New Documentary on a Weird & Wonderful Dutch Library Now Free to Stream on Amazon Prime

Boing­Bo­ing recent­ly ran a short pro­file on a new doc­u­men­tary that takes you inside the intrigu­ing Rit­man Library. Locat­ed in Ams­ter­dam, the library hous­es 23,000 rare books from hermetic/esoteric/occult traditions–Alchemy, Her­met­i­ca, Cabala, Mag­ic, Rosi­cru­cian­ism, Mys­tic, Theos­o­phy, Freema­son­ry, Pan­s­o­phy and much more.

You can watch the trail­er for the doc­u­men­tary above. But, even bet­ter, you can now stream the com­plete 90-minute film on Ama­zon Prime for free. If you have an Ama­zon Prime account, just click here to start watch­ing. If you don’t, you can sign up for a 30-day free tri­al, watch the doc, and then decide whether to remain a sub­scriber or not. It’s your call. (Note: they also offer a sim­i­lar arrange­ment for audio­books from Audi­ble.)

The same deal applies to oth­er films we’ve fea­tured dur­ing the past year. Jim Jar­musch’s new doc­u­men­tary Gimme Dan­ger–his “love let­ter” to punk icons Iggy Pop and The Stooges. And also Long Strange Trip, the new 4‑hour doc­u­men­tary on the Grate­ful Dead.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

The Art of Mak­ing Old-Fash­ioned, Hand-Print­ed Books

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es

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The Existential Philosophy of Cowboy Bebop, the Cult Japanese Anime Series, Explored in a Thoughtful Video Essay

Super Dimen­sion Fortress MacrossMobile Suit Gun­dam WingNeon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion — these are the kind of titles that might ring a bell even if you have no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in futur­is­tic Japan­ese ani­mat­ed tele­vi­sion shows. But how about Cow­boy Bebop? That evoca­tive­ly West­ern name itself, not an awk­ward Eng­lish trans­la­tion of a Japan­ese title but Eng­lish in the orig­i­nal, hints that the series stands apart from all the dimen­sion fortress­es, mobile suits, and neon gene­ses out there. And indeed, when it first aired in 1997, view­ers the world over took quick note of the dis­tinc­tive sen­si­bil­i­ty of its sto­ries of a ship­ful of boun­ty hunters drift­ing through out­er space in the year 2071.

“On paper, Cow­boy Bebop, the leg­endary cult ani­me series from Shinichirō Watan­abe” — recent­ly direc­tor of one of Blade Run­ner 2049’s short pre­quels — “reads like some­thing John Wayne, Elmore Leonard, and Philip K. Dick came up with dur­ing a wild, all-night whiskey ben­der.” So writes the Atlantic’s Alex Suskind in a piece on the show’s last­ing lega­cy. “Every­one speaks like they’re back­ground extras in Chi­na­town. The show ulti­mate­ly fea­tures so many cross-rang­ing influ­ences and nods to oth­er famous works it’s almost impos­si­ble to keep track. It’s Ser­gio Leone in a space­suit. It’s Butch Cas­sidy and the Sun­dance Kid with auto­mat­ic weapons.”

And yet Cow­boy Bebop remains, thor­ough­ly, a work of Japan­ese imag­i­na­tion, and like many of the most respect­ed of the form, it has seri­ous philo­soph­i­cal incli­na­tions. Chan­nel Criswell cre­ator Lewis Bond exam­ines those in “The Mean­ing of Noth­ing,” his video essay on the series. “Can we as humans find some­thing in noth­ing, find pur­pose beyond sur­vival?” Bond asks. “These onto­log­i­cal thoughts that plague us make up the same exis­ten­tial drift our char­ac­ters repeat­ed­ly find them­selves in, and it’s what is most sig­nif­i­cant to the jour­ney of Cow­boy Bebop.” He looks past the cool­er-than-cool style, snap­py dia­logue, wit­ty gags, and rich, unex­pect­ed mix­ture of aes­thet­ic influ­ences to which fans have thrilled to find “a meta­phys­i­cal expres­sion of how peo­ple over­come their lives, par­tic­u­lar­ly the lin­ger­ing grief that comes with them.”

Tak­en as a whole, the show resolves into a pre­sen­ta­tion of life as “less of a lin­ear path towards a goal, more of a haze that we must ven­ture through with­out any guid­ance, because the sad real­i­ty of Bebop’s sto­ry is that our cast of char­ac­ters are lost in the cos­mos with­out any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for why they live, oth­er than to exist.” The series came to a famous­ly ambigu­ous end after 26 episodes, but this past sum­mer we heard that it may return, reboot­ed as a live-action series. What­ev­er its medi­um, the world of Cow­boy Bebop — with its space­craft, its inter­plan­e­tary cops and rob­bers, and its super­in­tel­li­gent cor­gi — amounts to noth­ing less than the human con­di­tion, a place we have no choice but to revis­it. Might as well do it in style.

