The Martian Chronicles

[Sugar_Nads]

Has anybody seen this show/film? Is it any good?

[trekgeezer]

It was a mini-series shown in 1980, I think on NBC. They show it occasionally on SciFi channel.  Some of the episodes work okay and others don't.  

The effects are pretty bad in some parts of it,, but it is worth a watch at least once.

[Dave Munger]

All the action parts:

Wockachaka Wokaaa ... Wockachaka Wokaaaaaa ... Wockachaka Wokaaa ... Wockachaka Wokaaaaaaa ... Wockachaka Wokaaa ...

[ED]

I watched it recently, I think SciFi re-ran it in the last year.  I found it very interesting, if not exactly gripping.  
-Ed

[Sugar_Nads]

Cool... I'm somewhat of a Trekkie so cheesey effects don't bother me. Heck, isn't that why we're all here? ; )

Thanks for the input... Especially the input from Fozzie Bear... "Wockah Wockah!"

[JohnL]

The Martian Chronicles was originally a collection of short stories. The stories weren't directly connected, but they all fit into a sort of timeline of the exploration of Mars. The miniseries basically took the stories and strung them together to make one long story. I believe that several of the stories were also filmed as episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater. I recall one about astronauts landing on Mars and finding people from their childhood, which was also in the miniseries.

[Ozzymandias]

John L is thinking of "Mars Is Heaven." I saw parts of it on SciFi a few months ago.  It is very dated with the 70's clothes and wah-wah- guitar music. I remember seeing an interview with Bradbury and he said he hated it.

The Dimmension X radio show aired a version in 1950 that is real good. Abbriaviated but good. They also did many of the individual stories.

[Yaddo42]

Bradbury has been talking about a new miniseries version of "The Martian Chronicles" that has been on the drawing board for several years. Frank Darabont was going to produce or executive produce it, no idea what the status of the project is now. I've heard and read about it from various places, including when Bradbury came to my town several years ago to speak and to see a theater production of several of his stories. He said the new version was supposed to air on TV here and be released as a series of theatrical films overseas, mostly in Europe, but this was roughly three years ago. The only one of the projects based on his work that he described then that has gone forward was the film of "A Sound of Thunder" and then he was complaining about the changes then-director Rennie Harlin (who he didn't name at the time) wanted to make to the story, and rightly so. But this has been discussed in other threads.

I have a soft spot for the first miniseries, even though it is very uneven, the effects are bad even by the standards of the era, and the writing tries to shoehorn the stories into a common narrative based around a core group of characters. It is worth a look, like others have said, but is a pale shadow of the book.

[peter johnson]

A very old thread on this board years ago spoke of the failure of a film version to go forward of this collection in the 1960's.  I had a trade paperback with a "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture" on it from about 1966 or so.  I wonder if they got to actual filming on this, and if so, whatever happened to the footage?
peter johnson/denny crane

[Dave Munger]

I fear I may have misled the nice people. It was really more like BWANANANA-BWANA plink plink BWANANANA-WAAANAAA plink plink

This book was kind of similar to The Illustrated Man. TIM was pretty much a bunch of unrelated stories strung together, and a lot of them were Mars related but seemed not to have made the cut. The movie was actually much better than the book this time, IMHO. One of the best stories in the book that didn't make it into the movie was "Kalidiscope", which I think may have been originally written for the radio. I just heard it on the radio awhile ago and it was very effective in that medium. I think the end of "Dark Star" was a homage to this story. One problem with The Illustrated Man movie: everything in it will seem so familiar, you'll swear you've seen the movie before the first time you see it. The movie should be the standard for all of the "three short films stuck together" movies; the framing device, or narritive conciet, or whatever they call it that they used to stick the stories together actually works as a good story on it's own. "They're not tattoos! They're SKIN ILLU-STRATIONS!!!"

[Dave Munger]

>seemed not to have made the cut.

I mean, to be included in The Martian Chronicles.