Movies - TV
We Wouldn’t Have The Waltons Without This Hated Twilight Zone Episode
By WILLIAM BIBBIANI
While the people of “The Twilight Zone” don’t clearly connect together, an elderly couple from the horror sci-fi show actually appears in another TV classic, “The Waltons.”
The episode “The Hunt” features an elderly man living in the mountains with his wife and dog before tragedy strikes, leaving the man and dog to wander purgatory forever.
Despite not being very popular among fans, “The Hunt” would lead episode writer Earl Hamner Jr. to create the TV drama “The Waltons.”
Based on Hamner’s 1961 book, “Spencer’s Mountain,” “The Waltons” tells the story of a family living in Virginia throughout the Great Depression and World War II.
According to Hamner, the characters of Grandma and Grandpa Walton were the same as those from “The Hunt.”
Hamner shared, “The similarity is not accidental.” At the time of the episode, he was working on a collection of short stories called “The Old Man and the Old Woman.”
He added, “Those characters which I used in ‘The Hunt’ also were later to become the Grandma and Grandpa Walton people.”