The com­plete Cow­boy Bebop series can be bought on blu-ray, or if you’re a sub­scriber, you can watch the episodes on Hulu.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the New Ani­me Pre­quel to Blade Run­ner 2049, by Famed Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Shinichi­ro Watan­abe

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Download New Storyboarding Software That’s Free & Open Source

Quick tip: The new soft­ware pack­age, Sto­ry­board­er, makes it “easy to visu­al­ize a sto­ry as fast you can draw stick fig­ures.” You can cre­ate a sto­ry idea with­out actu­al­ly mak­ing a full-blown movie and see how it looks. Sto­ry­board­er is free. It’s open source. It’s avail­able for Mac, Win­dows, and Lin­ux. And you can down­load it here.

As the web­site Car­toon Brew notes, the sto­ries cre­at­ed in Sto­ry­board­er “can be export­ed to Pre­miere, Final Cut, Avid, PDF, and ani­mat­ed GIF for­mats.” Or you can “refine the art­work in Pho­to­shop.”

Get Sto­ry­board­er here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Car­toon Brew

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Makes Its $149 Pho­to Edit­ing Soft­ware Now Com­plete­ly Free to Down­load

NASA Puts Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

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Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Barrett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

Though he even­tu­al­ly dis­ap­peared from the pub­lic eye, Syd Bar­rett did not fade into obscu­ri­ty all at once after his “errat­ic behav­ior,” as Andy Kahn writes at Jam­Base, “led to his leav­ing” Pink Floyd in 1968. The found­ing singer/songwriter/guitarist went on in the fol­low­ing few years to write, record, and even spo­rad­i­cal­ly per­form new solo mate­r­i­al, appear­ing on John Peel’s BBC show in 1970 and giv­ing a long Rolling Stone inter­view the fol­low­ing year. He even start­ed, briefly, a new band in 1972 and worked on new record­ings in the stu­dio until 1974.

Bar­rett released two solo albums, The Mad­cap Laughs and Bar­rett, in 1970. Like the solo work of Roky Erick­son and Skip Spence—two oth­er trag­ic psy­che­del­ic-era genius­es with men­tal health struggles—Barrett’s lat­er com­po­si­tions are frus­trat­ing­ly rough-cut gems: quirky, sin­is­ter, mean­der­ing folk-psych adven­tures that pro­vide an alter­nate look into what Pink Floyd might have sound­ed like if their orig­i­nal inten­tions of keep­ing him on as a non-per­form­ing song­writer had worked out.

Assist­ing him dur­ing his stu­dio ses­sions were for­mer band­mates Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour. The band still admired his sin­gu­lar tal­ent, but they found work­ing, and even speak­ing, with him dif­fi­cult in the extreme.

As Gilmour has described those years in inter­views, they car­ried a con­sid­er­able amount of guilt over Barrett’s ouster. In addi­tion to the heart­break­ing trib­ute “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond,” Gilmour has often per­formed Syd’s solo songs onstage in affect­ing, often solo acoustic, ren­di­tions that became all the more poignant after Barrett’s death in 2006.

In the videos at the top, you can see Gilmour play two songs from Barrett’s The Mad­cap Laughs—“Ter­rapin” and “Dark Globe”—and fur­ther up, see him play “Domi­noes” from Bar­rett, with Richard Wright on Key­boards. Gilmour has also revis­it­ed onstage Pink Floyd’s ear­li­est, Bar­rett-front­ed, days. Just above, we have the rare treat of see­ing him play the band’s first sin­gle, “Arnold Layne,” with spe­cial guest David Bowie on lead vocals. And below, see Gilmour and Wright play a ver­sion of the ear­ly Floyd clas­sic “Astron­o­my Domine,” live at Abbey Road stu­dios.

It was, sad­ly, at Abbey Road where the band last saw Bar­rett, when he entered the stu­dio in 1975 dur­ing the final mix­es of Wish You Were Here. Over­weight and with shaved head and eye­brows, Bar­rett was at first unrec­og­niz­able. After this last pub­lic appear­ance, he felt the need, as Waters put it, to “with­draw com­plete­ly” from “mod­ern life.” But the trag­ic final months with Pink Floyd and few sight­ings after­ward should hard­ly be the way we remem­ber Syd Bar­rett. He may have lost the abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate with his for­mer friends and band­mates, but for a time he con­tin­ued to speak in haunt­ing­ly strange, thor­ough­ly orig­i­nal songs.

