Shark Bytes

Good Show.

This show never jumped. I still remember seeing the end of the "Head Of the Class" episode with Christopher Lloyd laughing with that big scarfe around his neck....Creepy as hell and just plain AWESOME!!!!!

No one is mentioning the "Boogie man" episode because it wasn't an amazing story episode. It was a New Twilight Zone episode, season one, episode 10 entitled "The Shadow Man"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Man

It was a wonderful episode and one of my favorite ones of the new twilight zone series.

I wasn't that crazy about the show.

Each episode came across as a predictable miniature Spielsberg movie.

If you saw one, you saw them all.

I havn't read such an amazing story.

The name is 'Amazing Stories', not 'this-stuff-is-to-be-taken-seriously'.It's about suspending disbelief. Talented guest stars, dynamic stories, terrific production values, John William's fanfarish theme...all combine to make this one of my all-time favorites. The episode where Charles Durning prevented an airliner crash because he dreamt it earlier, the one where Kathy Baker meets herself from 30 years in the future, or when Patrick Swayze is struck by lightning in a prison break, and gains the ability to cure people with a touch (and this was before Stephen King's The Green Mile). And the list goes on.
Sure, it had a few turkeys, but what show doesn't?

I think this show's downfall was that they built it up like it was going to be the next Twilight Zone. Of course, Spielberg's and Serling's world outlooks are miles apart to begin with, but in tone and style this show was a lot closer to Serling's swan-song (and Spielberg's first directing gig), Night Gallery. Like that show the quality of the episode depended on who directed it. Some (the WWII episode, the Amazing Fallsworth) were really classic, while others were just stupid. This is the perfect show to watch on DVD.

Way more misses than hits on this show. The aforementioned "ghost train" episode was the pilot, I think, and pretty lame. Anyone remember the "mummy" episode with Balki in it---they were filming a mummy movie and meanwhile there was a, wait for it, REAL mummy on the set! Gee, if you'd never seen any 3 Stooges shorts you might think that was a pretty fresh idea. And the one with the 2 kids with the black babysitter was pretty racially behind-the-times, don't you think? (A black woman with an Island accent? She MUST know voodooo!).
Just goes to show not everything Speilberg touched turns to gold.

I remember waiting with anticipation the arrival of "Amazing Stories". How could I not? Spielberg could seemingly do no wrong and finally he was coming to TV with a series. Well, then I saw that as far as TV goes, Spielberg has the Midas touch in reverse. That is, everything turns to crap. The vast majority of the series was just garbage. The first episode was nonsensical junk and subsequent ones weren't much better. About the only bright spot in the entire lineup was "The Mission" with Kevin Costner as a B-17 pilot with crewman trapped in the ball turret. Yes, I'm sure that was traumatizing for some kids, but, geez, the turret gunner was rescued at the end. (And by the way, Costner's character didn't want to just give up on saving the gunner. However, he had to think about the ENTIRE crew, not just one man. If he had continued to try to save the ball turret gunner, he could have lost not only that man but everyone else on board the bomber. Costner's character did what any B-17 pilot would have done. That is, he did what was best for whole crew.) I would have thought "Gather Ye Acorns" would have been much more traumatic given that Mark Hamill's character had basically wasted his entire life. Sure, he got extreme wealth but only after he whizzed away the best years of his life listening to that little tree troll or whatever that thing was supposed to be.

I remember watching this show when it first premiered, but for some reason I couldn't remember specific episodes except for "Family Dog" and one where Christopher Lloyd played a scary teacher, I think it might have been called "Meet the Masters" from his punishment of making kids hold books out at arms length. I got Tivo recently and began recording the 2am showings on the Sci-Fi channel. I've watched about 10 so far....and now I know why this thing didn't last. Most of the stories weren't very Amazing, as a matter of fact, most of them were sci-fi comedy that just didn't work. I think in my head I was crediting Amazing Stories, with episodes of "Tales from the Darkside" which was a much better show, and still holds up today. The cheese factor of Amazing Stories is just too much. I'm actually surprised it lasted as long as it did.

The episode where the high school students become magnetized. If the storyline wasn't painfully predictable, it was so stupid that an intelligent person would shut it off in disgust.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the episode where the magic formula made pictures come to life (I think it had Jon Cryer as the main character). He kept messing with the amounts, making a half-woman or a giant. Even though it was one of the comedic episodes, I still remember being scared at the last scene where the formula stuff is spilled onto the horror magazine cover. Good stuff.

There is no way that this show could have jumped. It was actually a series of short films, all with their own writers and directors. Each one had its own quality. Many sucked, but that was probably because they were trying to make movies with a television schedule and did not have time to fine tune them, preview them before audiences, or even had the budget to film pickups when needed. However, some episodes were very good. You just didn't know what you would get from week to week. My best memory of this series does not come from an episode but from the promotion of one of the episodes where NBC warned that it was so scary that viewers deception was advised. I remember watching it and everyone in the room agreed, it was not even the least bit scary. One of my favorite episodes was the Mark Hammil episode, but for the story. The execution of the episode itself was poor. But anyone who goes into a comic book store or collectors shop today will realize that most of the stuff their parents forced them to throw out is now worth a small fortune. Ill bet the person who wrote that episode did have the first Superman comic and Disney wind up toys when he was a kid, and even in the 80's they were worth tens of thousands of dollars. After watching that episode I decided myself not to throw my stuff out but to put them and their original box carefully away when I was done with them, and every now and then I can use one to pick up a lot of extra cash off of Ebay when I am short. Question? During the run of the show they announced that one of the episodes was so good that they were going to expand it into a feature film and releases it in theaters instead of showing it on Amazing Stories. Does anyone know which movie [ if any ] it became?

The Mark Hamill episode. I'm sorry - it was too strange. I had issues throwing things out as a child, but I didn't after I saw that episode! Mark Hamill as the junkman was my worst nightmare made real. Otherwise, I LOVED that show. The Head of the Class Episode was wonderful. Nobody's mentioning the boogie man episode - the one where the shadow man takes up residence under a little boy's bed, but promises not to hurt him because he can never hurt the child who owns the bed he lives under. The ending was so scary, it was one of the formative moments of my childhood. Brilliant!

I was always watching this as a kid and remember it was the one show my parents specifically told me not to watch because my little sister would be too scared while my older sister and I couldn't wait to see the next episode. Especially after the voodoo babysitter episode.