This series landed in my life at the perfect time, right smack dab in those informative years when “memory movies,” or in this case “memory series” are made. I was fifteen, and I’m going to review the five episodes that stuck with me all these decades, and I’m going to start with the creepiest episode this show ever produced, “Go To The Head Of The Class.” Amazing Stories was the brainchild of Stephen Spielberg, but it had nothing to do with the Amazing Stories scifi magazine from the 1920s; he only borrowed the title. The show is similar to The Twilight Zone, being an anthology of strange tales of mild horror, science fiction and fantasy. I don’t recall how many “horror” episodes they did, but this one always stood out, most of them family friendly coming in around the PG rating, but “Go To The Head Of The Class” was the only episode that feels very much PG-13, and had they added blood to some “key shots” I’ll go into in a minute it certainly would have jackknifed into rated R material, but even without any blood those “key shots” still creeped me out. All the episodes except for this one and “The Mission” were 30-minutes long (roughly 20 without commercials); this one ran an hour (44-minutes without commercials).
I had to check to see when it debuted because my memory says it was a Halloween episode, but I was wrong, it aired November 21st.. Aside from the creep factor, why this made such an impact had to do with the main characters, specifically the focus being on two teens, Peter Brand (Scott Coffey) and Cynthia Simpson (Mary Stuart Masterson), and their “evil” teacher (English, I think), Professor Beanes played beautifully by Christopher Lloyd! Lloyd can do menacing very well when he wants to, and this was the first episode where I saw that side of him. Later in his career he put a little of that on display again as Uncle Fester in the two Addams Family movies from 1991 and 1993, more so in the first film. I tend to forget he also dabbled in villainy in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), where he played an alien.
Some movies and TV shows that end up becoming burned-in memories are sometimes due to the fact that some of them can get me to imagine myself as the put-upon main character(s) and/or imagine the unreal events happening right in my home town, and that’s what this episode did. As I said the main characters were teens, I was a teen, and like them I was also in high school, but I did not have the kind of tyrannical teacher Brand and Simpson had to contend with.
Peter is constantly late for school, and right in the beginning the show sets up Beanes take-no-prisoners (or even be a little bit sympathetic to them) personality as he likes to get in the faces of his students, yell at them, make them swallow their days old gum on the undersides of their desks, and threaten them with detention, but the most “abusive” thing he likes to do, when he’s had enough, is to bring them up to the head of the classroom, have them hold their hands (palms up) out to their sides and rest a series of heavy books on each, if they drop any of them — automatic detention!!
Actually, come to think about I did have a teacher who was almost as a douche as Beanes, his name was Mr. Estes, he was my sixth grade teacher, and he loved to yell at us and was very temperamental and moody. God, I hated that fucker!! I think he’s dead. Good, I say. Yes, I had to suddenly get that off my shoulder.
Anyhow, this series is taking place in that infamous era when there were urban legends of heavy metal bands that supposedly had satanic rituals hidden in their songs and you could get access to them by playing their records backwards. I have no clue if any of that was ever true, I wasn’t into heavy metal, but from my perspective it was just an “urban legend” that proliferated throughout the 80s. Cynthia proposes performing one of these rituals to curse Beanes, she tells Peter she tried it with her Mom, and it worked, but the ritual was nothing major, it just gave her hiccups for three days, so much so her Dad decided to take her to the hospital on the third day. But she confesses to Peter, after they play her Blood Sausage (love that band name) record backwards and hears the ingredients they need to perform the curse, she had to substitute that “fingertip of a dead relation by blood” to a strand of hair from her dead grandmother they kept in a photo album. This led me to believe she really was playing with the supernatural equivalent of a hand gun, but unintentionally watered down the spell with that strand of hair. What they want to do to Beanes is the same spell, but this time she really does want to get a hold of that “fingertip,” and in so doing we get to see what this spell was really designed to do — to kill!
This leads us to the first memorable set piece of utter oozing eeriness. When I first saw this I was just getting into Hammer movies, and didn’t quite see the inspiration for this lengthy graveyard scene, but now that I’ve seen quite a few this had to be Hammer inspired. The graveyard they sneak into this night is pure Hammer Films atmosphere, specifically it reminded me of an early scene in The Vampire Lovers (1970), with the rolling ground fog, the moon over head, the crumbling tombstones, and this one even has an unintentionally menacing grounds creeper they suddenly find themselves having to avoid when he shows up to claim the six pack he’s hidden in an open grave. This spell has to be done before the stroke of midnight, with these ingredients: “Add dirt from a grave that is freshly dug, And the fingertip of a dead relation by blood. This mixture ignite at the stroke of midnight, By the united hand of woman and man.”
