10 Twilight Zone Episodes That Eerily Predicted The Future
4. Steel
Set ten years in the future in 1974, boxing has been banned. However, robot fighters managed by humans have kept the sport alive. Unfortunately, Steel Kelly played by Lee Marvin manages an outdated, broken-down robot fighter.
Kelly’s ‘Battling Maxo’ breaks down just before a big fight. Kelly and his partner don’t have the resources to fix him for bell time. Rather than give up the fight and the purse, Kelly decides to masquerade as a robot to take on one of the newest robot fighter models and is nearly beaten to death. This season 2 episode was based on Richard Matheson’s short story which also inspired the 2011 film Real Steel.
Although Rod Serling’s prediction that prizefighting would soon be banned, the episode accurately predicts the rise of robot fighting. It started in the late 1980s with the ‘Denver Mad Scientists Society’s’ Critter Crunch event and continues today with shows like ‘Robot Wars’ and ‘BattleBots’.