The Fever

The Fever is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.

Details

Episode number:17 Season: 1 Production code: 173-3627 Original air date: January 29, 1960 Writer: Rod Serling Director: Robert Florey Music: stock (taken primarily from Jerry Goldsmith's "jazz themes", which are used as incidental music on many other Twilight Zones)

Cast

Franklin Gibbs: Everett Sloane Flora Gibbs:Vivi Janiss

Synopsis

A man goes to Las Vegas, Nevada with his wife because she won a competition. The man quickly becomes addicted to gambling on the slot machine. He hears the slot machine calling out his name, and when he is almost out of money and the machine breaks down he becomes convinced that the machine is mocking him. He imagines the machine is chasing him, and then falls backwards out of the window to his death.

Trivia

"Serling celebrated signing of his new show, The Twilight Zone] by spending a weekend in Las Vegas. While Carol Serling was having good luck nearby, he became enslaved by a merciless one-armed bandit, an incident he would turn into one of his first Twilight Zone episodes, "The Fever"...
  • Gordon F. Sander, excerpt from 'Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man'.

  • Serling wrote an expanded ending to this episode when he adapted it to short story form. The addition read:
Flora Gibbs flew back to Elgin, Kansas, to pick up the broken crockery of her life. She lived a silent, patient life from then on and gave no one any trouble. Only once did anything unusual happen and that was a year later. The church had a bazaar and someone brought in an old used one-armed bandit. It had taken three of her friends from the Women's Alliance to stop her screaming and get her back home to bed. It had cast rather a pall over the evening."
  • excerpt from "The Fever", published in 'Stories From the Twilight Zone' in April 1960

Themes

A warning about the dangers of gambling. Similar themes are addressed in The Silence.

External link

References

  • Sander, Gordon F.:Serling: The Rise And Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
  • Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)
Back to: The Twilight Zone, Episode List, Season 1 Fever

 

<< PreviousWord BrowserNext >>
hand saw
list of austrians
hand plane
adze
broadaxe
hewing
zamboanga city
novi sad
special areas of conservation in northern ireland
carloman of france
desiderius
carnuntum
djordje balasevic
odo, count of paris
odo of bayeux
surface tension
embleton, northumberland
cluster bomb
van der graaf generator
sanitization
lulu (opera)
lulu
i shot an arrow into the air
the hitch hiker (the twilight zone)
william nelson
billy bass nelson
sandra schmirler
malmoe
werner erhard and associates
bernie worrell
sila mara caldern
national parks in the republic of ireland
constant folding
howard stern
burns and allen
the lone ranger
the shadow
english heritage properties in england
dragnet (drama)
1992 winter olympics
randy lee white
1980 winter olympics
1984 winter olympics
self evidence