To get that coveted finger they break into Beanes family crypt and perform the ceremony right there. Peter now wants to check in with Beanes to see if actually worked, this is where we get to see the kind of house he lives in, a big, old, haunted house looking one. It’s even bordered by a tall wrought iron gate, and the inside looks as impressive, maybe I should say expensive. Beanes certainly can’t afford this on a teacher’s salary, which always made me wonder if he came from a well off family.
Snooping around his windows they finally spot him lying on the floor. Peter freaks and breaks in for fear they did something unintentionally serious to him, and you know what, they did! They killed him! Dead. Like deader than a doornail dead. Done properly that spells kills, and Cynthia nearly killed her own Mom. But this ain’t the end of it. They should have just gotten the hell out of there and let dead teachers lie. Beanes’ death probably would have been discovered to be “natural causes,” but Peter freaks out thinking they’ll somehow be suspects, and this gets them to check Blood Sausage’s record again for a remedy, and wouldn’t you know it there’s a “Dead Shall Rise” song. Playing it backwards reveals a spell to revive the dead. Well, hotdiggity, let’s see how worse we can make this for ourselves!! Woo-hoo!!
Actually, it’s Peter that accidentally screws the pooch this time around. One of the things they need for this spell, like the last one, was a photo of Beanes. They get one but as he’s ripping it out of the book, he tears it in half, but instead of looking for another one he puts both halves into the mix with the other ingredients. Get ready because the supernatural equivalent of a shotgun is about to go off this time!
The story is credited to Mick Garris, with teleplay credits also going to him as well as Tom McLoughlin and Bob Gale. Re-Animator (1985) hit the scene in October of ’85, and this episode debuted November of 1986. I bring up Stuart Gordon’s H.P. Lovecraft adaptation because I feel the window between that movie’s debut and this episode’s leaves enough room for Garris to have been influenced by that flick. And I’m speaking about Dr. Hill’s “headless problem” in that movie. For those reading not in the know about Re-Animator, it’s a movie based on Lovecraft’s story. One of the main characters is Dr. Herbert West who’s perfected a serum that brings the dead back to life. He’s not entirely the good guy, but a somewhat likable bad guy, his main nemesis is a Dr. Carl Hill who seeks to steal his formula and pass it off as his own creation. West sees things differently and kills him by decapitating the man with a shovel. In a moment of boredom right after he wonders if he his serum can reanimate parts, so he doses Hill’s head and his body, and, yes, it can bring separate body parts back to life. So, Hill is back in the game and menacing the cast from there on out using his body to carry around his head, a head that can communicate as well as it did when it was alive and attached. There’s no way Gordon’s movie could not have inspired this episode.
Once the ritual is cast, it takes a moment before suddenly and horrifically Beanes’ body sits up . . . without his head, which is still on the pillow, eyes open and menacing the two teens. This is where the PG-13 comes in; hats off to the late FX artist, Stan Winston, for doing the head effects. You can see all the details in the exposed inner neck, and had this been a little more on the realistic side blood would be gushing from that “neck wound” as well as the stump on the body sitting up. There are a couple of more shots like this as Beanes begins his horrific PG-13 menacing of the teens as they try to get the fuck out of the house. In a couple of instances he chucks his head at them, and we get to see that PG-13 dry neck exposed wound even more. All these scenes, from the point of the reanimation onward, simply creeped me the hell out. There are a couple of instances where Beanes’ headless body is holding his head by the hair that reminded me so much of key scenes in Re-Animator where Hill does the same thing. Check out the slideshow below for some of the headless highlights from this episode!
These kids aren’t even safe when they get out of his house, he follows chasing them into town, and as Cynthia manages to get away, Peter has the bad fuckin’ luck to be in the bullseye now as Beanes chases him all the way home. Yeah, that’s right, all the way home! Ending with him chucking his head through his bedroom window, and plopping down on Peter’s bed just before he knocks himself unconscious.
The next morning he wakes with a start, Beane’s head is gone, was it all a dream? Coming in late again to class he finds Cynthia at the head of the class trying not to drop them goddamn books. Beanes comes up behind him and appears to be miraculously in one piece, but then he pulls his scarf off to reveal the fact he managed stitch his head back onto his body. The episode ends there with Beanes now poised to be an even greater menace in their lives, an undead one. Cue evil laughter.
