The Ray Bradbury Theater

1The Earthmen

23 minJan 3, 1992

A crew of a spaceship return to Mars after a 20-year absence to discover a scientist and his family unaffected by their stay.

2Zero Hour

23 minJan 10, 1992

In the near future, young children are persuaded to help an imaginary friend named "Drill" to play a game called "Invasion".

3The Jar

23 minJan 17, 1992

A farmer impresses the townsfolk with a mysterious jar bought from a traveling carnival sideshow.

4Colonel Stonesteel and the Desperate Empties

23 minJan 24, 1992

A boy and a neighbor invent a fake mummy to stir up the townspeople and relieve the boredom of the last days of summer.

5The Concrete Mixer

23 minJan 31, 1992

A Martian's reluctance to attack Earth stems from what he read in his alien comic books.

6The Utterly Perfect Murder

23 minFeb 7, 1992

As a boy, piano prodigy, Douglas, was tormented by a gang of bullies, led by Ralph. Now, fifty years later, Doug looks for closure in his life, by traveling back to his hometown and getting his revenge.

7Let's Play Poison

23 minFeb 14, 1992

After witnessing a student's accidental death because of bullying, a teacher vows to put children in their place but they plan to do the same to him.

8The Martian

23 minFeb 21, 1992

A Martian welcomes grieving parents who move to Mars.

9The Lonely One

23 minJul 10, 1992

After discovering the body of the latest victim of the serial killer known as The Lonely One, Lavinia persuades her friends to go to the movies to take their minds off the tragedy. The result is a long, scary midnight walk home for the increasingly terrified Lavinia.

10The Happiness Machine

24 minJul 17, 1992

A family man, incorrigible dreamer and small-town inventor is inspired to build a machine that can create happiness. However, his wife makes him realize the irony of such concept.

11Tomorrow's Child

23 minAug 14, 1992

An experimental childbirth procedure results in a couple's baby being born into another dimension. The child's non-human appearance puts a lot of strain on the new parents and threatens to send the wife into madness.

12The Anthem Sprinters

24 minAug 21, 1992

An American author on a visit to Dublin stops by a pub where he is caught up in the excitement over a local sporting event known as "anthem sprinting." In this challenge runners compete to see who can get out of the theater fastest during the pause between the end of the film and the start of the Irish national anthem and this time the stakes are the American's first edition of Joyce versus the pub's Sean O'Casey autographed playbill.

13By the Numbers

23 minSep 11, 1992

The manager of a hotel pool drills his young son with military precision, leading to tragedy.

14The Long Rain

24 minSep 19, 1992

When an army spaceship crash lands on a world where it never stops raining, the four survivors try to reach the Sundome that has been erected on the planet and provides the only shelter. But exhaustion hits and predatory plants await.

15The Dead Man

24 minSep 26, 1992

A lonely middle-aged woman moves to a small town to take a job as a manicurist and finds she is strangely drawn to local eccentric Odd Martin--who claims to be dead.

16Sun and Shadow

23 minOct 3, 1992

An American film crew arrives in a Mexican village to shoot a TV commercial; Ricardo, a townsman, interferes with the filming because he resents his life being treated as a colorful prop by these arrogant interlopers.

17Silent Towns

23 minOct 10, 1992

A technician accidentally stranded on Mars by a sudden evacuation searches desperately for another human being on the desolate world. When he finds an equally lonely woman, she is not what he was expecting.

18Downwind from Gettysburg

23 minOct 17, 1992

Walter Bayes has devoted his life to creating a robot duplicate of Abraham Lincoln to inspire the American people to recommit themselves to the nation's ideals. On the night of its unveiling, however, a maniac named Booth plots to assassinate the Presidential automaton.

19Some Live Like Lazarus

23 minOct 24, 1992

A young couple falls in love but his domineering mother comes between them; when the old woman finally dies--forty years later--the next step is not very clear.

20The Handler

22 minOct 27, 1992

A small town mortician takes a perverse delight in exacting postmortem revenge against his enemies, until his day of reckoning arrives.

21Fee Fie Foe Fum

23 minOct 28, 1992

A vicious prankster convinces his wife's mean old grandmother that he is planning to kill her and her pets and grind them up in the new garbage disposal that he bought for her.

22Great Wide World Over There

23 minOct 29, 1992

Cora Gibbs is an illiterate woman living on an isolated farm with her much older husband. When her educated nephew Benjy visits for the summer, she sees her opportunity to connect with the "great wide world over there" by sending and receiving mail.

23The Tombstone

23 minOct 30, 1992

A bickering couple checks into the last available room in a small hotel only to discover that the previous occupant left a tombstone in the room. No one gets any sleep as the wife is now convinced the room is haunted.