The Twilight Zone: The Fever
Nov. 19th, 2025 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt’s been a while since I’d seen a Twilight Zone episode I was already familiar with through an adaptation. That makes sense comparing the number of those adaptations to the number of episodes themselves, but I was still interested to see “The Fever” come up. I’ve already mentioned how I’d come across not just short-story adaptations but a smaller number of black-and-white comics versions too. With recollections of how this story turned out when drawn, I was curious as to how the original would compare.
The story involves a married couple (older than I’d imagined them to be) who win a trip to Las Vegas. (The establishing shots are accompanied by music that did have me thinking of “Hooray for Hollywood” as familiar from Looney Tunes cartoons, but after that this episode’s score did seem to get more jazzy and compelling...) While the wife is ready to enjoy herself, the husband starts off thoroughly disapproving. Even if this amounts to “well, he was unpleasant to start with,” there might be a difference between “personal disapproval” and “concern for others,” and it can seem at least a half-point might be made about “however brief, whatever the risk of going even so far as to just ‘regret it later,’ buying one sort of thrill might have a price that can be paid,” I’m cautious myself about gambling because of warnings about “getting hooked.”
I do, though, have to admit to navigating through the service years of the Love Live mobile games with their “gacha” mechanic. As well, despite first becoming aware of it through an unenthusiastic capsule review in a late issue of Creative Computing, I did sign out an ebook when it turned up in one of my library’s lending applications about people trying to build a computer (to be concealed in their shoes) that could predict roulette. (Predicting blackjack seems more practical from certain tales, but I don’t think I could think fast enough to manage it.)
The husband’s first fall from grace over ten dollars from one half-forced pull at a slot machine quite antique and almost flimsy, perhaps, to modern eyes did play out a bit different from how my mind had had it. Afterwards, I did ponder “blaming the machine itself because that was easier to get on TV than blaming the people who designed it,” but even with an element of “how much of it is in his head?” there was something, and perhaps something a bit scary even without the exaggerations of comics, to the Twilight Zone element.
The story involves a married couple (older than I’d imagined them to be) who win a trip to Las Vegas. (The establishing shots are accompanied by music that did have me thinking of “Hooray for Hollywood” as familiar from Looney Tunes cartoons, but after that this episode’s score did seem to get more jazzy and compelling...) While the wife is ready to enjoy herself, the husband starts off thoroughly disapproving. Even if this amounts to “well, he was unpleasant to start with,” there might be a difference between “personal disapproval” and “concern for others,” and it can seem at least a half-point might be made about “however brief, whatever the risk of going even so far as to just ‘regret it later,’ buying one sort of thrill might have a price that can be paid,” I’m cautious myself about gambling because of warnings about “getting hooked.”
I do, though, have to admit to navigating through the service years of the Love Live mobile games with their “gacha” mechanic. As well, despite first becoming aware of it through an unenthusiastic capsule review in a late issue of Creative Computing, I did sign out an ebook when it turned up in one of my library’s lending applications about people trying to build a computer (to be concealed in their shoes) that could predict roulette. (Predicting blackjack seems more practical from certain tales, but I don’t think I could think fast enough to manage it.)
The husband’s first fall from grace over ten dollars from one half-forced pull at a slot machine quite antique and almost flimsy, perhaps, to modern eyes did play out a bit different from how my mind had had it. Afterwards, I did ponder “blaming the machine itself because that was easier to get on TV than blaming the people who designed it,” but even with an element of “how much of it is in his head?” there was something, and perhaps something a bit scary even without the exaggerations of comics, to the Twilight Zone element.