The network cancelled Amazing Stories after the second season. Spielberg executive produced a movie in 1987 called, Batteries Not Included. It was initially supposed to be an episode of Amazing Stories had it gone into a third season, but Spielberg liked it so much he turned it into a movie. I wish someone had done that for “Go To The Head Of The Class.”
Not only did this episode have some noteworthy names penning it, it was also directed by a noteworthy director, Robert Zemeckis, you might remember him as the director of the Back To The Future trilogy. The biggest name in the cast is Lloyd, who we Gen-X’rs first got to know as Jim Ignatowski from the sitcom, Taxi (1978-1983). The teens (Coffey and Masterson) have noteworthy careers too. Coffey was a name I never could remember, but he was one of those kids that kept popping up in things, like, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), SpaceCamp (1986), and Some Kind Of Wonderful (1987), and a bunch of TV appearances. Masterson also had a role in Some Kind Of Wonderful, as well as other well known films from the 80s and 90s like Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Benny & Joon (1993) and the all girl western, Bad Girls (1994).
THANKSGIVING: Since we’re in Season Two territory I’ll continue on with the other two episodes that stayed with me. The second being, “Thanksgiving,” it aired the week after “Go To The Head Of The Class,” and in my opinion it too is a horror episode, except this being a Spielberg production the overt and bloody horror is implied with great effect in the final scene. Let your imagination do the walking basically. This is only a two character narrative with two heavy hitter actors, David Carradine (Kung Fu) and young-as-hell Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer, Brooklyn Nine Nine is what she’s probably most known for nowadays). She’s so young in this 1986 episode she’s playing stepdaughter, Dora to Carradine’s douchebag stepfather, Calvin.
They live out in the desert of California, and it’s desperate times as Thanksgiving approaches. Calvin’s been looking for water on the property. He’s dug a pretty deep hole for a potential well, but it keeps coughing up nothing but dirt. Dora’s job is to hoist up the buckets of dirt Calvin digs, and take his abusive shit. Well, this one particular day Calvin rushes back up the ladder with a story of how the whole ground gave way beneath him, and if he wasn’t partially standing on the ladder he would have been dropped into oblivion.
This is where things get interesting. There appears to be a bottomless pit now on their property and Calvin wants to find out how deep it goes, so he ties a flashlight to some heavy duty twine and lowers it down, and lowers it down, and keeps lowering it down until he’s out of twine. Now something even more interesting happens. He gets a tug on the twine, a quick sustained tug that eventually relents. He quickly winds the twine back up and what’s tied to the end is not a flashlight but a pouch, with a message written in an indecipherable language, and two hunks of pure gold!!
While Calvin goes to town to appraise his gold, Dora gets to work on offering the “Hole People,” as she now calls whatever’s down there, something they can actually use: a dictionary to communicate in English and a hunk of ham, figuring they must need food. Within minutes she gets a tug and a response when she hauls up some weird looking “jewelry,” another piece of gold, and a reply, in English this time: “Using your crude code book our scholars have determined this food to be ham, very tasty, payment enclosed, what else do you have?”
So, there’s something intelligent living under the ground. Something this episode never shows. When I first saw this, I really hoped we got to see what was in that hole, what the “Hole People” really were, and even though we never did there was enough left to allow me to fill in the blanks and still feel impacted.
Dora now sends down a whole raw chicken from the fridge in a picnic basket. I’m guessing that was probably what she and Calvin were going to have on Thanksgiving. Another tug, and up she hauls the basket (they decided not to take that), but now it’s filled to the brim with more weird jewelry and gold, with an accompanying note saying: “Our scholars have determined this food to be chicken, very tasty, payment enclosed, what else do you have?”
You can kind of see where this episode is heading once Calvin gets back and is determined to get as much gold out of that hole as possible, and for some odd reason thinks whatever’s down there might want a box of flashlights. You see he’s unaware of what Dora’s been doing and maybe if she had told him she had established communication things would have worked out differently, but as I said Calvin’s an abusive douche, she has some gold of her own, and she keeps her “breakthroughs” with the “Hole People” to herself. When the flashlights come back all chewed up, Calvin gets pissed and makes plans to go down there himself. Now, you can see the “sting” of this episode setting itself up. Had this been part of Masters Of Horror (2005-2007), or Fear Itself (2008-2009), or even Monsters (1988-1990), we’d probably get to see what transpires down there when Calvin gets himself all dressed up in military gear, with a gas mask, and a shotgun and lowers himself down.
