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Rod Serling, the creator of the US television series The Twilight Zone (1959-64) firmly believed in the connection between smart science fiction, imagination and progress. In this 1963 interview, newly and inventively animated for PBS’s Blank on Blank series, Serling discusses how scientific discoveries are driven by the same youthful impulse to bring the unreal to life as his own work, which creates ‘impossibilities’ through storytelling.
Producer: David Gerlach, Amy Drozdowska
Animator: Patrick Smith
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Sports and games
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play
5 minutes
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
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Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
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Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
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Animals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Information and communication
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph
36 minutes