- For other uses, please see Fever (disambiguation).
| “The Fever” | |||||||
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| The Twilight Zone episode | |||||||
 The Slot Machine from The Fever |
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| Episode no. | Season 1 Episode 17 |
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| Written by | Rod Serling | ||||||
| Directed by | Robert Florey | ||||||
| Guest stars | Everett Sloane : Franklin Gibbs Vivi Janiss : Flora Gibbs |
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| Production no. | 173-3627 | ||||||
| Original airdate | January 29, 1960 | ||||||
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| List of Twilight Zone episodes | |||||||
"The Fever" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
Contents |
Rod Serling's opening narration
"Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights, all expenses paid, at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs' knack with a phrase. But unbeknownst to either Mr. or Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there's a prize in their package neither expected nor bargained for. In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce, a most inoperative, deadly, life-shattering affliction known as The Fever."
Synopsis
Franklin and his wife Flora go to Las Vegas, Nevada because she won a competition. He detests gambling, but his wife is excited about their vacation. Franklin is given a coin by a drunk man at the casino, who makes Franklin use it in a slot machine. He wins and tells his wife that they should keep the money and not lose it back like the other people. As they depart, Franklin believes he hears someone calling his name. He continues to hear his name being spoken as he tries to sleep. Disturbed, he decides he cannot keep "tainted" money, and that he is going to get rid of it by putting it back in the machine. Later, Flora goes to the casino and finds him playing the machine obsessively. Addicted, Franklin has lost a great deal of their money. When Flora tries to coax him to stop, Franklin declares that he has lost so much, that he has to try to win some of it back. He becomes enraged when she presses for him to leave, declaring that the machine is "inhuman", that it "teases you, sucks you in." Others observe that he has been playing the machine for hours. Eventually, the slot machine takes his last dollar and breaks down. Franklin begins yelling and attacking the machine to give him back his "last dollar." He is taken out of the casino screaming. Later in bed, Franklin tells Flora that the machine was about to pay off, but deliberately broke down so that it wouldn't have to. He then hears the machine again calling his name. He sees it coming down the hallway to their room, "chasing" him, but Flora cannot see it and believes that he is going crazy. When the machine continues to follow him, repeating his name over and over, "Franklin, Franklin, Franklin!" he backs up towards the window, his hands over his ears, finally crashing through the glass and falling to his death. The police stand over his body, noting that his wife had stated that he had not slept in twenty-four hours. The last scene shows the slot machine rolling up to the dead body and spitting out Franklin's last dollar onto his dead hand.
Rod Serling's closing narration
"Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally, his life to an inanimate metal machine variously described as a one-armed bandit, a slot machine, or in Mr. Franklin Gibbs' words, 'a monster with a will all its own'. For our purposes, we'll stick with the latter definition, because we're in the Twilight Zone."
Trivia
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Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones. |
- "Serling celebrated the 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.
- The "voice" of the slot machine was created by recording the sound of many quarters and dimes running down a metal chute. Then, small speakers playing the sound of the coins in the chute were attached to an actor's throat. The actor then whispered his dialog, making the words with his mouth and larynx...but the metallic sound of the clinking coins came out of his mouth.
- In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Skill Crane", Mr. Krabs buys a crane game machine (in which you insert money to move a claw and get a prize). Squidward can't seem to win at it whereas SpongeBob does so easily, and the losing drives Squidward crazy; he even believes the creaking of the swinging claw is saying his name, much like the slot machine coin sound.
- In Disney's The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney's California Adventure, after leaving the elevator you are directed down a hall. In one of the areas before you get to the hall leading to the exit is the slot machine from this episode.
- There is a scene in Darren Aronofsky's adaptation of Requiem for a Dream which involves the character Sara Goldfarb being haunted by her refrigerator. The scene is very similar to one in this episode, when Franklin is haunted by his slot machine nemesis.
- A music video from the band The Chemical Brothers features a man that is on the run from a machine from the car factory where he works. It chases him throughout the city where the picture finally scrolls away from him sitting in the middle of the road laughing and crying, obviously insane, as numerous machines surround him.
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)
