I've mentioned time and time again how much of a fan of the anthology style of series I am. Harking back to the days of "The Twilight Zone", "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", "The Inner Sanctum" and "Thriller", these shows offered different stories, different actors and even different directors every week. Of course, when you have a series like this you take the bad with the good. Obviously some episodes will be better than others, but the chances of striking gold are generally higher. As the years went by, the anthology series went by the wayside only to resurface in the mid 1980's. Remakes of "The Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" popped up along with some newer, fresher faces. One of the best of the lot was Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories." But for some reason it seemed I was a part of only a few who really appreciated the art form Spielberg was trying to revive. The series only lasted two seasons, both of which suffered from fairly low ratings.

This was a shame because, in spite of a handful of episodes I would have deemed 'awful', the majority of the run of the series delivered wonderfully entertaining (if not entirely amazing) stories. Some of these episodes were so good in fact that an attempt was made to repackage some of them in two hour volumes of "Amazing Stories" TV movies.

Being that I was an avid video tape nut as a kid, I had almost every episode on tape… even now… 21 years later. The only problem I had was that the quality of the tapes were poor (I was stupid enough to have used SLP to get the most out of the tapes) so watching my favorite episodes became more of a chore causing me to put them away on the shelf. Needless to say when the announcement came that Universal was releasing the first season, 'jumping for joy' became more than a figurative term in my house. The tapes went into the trash, the day the set showed up and I finally had the opportunity to introduce my wife to one of my favorite shows of the 80's.

Now, I mentioned that a handful of the episodes were… awful. Most were from the second season so there are only one or two in this set that bordered on stinkeroo. They weren't un-watchable, but sometimes the comedy was painfully ill-times. "Hell Toupee" is probably the worst of the lot, but you know… I still laughed at some of it. On the other hand, most of the rest of the episodes bordered on brilliant, Spielberg having wisely cast his series with some of the bigger names in Hollywood and convincing some top directors to lend their talents.

To be honest, naming favorite episodes would almost be impossible as I would have to name them all for some reason or another. One of the top of my list though is the episode "Mummy, Daddy", in which an actor making a mummy movie finds out his wife is in the hospital having their baby. He becomes determined to get to the hospital, in the middle of night, from the middle of nowhere… dressed head to toe in bandages. The poor guy has to face closed gas stations, redneck hunters and eventually a real mummy. It's a hysterical episode and usually the first one I mention to anyone when talking about the series.

Running a close second is the episode "The Mission", which stars Kevin Costner, Kiefer Sutherland and Casey Smiesazko and WWII gunners in an airplane during a battle. Smiesazsko is a belly gunner who gets stuck after the plane is struck. On the way back to the base, they discover that the wheels are gone and if they land it will crush the belly gunner's seat… along with the gunner. Most of the episodes were a half hour, but this one was intense hour of the crew trying to decide what to do. The ending is pure magic, which took hits from critics of the series, but since when did critics have imaginations? (Well, okay… most critics!!)

Some other favorites are "Santa '85", in which a young boy tries to help Santa Claus after he is arrested for breaking and entering, "No Day at the Beach" which was shot in black & white and features a young man on a ship the day before D-day. He is picked on by his comrades because he is a little slow, but on the day they hit the beach, there are surprises in store for them all. And I would be remiss if I failed to mention "The Doll", which starred the great John Lithgow as a very lonely man who falls in love with a doll. While the premise sounds a little bizarre, trust me when I tell you it is a tearjerker of immense proportions. It earned Lithgow a well-deserved Emmy nomination.

I know there will be some, and there have already been some, who will claim the show was cheesy. And I'll admit there was a certain amount of cheese to a few of the episodes, where it was warranted. But what "Amazing Stories" attempted to do was to bring audiences back together through the magical world of storytelling. These weren't meant to merely entertain, they were meant to show people having an imagination wasn't something you had to leave behind in childhood.

Universal's DVD delivers 24 episodes from the series' first season, all of which look a thousand times better than they did on my videotapes. Sadly, the one disappointment I had was that there were few special features to add to the magic. There are a few deleted scenes for eleven of the episodes, but that's it. I was hoping for a few commentaries or behind the scenes materials. I suppose it was hard to try and get some of that together with so many people being involved in the show. As it was, I understood that one of the hold ups to having the series released in the first place was because of rights issues. Thankfully at least those were resolved and hopefully it will mean that the second season won’t be far away.

Episodes:
Ghost Train
The Main Attraction
Alamo Jobe
Mummy, Daddy
The Mission
The Amazing Falsworth
Fine Tuning
Mr. Magic
Guilt Trip
Remote Control Man
Santa '85
Vanessa in the Garden
The Sitter
No Day at the Beach
One For the Road
Gather Ye Acorns
Boo!
Dorothy and Ben
Mirror, Mirror
Secret Cinema
Hell Toupee
The Doll
One For the Books
Grandpa's Ghost

Extras: Deleted Scenes
Specifications: Full Screen
Studio: Universal
Release Date: 7/18/2006
Region 1
MPAA Rating: NR
Website

We'll give Amazing Stories: Season 1 an A.