R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

haha.
it's funny, even though I was probably eight or nine when I read the martian chronicles, i remember *getting* that the stories weren't supposed to be some kind of truly speculative version of what Mars might be, but more of this imaginative fantasia kinda thing that was more about humanity than it was about spaceships or whatever. not saying i was a super-precocious reader or anything, just that Bradbury was able to get that across to a nine-year-old.

I'll have to read The Veldt at lunch to figure out if I've read it before.

http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm

Ha, I have a brother 12 yrs younger than me who was a baby at the time I read "Small Assassin." I had a nightmare where he was walking around holding a scalpel. One of two specifically Bradbury-inspired nightmares I can remember, though there were probably more.

there's a great moment in Fallout 3 where you step into a bombed out house where all the humans are dead but a robot keeps up the maintenance and reads 'there will come soft rains' to the children's skeletons

re-read the October Country recently and The Scythe creeped me out something proper.

ha, i thought i was the only one who was really effected by The Veldt as a kid

RIP

This is a sad day. I read Something Wicked... just a few months ago, having managed never to read it before, and it really is a masterpiece. The short stories, and the work approach of the man himself, such huge influences on me in so many ways, right down to autumn in Minnesota automatically being BRADBURY'S TIME.

This dude GOT IT DONE.

We should do a rundown of the various film/TV/radio adaptations. Here's The Electric Grandmother aka a version of "I Sing the Body Electric!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvUWvifigLs

And of course I presume we all know about Something Wicked This Way Comes.

he was awesome. i remember reading an old book of his stories when i was a pre-teen and just loving it so much, total young-mind-shaping times.

xp ha, just found out my friend's dad did the screenplay for that w/ bradbury!

and the cat pic is perfect.
RIP

how is the film of Something Wicked? He wrote the script. It got p good reviews in '83 but did no business, I think.

Purists were upset with the Truffaut version on F451, but I thought it came off reasonably well, esp the last scene. (and considering the director hadn't mastered English)

And he adapted Moby-Dick for John Huston, which I haven't seen either.

He was involved on some level with the big Harryhausen/Schneer fantasies too right?

Jesus Morbs, see Huston's Moby! It slays.

i remember meeting ray bradbury as a teenager. i asked him to sign a book for me and i said a bunch of well-meaning but inane teenage hero worship shit about his books. maybe it was because his books were the first adult books i'd read where i grasped a certain level of thematic subtlety.i mean i had read adult books and i had read stuff like heinlein and stephen king and whatnot and i'd "got the message" and i had read philip k dick and understood the plot (if not necessarily the message), but i remember the nihilism of things like the martian chronicles and fahrenheit 451 and the way he undercut his heroes. maybe it was the first time i really grasped the feeling of a pyrrhic victory?

anyway, i met him and had him sign the small pile of paperbacks that i'd gradually nicked from the school library and he said something back that was kind and diplomatic but at the same time somehow also made me keenly aware that what i'd say was a bunch of inane teenage shit. i think this was maybe the first time an adult other than my parents had really done that to me and i sort of remember it as the beginning of a long decline into the self-loathing, frustration and isolation most of his best characters (guy, spender, etc) seem to embody. it was years before i went back to ray bradbury - maybe not even until after college - and i never really

thanks a lot big guy.

This is spectacularly sad to me; Bradbury saw me through puberty. I'm genuinely choked up. Love this guy, RIP.

I've read that the Something Wicked production was rather fraught. Shit got changed a lot from RB's draft, some Disney interference, the score which Georges Delerue wrote and fully recorded was thrown out, etc.

(the rejected Delerue score is one of the best film scores of all time BTW)

There's also the animated movie The Halloween Tree which looks kinda bad but I wanna see it someday...

Of course he's a hero of mine:

Ray Bradbury had a lifetime of amazing accomplishments but perhaps most notable was living 50+ years in LA without ever learning to drive.

JL, I have to read Moby-Dick first.

I remember the film version of Something Wicked really freaking me the fuck out and thinking it was awesome but y'know I was like 13 and haven't seen it since.

At around age 15, The October Country changed the way I read, the way Hitchcock changed the way I watch movies.

I will never forget you, Mr. Bradbury.

RIP, ray. my first favorite author, not since displaced.

(xp to morbius)
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/12/21/1324481045307/Zelig-1983---starring-Woo-007.jpg

Martian Chronicles is probably my favorite book of all time.

