Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes and other SciFi Classics

Feel free to discuss your favorite SciFi classic movies. The thread `Rewatched TMP last Night´ in ST movies I-X tends to digress once in a while, so I decided to start a new thread.



I know there are a lot of Logan’s Run fans around, or Planet of the Apes for that matter. I have fond memories of LR, I can re-watch it without being bored.



I remember one of the Apes movies with an ape baby being exchanged. I can’t remember any details, I will re-watch it on TV when they show it next time.


Several years ago I saw The Island with Scarlett Johansson and was a little bit disappointed. The movie lacked the charm of many SciFi classics. I liked that it wasn’t as swift as many of the modern blockbusters and Scarlett Johannsson is lovely.
The Black Hole with Maximilian Schell is one of my favorites, although it wasn’t favorably reviewed. At least B.O.B. and V.I.N.C.E.N.T, the robots, were cute…..


I also like the Alien Nation series with Eric Pierpoint and Gary Graham, based upon the movie Alien Nation Spacecop L.A. I like the series cast better, though. Both actors appeared in Star Trek episodes, too, so there is a connection.

 

As I recall, that film was basically plagiarized from the 1979 film Parts: The Clonus Horror. The makers of that film filed a lawsuit, but it was settled out of court.

Is that what the movie was called in Germany? In the US it was just Alien Nation. (Although that was arrived at after two or three working titles including Outer Heat and Future Tense.)

And yes, the series was far, far better than the movie. The movie had a great concept, but squandered it and just did a routine buddy-cop action movie. The series took the potential of the premise and developed it marvelously.

 

I guess the Germans added Spacecop L.A. to set it apart from the series. I can hardly remember the movie, but I liked the series with Gary Graham as Sykes. They should show it again on TV. Tele 5 or Kabel 1 are the channels which show a lot of old SciFi movies or series (e. g. the umpteenth reruns of TNG, Voger, DS9 and ENT; sadly TOS lives in the shadow).

I don't know if there are examples, where the movies are better than the series.

A different cast can change a lot, for the better or for the worse.

 

IMDb says that the film's release in West Germany was eight months before the TV series premiered in the US. So assuming that was its original German title, it can't have been because of the series.

Maybe they just figured the title wasn't clear enough in German. In English, the word "alien" used to mean "foreigner" (and still does in many cases, e.g. "illegal alien"). It didn't really become commonly understood to mean "extraterrestrial" (outside of science fiction literature) until around the 1960s. Other languages may not have followed suit. Google tells me that the German word for "alien" is "Ausländer," i.e. "outlander," foreigner. So maybe the title Alien Nation didn't convey the extraterrestrial element to a German audience without the "Spacecop" part being added.

Oh, there are plenty. Planet of the Apes, War of the Worlds, and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure come to mind (although the first season of the Bill and Ted animated series wasn't half bad). Although in this day and age, I find that TV is better than movies on the whole.

 

I vaguely remember having seen `Making Mr. Right´ when I did a google research about movies with androids. I didn't know that John Malkovich played the lead character...
There is also `Not Quite Human´ with that young android named Chip....
Sometimes I miss the old movies from the 70ies and 80ies.

 

I haven't seen PoTA in decades, and need to revisit it soon.

I've had Logan's Run on DVD for a while, and have watched it a handful of times since then. My thoughts are that the film is enjoyable, but very much a product of the mid-70's. Nobody will be wowed by the story, and shopping mall sets, and the tinfoil boxed robot. The film was entirely too dark, dirty, and morbid. Almost the antithesis of Star Wars, which came out a few years later, though you can clearly see the similar design influences between the two films in costume and sets. I'd recommend any scifi fan watch the film at least once.

I have similar feelings about other 70's scifi films, such as The Omega Man, Soylent Green, and Silent Running.

 

I've never been impressed with Logan's Run. It has its moments (some of them involving Jenny Agutter and a deficit of clothing), but it has a weak script, really bad miniature work on the domed city, and a rather ludicrous and arbitrary ending.

I remember watching the series, both in first run and in later reruns, but I don't remember it being much better than the movie, even though it had D.C. Fontana as its story editor and a number of scripts by Star Trek veterans. I actually saw the series well before I saw the movie, I think, since my father deemed me too young to see a PG-rated movie at the time. Although I know I saw an edited version of the movie on TV several times.

 

Don't forget the soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith
German FSK rating for Logan's Run was 12 (allowed for kids 12 and older). Hm, the German system obviously doesn't involve something like `parents should check...´or something. Many people from the former GDR love nudism on beaches with special markings. Being nude comes naturally to them and their kids, so they would laugh about the LR nude scenes. I was born in the former GDR (but didn't live there for more than just a year), but I don't share their penchant for nudity .