This col­lec­tion of videos comes to us via Jam­Base.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Syd Barrett’s “Effer­vesc­ing Ele­phant” Comes to Life in a New Retro-Style Ani­ma­tion

Short Film Syd Barrett’s First Trip Reveals the Pink Floyd Founder’s Psy­che­del­ic Exper­i­men­ta­tion (1967)

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with House­hold Objects: Hear Two Sur­viv­ing Tracks Made with Wine Glass­es & Rub­ber Bands

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The History of Hip Hop Music Visualized on a Turntable Circuit Diagram: Features 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Every genre of music has its lin­eages and fil­i­a­tions, and each gen­er­a­tion tries to out­do its pre­de­ces­sors. In no genre of music are these rela­tion­ships so clear­ly defined as in hip-hop, where good-natured bat­tles, furi­ous beefs, nos­tal­gic trib­utes, and guest appear­ances explic­it­ly con­nect rap­pers from dif­fer­ent eras, cities, and styles. Since the ear­li­est days of hip-hop, groups have formed crews and loose alliances, built their own labels and media empires togeth­er, and defined the sounds of their region. At the cen­ter of it all was the turntable, which found­ing fathers like Kool DJ Herc repur­posed from con­sumer play­back machines to elec­tron­ic instru­ments and pro­to-sam­plers. No mat­ter how far the music has come in its sophis­ti­cat­ed adap­ta­tions of dig­i­tal stu­dio tech­nol­o­gy, hip-hop’s essen­tial archi­tec­ture came from the meet­ing of two turnta­bles, a mix­er, and a micro­phone.

Pay­ing homage to that hum­ble ori­gin, the Hip-Hop Love Blue­print by design house Dorothy takes the cir­cuit dia­gram of a turntable as the basis for a map con­nect­ing 700 of hip-hop’s major play­ers, from god­fa­thers like Cab Cal­loway, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets, to orig­i­na­tors like Herc and Grand­mas­ter Flash, gold­en age heroes like Run-DMC and Eric B. and Rakim, polit­i­cal artists like Pub­lic Ene­my and KRS-One, West Coast giants like N.W.A. and Dr. Dre, under­ground and indie rap­pers, turntab­lists and star pro­duc­ers, and every­thing in-between.

Con­tem­po­rary stars like Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Jay‑Z, and Kanye appear, as, of course, do the mar­tyred icons Big­gie and Tupac. The Beast­ie Boys, De La Soul, Eminem, Nas, Juras­sic 5, J Dil­la, Mos Def, MF Doom, Kool Kei­th, Run the Jew­els… you name ‘em, they’ve prob­a­bly made the cut. The dia­gram–view­able online for free, and pur­chasable for £35.00–even fea­tures the names of ear­ly break­dancers like the Rock Steady Crew and graf­fi­ti artists like Lady Pink and Futu­ra 2000.

As in ear­li­er such charts from Dorothy, like Alter­na­tive Love and Elec­tric Love, fans may find fault with the place­ment of cer­tain fig­ures and groups, and with the choice of empha­sis. Rap abounds in mas­cu­line bravado—and at times no small amount of misogyny—but it should go with­out say­ing that female stars like Salt ‘n’ Pepa, MC Lyte, Queen Lat­i­fah, Mis­sy Elliott, and Lau­ryn Hill are as influ­en­tial as many of the biggest male names on the chart. Yet not one of them gets top billing, so to speak, here. This unfor­tu­nate fact aside, Hip-Hop Love does a very impres­sive job of cat­a­logu­ing and con­nect­ing the most com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful, big-name artists with some of the most under­ground and exper­i­men­tal. Though we asso­ciate artists with par­tic­u­lar regions—Outkast epit­o­mizes the South, for exam­ple, Wu-Tang Clan is New York to the core—the blue­print pulls them all togeth­er, reach­ing out even to UK grime and trip-hop, in a schemat­ic that resem­bles one huge, inter­con­nect­ed elec­tric city. You can get your own copy of the poster online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music Visu­al­ized on a Cir­cuit Dia­gram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inven­tors, Com­posers & Musi­cians

Enter the The Cor­nell Hip Hop Archive: A Vast Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion of Hip Hop Pho­tos, Posters & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

90,000 Fans Sing “I Won’t Back Down” at University of Florida Football Game: A Goosebump-Inducing Tribute to Tom Petty

Tom Pet­ty grew up in Gainesville, Flori­da, in the back­yard of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da. On Sat­ur­day, dur­ing a foot­ball game against LSU, some 90,000 Gators fans gave Pet­ty a rau­cous send off, singing “I Won’t Back Down” in uni­son. Don’t know about you, but it gave me the chills.