Yes, there was a message that came with those chewed up flashlights, Calvin didn’t notice, but Dora did: “Our scholars have determined these devices to be flashlights, prefer chicken, no payment enclosed, what else do you have?”
There’s a moment when she could have saved Calvin’s life, but before he goes down he just had to berate her one last time, so, revenge is now a dish best served at the bottom of a hole in the middle of a desert with constantly hungry “Hole People.” However, she does for a brief moment almost cut the wire connected to that makeshift lift he was standing on as it lowered him down. Now comes the tug again, and she begins to hoist the lift back up. There’s Calvin looking like he’s standing right there on the lift. A close inspection reveals that’s nothing but the gear and clothing he had on, including the gas mask, but inside is a shit-ton of jewelry and gold, with the note saying: “Our scholars have determined this food to be turkey. Delicious. Payment enclosed. What else do you have?”
Notice the first use of the word, “delicious” from the “Hole People?” So, human meat ended up tasting the best of the things Dora and Calvin sent down. That gives me the shivers.
FAMILY DOG: This is the series only animated episode, and I haven’t seen it in forever. Does it hold up? For the most part, yes, but it starts out absolutely tragic. Not literally, I mean figuratively because the family this poor dog got saddled with is the worst. The episode is told from the dog’s perspective and as it begins we see the nearly abusive shit he has to put up with. The husband ignores him, and uses him as a scapegoat for his farts, the wife (voiced by Annie Potts) emotionally abuses him, and the kids physically abuse him. But the real turning point comes when the house gets burgled when the family is out one night, and father/husband, Skip Binford, in no uncertain terms says if he fucks up again that’s it.
So, what happens next is the house is burgled again, by the same two burglars and, you guessed it, the dog fucks up. Again! Skip wants an attack dog, but instead of getting one, he takes his dog to a sinister place to be reconditioned into a snarling mass of canine fury when danger strikes.
A week later he returns to pick him up, but not without a demonstration since he doesn’t appear to act any different. One snap of Miss Lastrange’s (voiced by Mercedes McCambridge) fingers and he turns into a seething ball of terror! But here’s the twist, as predicted the two men return to steal yet again, and this time the dog cuts them off at the front door, but upon returning to their hideout, unknown to them the dog latched on to one of their arms and refuses to let go. The dog inadvertently switches sides when a cop comes to arrest them and upon instinct attacks the shadow trying to break through the door. The two men use the dog in their bank heists, and the dog willing complies, until the moment during a drive one of them decides they don’t need a dog anymore . . . one thing leads to another and the dog becomes a turncoat yet again, causes a crash, and they’re arrested. It does have a nice ending, he’s returned to his family, they actually respect him and are nice to him now. Note, this episode gets funnier once he’s been re-trained.
This episode was written and directed by a then unknown Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Tomorrowland), and Danny Elfman contributed to some of the music. Spielberg turned this episode into a series in 1993 that ran only 10 episodes. It was considered a flop, and I can’t recall if I ever watched it.
THE MISSION: Let’s head back to Season One and discuss the two episodes from there that stayed with me all these years. Of the five I’ve reviewed here the two best, the two that you could watch and get a pretty good sense of the various vibes of the show, are the previously dissected “Go To The Head Of The Class” and this one here, “The Mission.” Whereas horror was the genre at the center of Class, fantasy would be what I would categorize “The Mission,” Rod Serling historical fantasy to put a more precise point on it.
Stephen Spielberg directed two episodes (the first being the very first episode “Ghost Train”), and it’s this one here that stood the test of time by fans. I forgot the runtime on this one as well. I thought “Go To The Head Of The Class” was the only hour long episode the show produced, but I was wrong, “The Mission” would be the second, or the first I should say. Without commercials it runs 46-minutes, and is a period piece taking place during a bomber mission in World War II.
It comes with two major before-they-were-famous stars, and one that is but just isn’t as well known: Kevin Costner, Kiefer Sutherland and Casey Siemaszko. Not to mention character actor Peter Jason (mostly known for his John Carpenter collaborations) and Karen Kopins, who (at least by me) is mostly known for playing Robin Pierce in the hilarious vampire comedy, Once Bitten (1985). She has no lines in this episode, plays Liz, the wife of Siemaszko’s character, and has only a few minutes of screen time.
