| Series: | The Twilight Zone |
| Season: | 1 |
| Episode: | 35 |
| Director: | |
| Music: | Stock |
| Production: | 173-3617 |
| Guests: |
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| Prev: | The After Hours |
| Next: | A World of His Own |
| Season Article: | The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series, season 1) |
| Episode List: | List of The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) episodes |
"The Mighty Casey" is episode thirty-five of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.[1] Its title is a reference to the baseball poem "Casey at the Bat". It originally aired on June 17, 1960, on CBS. The episode was written by Rod Serling,[2] and directed by Robert Parrish and Alvin Ganzer.
"Mouth" McGarry, the manager of a broken-down baseball team called the Hoboken Zephyrs on its last legs, is introduced to Dr. Stillman, an inventor who built a robot named Casey to play on the team. Casey has the ability to throw super-fast balls, super-slow balls, and extreme curveballs that cannot be hit.
Eventually, after Casey is beaned by a ball and given a physical examination, the National League finds out and rules that Casey must be taken off the team because he is not human. Dr. Stillman then installs an artificial heart for Casey.
However, due to his new heart, Casey now possesses human emotions. He refuses to throw his fast balls anymore, saying that he feels empathy with the batter and does not want to ruin the batter's career by striking him out, and quits baseball to become a social worker. With the team sure to fold soon, Dr. Stillman gives McGarry Casey's blueprints as a souvenir. Glancing at them, McGarry suddenly has an idea, and runs after Dr. Stillman to tell him. Rumors later surface intimating that McGarry has used the blueprints to build a world-champion team of Casey robots.
According to The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic by Martin Grams, the entire production was originally filmed with Paul Douglas in the manager role. (Douglas previously played a baseball team manager in the 1951 film Angels in the Outfield.) On Friday, September 11, 1959, the day after the episode finished shooting, Douglas died. Douglas had been, unbeknownst to anyone, suffering from an incipient coronary during the production; his performance was adversely affected, as on film, Douglas appeared mottled and out-of-breath.
Writer and executive producer Rod Serling felt that the circumstances of Douglas' death cast a pall over what was supposed to be a light-hearted comedic episode, and decided that a re-shoot was necessary. CBS refused to finance any re-shooting, so consequently, virtually the entire production was reshot at the expense of Rod Serling's Cayuga Productions with Jack Warden in the team manager's role. The other roles were not recast, and as much footage from the original filming was used as possible, including (in the episode's final shot) a scene in which Douglas is seen in the distance, with his back to the camera, as the manager. Original director Alvin Ganzer was not available for the re-shoot, so Robert Parrish was brought to complete shooting; both are credited as directors on the finished episode.
In Serling's original first-draft script (and in his short-story adaptation that appeared in the 1960 anthology, Stories from The Twilight Zone), the team was supposed to have been the Brooklyn Dodgers (their stadium in the original story was "Tebbet's Field"), who, like the fictitious "Hoboken Zephyrs", moved west in 1958 to become the Los Angeles Dodgers. The closing narration refers to the original draft: at the time of broadcast, the Dodgers had beaten the Chicago White Sox to win the previous year's World Series, doing so with a dominant pitching staff featuring Don Drysdale, Johnny Podres and a young Sandy Koufax.
The baseball scenes were filmed at the Los Angeles version of Wrigley Field, an often-used venue for Hollywood films featuring baseball scenes. The TV series Home Run Derby was also filmed at Wrigley, and also aired that summer of 1960. The Wrigley footage, with the stands empty, was supplemented by brief clips of stock-footage crowd scenes, from the Polo Grounds and Fenway Park.