Did You Love Other Vintage Sci-Fi Shows?

Discussion in 'Star Trek - The Original & Animated Series' started by ZapBrannigan, Mar 7, 2013.

  1. ZapBrannigan

    ZapBrannigan Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    How do TOS fans rate the other vintage sci-fi shows? I seemed to like everything I got my hands on:

    - LOST IN SPACE, even at its worst, was good for the hardware, the music, and likeable cast. And as an adult, I finally get Dr Smith. Now he's hilarious instead of infuriating.

    But I've seen many references over the years to the idea that a lot of STAR TREK fans hate LIS, and vice versa.

    - VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, LAND OF THE GIANTS, TIME TUNNEL: I never really got to see these for some reason. I think I would have liked GIANTS the best; that seems like my kind of show.

    - Classic GALACTICA and BUCK ROGERS: loved them both as a kid; now I find BSG to have a more timeless quality and more texture, detail, etc.

    - MAN FROM ATLANTIS: loved it at the time, now find it less thrilling but still a neat concept, a cool submarine, some good music scores.

    - LOGAN'S RUN: I watched it once in first run on CBS, circa 1977, but it didn't make any lasting impressions. I think I liked the android REM, who was a lot like Mr Data would later be.

    So how would you as a TOS fan rate these and other vintage shows?
     
  2. mach7

    mach7 Commander Red Shirt

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    Lost in Space was very good the first season, then the quality fell off fast.

    Voyage was the same. Very good movie, good 1st season then the quality dropped off.

    LotG and TT I remember as being really good but I tried to re-watch them and they aren't very good.

    I liked Buck and Galactica, very fun.

    Never cared for Man from Atlantis or Logan's run.

    You forgot:

    The Invaders. Love it, kind of the anti-trek. Well produced.

    Space 1999. First season good, second season garbage.

    UFO. Very Very well done. I love it and still watch it as much as TOS.

    The Starlost. Just a train wreck, but you can't look away! Utter crap.

    Anyway thats my opinion.
     
  3. Dale Sams

    Dale Sams Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Lost in Space never hit a chord with me. I loved BSG, the Man from Atlantis and Buck Rogers at the time...but now it wouldn't do much for me, though I appreciate BSG's fervor and ambition. Logan's Run kind of bored me.

    Right off the top of my head, the only shows pre-1975 that I could say I adored then and still do would be TOS, Twilight Zone and Night Stalker.
     
  4. Admiral Buzzkill

    Admiral Buzzkill Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits were classics.

    I liked Irwin Allen's stuff when I was younger - Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Time Tunnel and Lost In Space - but outgrew it by the time I was in junior high. The "sf TV boom" of the late 70s and early 80s, driven by the success of Star Wars, was mostly badly-written tripe.
     
  5. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    Watch, yes. Love, no.
     
  6. scotpens

    scotpens Professional Geek Premium Member

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    The original Outer Limits. One of the best sci-fi TV shows ever. Unfortunately the quality dropped off markedly in its second and final season -- much like TOS Trek's third season, and for the same reasons.

    Never got into the original Galactica or Buck Rogers. They just seemed like very juvenile, third-rate Star Wars ripoffs.
     
  7. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    I love Twilight Zone and Outer Limits.
    Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was merely tech-porn for me in my youth. Now it's just boring.
    I like the first half dozen episodes of Lost In Space and a few later ones (notably "The Antimatter Man" which is a model for what the show should have been like), but most of it is silly.
    I adore the first season of Batman, which may not be SF, but is as much so as Voyage. It's a perfect play-it-so-straight-it's-funny twist on the late 50s Batman comics.
    Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants are a bore.
    I LOVE UFO. It's got some hokey bits, but overall it's got some nice dark drama about it.
    I never got into series like Logan's Run, Fantastic Journey and their ilk.
    I liked Space:1999 season 1 (but never saw season 2) and maybe it would appeal to me more as an adult, but what I have seen of it in recent years is kind of meh. It lacks that "snap" that UFO had.
    I liked Battlestar when it came out, but even during its initial run I knew a lot of it was rubbish.
    Buck Rogers was just rubbish and I didn't even make it through the 1st season. I tried the 2nd and it was just boring.
     
  8. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Besides being a gigantic Star Trek fan, I was a huge Gerry Anderson fan in grade school in the 1970's, so I was into Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and Space: 1999.

