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Re-Telling Tales: The Short Stories of Ray Bradbury in Adaptation

Conference Paper · July 2007

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Re-Telling Tales: The Short Stories of Ray Bradbury in Adaptation

Phil Nichols, July 2007

Ray Bradbury (1920 - ) is one of the more widely adapted short story writers. His

stories have been turned into films, radio plays, television programmes and stage

plays. Those which have been adapted most fall into two broad categories: the weird

tales and suspense stories typical of his earliest book, Dark Carnival (1948); and the

science fiction tales typical of his fourth book, The Illustrated Man (1951).

There is something about Bradbury’s best stories that encourages re-telling. Many of

the feature film adaptations of Bradbury’s works have been weak, or only partially

successful, but this shouldn’t mask the many more successful adaptations in short

film, theatre, radio and television.

When Sam Peckinpah proposed filming Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This

Way Comes, Bradbury asked him how he intended to do it. Peckinpah replied that he

would simply tear the pages out of the book and stuff them into the camera (Kerns,

1992). This wonderful image unfortunately reinforces the fallacious view that fidelity

of adaptation is important (Leitch, 2003). It also overlooks the transformations which

can occur when, in Dudley Andrew’s (1984) words, “the cinema…records its

confrontation with an ultimately intransigent text”.

Much of the literature on adaptation focuses exclusively on feature-length adaptations

of novels (Naremore, 2000 p10), presumably because these outnumber any other type
of adaptation, due in turn to the prestige value accorded to literary sources (cf.

McLuhan (2001): old media become content for new media). This means that there

has been relatively little theorising on adaptations from short stories, whether into

film or other media.

In this paper I will look at three Bradbury short stories which have been repeatedly

adapted. I hope to explore the popularity of the stories in adaptation, and work

towards some aspects of adaptation for further study..

Mars Is Heaven

“Mars is Heaven” was first published in 1948 in the pulp magazine Planet Stories.

The story is an unusual hybrid: clearly a science fiction tale about a mission to Mars,

but structured as a horror story with a setting of small town America. Captain John

Black and his crew land on Mars, and discover that it’s just like 1920s Illinois.

Ultimately, Black deduces that the Martians have staged an elaborate charade - a

seduction - as a way of overcoming the invasion of Earthmen. The crew are all killed,

and the Martians stage a 1920s Earth-style funeral ceremony for them.

In a sense, the first adaptation of “Mars is Heaven” came in May 1950, when

Bradbury converted his standalone short into a chapter of his novel The Martian

Chronicles, making just a few adjustments to sustain the internal chronology and

logic of the Chronicles.

A radio adaptation appeared shortly afterwards (2 June 1950), Morton Fine and David

Friedkin’s dramatisation for the series Escape. This introduces a novel framing device

of purporting to be live radio coverage of the first rocket to Mars, presumably written

to help the story fit into the general suspense genre of the series. This adaptation takes

many of the sensory details directly from Bradbury’s story: iron deer on the lawn,

piano music flowing from the house. It also modifies the story to include a love

interest.

Fine & Freidkin’s script was re-used in the series Think/ABC Workshop (16 March

1953), but with the live radio framing story removed. This adaptation of the

adaptation takes the episode back to being quite close to the original story.

Another radio adaptation appeared in 1950 , for the series Dimension X (7 July 1950).

In this version, events unfold almost exactly as in Bradbury’s short story, although the

adaptor, Ernest Kinoy, makes much more of the procedural niceties of landing on

another planet, in a similar way to the feature film Destination Moon, released in the

same year. Kinoy also places emphasis on the space crew being a military outfit,

serving to intensify Black’s conflict with his crew.

Where Bradbury’s story gives visual clues to the whereabouts of the rocket ship - the

green lawn, the large house, the iron deer ornaments – Kinoy chooses to add an audio

clue: a rooster is heard crowing. However, he fails to capitalise on another audio clue

which Bradbury provides: the sound of a piano.

Kinoy doesn’t kill the earthmen. Instead, his version ends with a chase – the evil

martians pursue the captain back to his abandoned space rocket, where he locks

himself in and radios earth for help.

As with most of the adaptations of “Mars is Heaven”, this one exploited the horror

aspect. Stephen King (1982) has claimed this exact episode as being one of his

defining early experiences of horror. It is, in fact, fairly typical of the Dimension X

series as a whole: Five years later (8 May 1955), Kinoy’s script was use again for

another series, X Minus One.

A later, disappointing, adaptation of “Mars is Heaven” was written by a writer of

whom we might have expected better. For the 1980 TV serialisation of The Martian

Chronicles, a script was commissioned from Richard Matheson, best known as the

screenwriter of dozens of Twilight Zones (1959-64), The Incredible Shrinking Man

(1957), and Duel (1971). The Matheson version (at least, as filmed) is almost devoid

of emotion: astronauts don’t seem particularly bothered to have discovered their long-

lost relatives on Mars, and as a result the Martians’ seduction of Captain Black is not

particularly traumatic. There is also a very prosaic explanation of the seduction

(blamed – and I kid you not – on a poisoned chocolate pudding). This adaptation is, in

plot terms, quite close to the original story – but the imagery is lacking, as is the

emotion and the suspense.

Bradbury himself has adapted the story on at least two occasions. For his stage play of

The Martian Chronicles (1986) he wrote a condensed version of the story, with just a

few alterations to the imagery (but including the audio cue of a rooster, which appears
to be borrowed from Ernest Kinoy’s radio adaptation), and some slight plot tinkering

to help him segué into the next story in the Chronicles.

For his television series Ray Bradbury Theatre (20 July 1990) he produced a version

very similar to the play. He did incorporate a new visual flourish in transitioning

captain Black from uniformed military man to relaxed man-in-civvies, using a dance

between Black and his mother.

“Mars is Heaven” shows us some of the issues in adapting a short story to another

medium. There are issues to do with plotting; theme; visual and aural imagery; and

issues related to audience expectation (showing death might be taboo; adding a love

interest might be customary).

As an insight into Bradbury’s own work, his own adaptations show a willingness to

re-visit - interrogate - his own text, something that Eller and Touponce (2002) have

shown to be characteristic of his working methods.

Zero Hour

“Zero Hour” first appeared in 1947, again in the pulp science fiction magazine Planet

Stories. Its first book appearance was in the 1951 short story collection The Illustrated

Man. This collection, above all others, is responsible for Bradbury being branded as

an anti-technology writer. In fact, most of the collection is not anti-technology, but

can be seen as warning of what may happen to us if we do not use technology

appropriately.

“Zero Hour” is the story of an alien invasion, with unseen aliens using earth children

to prepare the way for an attack. The story is told through the eyes of a young girl,

Mink, and her mother. Mink’s childish play is all but ignored by her busy

mother…until, too late, she discovers that it’s not a game; earth really is being

invaded. Mum and dad retreat to the attic, but are eventually discovered by Mink and

the invading army. The classic closing line is “peek-a-boo”.

This story operates on several levels. It is genre science fiction, so the story is full of

what appear to be passing references to future technology. It is also, yet again, a

horror story, and like several of Bradbury’s greatest tales it contrasts the assumed

innocence of childhood with the horrors that children are capable of. And it warns us

not to ignore our children, not to be too busy, not to allow our technology to pull us

away from human relationships.

“Zero Hour” has been adapted for radio and television many times. In the 1950s and

1960s, the radio series Suspense adapted it three times (5 April 1955; 18 May 1958; 3

January 1960), and it was also adapted for Dimension X (17 June 1950), Lights Out

(23 July 1951), Escape (4 October 1953), and X Minus One (23 November 1955).

What is curious is that most of these anthology series were not science fiction shows,

and indeed their adaptations of “Zero Hour” typically play down the science fictional

aspects, leaving just the domestic drama of mother, child and childish games, and the
shocking revelation that there really is an alien invasion going on. The story seems to

have struck a nerve in that era of cold-war paranoia.

So what of the background science-fictional elements? Mark Rose has identified

“landscape as hero” as being particularly common in science fiction and fantasy. One

reading of Bradbury’s story could hold the landscape to be pivotal to the author’s

theme. Several of his adaptors have clearly not seen it this way, allowing the

foreground plot to cast shadows onto a completely different background.

Could it just be just a matter of contexts? In the context of Planet Stories, the pulp

magazine, the science fiction elements help the story justify itself as science fiction.

In the context of a non-SF suspense radio series, the absence of SF elements help the

story sound plausible. We see here how the adaptor takes elements which are

appropriate for their purpose. Or, perhaps to use Bazin’s metaphor, the original text is

like a crystal chandelier, and the adaptation is a flashlight which intersects it,

illuminating facets selectively. (Andrew, 1984).

There is one other element of Bradbury’s story that most of the adaptations either

miss out or overlook. Bradbury clearly shows that only younger children, with their

imaginative games, are susceptible to his aliens’ influence. He shows a gang of 12

year olds who are explicitly excluded from the younger children’s games. Bradbury is

here observing that the onset of puberty is a dividing line between childish games and

adulthood, a theme that he will use in other child-horror stories, and that also

permeates much of his “Green Town” work, which includes the novels Dandelion

Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).

Bradbury has himself adapted “Zero Hour” on two occasions: once as a stage play,

and once for his TV series. The Ray Bradbury Theatre version (10 January 1992)

restores the SF elements lost from earlier adaptations, thereby restoring the theme of

our relationship to technology. He also restores the divide between younger and older

children, and does so by showing rather than just telling (as he does in the short

story).

The TV adaptation also exhibits an adjustment which illustrates some of the

compromises of storytelling that a successful adaptation may require. In the short

story, the mother suddenly flips into a state of knowledge of what is really going on.

In the TV adaptation, though, a dramatic turning point is called for at the end of act

one, and is provided when she observes Mink playing with a gyroscope which

vanishes into thin air. This is another manifestation of the dramatic requirement of

“show, don’t tell”. Dramatically, it works, but symbolically it is less effective than the

mother working it all out in her head.

“The Veldt”

“The Veldt” first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1950, and its first book

appearance was in The Illustrated Man (1952). It is the first story in that collection,

and sets the tone for the entire book.

George and Lydia are two busy parents who let their children occupy themselves in

the nursery. This particular nursery is what today we might call a virtual reality

environment. On a whim, the children can have the nursery simulate any place on

earth. Unfortunately, the children spend rather too much time in a simulation of the

African Veldt, which begins to take over. George and Lydia get their comeuppance as

absentee parents when the lions of the veldt become too real and attack them.

Thematically, this story is very similar to “Zero Hour”; again, parents ignore their

children’s play at their peril. Bradbury later said, “I wrote ‘The Veldt’ because my

subconscious knew more about children than has often been told” (Bradbury, 1972).

He wrote the story at a time that television was just beginning to have an impact in the

United States, and for decades it has been possible to read the story as showing the

dangers of television addiction – and, recently, of addiction to computer games (note

that the National Consumer Council (2007) this very month warned us of what

Bradbury told us over fifty years ago…) One of Bradbury’s advantages over some of

his contemporaries is that he has never been too specific about how his technologies

work. This has meant that some of his once-ludicrous extrapolations can now seem

threateningly plausible.

“The Veldt” has been adapted several times for radio. Dimension X did it with a script

by Ernest Kinoy (9 August 1951; the same script was also used for the X Minus One

broadcast of 4 August 1955), but didn’t allow the parents to actually die (where have

we heard that before?). Dimension X brought to the foreground the character of

McClean, a psychiatrist, who has been investigating the apparent paranoid state of

George and Lydia.

Bradbury himself has adapted it for stage (Bradbury, 1972). In a bold departure, he

conceives of the nursery wall (where the Veldt appears) as being where the audience

sits. To summon up lions he uses sounds and lights and dialogue, nothing more. It is

one of his most effective plays, precisely because he has thought about how to evoke

the lions in this medium, rather than trying to convert what he had written in the short

story.

Howard Kreitsek adapted the Veldt as part of the 1969 feature film The Illustrated

Man. In Kreitsek’s version, the story begins on the Veldt. George & Lydia (actually

re-named in the film) really are walking about on the Veldt, surrounded by lions and

zebra. Then it is revealed that they are in a holographic projection. The large budget

allows a quite naturalistic treatment of the illusory environment, but is somehow less

effective for depicting rather than evoking.

Bradbury also adapted the story for screen, for his TV series (The Ray Bradbury

Theatre 10 November 1989). The chief successes of this adaptation are the use of the

therapist McClean to diagnose the theme of the story for the viewer, and the

introduction of a tactile cue – the discovery of real soil on the ground of the nursery-

to propel the story forward.

This year, BBC radio presented a new adaptation of “The Veldt” by Mike Walker.

Walker’s play puts us right back in the hands of bad technology, or at least bad

technology made by people with an interest in overpowering us. This adaptation can

be seen as emphasising elements of the story which are most appropriate to our time.
“The Veldt” is one of Bradbury’s best pieces of short story writing. His descriptions

of the Veldt are evocative, and a close reading of these passages can be quite

revealing about how his style and technique work. He draws upon all of our senses,

often in passing and often in metaphor. The reader feels immersed. Here is an

example passage:

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so

feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur

on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty

upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was

in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the

yellow of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion

lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from

the panting, dripping mouths.

It can be argued that some of these metaphors are imprecise, or that Bradbury is

laying it all on too thick. However, the pace with which he summons up one sensory

image after another is, I would argue, what makes his stories so vibrant and vivid.

Much of the literature examining Bradbury’s work focuses on thematics, but a major

part of Bradbury’s appeal seems to be the imagery. William Touponce’s (1998)

analysis of Bradbury in terms of Bachelard’s notion of reverie is one of the few to

address how this mode of imagery works in the context of narrative. For the reader,
the well chosen metaphor, cast off in the rapid flow of the narrative, provides the

story with an inner life that the “mere” plot or theme does not express.

The various adaptations of “The Veldt”show a range of methods of dealing with these

metaphors. The tendency in TV and film is to make the images “real”; that is,

indistinguishable from the reality the narrative ordinarily represents. According to

Metz (1991), this is because the film image is instantly denotational, as the film image

functions more at the level of sentence that at the level of word.

In theatre and radio, there seems to be more opportunity (or more willingness?) to

retain the imagery, to use aural signifiers to connote lions rather than denote them.

Conclusions

The study of Bradbury’s short stories in adaptation can reveal insights into the source

texts; into the processes of adaptation; and into the potentialities of different sign

systems of each medium.

In the absence of an established body of critical theory for short story adaptation, we

can borrow from the analysis of film adaptation, although it would seem that many of

the concerns of that literature focus on elements which are not so appropriate for

present purposes.
As to why Bradbury’s stories persist, being adapted over and over, two areas warrant

further study:

• The landscape as being something that can be apparently be adjusted, allowing

the foreground to cast the shadows we find culturally appropriate at any given

time

• The extent to which a text invites an inner life, leading to different readings

and therefore different adaptations.

 References

Andrew, D. (1984) Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bradbury, R. (1950) The Martian Chronicles. New York: Doubleday

Bradbury, R. (1951) The Illustrated Man. New York: Doubleday

Bradbury, R. (1957) Dandelion Wine. New York: Doubleday

Bradbury, R. (1972) The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and other plays. New York: Bantam

Bradbury, R. (1962) Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Simon & Shuster

Bradbury, R. (1986) The Martian Chronicles [play]. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing

Eller, J.R. & Touponce, W.F. (2004) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press

Kerns, W. (1992) “Bradbury Delivers Fantasy for Half a Century” in Aggelis, S. (ed.) (2004)
Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi

King, S. (1982) Danse Macabre:the anatomy of horror. London: Futura

Leitch, T. (2003) “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory”. Criticism 45:2, pp 149-71.

McLuhan, M. (2001) Understanding Media. London: Routledge

Metz, C. (1991) Film Language: a semiotics of the cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Naremore, J. (ed.) (2000) Film Adaptation. London: Athlone Press.

National Consumer Council (2007) Watching, Wanting and Wellbeing: exploring the links [online]
< http://www.ncc.org.uk/nccpdf/misc/NCC167rr_watching_wanting_wellbeing.pdf >[cited 20 July
2007]

Touponce, W.F. (1998) Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press

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