Ray Bradbury’s appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on March 1, 1978 was very enjoyable. Ray and Johnny chatted animatedly about the possibility of life on other planets and Ray even said he kept an open mind that extraterrestrials might have visited Earth.

Ray shared an interest in space launches with guest Don Rickles. Ray’s plays, especially The Martian Chronicles, also came up in the discussion. Ray proved himself extremely intelligent and as articulate in speaking as in writing.

Ray Bradbury’s guest spot on The Merv Griffin Show on January 12, 1978 was one of his relatively rare talk show appearances. Unfortunately the copy on YouTube seems to be just excerpts from the interview provided by the company which has the licensing rights as a teaser to whoever wants to buy rights to show the program in entirety.

Bradbury enthused about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, going so far as to call it the most significant film of the last twenty years. He discussed the importance of space exploration and brought his poetry book When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, from which he read a few lines from the end of a poem about space exploration.

Even the highlights provided in the YouTube copy are well worth watching. It would be interesting to know how long the original interview lasted.

The Season 3 episode of 21 Jump Street entitled “Woolly Bullies” originally aired on February 19, 1989. I was a fan of the show and tried never to miss it, so I caught this one in first run. The show follows a number of youthful police detectives who often go undercover as high school students.

Officer Doug Penhall, played by Peter DeLuise, is trying to infiltrate a computer club whose members have been wreaking havoc by changing grades in the school’s system. Because of his nerd disguise, Doug cannot deal with a bully who is keeping him out of the club by intimidating Doug and the club members.

Doug goes to Captain Adam Fuller, played by Steven Williams. As Captain Fuller and other officers listen, Doug describes his bully problem. Captain Fuller relates being bullied by a cousin who forced him to shoplift as a young teenager. Officer Tom Hanson, played by Johnny Depp, has one of the longer stories, about how around age nine he was continually beaten up by a girl who knew he would not hit a girl. Another officer has the shortest story as he simply punched the bully in the face, and a few others have no bully stories but simply listen.

About half the episode is taken up by Doug relating his experience with a bully named Jack Archer, who tormented him from the fifth to the tenth grades. Doug was orphaned and living with his Uncle Nick, played by Dom DeLuise. After describing a series of ever worsening bully incidents culminating in serious property damage, Doug decides to find out where Jack Archer, who had moved away, is now living and confront him.

This is where Ray Bradbury comes in. The main character in Bradbury’s story “The Utterly Perfect Murder” is also coincidentally named Douglas and nicknamed Doug. Although the bully’s name and the specific bullying incidents are different, and it was Doug and not the bully who moved away, the deciding to travel to confront the bully and the outcome of the confrontation are absolutely identical. In the 21 Jump Street episode, the confrontation helps Doug Penhall resolve his current bullying problem and pursue his investigation.

The next day after seeing the episode, I wrote Ray Bradbury and told him 21 Jump Street had ripped off his story. Bradbury always responded when he found any message of interest and I was sure he would find this of interest. To my surprise I received no response. Sometime later I was talking to Ray’s longtime bibliographer Donn Albright who said Ray said this happens all the time and he declined to pursue it, although the first time it happened Ray took it to the Supreme Court.

Overall I found this a good episode of 21 Jump Street and very memorable. I just watched it for the second time after not seeing it since 1989.

At one point in the 64th Annual Academy Awards, at the 1992 Oscars, presented in 1993, comedian Billy Crystal introduced actor Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks introduced a clip of another ceremony held by the Academy before the main awards. In it, author Ray Bradbury presented an honorary Academy Award, specifically the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, to his dear friend Ray Harryhausen for his lifetime of technical achievements on film. This was in recognition of his immense impact on the special effects industry, specifically for his pioneering stop-motion model animation technique known as “Dynamation.”

Stills were shown of some of Harryhausen’s work but no clips. If Bradbury spoke before presenting Harryhausen the award, that part was not included. The clip showed Bradbury smiling and congratulating Harryhausen, and Harryhausen’s acceptance speech.

A couple of copies of this portion of the ceremony can be found on YouTube.

Prisoners of Gravity was a Canadian television news magazine program which aired 139 episodes over five seasons from 1989 to 1994. It was hosted by Rick Green.

The premise was that Rick, a fan of speculative fiction, was disturbed by news broadcasts about the dire state of the world and escaped Earth as Commander Rick. He broadcasted the show each week from an orbiting space station. Each episode had interviews on a specific topic.

The topic for December 15, 1993 was “Amnesia/Total Recall.” Author Ray Bradbury appeared discussing his own total recall beginning from the moment of his birth. Bradbury was sure no one would have told him these things and the only way he could have known them was to remember them. It was very interesting and informative.