    The Night Stalker, Six Million Dollar Man (see avatar), and Wonder Woman had their place, as did the even lesser shows like Project UFO and Logan's Run. Basically, anything sci-fi on network TV in the mid 1970's throughout the decade got watched.

    Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was the only Irwin Allen show I recall us having, and that was only back when I first saw TOS. Having seen some of that recently, I don't think I missed much.

    Saturday morning fare was also important. So Star Trek: TAS, Land of the Lost, Ark II, Space Academy, Jason of Star Command, Super Friends, etc. etc. all got watched.

    When I visited our relatives in bigger cities, I was always jealous that they got neat shows like Ultra Man. I remember thinking that was cool, when I was like 5, but I only saw a few episodes.

    I always recognized that original BSG blowed. Ditto for Buck Rogers.

    In junior high, we had a run of The Prisoner on PBS, which I loved.

    We never had The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits on our 4 UHF channels, so I had to wait until cable was laid to see those. By then I was on my way out of high school.

    We also never had Lost in Space, thank God. I'm picking that up now on MeTV, and boy is it awful.

    I'm probably leaving some shows out, but that's the overall gist for me growing up.

    Of all those shows that I saw growing up, Star Trek, Thunderbirds, and The Prisoner were my favorite.
     
  9. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    ^^^If you've got MeTV keep an eye out for "The Antimatter Man" on LIS. They ran it not long ago, but it finally gave Guy Williams the chance to be the focus of the episode.
     
  10. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    OK, will do!
     
  11. ZapBrannigan

    ZapBrannigan Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I'm enjoying the commentary. My biggest shows that I forgot to mention would be SIX MILLION, BIONIC WOMAN, TWILIGHT ZONE, and SPACE 1999.

    We never got the Gerry Anderson "marionation" shows, but I would have watched them for sure if they'd ever been on. And I never saw THE INVADERS or THE PRISONER.

    THE TWILIGHT ZONE came back in the 1980s, and that series was great too.
     
  12. Gary7

    Gary7 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Twilight Zone is old and of course very dated in black and white, but the stories still manage to be timeless. Rod Serling was brilliant. I just wish more were made. Same thing with Outer Limits, although I'd say it was a little behind TZ. Definitely not enough episodes made.

    I did watch Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea, and at times really enjoyed it. I've seen some episodes now and can't bear to watch it... hasn't held up well at all, IMHO.

    Lost In Space was very endearing, seeing it as a child. I so identified with Will Robinson. I've seen some episodes more recently and my eyes are quite different now, but I can still appreciate it. Some of the humor is just so wacky. But you gotta love what Irwin Allen did with what he had available to him.

    I was into U.F.O. big time. LOVED it. A buddy of mine and I used to play-act interpreted scenes from the show--I was Foster and he was Straker. For a while, I thought I'd never like Star Trek as much... but then you grow up and realize the quality differences. TOS is far superior to anything else made prior to TNG.

    I was into Space:1999, despite all of its glaring flaws. And despite the disaster of Season Two, I continued to watch it and admire the hardware most of all. I pretty much disliked the stories and acting, just ogling over the technological eye candy. In retrospect, watching episodes now I'm left with appreciating only about a half dozen.... so no DVD set for me.

    I loved BSG... I couldn't stand Boxy. Frack and Feldkergarb sounded stupid as all hell. Larson made a really half-@ssed attempt at an "alien lingo." But the Cylons made up for a lot of what was wrong with the show, as well as all the Star Wars inspired SFX. To me, it hasn't aged well. I borrowed the DVD set and considered buying my own copy, then decided otherwise.

    Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century! Heh... that show had a lot of potential. It started out OK and there were some great episodes here and there. Wilma Deering... yowza. Boy did I ever have a crush on Erin Gray. Well, the series started down a slippery slope and got worse and worse over time. The "reboot" with the Searcher vessel was just plain stupid. I was so disappointed with what they did on that show, baffled as to what producers and executives had rattling around in their detached minds.

    TOS is the beacon to vintage sci-fi... nothing really compares, IMHO.
     
  13. Dale Sams

    Dale Sams Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Also, I loved Starblazers when I discovered it as a kid. I bought the first season set a few years ago and think I would like it if I sat down and gave it a good chance.

    Same with Six Million Dollar Man. I tried to watch The TV movie recently and Barbara Anderson just brings the thing to a screeching halt.
     
  14. bbailey861

    bbailey861 Admiral Admiral

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    I watched everything I could as a kid in the late 60's but none struck me like Star Trek.
     
  15. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Captain Captain

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    I'd watched THE TWILIGHT ZONE on CBS and THE OUTER LIMITS on ABC and loved them both while growing up. There was also the more scary ONE STEP BEYOND and the hot again, cold again THRILLER that was at its best in the horror genre.

    I didn't grab onto VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA though. I found the initial premise of drama on a submarine to be not of interest to me. Little did I know that those turned out to be the best of the series. Since I didn't watch it much, I must have missed the more sci-fi episodes that year.

    LOST IN SPACE came along, was in a great time slot for me, and I watched it regularly. I hated Smith and wished he would just go away but he never did, and I finally grabbed onto the humor of him and the robot, and stuck with the show through its run, always hoping it would get better, but it rarely did. Even then, I loved the John Williams music.

    Fall of 1966 saw the start of two new sci-fi shows on two consecutive nights, STAR TREK on NBC on Thursdays, and THE TIME TUNNEL on ABC on Fridays. My problem with STAR TREK was its time slot - I just wasn't ready to give up on my favorite show of BEWITCHED on ABC, which was on during the second half of STAR TREK. So that first year, I watched a number of first-halves of STAR TREK, never knowing how it ended.

    On Fridays, THE TIME TUNNEL really excited me. The pilot was just an excellent hour of television, with a fabulous premise, terrific sets, great cast, and a pretty decent story set aboard the ill-fated Titanic. The following episode featured a flight to the moon, and I was hooked. THE TIME TUNNEL had such great promise, that I was never able to shake its hold on me. It remains a sentimental, if flawed favorite to this day.

    In fact, it was a newspaper blurb on the TV page that got me back to STAR TREK. The blurb read: "Fans of TV's TIME TUNNEL will like tonight's STAR TREK..." and went on to describe the outline of "City On The Edge Of Forever". TIME TUNNEL was such a hit with me that I finally bagged BEWITCHED and stuck with STAR TREK. From that moment on, I was a STAR TREK fan for life. But it was TIME TUNNEL that got me there.

    Harry
     
  16. DalekJim

    DalekJim Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    As much as I worship Trek and consider it to have had a mammoth impact on my life, my favourite TV series is the original classic run of Doctor Who. Other classic shows I like are The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits and The Avengers.
     
  17. mos6507

    mos6507 Commodore Commodore

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    I never knew UFO existed back in the day, but when I downloaded episodes online I was really taken by it. The stories can get kind of long-winded (which is true in lots of Anderson's stuff) but just the Austin Powers production values make it really one of the "hippest" visions of the future ever imagined.
     
  18. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    I still don't know exactly what UFO was. It came and went while I was living in Japan
    and I never ran across it in reruns after my family moved back to the US. Images from google shows me some characters that have popped as avatars here from time to time. My nerducation seems to have missed a course.
     
  19. Relayer1

    Relayer1 Admiral Admiral

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    Lost in Space was unwatchable crap. Even as a kid I hated it.

    Voyage, LotG and TT were OK but I didn't feel the urge to tune in every week.

    Buck was sort of OK but Twiki was just too annoying.

    Galactica was good at the time.

    Man from Atlantis was poor and Logan's run was just about O.K.

    The Invaders quickly became tedious and repetitive.

    Space 1999 still looks great, but the science was crud and the stories went downhill in the second season.

    UFO was very good.

    Blakes 7 was excellent despite looking very very cheap. If only Gerry Anderson had made it...

    Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Night Stalker never appealed to me.

    I have to be wary of hindsight, as none of them have stand up particularly well now, but I did think most of them were utter tripe at the time !

    It makes you aware how good TOS was for its day, and even that looks rather cheesy now.
     
  20. Ssosmcin

    Ssosmcin Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Ah, Zap, now you asked a question I appreciate:

    VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA: my second all time favorite show and easily Irwin Allen's best and, at the time, most successful. Back when SF was a tough sell, Voyage lasted 110 episodes over 4 years. In the US on network TV, that was quite a feat and a record it held for a very long time. It was great fun and Richard Basehart was easily the greatest actor working in television. It got very weird and often childish, but it was fun 99.9% of the time. It is nowhere near the quality of Star Trek, but I love it just about as much.

