Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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108 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Complete Ray Bradbury Theater! Short Stories from the Master!, January 25, 2006
Finally, The Ray Bradbury Theater is back on DVD!!! This forgotten classic is a must for all anthology lovers (Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Amazing Stories).
The Show began on HBO and showcased some high profile names from the 1980s. It was moved to the USA Network and apparently thrived enough to have been on until the early 1990s. Personally, I think the show would have been better off if it would have stayed on HBO because the early episodes are a few minutes longer and being on a paid movie channel they attracted bigger names. Plus, the original opening to the show with Ray walking around his office was a lot more atmospheric and creepy than the later episodes on the USA Network.
Like all anthology shows there are some bad episodes. However, what I like about this show is that ALL of the 65 episodes were written by one of the greatest American writers of the 20th Century! True there are some sleepers and stinkers in the bunch, but in general this is a very entertaining show. Even the episodes that do fail, I think suffer more from ineffective special effects and/or lackluster acting and dialogue than from Mr. Bradbury's actual "ideas."
This box set is very affordable. Unfortunately, the re-mastering is mediocre in picture and sound quality and because there are like 13 episodes per disc, the episodes look pixilated during fast motion scenes which can be annoying! To top things off, the episodes aren't even in the order of which they aired and there is even misspelling of a title on the DVD menu! However, I'm just happy to have this show on DVD. I got it for a great price and provided like a month full of cheap entertainment. For my 2 cents worth, I would say "The Playground," "The Murderer," and "Tomorrow's Child" are the high-water mark episodes of this show. Down below I rate each episode.
My rating system goes like this:
Excellent ... is a classic episode
Acceptable ... is an enjoyable, but perhaps slightly flawed episode
Poor ... is a boring and/or weak episode
"Marionettes Inc." Acceptable
"The Playground" Excellent (The ONE everyone remembers!!!)
"The Crowd" Excellent
"The Town were No One Got Off" Excellent
"The Screaming woman" Excellent
"Banshee" Excellent
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" Excellent
"Skelton" Poor
"The Emissary" Acceptable ( It bugs me they have a girl playing a boy character!)
"Gotcha!" Excellent (Starts off slow, but then becomes intensely scary!)
"The Man Upstairs" Acceptable
"Small Assassin" Poor
"Punishment without Crime" Excellent
"On the Orient, North" Poor (Zzzzzzz...)
"The Coffin" Acceptable
"Tyrannosaurus Rex" Poor
"There was an Old Woman" Acceptable
"And so Died Riabouchinska" Acceptable
"The Dwarf" Acceptable
"A Miracle of Rare Devices" Poor
"The Lake" Excellent
"The Wind" Acceptable
"The Pedestrian" Poor
"A Sound of Thunder" Excellent
"The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" Excellent
"The Haunting of the New" Poor
"To the Chicago Abyss" Poor
"Hail and Farewell" Excellent
"The Veldt" Poor
"Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!" Poor
"Mars is Heaven" Excellent
"The Murderer" Excellent (Both hilarious and thought provoking, my favorite episode)
"Touched with Fire" Acceptable
"The Black Ferris" Excellent (It's like a mini movie)
"Usher II" Acceptable
"Touch of Petulance" Acceptable
"And the Moon be still as Bright" Acceptable
"The Toynbee Convector" Excellent
"Exorcism" Poor (Seems like a pilot for a bad TV show)
"The Day it Rained Forever" Poor
"The Long Years" Acceptable
"Here there be Tygers" Acceptable
"The Earthmen" Poor
"Zero Hour" Excellent
"Colonel Stonesteel and the "Desperate Empties" Poor
"The Concrete Mixer" Acceptable
"The Utterly Perfect Murder" Acceptable
"Let's Play Poison" Poor
"The Martian" Poor
"The Lonely One" Excellent
"The Happiness Machine" Acceptable
"Tomorrow's Child" Excellent (A bizarre episode, Rod Serling would have been proud!)
"The Handler" Acceptable
"Great Wide World Over There" Acceptable
"Fee Fie Foe Fum" Poor
"The Anthem Sprinters" Poor
"By the Numbers" Acceptable (A surprise ending, indeed)
"The Long Rain" Excellent
"The Dead Man" Excellent
"Sun and Shadow" Acceptable
"Silent Towns" Excellent (Very Funny)
"Downwind from Gettysburg" Excellent
"Some live like Lazarus" Acceptable
"The Tombstone" Poor
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42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent collected-works set, January 29, 2006
I have always liked Ray Bradbury's mind. As a kid I read his stories in comic books and as a teen I read nearly all of his books. When the Ray Bradbury Theater was on the USA Channel in the 1990's I tried to never miss it. I don't understand why, but I guess I was one of the few people on the planet who had no difficulty in setting my VCR to record whatever I wanted to watch if I wasn't home to watch it. As a result I just happen to have a few miscellaneous episodes of the Ray Bradbury Theater around that I recorded fifteen years ago. The visual quality of the video tapes were nearly as good as the actual broadcasts. I was excited to learn that the entire run of 65 episodes of the Ray Bradbury Theater were released on DVD last year but after reading some of the disparaging revues railing its inferior quality, I refrained from buying it. Recently I bought a used copy on Amazon and I have been kicking myself ever since because the quality is better than my video tapes and I have been really loving watching the many episodes I have never seen. True they do not look as pretty as transfers of high-budget Hollywood fare of today but the originals were never filmed on 35mm and will always look like a TV show. If you like Ray Bradbury or if you enjoyed the show, you'll be glad you bought this set.
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63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally!, March 29, 2005
I've been waiting for a long time to see this series come to DVD. I remember watching it when I was a teen and loving it. Now, almost 20 years later, the show lives again on DVD! Some of Bradbury's best short stories are shown here, including "The Wind", "The Veldt", "The Town Where No One Ever Got Off", and "A Sound of Thunder" (being made into a feature film for this Summer). There are over 65 episodes here, which gives you an idea of the hits and misses you'll find. Not every episode is a gem (what series could ever say that anyway?), but most are great. Guest stars galore like Jeff Goldblum, Drew Barrymore, Peter O'Toole, William Shatner (in a REALLY creepy story called "The Playground"), and lots of others (remember, this was the 80's, and those were big names then). The special effects aren't necessarily anything to brag about, but the stories can keep you on the edge of your chair.
Unfortunately, the image transfer is horrible at times. The images blur when the camera moves, or pixellate at odd times. Some of the images look washed out. But keep in mind that this was probably made off of older masters, so you can't expect perfection. I'm just glad to see it finally made it to DVD so we can see it again in its entirety!. The shows range anywhere from 22 to 30 minutes.
If you're a fan of the Twilight Zone (of which Ray wrote a couple of episodes), then this is another great series to add to the collection (and at a good price for all the episodes). There are no extras at all in here, but I can live with that. Thanks for bringing it back for us!
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