Amazing Stories

Author: Steven Spielberg, Joshua Brand, John Falsey

Steven Spielberg was at the top of his game when he brought Amazing Stories to television in 1985. The magazine that helped define how science fiction would evolve, and which certainly helped to form what Spielberg would create in his early years, provided the inspiration for an incredible rotating team of writers and directors to create around. Some stories are fantasies, while others are deeply science fictional, and some are just plain weird. The fact that Spielberg was willing to try an anthology series when they hadn't been a regular part of the television landscape for two decades shows how much pull he had, and when you factor in the talent that he got for various episodes, you can see the power of Spielberg. The stories themselves are, well, amazing, with some taking the form of the classic Hitchcock twist that would influence folks like M. Night Shaymalan, and others are straight-ahead adventure tales from directors like Joe Dante, Paul Bartel, Clint Eastwood, and Martin Scorsese, with actors such as John Lithgowe, Mark Hamill, and Kevin Costner!Why it's on the list:It's an incredible look at what was happening in 1980s genre television and film.