This is Mark Zickery, the author of The Twilight Zone Companion, and you're listening onto the Twilight Zone podcast. Now I can't believe it's been that long,

but quite fittingly, as well as being my first guest. He was the first real Twilight Zone commentator,

the first to look at the show in detail and dig into the production behind the show. Mark Zickri is the author

of the Twilight Zone companion and as a younger man he started his Twilight's own journey

when many of the people in front and behind the camera on the show, were still with us.

So while there have been many great Twilight Zone books written since,

Mark Zichry's timing and vision was such that the Twilight Zone companion stands alone in many ways,

as not only being the first to venture into the Twilight Zone,

but also being the book that got these great Twilight Zone stories directly from the people involved.

He had a level of access that everyone who came after can only dream of.

Personally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Zichri because his name does loom so large in the world of the Twilight Zone that him agreeing to come onto the show

when it was still so very young, gave the podcast some level of legitimacy.

I could then go to other people and say, look, Mark Zichri came on the show,

and they take notice and agree to come on. Now, I had interviewed many celebrities before that

as a magazine writer, but that was my first Twilight Zone interview, and I had Mark Zickri to thank for that.

Now I haven't mentioned it on the show yet, but recently this year,

a new third edition of the Twilight Zone Companion was released.

And the reason I haven't mentioned it is that I really wanted to get Mark Zickery back onto the show to tell us exactly

what was new about it. And we had made tentative steps to do that, but in the meantime, something else

happened. Since I started the Twilight Zone podcast, I've connected with many people all over the world and one of the people who I

have connected with who I do consider to be a genuine friend is a gentleman called Brandon Shea Matala.

Now Brandon is a very prolific podcaster and I enjoy his output immensely and I'll go into more of what he does at the end of this episode

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