The Post in Which Roger Doesn’t Mention His Close Personal Relationship with Rod Serling

Richard writes:
Roger,
Being an old resident of Binghamton, I thought you might know about this:
Back when I was going to school there (1975-79), someone told me that an episode of The Twilight Zone had been shot in the Binghamton bus station. Naturally, I had been to the bus station periodically (although interestingly enough, I had to take the bus to Albany because there were no direct lines to Kingston). Well, recently, I bought the first 3 seasons of the Twilight Zone on DVD. Well, sure enough, episode 21 (Mirror Image–Feb. 26, 1960) does take place entirely in a bus station and one of the characters states that he is going from Binghamton to Syracuse! The thing was, I couldn’t tell if it was a TV set or if it was filmed on location!! My memory of the bus station is not that clear and certainly, it would have changed over the course of 15 years. Do you know anything about this?

Just curious! Thanks for listening!

I had not heard this. So I pulled off my The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree (Bantam Books, 1982) off the shelf. The show you reference is during the rocky first season and starred Vera Miles and Martin Milner. Right after that 2/26 show, no episodes aired until 4/1, according to the book, although other guides, such as this one show no such break in the season.

The pilot for The Twilight Zone was shot at Universal, but the season was shot at MGM. Buck Houghton, the show’s producer was quoted as saying: “MGM traditionally kept everything they ever made. Just about everything you could ever wish for in an anthology was there, including the back lot, which had New York Streets and forests and lakes and you name it.” Zicree continues: “The ‘you name it’ included small towns from Middle America and the Old West.”

I’ve long thought Binghamton (and Buffalo) were culturally in the Midwest. In any case, there’s no specific mention of filming on location in the book for that first season, so I’m going to suggest that it’s unlikely that they shot in Binghamton, or anywhere else, at least during year one.

The Wikipedia addresses this episode, and you can tell me if it’s right or wrong. I have a vague recollection of this show, probably when it was first in off-network reruns, and I thought it looked similar to, but not exactly the same as, the Greyhound station in Binghamton.

Not so incidentally, I got this e-mail recently:

Hi Roger,