Great line I just stumbled across in that Electric Grandmother adaptation I linked earlier, from near the end of the film:

"I forget the difference between loving people and paying attention to them. There is a difference."

Hate to say one line sums up a life's work, but it sums up a large part of it, so well.

No-one else liked the TV miniseries of The Martian Chronicles, but I loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEMWtyAKRhQ

RIP, the Golden Age writers are almost all gone now aren't they?

I think a bunch of people around here DID like it.

Pohl is still around.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/

ha i remember watching that martian chronicles miniseries as a kid and being ... disappointed. but maybe it's good!

Yeah I remember the miniseries was shown just a few months after the fourth-grade reading I mentioned and I was very, very hyped for it; my parents let me stay up to watch it all. One of the first times I was ever disappointed that they didn't 'film the book,' but you have to learn at some point. I'm sure it comes across as clunky in parts now but I'm glad they did it, hell, I'm still surprised they did it!

I found it very interesting, when I got around to reading Rock Hudson's official biography/autobiography years later, that there's absolutely no mention of it at all in there.

in that still, it just looks like a Martian guested on an episode of McMillan and Wife.

Here was a recent mention: The 1970's Science Fiction Movie Poll

I'm thinking about the intro segments to that Ray Bradbury Theater (Ray Bradbury Presents?) anthology show from the 80s, where RB sits surrounded by all these crazy toys and pieces of art. 'I just look around and find my inspiration...'

The most memorable episode from that series for me was the one where the kid meets a scary old hobo in a rail car who talks to him about the savagery of the ol' cavemen...

the something wicked movie is truncated and conventionalized and the two kids aren't very good but jason robards (as will's dad the fearfully aging town librarian) and jonathan pryce (as MR. DARK) are both great and the movie kinda naturally recenters on them. they have a totally great scene together when mr. dark offers will's dad his youth in exchange for betraying the kids, and offers him one less year removed for each few seconds he hesitates, it is torture porn but just w/ talking.

Nobody on this thread liked the miniseries: Ray Bradbury's _The Martian Chronicles_

pam grier, too, in something wicked!

I think it's a sign of how specific and towering Bradbury was that I was convinced 'The Ugly Little Boy' was by him until I checked just now and discovered it was Asimov. It just SEEMS like it would be a perfect Bradbury story.

Thanks for that link to the thread there, James Redd, had almost forgotten about that. But a lot of the comments on the miniseries there are positive!

Something that really made me happy decades ago was reading in Arthur C. Clarke's autobiography how much he loved "The Crowd."

You're welcome, Ned. Sorry, but I can't read whole threads carefully anymore, I have moved down the message board life cycle chain as described by Tom in his paper.

I always had a special place in my heart for The Man Upstairs.

The TV version from Rad Bradbury Theater is excellent as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9Mv1Lzsyus

Meantime, the things I learn -- so Deadmau5's latest single is (and is inspired by)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiUAq4aVTjY

Ray Bradbury meets Groucho Marx. Crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3B1lYtTJQI

He makes an interesting appearance in this book: http://howtowreckanicebeach.com/

man, i loved this guy. reading 'the fog horn' at 9 or whatever was one of the more mindblowing moments of my reading life. i still don't know how he made a lonely dinosaur tearing down a lighthouse seem so poetic and beautiful and sad.

There is a mention of him in Ballard's intro to his complete short stories that is quoted in the Guardian obit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/06/ray-bradbury

At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination

David Brin in Salon:

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/06/ray_bradbury_american_optimist/singleton/

It's very likely I first became aware of Bradbury by seeing him on the network moon-landing coverage.

'Make sure when you wake up in the morning that you know you accomplished everything you possibly could the previous day. And then do it again!’

There are two kinds of people in this world....

Mr. Bradbury and Dr. Morbius

"Doctor" if you're feeling nasty

As with R A Heinlein, I prefer his earlier work to his old coot pronouncements.

oh I dunno: Morbs still writes excellent reviews.

I saw that coming from miles away like the last Martian astronomers saw the rockets leaving the surface of the Earth

I knew Colbert was a fan (thus the link above) but how had I missed the existence of this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSoigRHHNLM

Such a great story.

could not turn that off (meta!)

i think that was the first short story i ever read

it was kind of all downhill after that

And now his house is gone.

http://file770.com/?p=20397

There came soft rains?