Charles pours himself a large whiskey, shrugging off his sister’s appeals to calm down. William Shatner, who plays Charles, has ditched the Captain Kirk smirk for a haunted thousand-yard stare, though the signature halting delivery remains.
“You should have seen it. Smelled it. Heard it. The playground stinks. Tennis shoes. Blood. Dirty bandages…”
Shatner’s character has a phobia of playgrounds. As if the 1980s iteration of a playground isn’t terrifying enough in its own right, with its rusting slides, creaking swings and deadly roundabouts, Charles was tortured in one by bullies as a child. In the episode The Playground, he frets over taking his young son through the chicken-wire gates for the first time.
As ever, with The Ray Bradbury Theater, there’s a fiendish twist.
Amazon Prime is streaming five out of the six seasons of the HBO anthology that aired between 1985 and 1992. Kitsch, macabre, gloriously schlocky and sometimes flimsy (both the incidental music and the cheap sets with lashings of blue light), The Ray Bradbury Theater grew from the same cable-TV compost as The Twilight Zone (for which Bradbury also wrote), Tales from the Crypt, the George A. Romero-produced Tales from the Dark Side, Amazing Stories and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which began the anthology genre in the 1960s but had a second innings on cable in 1985.
Bradbury, who died in 2012, was the prolific American author best known for Fahrenheit 451, but it’s his 1950s collections of short stories – such as The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Golden Apples of the Sun and The October Country – that are the basis for The Ray Bradbury Theater. The 80s saw a resurgence of interest in the 50s; not only in fashion and in music, but on screen: Back to the Future, Stand by Me and The Wonder Years were among the nostalgia hits.
Perhaps Bradbury’s worries about dystopian society fed into the Cold War fears of the era. As he told The Guardian, he was preoccupied with the future from a young age, through the adventures of Buck Rogers, space expeditions and time machines. And there are many space-age episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater, such as And the Moon Be Still as Bright, in which we learn with sinking familiarity that chickenpox wiped out a whole civilisation on Mars. “But what the hell. We made it. That’s all that matters, doesn’t it?” says the sole astronaut who feels affected by this. “I thought YOU would understand,” he says to the crew member of Cherokee descent.
But there’s also much that mocks the mannerisms of Earthbound society. In Exorcism, bitter rivals at the Ladies Honeysuckle Harmony Lodge resort to witchcraft to undermine one another. In The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone, a best-selling author at the top of his game is thrilled to be passed a note at his book signing that promises he will be murdered. “You have written too many books,” his would-be assassin moans. “How do I hate thee?”
Stars include Jeff Goldblum (and his perfect hair) in The Town Where No One Got Off; Eugene Levy in The Skeleton as a hypochondriac who meets a grizzly end; and Leslie Nielsen as the enigmatically sinister Fantoccini in Marionettes, Inc. Things get meta when Drew Barrymore reads a Tales from the Crypt comic in The Screaming Woman.
Bradbury himself appears at the beginning of each episode to introduce the plot, in the style of the British TV series Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. The latter ran from 1979 to 1988, with stars such as Joan Collins and John Mills. Whereas Dahl addresses the viewer from a comfortable armchair by a roaring fire, Bradbury is surrounded by writerly clutter, curios and a typewriter.
Untroubled by rave reviews in its initial run, The Ray Bradbury Theater is a lucky dip best played late at night. In fact, you’ve probably seen it before, in a haze after midnight, already feeling like you were entering a portal to some other eerie dimension.
