after #election2024.
28. “A Nice Place to Visit” (Episode 1.28)
A guy dies and goes to what he thinks is heaven because he does nothing but win. The twist? It’s actually hell, and winning gets boring after a while. Big Deal. We’ve known this is hell since 2015 and we still need to go to work and shit.
27. “The Masks” (Episode 5.25)
A wealthy man on his deathbed forces his greedy heirs to wear grotesque masks until the stroke of midnight to receive their inheritance. When they remove the masks, however, they find their faces have been permanently deformed, their outward appearance now matching the ugliness within them. Take a look at that picture. Everyone there is still more appealing than Trump, Christie or DeSantis by a country mile.
26. “Little Girl Lost” (Episode 3.26)
A young girl vanishes into another dimension through a mysterious portal in one of the walls of her home. It seemed awfully scary in 1962, but today we should all be so lucky.
25. “The Lonely” (Episode 1.07)
In the future, prisoners are marooned on their own planet, with only a sex robot for company. This is supposed to be scary? Real-life prisons are overcrowded, under-resourced, and not a sex robot to be seen. Robert Duvall’s prison sounds better than most of our lives.
24. “Two” (Episode 3.01)
In the future, a world war rages for so long that in the end there is only one survivor from each side. One of them is a woman, and the other is a Charles Bronson. They almost kill each other, but eventually decide to call off the battle and, presumably, repopulate the earth. It’s grim sure, but the survival rate of this war is higher than the survival rate of the upcoming third World War by about two.
23. “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” (Episode 2.28)
Stranded at a snowed-in diner, the passengers of a bus discover that someone among them is secretly an alien in disguise. We would kill to have a problem as tame as “Who is the interloper?” Instead, we must decide which proven interloper will do the least amount of damage running our country for the next 4 years.
22. “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (Episode 5.17)
In a future overtaken by vanity, everyone is forced to have cosmetic surgery to make them look like one of a dozen beautiful people. They get twelve people to choose from?! We only get to choose between two people to be president and they aren’t even hot!
21. “The Odyssey of Flight 33” (Episode 2.18)
Accidentally traveling to the time of the dinosaurs is scary, sure, but at least you’re up there in the safety of an airplane, not down here on the ground, present-day watching the dinosaurs run the government.
20. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (Episode 5.03)
A gremlin threatens to destroy an airplane mid-flight, and no one will heed William Shatner’s panicked warnings. If you think that’s bad, wait until you see what four more years of neglect does to our entire infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if we wind up with Biden again, Trump again, or any of the other GOP mutant hopefuls, you’re going to want to avoid trains and bridges.
19. “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (Episode 3.14)
A clown, a hobo, a ballerina, an Air Force captain, and a Scotsman all find themselves in a circular room with no exit, with no memory of who they are or how they got there. Each one of them would be a more viable candidate than anyone we will see on the 2024 ballet.
18. “Twenty-Two” (Episode 2.17)
A stripper recovering from exhaustion keeps having a recurring dream in which she wanders down to the hospital morgue, where a nurse tells her “Room for one more, honey” before she wakes up screaming. Later, when she is boarding a plane, a stewardess identical to the nurse in her dream says “Room for one more, honey.” She screams and runs away. The plane takes off and explodes. It must be nice to be able to change your fate like that. We’ve been having nightmares about the next presidency every night and we’re still gonna have to get on the plane.
17. “The Eye of the Beholder” (Episode 2.06)
In a world where everyone is a pig-faced ghoul, a conventionally attractive woman is considered deformed, and after her 11th attempt at corrective surgery she is still “ugly.” Hang on… 11 surgeries? So even in this fictional world run by literal fascist pigs, insurance will cover 11 surgeries to fix a purely cosmetic issue? Which world is the dystopia again?
16. “The Howling Man” (Episode 2.5)
A man seeks shelter from a storm in a monastery, where he finds that the monks are keeping a prisoner. The prisoner howls and begs for help, but the monks warn the man that the prisoner is in fact the devil and must never be released. We got a guy like that. If you listen closely you can hear him howling now. “This trial is a witch hunt,” he says. “Stolen election!” he whines. “Make America great again!” For the love of God, don’t let him out.
First off, this movie reminded people of Johnny Rotten’s existence–which we really didn’t need. Also, it was basically an advertisement for head trauma. So, if I hit my head like Arto Saari, I’ll get to see some unreleased Tom Penny footage? Kids couldn’t stop getting concussions.
I split my nutsack three times trying to do a 180 a parking meter because Hollywood elites Spike Jones, Mike Carroll, and Rick Howard had a green screen budget and I didn’t know any better. And I only recently found out that it wasn’t actually Owen Wilson doing that bluntslide? My wife called me a dumbass for not realizing it sooner. As a teenager, this video was detrimental to my physical, emotional, and skateboarding development.
Toy Machine’s skate park to prison pipeline classic sends all the wrong messages. This video screamed, “If you make weird art and listen to jazz, you can also own a famous skateboard company!” which inspired lots and lots of troubled individuals to invest in their passions and have fun. This video significantly impacted the number of workers available to manufacturing facilities in the late ’90s and early ’00s.
3/4 of my shins are burnt to a crisp because–who else?–Hollywood elite Spike Jones made my whole middle school think they could kickflip a five-stair with a flaming board. It’s really a skateboard company’s responsibility to tell their young, impressionable viewers what’s real because if a kid that just keyholed a Mountain Dew sees a flaming skateboard in a video, they’re going to do it, too. Reckless.
