Title: “Walking Distance”
Original transmission date: October 30 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Robert Stevens
Starring: Gig Young as Martin Sloan
Frank Overton as Robert Sloan
Irene Tedrow as Mrs. Sloan
Michael Montgomery as Tweenage Martin
Ron Howard as Wilcox Boy
Byron Foulger as Charlie
Sheridan Comerate as Gas Station Attendant
Joseph Corey as Soda Jerk
Buzz Martin as Boy with Car
Nan Peterson as Woman in Park
Pat O'Malley as Mr. Wilson
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Childhood, innocence, longing for the past, pressure of modern life
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating: B-
Serling’s opening monologue
Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Occupation: vice-president, ad agency, in charge of media. This is not just a Sunday drive for Martin Sloan. He perhaps doesn't know it at the time, but it's an exodus. Somewhere up the road he's looking for sanity. And somewhere up the road, he'll find something else.
Leaving his car in for a service at a gas station, an executive realises he’s stopped near the town he grew up in, and since the service is going to take about an hour, he decides to walk into town, to see how things have changed. Turns out they haven’t. He can still get his favourite ice cream - at the price he used to pay as a kid - and the boss of the ice cream soda parlour or whatever the damn hell you Americans call those things - soda fountains? - well whatever - is still alive when he should be long dead (though the businessman does not see this; it happens after he leaves the shop). Heading into town, the executive, Martin Sloan, meets a kid, but he gets spooked when he tells him his name, saying he knows Marty Sloan and he (the executive) is not him.
Things take a weirder turn (I know; you and I know where this is going, but let’s just run with it as if we don’t, eh?) when he meets the so-called Martin Sloan, and recognises him as himself. Intrigued (but perhaps not quite getting it right away) he goes to his old house, and meets his mother and father, as they were when he was eleven years old. They of course don’t recognise him, grown now into a man, and indeed think he’s mad when he tries to tell them who he is, and slam the door in his face. After a second, similarly unsuccessful attempt to convince his parents of who he is, Sloan decides it’s more important to use this god-given opportunity to right his past than to establish his identity here, which nobody will believe anyway.
He goes to talk to his younger self on the merry-go-round, but there’s an accident when past Martin runs from future Martin and falls. Later, his father comes to see him, saying he has looked in his wallet and the evidence there seems to confirm that he is who he says he is. Even if the father does not understand how it’s happened, it has. He tells future Martin he has to leave and he does. When he returns to the soda thing, it’s all modernised (back to how it should be) and things cost 1959 prices. The old owner is indeed dead, and he’s told the merry-go-round he just rode on was condemned and torn down twenty years ago. He heads back for New York, in a sober silence, carrying now the inherited limp he got when he caused himself to fall off the fairground ride.
Serling’s closing monologue
Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men, perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too, because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.
The Resolution
There really isn’t one. Sloan discovers that he doesn’t belong here and kind of bogs off without doing anything, other than perhaps gaining a new perspective on adulthood.
The Moral
I expect it can be interpreted two ways: either “you can’t go back home” or “be happy with what you have.” Either way, I personally find it weak.
Iconic?
You’d have to say yes. I don’t know if this was the first story wherein someone is magically transported back to their childhood (more than likely not) but it certainly set the template for a slew of science fiction adaptations, and would also crop up periodically in this series again and again. To some lesser degree, its themes tie in to time travel movies such as
Back to the Future and series like
Future Man.
And isn’t that…?
Ron Howard (1954 - )
The small boy Sloan meets when he first enters Homewood is played by Howard (surely if not his first acting part, one of the first?) who came to fame as Richie Cunninham in the seminal series
Happy Days, also the movie
American Graffiti, and who went on to become a very successful movie producer.
Personal notes
I find it odd that this is rated so highly, ninth best episode of the series according to Time Magazine. For me, it’s pretty empty; an episode that promises much and leads up to… nothing. Sloan does nothing while he’s “back home” other than weakly call after his younger self to cherish these childish years (yeah, great advice pal); he changes nothing and contributes nothing. In fact, if you want to balance it on a scale of good to bad, he goes in the opposite direction, collecting for himself a dodgy leg along the way and scaring the **** out of everyone. In the end he kind of shrugs and heads off. Would not be one of my favourites, that’s for sure. Even Serling himself admitted it showed up his inexperience as a writer, and I agree.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
You have to laugh at the innocence of the time though. Consider today, a man coming into a small town and sitting down beside a small boy to strike up a conversation. Or pursuing another young boy on the roundabout yelling “I’m not going to hurt you!” Seems to me he would be seeing the inside of a jail cell pretty damn quick!
Questions, and sometimes, Answers
Why did his father so readily accept the rather mind-blowing premise of his son having come back from the future? All he saw was some printed money and a licence that could have been manufactured in some joke shop. But this is all it takes to convince him that a near impossibility is in fact the truth?
Sloan talks about the roundabout. Don’t Americans call them carousels?
Themes
One which will be retread often in this series is the idea of returning to or reliving your childhood, going back to the place you grew up in and somehow magically finding that nothing has changed, often meeting your younger self. The theme of pressure is there too, pressure from a high-paid and stressful job, the enormous burden the “modern” world puts on those who want to make it, and what is sacrificed in attaining that goal. The innocence of youth is presented starkly contrasting with the reality of adulthood, and the idea of perhaps re-examining your life.