“Red Alert” animated GIF, by aforgrave, from “The Monsters are Due On Maple Street”
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own, for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is…that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
If there was ever an episode of The Twilight Zone that emphasized the fear of “the other” and the Cold War, The Monsters are Due On Maple Street would be it. Had they filmed this in colour, those lamp posts could have pulsed with Red light, and it couldn’t have made the point any clearer.
The hysteria in the closing moments is masterfully edited, and those wonky camera angles are so wonderfully characteristic of their time. I almost find the addition of the aliens on the hill at the end to be an anti-climax, and unnecessary. Had the episode simply wrapped with Serling’s closing commentary, it would have been even more real — no alien intervention required to push mankind off the edge.
Check out Brian Short‘s (@heystorytellers) masterful mashup edit of video from “Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and Kanye’s tune “Monster.” I love the way he cuts the edits to match the beat. One would almost think this episode had been shot and cut to suit the tune. So well done!
Kanye Is Due on Maple Street from Brian Short on Vimeo.
Cool Resources for The Monsters are Due on Maple Street
Some quick web searches also turned up gems like PDFs of the script, including one from a textbook that I’m sure I’ve come across over the years.
What a classic tale.
Hey, thanks a lot Andrew, i appreciate the shout, man.
I totally agree with you about the aliens. It changes the point, right? At first, it was, “People will scapegoat over anything.” Instead, now, it’s something more like, “Be afraid because someone might use this against you.” The final more seems to be about strength instead of virtue.
Also, I’m assuming from the work that you’re doing this semester, that you’ve discovered some instantaneous way to make Gifs, because for me, they still take a million years. Please point me toward your recipe, Red Alert. Otherwise I’m turning on your lawnmower when your back is turned.
Brian,
Ha — regarding the lawnmower, I carved ds106 in my back lawn this past weekend on a lark, with the intent of getting a photo. Unfortunately, when I went to shoot the picture from an upstairs window, I discovered that an upstart tree managed to obliterate the 06 from the limited vantage, and so I mowed it all into non-existence the next day.
Regarding my GIF process (or perhaps better described now as an affliction — affectionately referred to here as GIF-eye-tis), I started back in December 2012 with the @cogdog GIFfest (or GIFestivus, as Grant Potter and I called it) in a conscious attempt to sort out the necessary techniques and processes to make some artistic GIFs — now some tend to jump right off the screen as an “I’ve got to GIF that” compulsion. The “Red Alert” light was one of those. My process is not instantaneous, but some aspects of making GIFS are a lot easier now than they were six or seven months ago.
Depending on the GIF, several things can influence how long they take to do — some do take hours.
1) are the raw materials for the GIF simply frames from a video, or is there some added content required?
2) are there blemishes or distractions that need to be dealt with, removed, masked out?
3) is there any camera jiggle (old film frame misalignments are a pain) that needs resolving?
4) is there a need to fiddle with the timing of the frames, or duplicate frames to re-tell/emphasize something?
5) how much revision is required to get the GIF down to a manageable/respect-worthy size?
There are likely some other questions that I ask when creating a GIF, but as for the process leading to “Red Alert” — that one was fairly straightforward, and so I will do up a tutorial for it and post it. There were a couple of decisions I made along the way in support of #2, 3, 4, and 5 above. As for #1, Red Alert was just raw from the episode. So yeah, that will make for a good tutorial. Thanks for the impetus!