Tales of Tomorrow (TV Series) The Great Silence (1953) User Reviews

An interesting experiment that is a bit hard to watch.

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 14 September 2012]

The show begins by a TV announcer telling the audience that there is some sort of weird anomaly that has been causes portions of the planet to lose their voices. And, it is expected to spread and cover the Earth soon. However, they also THINK that it's only temporary--something caused by recent nuclear testing.

The scene now switches to a man (Burgess Meredith) and his wife. They live in a rural part of the country and have already lost their ability to speak. However, by accident, Meredith stumbles upon an alien and its space craft. The problem is that he can't exactly tell anyone--and he tries. There is an interesting twist at the end...and I'll leave that for you to see.

The show has two strikes against it. First, the writer seems to have forgotten that people CAN still write--and how this didn't occur to Meredith's character is beyond me. Second, although an unusual idea and it took guts to do it, it was not an especially enjoyable experience seeing everyone pantomiming throughout the show.

Burgess Meredith and Paul Ford and a Really Silly Idea

[Hitchcoc · 6/10 · 11 August 2013]

Can any of these characters write or draw a picture? The world is suffering from a substance that has muted the population. Burgess Meredith and his wife live in the woods. While he's out looking for a deer, he runs across a flying saucer, but he is incapable of communicating this. Not only that, a dwarf dressed as an alien in a rubber suit, has had one of his hands lopped by one of Meredith's traps. This now degenerates into a hopeless pantomime. Burgess goes to town to try to explain to Paul Ford what happened. What follows is a hilarious series of efforts that parallel Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman in "Young Frankenstein" stuck in the rotating bookshelf. Why they chose to do this is beyond me, but I have to admit if you throw out all possible critical observation, this is quite a hoot. Oh, by the way, do any of you have a pack of ten sticks of dynamite in a box in your house? Doesn't everyone?

An imaginative and amusing episode of the archaic sci-fi anthology

[jamesrupert2014 · 8/10 · 30 December 2021]

'Pa,' an illiterate mountain man (Burgess Meredith), tries to convince authorities through mime that the mysterious loss of the ability to speak spreading across the nation is a prelude to an alien invasion and not a result of H-bomb testing. Much of the episode is played for laughs, notably the scenes where 'Pa' and 'Ma' squabble silently before 'Pa' is sent out to rustle up some victuals or when 'Pa' tries to explain 'alien invasion' by pointing to stars on the flag and then kicking over a globe. Considering the show's usually small budget Pa's 'close encounter' is pretty good and the scene where his earlier discovery of what appears to be a sparkly three-fingered hand is explained is one-of-a-kind. Easily the most entertaining (albeit it a bit silly) episode of the old series that I have seen to date.