The Outer Limits

"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits."

The Outer Limits is an American television series that aired on ABC from 1963 to 1965. Similar in style to the earlier The Twilight Zone with more science fiction than fantasy stories, The Outer Limits is an anthology of discrete story episodes, sometimes with a plot twist at the end.

The Outer Limits originally was broadcast from 1963 to 1965 on the U.S. television broadcasting network ABC; in total, 49 episodes. It was one of many series influenced by The Twilight Zone and Science Fiction Theatre, though it ultimately proved influential in its own right. In the un-aired pilot, the series was titled Please Stand By, but ABC rejected it. Series creator Leslie Stevens retitled it The Outer Limits. With a few changes, the pilot aired as the premiere episode, "The Galaxy Being".

Writers for The Outer Limits included creator Stevens and Joseph Stefano (screenwriter of Hitchcock's Psycho), who was the series' first-season producer and creative guiding force. Stefano wrote more episodes than any other writer for the show. Future Oscar winning screenwriter Robert Towne ("Chinatown") would write "The Chameleon", which was also the final episode filmed for the first season. Two especially notable second-season episodes "Demon With a Glass Hand" and "Soldier" were written by Harlan Ellison, with the latter episode winning a Writers' Guild Award. The former was for several years the only episode of The Outer Limits available on laser-disc.

The first season combined science-fiction and horror, while the second season was more focused on "hard" science-fiction stories, dropping the recurring scary monster motif of the first season. Each show in the first season was to have a monster or creature as a critical part of the story line. First-season writer and producer Joseph Stefano believed that this element was necessary to provide fear, suspense, or at least a center for plot development. This kind of story element became known as "the bear". This device was, however, mostly dropped in the second season when Stefano left. (Three first-season episodes without a "bear" are Forms of Things Unknown, Controlled Experiment, and The Borderland all three of which were produced as pilots for other never-realized series and then re-edited as Outer Limits episodes. Another early episode with no 'bear' was The Hundred Days of the Dragon made before the "bear" convention was established. Second season episodes with a "bear" are Keeper of the Purple Twilight , The Duplicate Man, and The Probe. Bears appear near the conclusion of second season episodes Counterweight, The Invisible Enemy, and Cold Hands, Warm Heart.)

The Outer Limits had an opening and closing narration in almost every episode, by the "Control Voice" (Vic Perrin). Both shows were unusually philosophical for science-fiction anthology series, but differed in style. The show was straight action and suspense which often had the human spirit in confrontation with dark existential forces within or without, such as in the alien abduction episode A Feasibility Study or the alien possession story The Invisibles.

A few of the monsters reappeared in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series of the late 1960s. A feathered creature was modified to appear as a zoo animal in the background of the first pilot of Star Trek; a prop head from "Fun and Games" was used to make a Talosian appear as a vicious creature. The moving carpet beast in "The Probe" later was used as the "Horta", and operated by the same actor (Janos Prohaska). The process used to make pointed ears for David McCallum in "The Sixth Finger" was reused in Star Trek as well. The "ion storm" seen in "The Mutant" (a projector beam shining through a container containing glitter in liquid suspension) became the transporter effect in Trek.