★★★★★ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1980 | PG | Blu-ray Director Michael Anderson Cast Rock Hudson, Gayle Hunnicutt, Darren McGavin, Roddy McDowall
BLU-RAY DEBUT Scrambling to join the SF gold rush of the late ’70s, American TV turned to the works of Ray Bradbury. Hyped at the time as event television, this three-part miniseries came loaded with promise: directed by Michael Anderson (The Dam Busters, Logan’s Run), adapted by genre legend Richard Matheson, and packed with bankable smallscreen faces.
Bradbury’s novel is really a patchwork of vaguely connected short stories. The TV version honours that framework but such fidelity makes for disjointed viewing, however hard it tries to stitch together the assorted vignettes via random appearances by Rock Hudson’s thuddingly dull spaceman character.