![]() ![]() ![]() In "The Expeditions," the first of three 98-minute episodes, Col. The miniseries mostly adapts material from the book, but unimaginatively so. As Bradbury called it, a "half-cousin to a novel." The structure of the book, with loosely connected stories of varying length, was inspired by Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio particularly. On Blu-ray those lousy special effects look both worse and better, but overall the show has some good points.īradbury's 1950 book was not a novel, but rather a short story "fixup," a collection of previously published short pieces, some revised, some new with additional linking material. Worst of all, it was boring, so boring in fact that Bradbury himself declared it so publicly, at a press conference, essentially dooming the production before it had even aired, and compelling NBC to reschedule it from a planned high-profile September 1979 premiere to January 1980, effectively burying it.Īll these years later, The Martian Chronicles is still pretty weak. ![]() The futuristic sets looked cheap, and though adapted by another great fantasist, Richard Matheson, the teleplay was clumsy and illogical and its execution poor. Even by television standards of the time its special effects were mostly awful. In an era of outstanding television miniseries ( Roots, Shogun, etc.), the three-part adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1980) was a colossal disappointment. ![]()
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