Dr.This CHILDREN'S BOOK TITLED," FEVER DREAM " is authentically HAND SIGNED & DATED by LEGENDARY late Science Fiction author ,Ray Bradbury in orange marker.Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures (10).Go to the Head of The Class (Amazing Stories, 1986).The action moves to a wonderfully atmospheric cemetery (gnarled trees and ankle-deep mist), and after some spooky business with the pair hiding in an open grave to avoid a drunken caretaker, they break into the Beanes family crypt to prepare the potion ingredients, which include a severed bat's wing (supplied by Cyn, no questions asked), dead katydids, a graven image (a picture of Beanes from the school yearbook), rose water, the dirt from a freshly dug grave, and finally, a finger tip from a blood relative, which they procure from a reposing corpse (Ebenezer Beanes, 1854-1936) using a pair of garden shears. But although I fancied myself capable of casting black magic spells on my enemies and perhaps raising the dead, I never quite had the courage to sneak out my bedroom window at night.
The idea of kids trying to wield supernatural power using whatever pop-culture resources were available to them really spoke to me (I previously posted about my childhood dabbling with the dark arts trying to perform a spell depicted in the adaptation of John Bellairs' The House With A Clock In Its Walls from the TV special Once Upon a Midnight Scary). This mixture ignite at the stroke of midnight, (A July '86 TV Guide blurb suggested the show was poorly titled, since the stories were so often "banal and juvenile.")Īdd dirt from a grave that is freshly dug,Īnd the fingertip of a dead relation by blood. While technically impressive (every episode looked like a big-budget feature film), the stories were often of the treacly variety, eschewing irony for sentimentality, and straining to emulate those moments of wonder that Spielberg's films seemed to deliver effortlessly. Unrealistic expectations aside, Amazing Stories, it turned out, was not exactly what I was looking for in an anthology show. A who's who of talent, both on-screen ( Kevin Costner, John Lithgow, Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Harvey Keitel, Mark Hamill, Keifer Sutherland, Christina Applegate, Drew Barrymore, and Forest Whitaker, for starters), and behind the camera ( Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, Clint Eastwood, Irvin Kershner, Martin Scorsese, Brad Bird, and Tobe Hooper) would be pitching in to make sure Amazing Stories was the greatest thing to grace your television screen. So the prospect of this Hollywood-conquering hero returning triumphant to the unworthy boob-tube was kinda sorta unbelievable.Īnd he wasn't doing it alone.
The Extra-Terrestrial, Twilight Zone: The Movie and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on his director's resume, not to mention a producer credit on Poltergeist, The Goonies, Gremlins, and Back To the Future. But this was 1985, not 1971, and Spielberg now had Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. Of course, Spielberg got his humble start in television, directing memorable episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery (1969) and one of the best made-for-TV movies of all time, Duel.
There are two words that distinguished NBC's Amazing Stories from the other sci-fi/fantasy anthology TV series that arrived in the mid- 1980s (titles like The (New) Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Ray Bradbury Theater), and those two words are: