ENTERTAINMENT: Amazing Stories - Season 1 DVD

WHAT: Season one of Amazing Stories, the Steven Spielberg created television series that ran for two seasons on NBC, is available as a four-disc box set. Running from 1985 to 1987, the show was an anthology series similar to The Twilight Zone. However, Amazing Stories lacked a host, and despite 12 Emmy nominations and 5 wins, NBC canceled the show and said "bye-bye."

WHY: For a kid, Amazing Stories was just that: amazing, but also fun. Whereas The Twilight Zone could be frightening, the Amazing Stories - each episode was a unique, self-contained short story - were generally of lighter fare and more cinematic than the sitcoms or other dramatic series of the time.

Watching the series today, it seems obvious why the show couldn't sustain an audience: most of the protagonists simply reacted to the "amazing" events they became part of, instead of creating, controlling, or making decisions that effected their destinies.

Also, television series rely on a few economic basics, one being the need for a production to utilize set after set from episode to episode. It is expensive to build new sets all the time, so the overhead must have been great. I can imagine that Amazing Stories was expensive to make: each episode was a new director, new story, new characters, and typically had new production designs.

Does Amazing Stories stand the test of time as a great show? Not really, but it's still a good time, and it's fun to go back and view all the episodes that I remember so well. It's a nostalgic time machine that takes you back to the 80's, and just watching the guest stars in each episode is reason enough to add this set to your DVD collection.

Amazing Stories at Amazon.com

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