This movie has a notably "misty" look, blurring colors and detail. Though this movie has never been released on DVD, Blu-ray, or high-definition streaming, this was a deliberate choice by the producers, director, and cinematographer. They wanted to depict a "dream-like" state in an era before high-definition home video was even possible, much less affordable.
Director Robert Collector left the production before editing was completed, and requested that his name not appear in the credits.
This movie was released on VHS, Beta, and LaserDisc in 1988 by International Video Entertainment.
This movie grossed 1,149,470 dollars when it was released.
This movie was based on a novella by George R.R. Martin that appeared in a 1985 short story collection. Originally written in 1980, the twenty-three thousand-word novella was published by Analog Science Fiction and Fact. In 1981, at the request of his editor at the time, James Frenkel, Martin expanded the story into a thirty thousand-word piece, which was published by Dell Publishing together with Vernor Vinge's True Names as part of their Binary Star series. In the extended version, Martin supplied additional backstory on the various characters, and named several secondary characters which were not named in the original version. According to Martin, Writer and Producer Robert Jaffe probably adapted his script from the shorter novella version, since all of the secondary characters had different names than the ones he chose in the expanded version.