Up to this point Kostner’s biggest role was in the western, Silverado (1985), but I do recall a short time later catching a movie called, Fandango (1985) where he was one of the leads. This episode comes two years before his breakout role in The Untouchables (1985). He plays the Captain of the faithful 24th mission, an unlucky number of missions to be flying. Sutherland only had two credits to his name before starring in this episode, so he was a total newb, and it’s a year before his memorable role as psychotic bully, Ace Merrill, in Stand By Me (1986), and what I consider his breakout role as vampire, David, in The Lost Boys (1987) a year after that. He’s Static, one of the crewmembers in this episode.
Casey Siemaszko’s character, Jonathon, who’s at the heart of the episode, is an actor I’ve seen in a few other movies, but he never reached Kostner/Sutherland star status, my favorite movie he ever made was the comedy Three O’Clock High (1987). Interesting enough he co-starred with Sutherland again, this time in the western, Young Guns in 1988, though didn’t make it to the sequel. I’ve seen both movies, but can’t recall if he lived or died in the first one. If he died, well, that would explain why he never made it into the sequel.
“The Mission” starts off with the Captain (Costner) assembling his crew one foggy night on the runway for a mission his men are reticent to take without Jonathon, he’s their good luck charm, and haven’t seen any serious combat with him. I think this is supposed to be a final mission for some of them, but it being the 24th it’s considered unlucky, and to do it without Jonny is problematic to say the least, but he shows up at the last minute.
Jon wants to be a cartoonist for Disney when he gets out of the war and we get to see how good of an artist he is when Static finds one of his drawing books full of caricatures he’s done of the entire crew. This talent will come in handy as hell later on. Eventually, combat comes their way. Jonathan’s post is the ball gunner, that means he mans the 50-caliber machine guns mounted on the underside of the bomber in a ball-like turret that swivels. When they encounter fighters Spielberg orchestrates a pretty tense aerial battle on a mid-80s TV budget, seen mostly from the inside of the bomber as the crew returns fire. At the last minute Jon gets off some lucky shots that demolishes a plane coming towards him but part of the explosive wreckage smashes into the bomber at such at an angle it lodges him in the turret. He’s knocked out for a bit, has a bloody nose, but is pretty much all right. He just can’t swivel the turret into a position that allows him to climb back into the bomber. On the larger front the bomber itself is losing fuel and they’re going to have to land at a nearby base, if they can make it that far. Still no real worries, until Cap tries the landing gear that is.
Up to this point the crew was resolved to leaving Jonathan in there until they can land and get someone with a blow torch to extricate him. And then Cap sees the landing gear has been damaged—the wheels won’t deploy!!
Oh, shit.
Which wouldn’t be a problem really if there was no Jonathon in the turret to begin with, or if he had gotten killed in the confrontation, but he’s alive, and as the episode plays out the enemy plane wreckage is wedged so hard into them it can’t even be dislodged with good ol’ fashion human strength.
Oh, fuck.
Ideas anyone?
Cap comes up with a pretty good one, to give him a parachute, kick the window out, and try like hell to lunge far enough into the sky to miss the engine, and come down nice and easy in a field, or something, but the packed parachute won’t fit through the tiny opening in the turret, No big deal, just take it out and feed it to him, but he’s so frantic to get it on (there is a time issue here, like 12-minutes, I think, to get him out before they land, so I can understand the franticness), he tears the shoot as he’s pulling it in.
Okay, he’s probably going to die. Let’s all make peace with that right now.
Not quite. Jon’s got one final card up his sleeve, and it’s a doozy. He grabs some paper and a pencil and starts drawing a picture of the bomber with these bright, yellow cartoon wheels, and leaves the rest to God. One last try at deploying the landing gear suddenly works!! Just in the nick of time too. Whatever transpired, be it God, or some kind of untapped ability by the human mind to literally bring into existence that which is so desperately needed, resulted in the actual creation from paper, to mind, to reality, of those bright, yellow cartoon wheels!
Jon’s in some kind of trance after they touch down, so he’s extricated ever so carefully, and when the Captain slaps him to get him back, the wheels disappear and that turret is crushed flat!!
That’s a hell of an episode, I tell ya! Just as powerful as the horror was in “Go To The Head Of The Class,” but here it’s awe inspire and marveling at what could be a bonafide miracle during war time.
