Blog Post: Amazing Stories, Not! (x3)

Bay Street Video, the wonderful Bay Street Video, here in Toronto, stocks lots of old television series, specials, and documentaries. A few years ago I grabbed Steven Spielberg's misdirected half-hour anthology series, Amazing Stories. Like many video collectors, large and small, I watched two or three episodes before filing a television series to the back of the class. Forgotten. Until I pulled out all DVDs and Blu-ray sets last month to do a little reorganizing. While refiling the discs, Amazing Stories - Season One got called back to the front. Last night I cleared some time and ended up watching three episodes back-to-back, although that wasn't my original plan. Was my series watch of three due to my morbid fascination with a train wreck? Indeed it was.

Let me tell you a story....

In September of 1984 my radio blared some, what seemed like, amazing news: "Steven Spielberg will be producing a television series called Amazing Stories."

I couldn't wait. Well, I could, since I had just started film school, and the intensity of the first year of any such program would allow me to forget about any addition to a platform, television, however exciting it may be with the imagined misguided mad scientists and stomping giant robots, which was the first image that came to mind from my radio's waves. In my late teens I had essentially disregarded the tube as "appointment" "a waste of time every week". Any new program had to earn its stripes with me... even more so these days.

The year flew by, the summer job, my first in this great city of Toronto, and a modicum of anticipation energized the tummy. "The year of the anthology series" broke in September of 1985 with reboots of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, and the booting of Amazing Stories. A high school buddy of mine, Jonathan, who tripped to Toronto with me, and who was now a student at OCA (Ontario College of Art), arrived as planned to see what all the potential fuss might be. I had the big colour television, you see. Impressive, eh? The set's impressive screen size just set us up for thirty minutes of letdown.

"Ghost Train"

Steve? Spielberg? That's it? A freaking train?!

I love trains, but....

Infantile. The bit at the end with the train conductor and the boy's mother was embarrassing. (Spielberg at his patented worst.)

The series not only started off on the wrong rail, it continued its journey with two equally-underwhelming episodes: "The Main Attraction", which was funny enough for the first go-around, but one that lost any magnetism after just a few minutes; and "Alamo Jobe", grueling and drooling, galloping, bleating, in its twisted righteous self importance — a misprinted and rejected Classics Illustrated comic bucked by a horse.

Jonathan and I stopped there. Our train had arrived, and it was time to get the hell off! And get off, we did... if you'll pardon the expression.

John Williams' Amazing Stories theme music, while a fine piece on its own, leaving one with just one guess as to who wrote it, was wildly inappropriate; no fault of the composer, I'm sure.

Last night I watched a random selection of episodes, ones I missed back in 1984-85 ....

"One for the Road" —

I wasn't sure what the point of the story was, other than a pipsqueak version of the worst Twilight Zone episode. ("We get it! Ha ha!") While nicely directed by Thomas Carter, he refrains from overdoing camera technique, any effort by him is thwarted by a script that should never have gone to "mimeo". (Screenwriter Bob Gale had an interesting opinion on that Amazing issue, which I will get to before I wrap up this piece.)

"Gather Ye Acorns" —

An example of an idea that probably looked appealing when fastened in Spielberg's binder of archived story ideas, but one that should have been killed after the first draft teleplay. ("Well, it seemed like a good idea, but it's just not going to work" should have happened.) However, Mark Hamill was good, successfully rendering a man at different times in his extended lifespan. No surprises in this one... a core theme of Amazing Stories, it would seem.

"Mirror, Mirror" —

The episode last night that showed promise: its opening was culled from an old Hammer Studios horror film. Oh, that should have been a bad omen in that there's no way that level could be maintained throughout the episode's remaining 22 minutes. Yep, no go. Sam Waterson is a fine actor, but it just didn't work. ("Gee, that's nothing. When I see my reflection in the mirror each morning, images crack more horror than what Martin Scorsese could give the viewer. Martin Scorsese? That's it?! I'll direct my own scenes, thank you.") Oh, Helen Shaver and Dick Cavett help, somewhat. Anything to help bolster a hopeless script, one that should have been left lying as simple ideas on yellowed binder pages. Perhaps only kids would be scared by this one. Now that I think about it, Amazing Stories probably appealed most to young people. They may be today's defenders of the series. That is until they give it a rewatch.

Bob Gale, as quoted in Joseph McBride's excellent book, Steven Spielberg: a Biography ....

"Steven never could make up his mind what the show was going to be, whether it was going to be scary or whether is was going to be fantasy. Every month Steven would change his mind about what direction we should go. Television is not a director's medium, and it's great that Steven got all these directors in there to do these shows, but the scripts weren't any good. He should have spent more time getting the best writers in the world to contribute, and then worrying about the directors."

Fluttering whimsy, from which Amazing Stories suffers wholesale, is good for an episode or two: anything more indicates scripting problems and a lack of purpose.

What a waste of production management.

Amazing Stories started and ended its life a train wreck. To the scrapyard! No, not the DVD set!