The German title was `Flucht ins 23. Jahrhundert´, which means literally `Escape into the 23rd century´. This is most unfortunaty, though. There is no time travel involved in the movie, only escape from a rigid and cruel system.

 

The miniature work was great for the time, but I agree it looks incredibly fake today. Far too crisp and detailed for a huge city.

I'd say give the book a try. It has been a few years, but I remember the novel being much better, with a far more realistic setting and ending (no domed city).

 

I guess the idea is that it's set in the 23rd century (2274, in fact, just a year later than Star Trek: The Motion Picture!) and it involves an escape. Still not a very good title, though.

 

The miniature work was mediocre for it's time (both Star Trek and Space 1999 did better work and on a TV budget. I was 13 when the film came out - went to see it and laughed at the lousy miniature work.) I hadn't read the original novel yet (and if I had, I'd have even more issues with the film); but at the time, I found some of the concepts interesting, but it came across as the typical 'cold war cautionary tale about nuclear war' science fiction film - with a bit of a twist.

I recall the TV series too and that was absolutely terrible in terms or acting/story and effects. Filmation was doing Saturday morning live action shows with better overall scripts and effects in those days (and that's not saying much at all.)

 

I love the original Planet of the Apes.
I saw Logans Run a few years ago, and I thought it was OK. I've never seen the series.

 

I think that was "Escape From the Planet of the Apes" not that I've seen the classic Apes films for many years.

 

As far as the classics go, I LOVE Capricorn One, which I think often gets overlooked and isn't on nearly as much as it should be... It's not fantastical or overly heavy with the sci-fi, but it's a good chase thriller and boasts a curmudgeonly Elliot Gould as a wisecracking reporter with some good lines.

Flash Gordon is another film that really works for me as well... It's a good homage to the serials with Buster Crabbe along with some good old 70's cheese...

 

It's got a great Goldsmith score, but I don't care for its subject matter. It probably did a lot to popularize the whole "the Moon landing was faked" idea, even though it's about a faked Mars landing. Here's a David Gerrold column from Starlog #20 about how cynical and stupid and anti-science the movie is, and while I think a lot of his criticisms are kind of petty or overstated, I think he has a point.

I never cared for the De Laurentiis film that much, mainly because it overshadowed a much better version. The best Flash Gordon movie ever made was Filmation's 1979 animated film, which was extremely faithful to the comic strips and really well-made, as well as unusually adult for a Filmation production. Unfortunately, due to some rights conflicts with De Laurentiis (I think), the film was only aired once on prime-time TV in 1982 (though much of it was reworked into the first season of the '79 animated TV series, toned down for Saturday mornings) and has never had a US video release, though the whole thing's on YouTube, taken a Japanese laser disc edition.

 

Ah the 80's Flash Gordon film, a classic bit of 80's cheese with a helping of cheese on the side. Though I believe it performed poorly in the US but did well in the UK. The Queen soundtrack did help. But what about another 80's movie "Highlander" though they should have listened to their tag line There Can be Only One as the sequels were rather weak. the TV show in the 90's was OK however.

 

I did another research. I never saw LR in the original, so I wonder how they called the teleport shaft, Jessica entered when she ended up with Logan. The German term is "Liebeslift" (love lift), but they obviously named it The Circuit (Rundgang) in the original (for whatever reason).

Jessica could have ended up in Kirk's quarters......

 

I love the Flash Gordon movie, it's just so goofy and cheesy. The fact that it was written by one of the writers of the '60s Batman TV series explains alot.
I watched Highlander ages ago, but I don't really remeber it. I did enjoy it even to try to watch the second one, and the TV series. I enjoyed the TV series, but I gave up on the second movie pretty quickly.

 

The novel and recent comic book adaptation is better than both the movie and TV series, IMHO.

 

I never got the appeal of Highlander. It's such a bizarre concept. What good is immortality if all it does is make immortals murder each other? The whole thing is just so arbitrary. I mean, the Quickening supposedly gives an immortal the knowledge and skill of the immortals he kills, or something like that, so you'd think that eventually they would've gotten smart enough to realize that going around chopping each other's heads off over a nebulously-defined prize was a pretty stupid way to spend an extended lifetime.

Which is sort of what they did in the animated series -- yes, there was an animated series. It was in a post-apocalyptic world in which the immortals chose to pass the Quickening to each other voluntarily, without death being required, in order to gather the means to save the world, or some such thing. Not a very good cartoon, but the premise actually made more sense to me than the decapitatey approach of the movies.

But the franchise is a pretty good illustration of how mutable film continuity can be. I don't think any of the sequels are in continuity with any of the other sequels -- they all just follow on the first film and ignore each other. Although I think there's one film sequel that's based on the TV series.

I actually did watch the live-action series for a while -- I'm not really sure why -- but I lost interest sometime in season 2 or so, after they dropped some of the characters I liked. After all, I've never liked Adrian Paul much in anything I've seen him do.