The Twilight Episode That Was Turned Into A Kids Movie

“The Electric Grandmother” is a NBC made for TV movie released in 1982. I never saw this thing growing up, but it turns out that a lot of kids did. Many of my friends would talk about this movie and it sounded like a fever dream. All of them also assumed that it must have been based on a book that they never read in class.

After watching “The Electric Grandma” myself, I was really thrown off at how weird it all felt. It’s a really strange story about a family that loses their mother, and instead of the father picking up the slack, he decides to replace the mom with a robot grandma that shoots liquids out of her finger tips. Everything felt a little off, but the movie was presenting everything in such a positive and romantic light. I was kind of waiting for there to be a twist or a least a moral to the story. What is the educational value in this? I thought that maybe it was lost in translation from the book?

So I did a little research and found out that The Electric Grandmother isn’t based on a book. It’s based off a short story by Ray Bradbury from 1969, which itself is based off a 1962 episode of the Twilight Zone that Bradbury wrote. So the fact that this was written in 1962 explains why it’s more socially acceptable for a man to buy a robot than to just learn how to do laundry.

This was the 100th episode of Twilight Zone and it was called I Sing the Body Electric. I watched the episode and it’s not very good. I wanted to see if it was popular with Twilight Zone fans and it turns out they’re not big fans either. It’s never ranked as the worst, but it doesn’t show up in any top episodes list even when it’s the best 100 episodes.

So, The Electric Grandma, is made for TV movie for kids that’s a remake of a middling twilight zone episode released 20 years earlier. Okay, that explains a lot about this movie. Watch a full breakdown of the “classic” film “The Electric Grandmother” by watching the video above.