40 Fun Facts About The Veldt

Which animals does the nursery turn on George and Lydia Hadley at the end of The Veldt?

Lions close in on the trapped parents once the children shut them inside. Ray Bradbury never shows the kill, only the animals feeding in the distance afterwards.

Which electronic producer released the 2012 track The Veldt, inspired by Ray Bradbury's short story?

Deadmau5 built the track during a 22-hour live stream, and the next day found a singer who had already recorded his own vocals over it.

Peter and Wendy Hadley of The Veldt share their first names with characters created by which author?

J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy Darling fly off to Neverland, and critics call the echo deliberate: the Hadley children also escape adult rules into a fantasy world.

What does Wendy Hadley calmly offer David McClean at the very end of The Veldt?

A cup of tea is the chilling last touch: the children are picnicking politely while, in the distance, the animals finish feeding on what readers realise are their parents.

In The Veldt, whose are the strangely familiar screams George and Lydia Hadley keep hearing?

Their own screams are what the parents have been hearing all along: the room had been playing out simulated versions of the couple being hunted.

Ray Bradbury, author of The Veldt, is best known for which novel about a book-burning future?

Fahrenheit 451 was typed on machines rented for ten cents per half-hour at a university library, and Bradbury's headstone names him simply as its author.

What is the profession of David McClean, the family friend the Hadleys call in during The Veldt?

A psychologist by trade, McClean warns that the room has become a channel for the children's darkest thoughts, and he is the last adult to see them in the story.

The all-surrounding nursery in The Veldt takes which everyday mass medium to its logical extreme?

Television was the new mass entertainment of Ray Bradbury's day, and the story pushes its pull on children into a room that surrounds them on every side.

A space story collected alongside The Veldt in 1951 inspired a 1972 hit by which British singer?

Elton John's Rocket Man borrows from Ray Bradbury's The Rocket Man, about an astronaut father torn between his family on Earth and the pull of space.

What brand name does the Hadley family's fully automated house carry in Ray Bradbury's The Veldt?

Happylife Home is the model name, and the irony is the point: a house that cooks, bathes and dresses the family leaves the parents feeling unnecessary.

Which chewed and bloodied belonging does George Hadley find in the nursery in The Veldt?

An old wallet of George's lies in the corner where the big cats had been feeding, and the sight of it makes him lock the room that night.

By what means does the nursery in The Veldt pick up the scenes Wendy and Peter Hadley want to see?

Telepathy runs the room: it reads the children's minds and builds whatever they imagine, and when George tries thinking up a gentler scene the walls ignore him.

The Veldt was republished under its present title in which 1951 Ray Bradbury story collection?

The Illustrated Man opens with it, the first of eighteen tales that play out on the animated skin pictures of a wandering former sideshow performer.

The title word of The Veldt, meaning open grassland, was borrowed into English from which language?

Afrikaans gave English the word, which simply means field; the spelling with a final t is an older Dutch form that the Dutch themselves later dropped.

Which birds cast shadows over David McClean as he stands in the nursery at the end of The Veldt?

Vultures hang over the scene from the parents' first visit, wheeling above whatever the big cats are eating, and their shadows return as the story's closing image.

In The Veldt, David McClean says George Hadley has turned from Santa Claus into which figure?

Scrooge is McClean's word for a father who spoiled his children with everything they wanted and now, by switching the room off, is suddenly taking it all away.

Which American magazine first published The Veldt in September 1950, under a different title?

The Saturday Evening Post printed it in its September 23 issue, and the story only took its famous title the following year, when it was collected in a book.

When Wendy Hadley runs ahead to change the nursery in The Veldt, what replaces the African plain?

A forest is what the parents find, lush and harmless, but George is not fooled: he sends the children to bed and searches the room himself.

Which William March novel about a murderous child shares many themes with The Veldt?

The Bad Seed appeared four years after Ray Bradbury's story and asks the same uneasy question: whether a polite, well-raised child can kill without remorse.

Which bloodstained item of Lydia Hadley's does David McClean find in the nursery in The Veldt?

A scarf of Lydia's turns up just before the two men switch the room off, a second warning that the hunts are aimed at the couple, and one nobody acts on in time.

