In this chilling story by Ray Bradbury, frantic parents who try to rein in their spoiled children by shutting down the hi-tech games room in their “HappyLife” home become a “HappyMeal”. Although written in 1950 to question the rising influence of television, the story serves as a warning to modern parents who let their children build their lives around social networking and/or game play. The story’s major theme is the alienation, dehumanization, breakdown of family values that can arise in a household through over-reliance on technology. Other themes: consumerism, poor parenting, illusion vs. reality, dystopia.
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Video Version
This is an episode from Season 3 of the Ray Bradbury Theater TV series. It was first aired in November 1989, and includes a personal introduction by Bradbury himself. Watch and enjoy!
I love this story.
Smartphones are today’s nurseries, though they are soon to be replaced by VR and AI. EVERY instance of this story on the internet has the same typos though. E.G. “had” is “bad”. I cannot find an example without errors.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Chris. The typos, now corrected, are typical of a faulty OCR scan. The many instances you refer to on the Internet suggest a common original. I first posted the story over ten years ago (January, 2011), and can’t remember the source
This story is about how “family values” stands in the future generation where everything will be operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or what they called the new era of power innovation run with machine or software as opposed to the human intelligence. This machine that can think like a human which is considered to be smart and process a large of data in different ways is somehow will help how to make life easier but this is challenging and more complex especially for parents. Parents should know how to embrace this new generation and at the same time not forgetting the root of family values which is love and respect with each other.
Thank you for this fascinating insight into the relevance of this story for future generations.
this story sucks
This story is disturbing, but extremely well written and points to a very real situation which we are dealing with now. Lax parents and spoiled children.
rude