The Twilight Zone: The Big Tall Wish
Feb. 4th, 2026 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs I started watching “The Big Tall Wish” I suppose Rod Serling’s next-episode preview of it must have faded from my mind. Its first moments had me feeling as if I’d just been reminded it would involve an on-the-ropes boxer and the boy who believed in him. I might have remembered at some point that Serling had written Requiem for a Heavyweight (which I watched at the beginning of my “Turner Classic Movies period,” although that had to do with knowing Cassius Clay made a short but significant appearance in the movie before becoming Muhammad Ali), but I suppose I was wondering more if Serling’s sentimental streak would be out in force. Then, I had something larger to consider.
It didn’t take too many episodes of The Twilight Zone before I’d come to think “visible minorities” weren’t visible at all in the show. That seemed just an unfortunate part of the time it had been made. So far as “condemned now if you didn’t, condemned now if you did” might go, though, I did keep bumping into one of the two “check out this show, too” spots in frequent rotation at the end of each episode (along with a sprinkling of spots more like public service announcements) that had a black woman serving a meal to the family in “The Danny Thomas Show.” I wound up alluding to all of that commenting on the episode just previous, and then I saw the two main characters of this episode were black.
I could suppose the characters were also in roles most of the visible majority at the time would have accepted without thought. For myself, though, I could also think of the characters as people in themselves, no different really from other characters in The Twilight Zone, and that was something I could accept even with thought. I suppose it did help that the boxer, marked-up face aside, was in better shape than the shambling wreck in Requiem for a Heavyweight. There was one moment where I did amuse myself wondering if Serling had just poked fun at his own dialogue.
The “big tall wish,” made at a last moment, added the element of the fantastic. When the boxer was just one of two people left to know what would have otherwise been, he drifted away from believing in that, and that then cut through the strongest sentimentality even if it did get me thinking back to a certain take on “wishing” in “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.” The end of the episode, too, had a bit of “it’s not the end of the world” to it, and that helped. Mentioning going to a hockey game did bring to mind certain old cracks about “I went to the fights and...”, though.
It didn’t take too many episodes of The Twilight Zone before I’d come to think “visible minorities” weren’t visible at all in the show. That seemed just an unfortunate part of the time it had been made. So far as “condemned now if you didn’t, condemned now if you did” might go, though, I did keep bumping into one of the two “check out this show, too” spots in frequent rotation at the end of each episode (along with a sprinkling of spots more like public service announcements) that had a black woman serving a meal to the family in “The Danny Thomas Show.” I wound up alluding to all of that commenting on the episode just previous, and then I saw the two main characters of this episode were black.
I could suppose the characters were also in roles most of the visible majority at the time would have accepted without thought. For myself, though, I could also think of the characters as people in themselves, no different really from other characters in The Twilight Zone, and that was something I could accept even with thought. I suppose it did help that the boxer, marked-up face aside, was in better shape than the shambling wreck in Requiem for a Heavyweight. There was one moment where I did amuse myself wondering if Serling had just poked fun at his own dialogue.
The “big tall wish,” made at a last moment, added the element of the fantastic. When the boxer was just one of two people left to know what would have otherwise been, he drifted away from believing in that, and that then cut through the strongest sentimentality even if it did get me thinking back to a certain take on “wishing” in “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.” The end of the episode, too, had a bit of “it’s not the end of the world” to it, and that helped. Mentioning going to a hockey game did bring to mind certain old cracks about “I went to the fights and...”, though.