    - LOST IN SPACE: loved it as a kid, but only "like it" today, mostly because fully half of the series was awful. I don't mind cheesy aliens and crappy plots (see Voyage), but it became a "spacey" answer to Batman and the emphasis on fantasy comedy with Dr. Smith ruined it. It still had some real gems in the later episodes, but that second season is almost a total write off. Still John Williams' work is some of the best Television music in history.

    LAND OF THE GIANTS: I like it, but it is the least of the Irwin Allen series. A great cast and effects, but dull stories and a dead-end concept make this one a chore most of the time. However, when they got weird in the 2nd season, it got more fun. Also Deanna Lund. Me-ow!

    THE TIME TUNNEL: the series that debuted the same year as Trek and the one critics preferred. I love it. A good solid adventure, even if the time travel theories make no sense. Again, great fun, as all of the Irwin Allen series were.

    Classic GALACTICA: another great show from my youth, but most often the hour long episodes are duds. The two parters, though, are amazingly good. It needed a second season to reach its potential, but having read the recently found proposal for that second year with all the changes, I'm glad it ended when it did.

    BUCK ROGERS: LOVE THIS SERIES! Both seasons. Oh man, it's cheesy as hell, but it knows it. The second season was more "serious" and lost some of that charm, but having just watched them all again, I'm thrilled at how much I still enjoyed them. Great escapist fare.

    MAN FROM ATLANTIS: No memory of this, although I am more than aware of it and what it's about. I know I watched it, but I don't recall anything about it other than that Patrick Duffy went onto Dallas right after this ended.

    LOGAN'S RUN: A cheesefest, but with great intentions. Some fantastic episodes by David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison and DC Fontana, they gave it a good try, but it was just another road show like The Fugitive and Planet of the Apes. Heather Menzies was pretty damned hot though.

    PLANET OF THE APES: I liked it, but it was kind of dull and repetitive. Good cast and Roddy McDowell is great, but it fell pretty short of its premiere episode.

    SPACE:1999 - my third favorite show of all time - both seasons. Love the atmosphere and music. The characters, such as they were, I enjoyed. Again, the second season got dumber, but it was still so much fun (I watch TV for fun - in case you didn't get it). Also Catherine Schell. Nuff said.

    UFO: A little stiff and dull the first half of the year, but it picked up greatlty in the back half. It deserved a second year. Good stuff.

    THE INVADERS: The Fugitive with aliens, it was good and scary the first year, then got dull the second. No movement in the story, no reason why the aliens didn't kill David Vincent. Better than it had any right to be because of the talent involved. It came about 15 years too early. It needed to be a serial.

    THE IMMORTAL (Chris George): a blatant retread of The Fugitive, but holy crap, did I love this short lived series. Amazing Dominic Frontiere music and excellent, tough performances by Christopher George. It didn't deserve a second season because the producers didn't even TRY to make it new, but it sure had great fights and chases.

    SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN/BIONIC WOMAN: Six Mill I love to this day. YBW - meh, too many sensitive "girl" episodes. I enjoyed Steve Austin and his tough guy act and this was the touchstone of my generation. Lots of fun. There's that word again.

    THE INCREDIBLE HULK: Another Fugitive retake, but the best of imitations. Nice balance of kids adventure and adult drama. Bill Bixby was my hero forever.

    V: Great miniseries, pretty good second mini-series, middling to awful weekly series. But I loved it. Why? F.U.N. I loved 80's action TV and whatever else it screwed up, V The Series had fantastic action.

    OTHERWORLD: Awful from the word go. A weird Lost in Space retake that just didn't work.

    TWILIGHT ZONE: another favorite which has a LOT more crappy episodes than people want to admit (the last two season are pretty dire for the most part). But its intelligence and fearlessness are well documented. It has earned its rep.

    THE OUTER LIMITS: slow going, but intelligent for the most part. People like to dismiss the second season, but that season contained a handful of some of the best episodes of the year (The Inheritors, Demon with a Glass Hand). Great stuff.

    BLAKES 7: the best british SF show ever. Amazing.

    DOCTOR WHO: could be great, could be awful. I liked it for the most part.