BTW, if you’re won­der­ing what the occa­sion­al boos are all about, it’s the U. of Flori­da fans tak­ing the LSU march­ing band to task for dis­rupt­ing the Pet­ty sing-along. Or so it was per­ceived.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

Jason Aldean Per­forms “I Won’t Back Down” on SNL–A Mov­ing Trib­ute the Vic­tims of the Las Vegas Shoot­ing & Tom Pet­ty

A 17-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Jour­ney Through Tom Petty’s Music: Stream the Songs That Became the Sound­tracks of Our Lives

Watch Tom Pet­ty (RIP) and the Heart­break­ers Per­form Their Last Song Togeth­er, “Amer­i­can Girl”: Record­ed on 9/25/17

Prince, Joined by Tom Pet­ty, Plays a Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solo On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps”

The Philosophical Appreciation of Rocks in China & Japan: A Short Introduction to an Ancient Tradition

In addi­tion to sum­ming up Socrates and his Euro­pean heirs, Alain de Bot­ton has also applied his five-minute ani­mat­ed video approach to the very basics of East­ern phi­los­o­phy. While offer­ing its intro­duc­to­ry sur­veys, the series may hope­ful­ly spur view­ers on to greater appre­ci­a­tion of, for exam­ple, the Bud­dha, Lao Tzu, and Japan­ese Zen mas­ter Sen no Rikyu, who refined the tea cer­e­mo­ny as a metic­u­lous med­i­ta­tive rit­u­al. Rikyu’s prac­tice shows us how much philo­soph­i­cal and reli­gious tra­di­tions (often a dis­tinc­tion with­out a dif­fer­ence) in Japan and Chi­na engage rig­or­ous­ly with every­day objects and rou­tines as often as they do with texts and lec­tures.

Yes­ter­day, we brought you sev­er­al short expla­na­tions of one such prac­tice, Kintsu­gi, the wabi sabi art of “find­ing beau­ty in bro­ken things” by turn­ing cracked and bro­ken pot­tery into gild­ed, beau­ti­ful­ly flawed ves­sels. Sev­er­al hun­dred years ear­li­er, in 826 AD, renowned Tang Dynasty poet and civ­il ser­vant Bai Juyi dis­cov­ered a pair of odd­ly shaped rocks that cap­ti­vat­ed his atten­tion. Tak­ing them home to his study, he then wrote a poem about them, influ­enced by Daoism’s rev­er­ence for the forces of nature and inspired by the hard evi­dence such forces carved into the rocks. Like the bro­ken pot­tery of Japan’s Kintsu­gi, Bai’s rocks come in part to sym­bol­ize human frailty. In this case, he casts the rocks as friends in his lone­ly old age, ask­ing them, “Can you keep com­pa­ny with an old man like myself?”

After Bai Juyi, aes­thet­ic med­i­ta­tions on the beau­ty of rock for­ma­tions became high­ly pop­u­lar and quick­ly refined into “four prin­ci­pal cri­te­ria,” writes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art: “thin­ness (shou), open­ness (tou), per­fo­ra­tions (lou), and wrin­kling (zhou).” The found arti­facts are often known as “scholar’s rocks”—a mis­trans­la­tion, de Bot­ton says, of a term mean­ing “spir­it stones”—and are cho­sen for their nat­ur­al wild­ness, as well as shaped by human hands. They were placed in gar­dens and stud­ies, and “became a favorite and endur­ing pic­to­r­i­al genre.” Dur­ing the ear­ly Song dynasty, such stones were “con­stant sources of inspi­ra­tion,” and were “val­ued quite as high­ly as any paint­ing or cal­li­graph­ic scroll.”

So high­ly-prized were these objects, in fact, that they appear to “have has­tened the col­lapse of the North­ern Song Empire,” through a mania not unlike that which drove the tulip craze in the 17th cen­tu­ry Nether­lands. As did many Chi­nese cul­tur­al traditions—including Zen Buddhism—the love of rocks crossed over into Japan, where it was adapt­ed “in a par­tic­u­lar­ly Japan­ese way” in the 15th cen­tu­ry, inspir­ing the “sub­dued, smooth,” min­i­mal­ist rock gar­dens we’re like­ly famil­iar with, if only through their con­sumer nov­el­ty ver­sions.