This is barely a skate video, but it still had a dramatic impact on the world outside of skateboarding. Landspeed was the moment skateboarders became not only menaces to society but also their family and every shopping cart wrangler on the planet.
Jazz is the devil’s preferred music, and this video is absolutely full of it. Not only did “Video Days” teach kids about the Blue Note back catalog, but it killed a bunch of guys in the process of filming it. RIP to all the lost Christian souls and the poor heathens who foolishly rode for Blind Skateboards.
The lack of handrails and switch tre flips down 20 really obscured everyone’s understanding of what skateboarding is supposed to be. When kids learned how to do inward heelflip backside disaster fingerflip outs and tailslide 720 reverts, they didn’t expect to be called a fucking nerd by literally every other person in the skate park.
The Josh Kalis part in this video made Love Park seem deceptively inviting. Countless Midwestern dolts traveled there only to be mercilessly beaten within an inch of their life by locals. This video was dangerous Philadelphia travel propaganda.
Look at a picture of Matt Mumford in 1999 and then look at one of him right now. “Why doesn’t he look any different decades later?” you might ask yourself. The answer is clearly that he’s Nosferatu, and this video is nothing but vampire propaganda. I have it on good authority that over the course of this video, Mumford turned everyone but Jamie Thomas into a creature of the night. “Why not Jamie?” you’re probably wondering. Because. You’ve seen his boards. The power of Christ compels him.
“Skate More” briefly made every dude dress like Jason Dill. We looked fucking stupid showing up to a party being the third guy wearing white painter’s pants rolled halfway up my shins with knee-high neon socks and a shirt covered in cigarette burns. Blame DVS for never getting the girl.
The tiny wheels in this video caused more injuries to children than polio. Thankfully the skateboard world started to wise up and ride wheels that could actually function.
This video sent me on a year-long quest to create the artsiest, most unique sponsor-me tape of all time. When I was done, I still didn’t have any sponsors and I spent so much time editing I forgot how to kickflip, but I could double-exposed film like a motherfucker. Plus, I spent a fuckload of money trying to learn bagpipes which only made my part worse.
The problem with this video is not that it made me spend my entire college fund to build a mega ramp at my parents’ house, it’s that Rob Dyrdek made everyone think they could “Pretty Woman” an adult man from paid security guard to emotional support man. Worst $40 I ever spent on a relationship.
Industrialists lobbying for looser work safety regulations funded “Fully Flared” As soon as Hollywood-insider Spike Jones blew up those stairs behind Mike Mo, OSHA regulations were slashed even further. It looked beautiful, but this video was as bad for Cairo Foster’s eyes as it was for dock workers. Shame on you, Lakai.
This video was a global conspiracy to brainwash kids into believing that skateboarding existed outside of the United States of America. Not true and very dangerous.
Shorty’s led me to believe that equestrian skills and sleight of hand would be pivotal to becoming a good skateboarder. What the fuck? I bought a horse and went to magic camp and still can’t abra-ca-do a heelflip or boardslide on my horse, Mr. Kermit California II.
America destroyed itself, and I blame those sexy Hook-Ups graphics. America can only be so horny before it smashes something beautiful.
This video proved the old adage, “It’s never too late…” is absolute horseshit. Unless you’re a teenage phenom with rubber bones and your parents’ bulletproof health insurance, you’re screwed.
Louie Barletta is one of the only people on the face of the planet that can be as annoying as he is drunk. His part was solid, but too many good kids fell victim to wearing plaid sweater vests in the wake of “Bag of Suck.”
In one of the single greatest skateboarding transgressions of all time, we were led to believe Jamie Thomas was aware of a band that wasn’t classic rock or Iron Maiden. Seeing a guy skate to the wrong kind of music can really undo some of the magic. It’d be like seeing Marc Johnson skate to a good song. Can you imagine?
The problem with this video is not that the Bones Brigade doesn’t find Animal Chin, it’s that I saw it with my older brother when I was four. I thought that fuckin’ guy was real and spent the next few months making missing person posters for that mysterious skateboarding demi-god. I mean, those guys just gave up!
It’s been a long-standing tradition for fossil fuel executives and lobbyists to gently massage Supreme Court Justices, relieving stress during tense discussions. The new code of conduct states that “Rubs of any nature will be limited to before and after the court is in session.”
All nine justices unanimously agreed to a new system for disclosing gifts. Instead of keeping every single item a secret, they will now be required to enter a special room known as the “Closet of Enchantment” and scream the name of the gift giver and the financial value of each gift into a special pillow. Failure to comply with this new rule will result in the justice losing 10% of their cut of the cash from the court’s official Bribe Box.
Anyone related to a Supreme Court Justice who received financial compensation from an outside interest group seeking to gain favor with a Justice will be required to report the value of the donation on their deathbed. They must give a detailed statement to a clergy member about each transaction. The clergy member will then be put to death in the interest of national security.
If a Justice has a personal or financial stake in a ruling they might be considered impartial and should recuse themselves from the case. However, if the Justice takes a long hard look in the mirror and decides it’s not a big deal after all, they will be able to resume normal activity.
Intimidating the briber into sweetening the pot is still allowed, but a Justice can no longer stare them down until they fork over the entire wad. The Justice will also be required to say “You know I’m not supposed to do this?” after each stack of cash is handed over.
Any bagged lunches, sodas, or snacks must be labeled in a “Clear and distinct fashion” to prevent them from being eaten by other Justices. Initials and nicknames will not be considered viable forms of identification. If clearly labeled food is eaten by a party not listed on the package, the offending party will be required to replace the food and provide an additional six-pack.
