The Twilight Zone: The Mighty Casey
Apr. 14th, 2026 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFor Easter’s extra-long weekend I headed home to see my family, which meant getting away from my Blu-Ray player and Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set alike. I did strike up a tenuous connection to the show that weekend, though. On going through the issue of the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow from exactly forty years back and seeing the winners of an adventure game competition, I managed to start an emulator, load a disk image of the programs from that month, and begin an adventure titled “The CoCo Zone.” After an “imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit” opening and a beeped-out version of what I understand to be the familiar Twilight Zone theme (but haven’t yet reached in my set), however, poking through the hallways of a completely empty prison might have made the title begin to seem an effort at borrowed gravitas. In any case I was interested in getting back to the show itself. The episode ahead was the last one left I’d first experienced via comics adaptations (although I’ve read an additional volume of short story adaptations of episodes still to come).
Where the adaptation had involved the Brooklyn Dodgers themselves (if playing at “Tebbet’s Field”), on television “The Mighty Casey” features the “Hoboken Zephyrs.” Their slump is a bit more conventional than what I understand had bedevilled the Dodgers of Brooklyn, who’d won the National League pennant multiple times in the 1940s and 1950s but gone on to triumph in the World Series just once, with the New York Yankees beating them every other time. Relief for the Zephyrs seems promised at last when a scientist (who gives me an impression of invoking what “scientist” began to mean after the Manhattan Project as opposed to the more conventional sort of “mad scientist”) introduces a tall prospect named Casey.
Casey, of course, is a robot (to be tested helping out the worst team around), although this secret is well-kept until he gets beaned in an official game. The team manages to kick the can a little further down the road by having a heart installed in him, but it turns out “heart” means more than just something that produces a pulse and heartbeat... All in all, the episode was played more as a comedy than my general impressions of The Twilight Zone have it. This might, though, have diminished the sense I’ve identified in other episodes of The Twilight Zone managing to contain elements that might be found in stories without “the fantastic” being involved. I did go the point of looking up the adaptation again, and noticed it ending pretty much on a mournful note; the episode itself has Casey’s blueprints passed on and alludes in Rod Serling’s closing narration to the pitching of the Dodgers picking up just after they’d added one last bitter blow to the fans in Brooklyn by moving west.
Where the adaptation had involved the Brooklyn Dodgers themselves (if playing at “Tebbet’s Field”), on television “The Mighty Casey” features the “Hoboken Zephyrs.” Their slump is a bit more conventional than what I understand had bedevilled the Dodgers of Brooklyn, who’d won the National League pennant multiple times in the 1940s and 1950s but gone on to triumph in the World Series just once, with the New York Yankees beating them every other time. Relief for the Zephyrs seems promised at last when a scientist (who gives me an impression of invoking what “scientist” began to mean after the Manhattan Project as opposed to the more conventional sort of “mad scientist”) introduces a tall prospect named Casey.
Casey, of course, is a robot (to be tested helping out the worst team around), although this secret is well-kept until he gets beaned in an official game. The team manages to kick the can a little further down the road by having a heart installed in him, but it turns out “heart” means more than just something that produces a pulse and heartbeat... All in all, the episode was played more as a comedy than my general impressions of The Twilight Zone have it. This might, though, have diminished the sense I’ve identified in other episodes of The Twilight Zone managing to contain elements that might be found in stories without “the fantastic” being involved. I did go the point of looking up the adaptation again, and noticed it ending pretty much on a mournful note; the episode itself has Casey’s blueprints passed on and alludes in Rod Serling’s closing narration to the pitching of the Dodgers picking up just after they’d added one last bitter blow to the fans in Brooklyn by moving west.