The Odyssey of Flight 33

"The Odyssey of Flight 33"

"The Odyssey of Flight 33" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

Opening narration

You're riding on a jet airliner en route from London to New York. You're at 35,000 feet atop an overcast and roughly fifty-five minutes from Idlewild Airport. But what you've seen occur inside the cockpit of this plane is no reflection on the aircraft or the crew. It's a safe, well-engineered, perfectly designed machine, and the men you've just met are a trained, cool, highly efficient team. The problem is simply that the plane is going too fast and there is nothing within the realm of knowledge or at least logic to explain it. Unbeknownst to passengers and crew, this aeroplane is heading into an uncharted region well off the beaten track of commercial travelers. It's moving into the Twilight Zone. What you're about to see we call The Odyssey of Flight 33.

Synopsis

This episode takes place on Global Airlines Flight 33, en route from London to New York City. About fifty minutes from Idlewild Airport, Captain Farver and his crew notice that their Boeing 707 is drastically increasing speed, crossing some kind of barrier. They soon realize they have been thrown back in time when they spot a plodding creature resembling classic Brontosaurus. They're able to repeat their incredible increase in speed, hoping to get back to 1961, but arrive above the 1939 New York World's Fair instead. Realizing that they can't land in 1939, and low on fuel, the captain knows that they must keep trying, in order to return home.

Closing narration

A Global jet airliner, en route from London to New York on an uneventful afternoon in the year 1961, but now reported overdue and missing, and by now searched for on land, sea, and air by anguished human beings fearful of what they'll find. But you and I know where she is, you and I know what's happened. So if some moment, any moment, you hear the sound of jet engines flying atop the overcast, engines that sound searching and lost, engines that sound desperate, shoot up a flare or do something. That would be Global 33 trying to get home...from the Twilight Zone.

Preview for next week's story

Announcer: "And now, Mr. Serling."

I've only got about 18 seconds to tell you that next week, Mr. Burgess Meredith returns to The Twilight Zone as "Mr. Dingle, the Strong." He plays the role of an incredible little man who's given the strength of about 500 men and comes out of it as a kind of a 20th century Hercules and Samson all rolled into one. It's designed to send you right from your set into a fast bowl of spinach. It's catching.

Trivia

• The episode does not mention 1939 in relation to the fair because the episode was made before the 1964-1965 World's Fair.
• The dinosaur footage was created for this episode at a cost of $2,500. The work was done in the stop motion animation process by the effects crew of the 1960 film Dinosaurus!, using the Brontosaurus model and miniature jungle set constructed for that production.
• Much of the technically accurate "cockpit dialogue" written by Rod Serling for this episode was based on conversations between his brother, Robert, who was an aviation writer, and an airline pilot friend.
• The plot of The Langoliers, a novella by Stephen King, bears a striking resemblance to that of "The Odyssey of Flight 33". In this novella, while the plane is in flight, many of the passengers and the entire air crew vanish (fortunately, one of the remaining passengers is actually a pilot) and they can't reach anyone by radio, tipping them off before they land that something is wrong, and several of the passengers and the new pilot think about, and start talking with each other about, science fiction. When the new pilot wonders aloud what they might see if they take the plane below the cloud cover underneath them, perhaps even dinosaurs, the text mentions him thinking about "an old episode of The Twilight Zone" where something very similar happened but he decides not to mention it aloud, as bringing up old science fiction television probably would not help his credibility under the circumstances.
• There is a major scientific inaccuracy in this episode. Shortly before they spot the Brontosaurus, Flight 33's crew identify the contours of Manhattan island (and are wondering about the absence of buildings before they spot the Brontosaurus). But in the era of this giant creature, about 150 million years ago, the world's geological landscape was vastly different from today because of continental drift and the action of plate tectonics.
• There are also some geographic and temporal inaccuracies. Near the end of the episode, the captain announces to the passengers that they are flying over Lake Success in New York and, instead of seeing the United Nations, they are looking at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Neither the United Nations nor the 1939 New York World's Fair were in Lake Success in 1939, The 1939 fair was actually held in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, which, later, would also host the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. The United Nations did not yet exist in 1939; it was based in Lake Success only from 1946 to 1951.

See also

• List of The Twilight Zone episodes

References

• DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1593931360
• Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0970331090

External links

• "The Odyssey of Flight 33" at IMDb
• TV.com episode page
• Full video of the episode at CBS.com