Which everyday chore does Peter Hadley dread doing himself if the house in The Veldt is shut off?

Tying his shoes is Peter's complaint, along with brushing his own teeth; he tells his father flatly that the house had better stay on, then walks back to the African plain.

Where are Wendy and Peter Hadley while their parents eat dinner alone early in The Veldt?

At a carnival is where the children spend the evening, which gives George the chance to walk into the room alone and discover it no longer obeys him.

What does David McClean advise George Hadley to do with the nursery after examining it in The Veldt?

Destroy it, he says, and bring the children to him for treatment, because the room now matters more to them than their real parents do.

After George Hadley shuts off every machine in The Veldt, the silent house is likened to what?

A cemetery is the image, and George turns it around when his son rages at him: the family has been lifeless for years, he says, and will only now start to live.

How does George Hadley react after he and Lydia flee the charging animals early in The Veldt?

He laughs and reminds his crying wife that none of it is real, an early sign of how completely he trusts the machines that will later trap him.

What do the beds in the Hadleys' automated house do for the family every night in The Veldt?

Rock them to sleep is the beds' job, yet on the night two screams ring out from the nursery, George and Lydia lie awake another hour before the rocking works.

The Veldt author Ray Bradbury said he would erase which invention of the last hundred years?

The automobile was his pick. After seeing a fatal crash as a teenager he never learned to drive, and he argued that cars kill more people than wars do.

Ray Bradbury outlined the plot of The Veldt on a 1956 quiz show hosted by which comedian?

Groucho Marx bantered with him on You Bet Your Life, where Bradbury summed up the tale six years after it first ran in a magazine.

Under which title did The Veldt first appear in 1950, before Ray Bradbury renamed it?

The World the Children Made was the original headline, pointing straight at Wendy and Peter; the later title shifts the focus to the grassland they conjure.

Which storybook hero does George Hadley try to summon when The Veldt's nursery sticks on Africa?

Aladdin was the kind of scene the children used to conjure; when George thinks of him now, nothing happens, and he decides the room must be broken.

Which novel of an engineered, pleasure-fed future did Ray Bradbury call a powerful influence?

Brave New World imagines citizens kept docile by comfort and entertainment, the same trap the Hadleys buy for themselves one labour-saving machine at a time.

Which actor played Carl, the storyteller, in the 1969 film that dramatised The Veldt?

Rod Steiger starred opposite Claire Bloom, but the film was judged a critical and financial failure, and Ray Bradbury was never consulted on the adaptation.

The 1969 film featuring The Veldt also adapted The Long Rain, a Bradbury tale set on which planet?

Venus, in Bradbury's telling, is a world of endless downpour where stranded astronauts are driven mad while hunting for a shelter called a sun dome.

A 1987 horror film of The Veldt, woven together with other Bradbury tales, came from which country?

Soviet Union studio Uzbekfilm made it, folding in threads from The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine and renaming the Hadleys the Stone family.

Ray Bradbury, author of The Veldt, grew up in which Midwestern town, the Green Town of his fiction?

Waukegan, Illinois was his birthplace, and he willed his personal book collection to the town's public library, where he had done much of his early reading.

The 2012 dance track The Veldt appears on which jokingly named record by its Canadian producer?

Album Title Goes Here came out that September, with the song in an eight-minute mix that drops the tribal drum introduction of the original.

What carries the Hadley family up to their bedrooms inside the automated house in The Veldt?

An air closet whisks them upstairs, one more chore the house has taken over, alongside cooking, cleaning and switching the lights on and off.

Ray Bradbury's own theatre company staged The Veldt as a one-act play in 1964 in which city?

Los Angeles hosted the Pandemonium Theatre Company's first production at the Coronet Theatre, which ran four months before an off-Broadway version followed.

The singer on the 2012 dance track The Veldt was discovered through which social platform?

Twitter is where Chris James posted his own vocal take on the unfinished instrumental, and the producer liked its nods to the short story enough to keep it.

Which director signed on in 2007 to remake the 1969 anthology film that includes The Veldt?

Zack Snyder was attached alongside Watchmen co-writer Alex Tse, whose script was planned in six parts and kept this story among them.