He sees the next door neighbor, a teen boy working on his brand new roadster; Martin soon discovers that it is the year 1934.
And his resolve is to put in a claim to the past.Confused and worried, Martin wanders around town and ends up at his former home again later that evening, where he again tries to convince his parents who he is by showing his identification, but he is slapped by his mother and rejected.
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 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.An excursion into fantasy on The Twilight Zone next week as two distinguished actors, Mr. David Wayne and Mr. Thomas Gomez, appear in "Escape Clause", the story of a strange contract between a mortal man and his most satanic majesty; a contract that ends most surprisingly.
The intimate score has an isolated running time of about 19 minutes, and it is played by a 19-piece-orchestra consisting of strings (violins, violas, cellos, basses) and one harp.
Similar themes of nostalgia, its potential risks, the relentless pressures of the business world, and the disillusionments that come with being an adult are explored in "A Stop at Willoughby", "Young Man's Fancy", "The Incredible World of Horace Ford", "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville", and to a lesser extent, "The Brain Center at Whipple's", as well as two Serling teleplays from before and after The Twilight Zone: The Kraft Television Theatre episode "Patterns" and the Night Gallery episode "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar".
[1] In an audio recording of an early 1970s lecture at Ithaca College included in Twilight Zone DVD packages, Serling was critical toward the episode, feeling in retrospect that his relative inexperience as a writer at the time was apparent in the screenplay.
However, Jodi Serling said in a 2019 interview with SyFy Wire that "Walking Distance" was her father's favorite episode of the show because it was "a very personal story for him" and there were "pieces of him in it".
"[3] Due to the high popularity of the episode and the music, the score has received several releases on CD in its original film version in monoaural sound and two re-recordings in stereo as well, one done by Joel McNeely with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (the only complete version) and the other by William T. Stromberg conducting the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.
Orchestrator John Morgan enlarged all sections of the orchestra for the latter, referring to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings as Herrmann's main influence on the score in the liner notes.
Composer/pianist Tom Alexander included the piece "Excerpts from Walking Distance" on his 2016 solo piano album Overbrook Avenue.