Ring-a-Ding Girl

"Ring-a-Ding Girl"
	The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 5; Episode 13
Directed by	Alan Crosland, Jr.
Written by	Earl Hamner, Jr.
Featured music	stock
Production code	2623
Original air date	December 27, 1963
Guest appearance(s)
	Maggie McNamara; Mary Munday; David Macklin; Betty Lou Gerson; Vic Perrin; George Mitchell; Bing Russell; Hank Patterson;

"Ring-a-Ding Girl" is episode 133 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on December 27, 1963 on CBS. In this episode, a movie star (played by Maggie McNamara) receives a mystical summon to return to her hometown on a matter of life and death.

Opening narration

Introduction to Bunny Blake. Occupation: film actress. Residence: Hollywood, California, or anywhere in the world that cameras happen to be grinding. Bunny Blake is a public figure; what she wears, eats, thinks, says is news. But underneath the glamour, the makeup, the publicity, the buildup, the costuming, is a flesh-and-blood person, a beautiful girl about to take a long and bizarre journey into The Twilight Zone.

Plot

Barbara "Bunny" Blake is a movie star living in Hollywood, California. Her hometown fan club in Howardsville, Virginia sends her a ring, and she tells her manager that her loyalty is still to her town because they all chipped in to help her go to Hollywood to pursue her career. Looking into the stone, she sees her sister Hildy imploring Bunny to come home. Though she has been hired to make a movie in Rome, Bunny makes an impromptu trip to Howardsville to surprise Hildy and her family.

Hildy and her son Bud hope that Bunny will attend the annual founder's day picnic, which coincidentally happens to be that very afternoon. Upon hearing this and after seeing a vision of local television newsreader Ben Braden also asking her to "come home", Bunny suffers a seizure, and Hildy calls over an old friend, the town doctor, who diagnoses that Bunny has been working too hard at her acting career and orders her to rest, despite her claiming that she was faking the seizure as an excuse to call him over. As he is also the chairman/organizer for the annual founder's day picnic, Bunny requests that he postpone the entire event so that she can see her friends in more personal settings, but he refuses and interprets her request as a sign that she has been spoiled by her Hollywood lifestyle.

As she sees a vision of her high school's custodian, Cyrus Gentry, requesting her help for the town, Bunny flees to the bathroom. The doctor gives Bunny's prescription slip to Hildy, but Bunny insists on accompanying Bud to the drugstore. On the way, they stop by her old school to meet Gentry, whom she asks to leave the school gates open. She then goes to the local TV station for an impromptu interview with Braden. In the interview, she announces a one-woman show in the high school gymnasium for the same time as the picnic. When Braden points out the conflict, she flippantly says the people will enjoy her show more.

Hildy accuses Bunny of "showing off" by forcing the town to choose between seeing her or attending the picnic. Bunny insists that she loves the town and its people and that she is using her show as a way of thanking them. Hildy at first says that she and Bud are going to the picnic. When Bunny sees a vision in her ring of a jetliner and its passengers, including herself and her manager, Hildy reconsiders and agrees to attend Bunny's show. As they are about to leave, it begins to rain. As they hear sirens outside, Bunny envisions herself on the jetliner in the rain, and she hugs her slightly bewildered sister. A breaking news flash comes on over the radio, and while Hildy and Bud are listening to the first reports of an airplane crash, Bunny quietly says goodbye, goes outside in the rain and vanishes.

A police officer calls to inform Hildy that Bunny is among the deceased passengers on the plane. The radio news anchor notes conflicting reports from onlookers who said that Bunny was on the plane and several townspeople who had seen her in town that day. The anchorman notes that many of the townspeople were in the auditorium waiting to see Bunny's show and that they would have died had they gone to the picnic because the jetliner crashed on the grounds. Hildy finds Bunny's ring, which had fallen to the floor and is now chipped and charred, and she realizes that Bunny had predicted her impending death in the plane crash and had come in spirit via the ring to save her friends and family.

Closing narration

We are all travelers. The trip starts in a place called birth, and ends in that lonely town called death. And that's the end of the journey, unless you happen to exist for a few hours, like Bunny Blake, in the misty regions of the Twilight Zone.

Cast

Maggie McNamara as Barbara "Bunny" Blake
Mary Munday as Hildy Powell
David Macklin as Bud Powell
Betty Lou Gerson as Cici
Vic Perrin as State Trooper (Jim)
George Mitchell as Dr. Floyd
Bing Russell as Ben Braden
Hank Patterson as Mr. Gentry
Bill Hickman as Pilot

References

DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0
Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0
Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)

External links

"Ring-a-Ding Girl" at IMDb
"Ring-a-Ding Girl" at TV.com

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The Twilight Zone (1959) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgment Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"
Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander with Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"