Amazing Stories

1 9 8 5 – 1 9 8 7  (USA)
44 x 30 minute episodes

This modern-day Twilight Zone was an anthology of sci-fi and fantasy dramas from NBC and Universal, produced by Steven Spielberg.

The series attracted the cream of Hollywood, both in front of and behind the camera; Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Paul Bartel, Robert Zemeckis and Spielberg himself were amongst the directors involved while guest stars included Kevin Costner, Drew Barrymore, Mark Hamill, Milton Berle, David Carradine and Charlie Sheen amongst many, many others.

One special hour-long show (‘The Mission’), directed by Spielberg and starring Kevin Costner and Kiefer Sutherland, took place aboard a World War II plane, where the crew frantically tried to save a machine gunner trapped in a turret next to the plane’s locked and damaged wheels.

As it happened, however, the trapped man was a cartoonist with ambitions to work for Walt Disney, and the story ended with his drawing the wheels that would enable the plane to land safely.

The cartoon had become reality, distilling the essence of the Spielberg phenomenon into a single image.

Each half-hour instalment of Amazing Stories was allotted a budget of $800,000 to $1 million, but the series did not strike a chord and fared poorly against CBS’s Murder, She Wrote.

In ‘Fine Tuning’, sitcom-loving aliens kidnapped Milton Berle to take back home; Sondra Locke, Harvey Keitel and Beau Bridges guest-starred in an episode about a haunted painter directed by Clint Eastwood; Hayley Mills played a mother tormented by a Dr Seuss-inspired ‘Greibble’ after she made the mistake of throwing out her son’s comic books; and Patrick Swayze foreshadowed Steven King’s The Green Mile (1999) when he played a death-row convict who could heal the sick.

The funniest episode of the lot, ‘Mummy-Daddy’, subverted the horror genre by featuring an expectant father-to-be, stuntman, dashing to be by the side of his wife, only to face hostility from pitchfork-wielding locals when he forgot that he was wearing a mummy costume from a horror movie he was making.

The New York Times called Amazing Stories a “spotty skein of cliches, sentimentality, and ordinary hokum” but Spielberg had made a deal with NBC that they couldn’t cancel his series even if the ratings were bad (which they were), so 44 episodes were filmed.

The series was treated badly in the UK, where the BBC tended to use it as a schedule filler on Sunday afternoons.