You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind,

a journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, The Twilight Zone.

If you listen to the first episode of the Twilight Zone podcast, you might remember that I played a short clip of a film that Rod Sailing made.

It was a film that he put together to try and get sponsorship for the Twilight Zone. Now in the film he did a rundown of some of the stories that he had lined up for the first season, the ones that they were going to shoot first.

One of which was quite a different version of the story that would become Mr Denton on Doomsday.

Now it seemed to not only change in structure but it had a couple of early names too

it was at one time called You Two Can Be a Fast Gun

and instead of focusing on a washed-up gunslinger it was all

about a schoolteacher.

A parenthetic note here. On the Twilight Zone there'll be a variety of stories and this

is a variety that covers not only story type but time locale the nature of the people.

For example this is a western called Death, Destry, and Mr. Dingle.

And this is the principal character in the story.

It's a cult 45.

There's a schoolmaster named Dingle who picks up this gun one day, finding it in a schoolyard.

Quite accidentally, it goes off on a couple of occasions. First, it

hits a rattlesnake between the eyes at 50 yards, then it knocks the gun out of a desperado's hand.

And while it's all quite accidentally, various onlookers make an assumption that Mr. Dingell's a

pretty fast gun, and they start to build not only a reputation for this spindly little dude but also almost a reverent tradition.

And as in the classic Western mold, every top gun in and out of the territory converge on the town,

ready to invite Mr. Dingle, poor little Mr. Dingle, who really doesn't know how to use a gun, do his showdown.

I'm sure that had Rod Sailing made the episode that way, it probably would have been just fine and quite entertaining, but I do think he made the right choice making the change.

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