MUMMY DADDY: This episode actually clocks in before “The Mission,” and is the second comedy in this five episode memory list of mine, and also the second horror comedy, although the horror to comedy ratio is, like, ten ninety, where as “Go To The Head Of The Class” I’d put at the reverse. It was written by Spielberg and until I revisited it last night I had forgotten there were a few notable character actors in it. If you’re a Gen-X’r, they’re ones you probably saw a lot in movies from the 80s, like Brion James, Larry Hankin, Billy Beck, and Tracey Walter. Beck was in “Go To The Head Of The Class” as the cemetery caretaker. In “Mummy Daddy” his role is Old Blind Man, and it’s a homage to the blind man in Frankenstein. For me his most notable role is the homeless guy in The Blob (1988) remake who first makes contact with the “blob.” Walter and James are the two most famous characters actors on this list. I’m personally a fan of the late James, but Walter’s been in a ton of TV and theatrical films. Both fall into that “Hey, it’s that guy again,” category, and that’s how I knew them before I started to pay attention to their names.
Another famous face for us Gen-X’rs is Bronson Pinchot. Again, another actor I had totally forgotten had done an Amazing Stories episode. This episode comes in right before he hits the big time with the sitcom Perfect Strangers (1986-1993). God, I miss that show. I watched it from pilot to finale and it just kept getting funnier the longer it went. Pinchot’s character doesn’t come with a name in this episode, he’s just known as the Director. The director and his crew are down South filming a horror movie in the swamps, a horror movie about a mummy. What?! An American Southern Mummy?! That’s right. And he tells the actor playing the mummy this movie their making is based on a local legend of actual mummy, Ra Amin Ka (Michael Zand), who ran amok around these parts a long time ago.
Okay, now, here’s the gag of the episode. The actor, Harold (Tom Harrison), playing the mummy, whom we only see once in a photo with his pregnant wife, his face is uncovered, so we can have a mental picture of what he looks like, is down here with her and she’s due in two weeks. It would take too much time to remove Harold from his mummy make-up, so the director tells him to just wait like that in his trailer until everyone else gets back from lunch. Cool. Suddenly, he gets news his wife’s gone into labor early, and he flies like a bat out of hell into a car and heads off to the hospital, forgetting he’s still dressed like a mummy. Not cool.
Can you see where this is going?
I knew you could.
Hijinks ensue when his encounters with the locals along the way get them to think Ra Amin Ka is back in town for a few days to kill. And, well, they now want to kill him. Brion James is Willie Joe, the lead redneck who first encounters Harold and rounds up a posse to go after him. But there’s another wrinkle in this episode, the real Ra Amin Ka really does show up again. This is where the Old Blind Man comes into play. As Harold is sneaking around the swamp trying to avoid the homicidal rednecks, he bumps into this blind dude living out there all by his lonesome, but in the back of his abode he has a sarcophagus of Ra Amin Ka, and he unintentionally wakes him when he finally feels Harold’s bandages and undead face, thinking Ka somehow got out. I should also point out the make-up Harold has on doesn’t allow him to talk in any clear fashion. He can grunt, and get out short, sometimes distinct sentences, but nothing that would allow him to point out he’s an actor and not a freakin’ mummy. He also has these splints strapped to his legs under the make-up to make him walk stiff legged, so, again, even when he moves he moves like a mummy.
Of course this episode ends on an upbeat note as he finally gets to his wife in the hospital to see his newborn. Harold’s make-up was more convincing than the make-up used for the actual mummy. They should have, maybe, switched that around, but I see why they didn’t. Harold has to look like a real mummy to freak everyone out.
To date we in the U.S. still do not have the original Amazing Stories series on DVD or Blu-Ray in a complete set. Universal has Season One out only in a DVD set but not Season Two. Umbrella Entertainment in Australia, on the other hand, has released both seasons previously in complete DVD sets, and this set here, Amazing Stories: The Complete Series, is the first time they’ve combined those two. You can buy it from them directly here, and from other various retailers like Amazon Australia, JB Hi-Fi, DVD Land, EzyDVD, and Sanity. If you’re based in the U.S., I recommend checking out Amazon, DeepDiscount, and ImportCDs.
Video/Audio/Subtitles: 1.33:1 full frame—5.1 English Dolby Digital—English subs only
Transfers on these looked good!
Extras Included . . .
- Deleted Scenes (Disc #1): Main Attraction (:19)
- Deleted Scenes (Disc #2): Guilt Trip (:40), Remote Control Man (:42), Vanessa In The Garden (3:44),
- Deleted Scenes (Disc #3): One For The Road (1:00), Gather Ye Acorns (:32), Boo! (:21), Dorothy And Ben (1:32)
- Deleted Scenes (Disc #4): Secret Cinema (2:57), The Doll (2:06), One For The Books (:54), Grandpa’s Ghost (6:22)
PHYSICAL MEDIA LIVES AT . . . 