Sunday nights in 1985 were all about Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. The opening credits were a mix of fantastical John Williams music and sweeping computer animation. In the preceding year, The Last Starfighter demonstrated that mid-80s CGI had advanced to the point of motion-picture-level special effects, and the Amazing Stories opening gave us a knight in armor swinging a sword, animated books flying through a Harry Pottereseque castle, and spaceships soaring through the stars. The series was an anthology, each episode a different amazing story with a different cast, inspired by its namesake, the Amazing Stories magazine first published in 1926.
Spielberg, during the amazing 80s
The anthology format flourished in the 80s. Think about the anthology movies - 1981’s Heavy Metal and 1982’s Creepshow come to mind. When was the last time you saw a modern movie that was a collection of short stories? Certainly anthology television shows still exist. Netflix’s Black Mirror is a perfect example, and I’ve written reviews on my site about some of Netflix and Amazon’s other offerings of Electric Dreams and Love, Death and Robots. So, when I saw a 2020 reboot of the 1985 series, in particular during a pandemic year where we’re craving new content, my interest was piqued.
Premiering on Apple+, the 2020 reboot smartly retains the original John Williams theme music with a newly-imagined CGI opening.
There are only five episodes, which seems quite small considering the 1985 series had twenty-four episodes per season. In the pilot, “The Cellar”, a handyman restoring an old house time-travels to 1921, where he meets a free-spirited young woman while trying to figure out how to return to modern day. The mechanism of time traveling is a sudden drop in air pressure from a super storm. He deduces, Back-to-the-Future-style, that being at the right place when the storm hits will jolt him to the present. It’s a very generic time-travel story. A man travels into the past and meets a woman.
It’s quite similar to the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.
“The Cellar” isn’t a bad story. It’s just not an amazing story. The pacing is slow and it lacks the Spielberg hook. As a writer, there are certain story beats you need to hit. In long fiction, you establish normal life before introducing an upset to kickoff the plot. In short pulp fiction, you jump right into things with the hook. Spielberg had a mastery of using the hook even in feature-length movies. In 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it was the discovery of a perfectly-preserved WWII squadron in the middle of a desert.
In 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark it was a dangerous trek into a trap-laden mountain in search of a golden idol.
There’s no setup for the characters in these opening scenes. Who are they and what are they doing is part of the hook. It’s the opening beat of an amazing story. Arguably, the opening of Raiders isn’t even part of the plot. The golden idol’s acquisition has nothing to do with the quest for the ark and doesn’t provide any momentum for that storyline. Its sole purpose is to introduce us to Indiana Jones, rugged relic-hunter, and learn that he has a nemesis, Belloq. But it works. The hook is set.
The remaining four Amazing Stories episodes generally suffer from the same issue with beats. There’s a person who doesn’t move on after her death, an alien-possession of a coma survivor, and a time-traveling WWII pilot who helps a family before returning to the past. The standout episode is “Dynoman and the Volt!’, which feels like an amazing story. A comic-book-loving boy, who is made fun of and ditched by his friends, teams up with his grandfather, a grumpy man who is recovering from an injury that’s cost him the ability to work. His grandfather also loved comic books as a boy, and ordered a ring that his favorite superhero, Dynoman, wore. Sixty years later it arrives in the mail. When the grandfather puts it on, he slowly gains Dynoman’s powers.
There is no crime-fighting in this story. Both the boy and the grandfather want to use the ring’s powers to impress their peers and regain respect. The story is a character story about the strained relationships of the grandfather, father, and boy, but what makes it work is that it’s just fun. It hits the right note that there’s still the adventure-loving boy in all of us, regardless of how grown-up we may think we’ve become.
In a way, I wish there were more than five episodes. There weren’t any bad episodes, but most were bland, except for Dynoman. It makes me wonder that, with a twenty-four-episode season like the 1985 original series, how many more Dynomans there could have been.
Incidentally, as I thought about the original series I found that all I remembered was the opening theme. I mean, there were forty-five episodes, certainly some must have stuck out? Sure, it’s been thirty-five years (!), but I can remember plenty of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes from the same timeframe. It turns out, the original series really wasn’t that good. There were a few Dynomans in there, such as Christopher Lloyd in “Go to the Head of the Class”, a very Death-Becomes-Her plot where two students curse their teacher with unexpected consequences.
Or “Remote Control Man” where a meek man discovers his remote control can replace his awful family members with television characters, which at first seems great until he realizes the characters come with all of the crazy plots that TV characters have.
Just from the one-sentence plot summary of “Remote Control Man”, you can tell there is a bit of a moral to the story, in the same way that the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits episodes usually had a perspective on mankind. It’s interesting because it’s not so much the plot that makes it a good story - I mean, the 70’s Hulk literally bursts through the remote control man’s wall at one point - but it’s the lesson. Anyway, something to noodle on as I search for some of the original forty-five episodes to rewatch.
