Amazing Stories The Complete First Season
October 2006 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

At the time this television series premiered, Stephen Spielberg had been ignored by the Academy Awards. That honor was to come later. But he had enormous box office popularity, having directed Jaws, Close Encounters, E. T., and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Because of Spielberg’s popularity and power, the 24 shows of the first season of Amazing Stories were made with the high production values known to few other TV shows of the period.

The introduction sets the theme. We see a native man telling stories at a campfire, and then we whiz through history until we see the same man at his fire but on a television screen with a contemporary family sitting around it. TV has become the new campfire.

The shows were half an hour, about 24 minutes of drama, back when commercial breaks were far shorter than today’s. Spielberg himself directed only two stories, Ghost Train and The Mission. But he wrote most of the others and was closely involved with every production. Ghost Train is a nostalgic story of an old man about to die who informs his family that a train is coming -- right through their house -- to pick him up. It does, of course, and quite realistically. The Mission, the one full-hour episode, is set during a World War II bombing mission. When an enemy airplane hits his plane, the belly gunner becomes stuck in the lower turret, and the plane’s landing gear is frozen. It is taut and tense drama as the plane speeds toward an emergency landing that will surely crush the turret and kill the man in it. The episode is as good as television drama gets, even to the crazy ending, which is something only a director as skilled as Spielberg could pull off.

That episode stars Kevin Costner as the pilot, and Kiefer Sutherland makes one of his first screen appearances. Perhaps without knowing it, he was in training for 24. Other shows had a lot of star power, featuring actors like Sid Caesar, Gregory Hines, Milton Berle, Tim Robbins, Sam Waterston, Joe Pantoliano, and Eve Arden. The list is a good mix of veteran and newcomer talent. Among the directors who participated were Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Joe Dante. The show also brought in the best Hollywood film score composers. John Williams wrote the music for Ghost Train and provided the uplifting theme for the whole series. It was not surprising to see names like Jerry Goldsmith pop up on the end credits. Everything about this series is crème de la crème.

Unlike some anthology shows, Amazing Stories always seemed respectable, even when a story line involved nastiness. Not much blood was ever spilled, and every tale seemed to be family oriented, fit for that crowd sitting around the electronic campfire. Many shows just fizzled out at the end, and there were two or three total misfires, like Guilt Trip, starring Dom DeLuise and Lori Anderson. Some of the best shows were the comedies, such as Mummy, Daddy, a hilarious yarn about an actor playing a vengeful mummy who is called from the movie set to the hospital where his wife is delivering a baby. Without the time to remove his costume and makeup, he is mistaken by the townsfolk for a real mummy, while the mummy he is portraying is actually pursuing him.

In keeping with the standards established by the show, the DVD set has very high production values. The picture is sharp and clean. It looks minted yesterday, not 20 years ago. When I upsampled it using my Toshiba HD DVD player, it looked close to HD, although it is fullscreen. The sound has been re-mastered to Dolby Digital 5.1. The music sounds fine, the dialogue is perfectly clear, and the surrounds, though not there all the time, are used effectively.

The only extras are 20-30 minutes of deleted scenes. You won’t say, "Gee, I wish they’d left that one in," but you’ll find all the deletions entertaining. There is one minus. The four discs are packaged overlapping two to a panel. If you want to play the second disc, for instance, you have to take the first disc off its spindle before you can get the one you want. It saves space but it is irritating when you want to see just one episode, and it is on the covered-up disc.

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