If there was any downside to growing up as an 80s kid, then it would have to be the fact that you were living in a pre-Internet, analog era. Granted, that's not a bad thing in and of itself. It did mean, however, that you couldn't just log on like you do now, enter the name of your favorite movies, TV shows, or sometimes even the very commercials you grew up with, and then binge watch to your heart's content. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the closest thing to a downside about having an 80s childhood is that you could never experience all of it at once. There was always the risk that you might miss out on something important. Maybe you were like me, and were so addicted to the cartoons airing on the Disney Channel that you didn't bother to realize you could also catch airings of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or
Gremlins as well once Mickey, Donald, and Goofy had taken their final curtain calls for the day. Or maybe you're thinking is so damned one-track because you're still just a kid that you never even realize that HBO might have been showing a George Lucas produced animated fantasy called
Twice Upon a Time, and so you miss out on an obscure yet valuable gem. These were the risks for 80s kids. The good news on my side of the equation is that I wasn't that dense. Sometimes I'd be smart enough to think, "You know, that Tom Hanks
Big movie sounds like it could be a lot of fun. Maybe I'll keep an eye out for whenever its on".
Still, even with these occasional moments of insight thrown into the mix, the sad fact remains that while most of us 80s kids were blessed with what I can only describe now as a resurgence of the Romantic Movement in the Arts , it still meant none of us had the kind of childhood were you were able to capture it all. Even today, 80s media presents one of the richest cornucopias in terms of both viewing and reading material outside of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It's an entertainment catalogue whose plethora is so vast that it makes perfect sense that a lot of its best offerings were unrecognized on their first initial run. So that a lot of us are just now rediscovering what we missed out on when we were young. That's sort of how it's been for me when it comes to the treasures offered by The Ray Bradbury Theater. It's the kind of TV show that can only exist as the product of another time and era in the thinking of corporate media. This was an era when everything was less commodified. The original Hollywood studio system had come to an end, and the net result was a brief moment when artists kind of had full control of the car keys. It meant they could assemble their little red wagons and not be afraid to install as many types of story engines as their Imagination could allow. This applied to the realm of television as mush as it did to the now fading institution known as the movie theater.
It meant you were in for a treat if you were a kid in the 80s. Because a lot of the big networks now found themselves sort of having to take risks on high concept Fantasy and Sci-Fi ideas. Some of them were pretty obvious, like the staples we've all come to know and love such as
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or
Inspector Gadget. Others, however, took a more daring approach to the kind of stories they could tell. This was the case with the series that author Ray Bradbury wound up producing for HBO. By then the noted Sci-Fi scribe was already something of a giant in the industry. The kind of name with the sort of clout that no longer exists in the strictest sense of the term. If Ray were still alive, odds are even he could never have managed to pitch a series which consisted of little more than adaptations of his most famous short stories and get it greenlit today. It's also sort of an open question in my mind whether Hollywood in its contemporary form would be capable of doing his work justice. As a character in Billy Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard once observed, "It's the pictures that got small". That seems to apply to our ability to try and recapture all the worlds and characters we fell in love with so long ago back when we were kids. Everybody seems to have had bigger imaginations in the 1980s.
It's in part because of this, along with the factor of the breakout success of films like Jaws, Star Wars, and E.T. that Ray was in a position where the idea for a TV show made up of nothing but his own words and characters was able to get that much coveted greenlight. It didn't hurt his chances that HBO was also still just a fledgling network at the time, ready and thankfully more than willing to take chances on the kind of material it would broadcast in order to let itself stand out from what was then a very large and generous yet competitive pack. It was an era when the Nielson Ratings ruled the roost. Anyone who could get even a sizeable enough chunk of eyes glued to sets showcasing the network's products would guarantee it at least a good enough spot to begin with in the Ratings charts. Hence the willingness of HBO to take chances with stuff like Lucas's almost forgotten animated feature, or Ray Bradbury's own collection of short stories. The final results turned out to be pretty good, by and large. At the same time, this was one of those programs that was ostensibly a part of my childhood that I just never got around to seeing when it first aired. I've been playing catch-up for a while now.
In that sense, it's like being given a second chance to recapture those aspect of your childhood that you may have missed the first time around. When it comes to reviewing a show like this there's a lot of good offerings to be had. Some of the stuff on that old anthology can surprise you with the level of their sophistication. I think it's best to start out by keeping things simple, however, and focus for now on one of the more easily read episodes to feature on the program. It's a nice little little bit of childhood thrills and chills, and it goes by the title of
The Screaming Woman.