As per usu­al, de Bot­ton imbues his les­son with a take­away moral: rock rev­er­ence teach­es us that “wis­dom can hang off bits of the nat­ur­al world just as well as issu­ing from books.” We may also see the love of rocks as a kind of anti-con­sumerist prac­tice, in which we shift the atten­tion we typ­i­cal­ly lav­ish on dis­pos­able objects des­tined for land­fills, trash­heaps, and plas­tic-lit­tered oceans, and instead apply it to beau­ti­ful bits of the nat­ur­al world, which require few invest­ments of labor or cap­i­tal to enrich our lives, and can be found right out­side our doors, if we’re care­ful and atten­tive enough to see them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kintsu­gi: The Cen­turies-Old Japan­ese Craft of Repair­ing Pot­tery with Gold & Find­ing Beau­ty in Bro­ken Things

East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Explained with Three Ani­mat­ed Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch the New Trailer for Electric Dreams, the Philip K. Dick TV Series, Starring Bryan Cranston, Steve Buscemi & More

If you had told crit­ics and film exec­u­tives thir­ty-five years ago that Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner would be one of the most beloved sci-fi films of all time—that it would tran­scend cult sta­tus to become a near-reli­gious object in sci­ence fic­tion and ani­me filmmaking—you would like­ly have been laughed out of the room. If you had pre­dict­ed that, thir­ty-five years lat­er, it would spawn one of the most spec­tac­u­lar sequels imag­in­able, you might have been met with con­cern for your san­i­ty. The world was just not ready for Blade Run­ner in 1982, just as it was not ready for Philip K. Dick in the 50s when he began his writ­ing career and “couldn’t even pay the late fees on a library book.”

In the fol­low­ing decade, how­ev­er, Dick’s work came into its own. Many years before it pro­vid­ed a near-infal­li­ble source for tech­no­log­i­cal pre­science and exis­ten­tial futur­ism in cin­e­ma, Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, the novel­la from which Blade Run­ner adapt­ed its sto­ry, got a Neb­u­la award nom­i­na­tion, one of three Dick received in the 60s. Five years ear­li­er, he won a Hugo award for The Man in the High Cas­tle.

Now, after the suc­cess of that spec­u­la­tive his­tor­i­cal novel’s grim Ama­zon adap­ta­tion, the com­pa­ny has part­nered with Chan­nel 4 and Sony for anoth­er small-screen Dick project—Elec­tric Dreams, co-pro­duced by Bryan Cranston, a long­time fan of the author.

An anthol­o­gy series based on Dick’s sto­ries, Elec­tric Dreams first airs on Chan­nel 4 in the U.K., and will soon move to Ama­zon, where Prime users will be able to stream the whole 10-episode sea­son for free. (If you aren’t a Prime user, you can get a 30-day free tri­al to watch the series, then keep or can­cel the mem­ber­ship.) Elec­tric Dreams reminds us that a cou­ple of phe­nom­e­na from Dick’s hey­day have made a sig­nif­i­cant come­back in recent years. First, imag­i­na­tive, high-con­cept anthol­o­gy shows like Char­lie Brooker’s Black Mir­ror and the Duplass broth­ers’ Room 104 hear­ken back to the suc­cess of The Twi­light Zone and less­er-known shows like Roald Dahl’s Way Out.

Sec­ond­ly, we’ve made a return to the para­noia, social unrest, author­i­tar­i­an­ism, and threats of nuclear war that formed the back­drops of Dick’s vision­ary fables. These are indeed “anx­ious times,” as Cranston says, but he and the show’s oth­er pro­duc­ers instruct­ed the writ­ers to “use the orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al as a spring­board to your own re-imag­in­ing of the story—keep the core… or idea behind it and enhance that and see how that affects not a Cold War peri­od when it was writ­ten, but now. How does it affect the mod­ern-day audi­ence?”

Giv­en the all-star cast and high-dol­lar pro­duc­tion val­ues evi­dent in the trail­er above, we can like­ly expect the same kind of qual­i­ty from Elec­tric Dreams as we have seen in near­ly every Dick adap­ta­tion thus far. And if it doesn’t catch on right away, well, that may be everyone’s loss but those view­ers who rec­og­nize, as Dick him­self rec­og­nized when he saw Blade Run­ner in 1982, that they have expe­ri­enced some­thing tru­ly unique.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

When Roald Dahl Host­ed His Own Creepy TV Show Way Out, a Com­pan­ion to Rod Serling’s Twi­light Zone (1961)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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