The Ray Bradbury Theater (TV Series) A Sound of Thunder (1989) User Reviews

A Dark Tale

[claudio_carvalho · 8/10 · 20 July 2006]

In the future, a time travel agency offers "The Time Safari", where client may kill animals like dinosaur, but specifically selected by the team, in order to not change the environment and consequently past. During one expedition, the traveler becomes scared with the huge dinosaur and leaves the protective path, shooting and stepping on the woods. When the team returns to their base, they realize that future has changed, and a further investigation showed that client stepped on a butterfly, with drastic consequences to mankind.

I recently saw Peter Hyams' "A Sound of Thunder" (2005) on DVD, with an extended version of this short tale of "The Ray Bradbury's Theater". I found the VHS where I taped this show and I watched again, and I found it darker and darker when comparing with the 2005 movie. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Safari no Passado" ("Safari in the Past")

The premise alone deserves a whole series

[rigovega · 7/10 · 9 September 2019]

Time traveling in the year 2054 is possible and humans as usual use technology for the wrong reasons. If you read the short story, this is almost exactly the same. This is one of the best episodes the series has to offer.

A Classic Story With Great Implications

[Hitchcoc · 8/10 · 27 March 2015]

I have seen so many portrayals of time travel into the past that every story must deal with the mutability of time. If one event goes awry, the entire future over millennia will be altered. It could mean the destruction of the future that created the time traveler. In this one, Kiel Martin (D.J. on "Hill Street Blues") is your prototype, bored big game hunter. He has killed everything that presents a challenge to the hunting community. Now he is going after the biggest carnivore of all, the T-Rex. He pays big bucks to a time traveling group that takes guys like him back in time to hunt. He is an arrogant, self-centered jerk. When the leader explains the pitfalls of failing to follow directions, he smugly ignores him. Unfortunately, when he does see his quarry, he panics. The story and the Bradbury episode have one of the most dramatic conclusions of all time, one that lives with us to this day. It has even has brought about a term in cosmology. This is pretty well done, all in all.

"We guarantee nothing, except the dinosaurs."

[classicsoncall · 7/10 · 16 January 2022]

I read something very similar to this story once, it might even have been Bradbury's own 'A Sound of Thunder'. Something in the back of my mind seems to recall it as the 'butterfly effect', which was the title of a 2004 movie with a similar premise. That's brought home near the end of this episode when a butterfly looking insect is removed from Eckles' (Kiel Martin) boot, with the implication that the time stream will be permanently altered by the mishap. This theoretical stuff is fascinating to ponder, but there's no way of proving it one way or another, merely because the fact of someone present day moving into the past would be enough by itself to change the time stream if that sort of thing was possible. Anyway, the return to a Nazi-like future for the dinosaur hunters was enough of a shock to make this a troubling time travel story. For Eckles, it was much more than he bargained for.

Still Packs A (Thunderous) Punch

[Gislef · 9/10 · 9 November 2022]

Bradbury's short story is the best suited of all his stories to the series format. There's a few things that are glossed over, but basically the 30-minute format works well for Bradbury's writing. There's no need to develop Eckles and Travis: they're archetypes, not real people. Bradbury was always best at dealing with archetypes. Yes, he could do well-developed characters, but mostly in his long-form stories like "Something Wicked...". "Sound" neither requires not has well-developed characters in the original story, and we don't get them here.

As such, Kiel Martin and John Bach are both good at playing those archetypes. Bach is the jaded hunter who has seen it all, and Martin is the cocky hunter who gets in over his head and is ultimately a coward.

The special effects with the dinosaur and the spinning time sphere are a tad outdated and/or cheap, but the special effects aren't the point of the story, unlike the later full-length movie which missed the mark on almost every aspect imaginable. Go in the past, change it, and watch the repercussions echo through history. Some of the dialogue is very Bradbury-esque, and delivered effectively by Bach. It's the kind of timey-wimeyness that shows like 'Doctor Who' and 'Quantum Leap' (the new ones) could learn from.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?