Sci-Fi TV Shows that you're pretty sure only you watched.

[Guy Gardener]

The Upright Citizens brigade Scifi bits were awesome... I can scarcely imagine what a movie of them trying to destroy the world would be like... But then, I just want more Amy Poehler always.

[The Borgified Corpse]

Valin wrote:

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"The Girl with Something Extra"

I recall seeing an old black & white pilot with that name.

Greg Cox wrote:

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So, where's my damn paper?

We don't deliver outside of Arizona. Get off my back!

[The Borgified Corpse]

One show that hasn't been mentioned yet: Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. Anyone else remember this? It was sort of a medieval Power Rangers rip-off that ran on Fox Kids for 1 season in the late-1990s. (It was originally supposed to get a 2nd season but, at the last minute, Saban stole its budget for Power Rangers Lost Galaxy instead.) It was a decent show. Unfortunately, they never really had enough money to make it look good. Unlike most of Saban's other shows, they didn't have any pre-existing Japanese footage to build the show around.

Truth be told, I mostly watched the show because Princess Deirdre was cute.

Oh, and I just decided to look up what the cast of that show has been up to since it ended back in 1999. Not much as it turns out. EXCEPT that the guy that played Angus, the Mystic Knight of Earth, recently played Lachlan on the 2nd season of Lost Girl.

[Christopher]

The Borgified Corpse wrote:

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One show that hasn't been mentioned yet: Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. Anyone else remember this? It was sort of a medieval Power Rangers rip-off that ran on Fox Kids for 1 season in the late-1990s. (It was originally supposed to get a 2nd season but, at the last minute, Saban stole its budget for Power Rangers Lost Galaxy instead.) It was a decent show. Unfortunately, they never really had enough money to make it look good. Unlike most of Saban's other shows, they didn't have any pre-existing Japanese footage to build the show around.

Actually I thought it looked great; the production values were much better than those of the Power Rangers shows or their Super Sentai source material. They actually got Foundation Imaging -- then the top digital-FX company in television, responsible for the pioneering work in Babylon 5 and later the CG effects in Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise -- to create CGI monsters and effects for the show, which were a lot more sophisticated than anything in the Ranger/Sentai shows at the time. They also did impressive location filming in Ireland itself, had a strong cast of Irish actors, and had pretty smart writing too. It was an astonishingly well-made (and decently-budgeted) show for a Saban production.

The main problem with Mystic Knights was with the action sequences. The weekly swordfights were hampered by the show's inability to depict any real violence, so they were all kind of inconclusive, just going through the motions. And the Knights' battles with the monsters were weak because they didn't interact much; you didn't have anything like a Megazord to battle the monsters directly, so you just had the actors standing around pretending to shoot stuff at a CGI monster in the sky, which wasn't all that interesting or dynamic -- and which tended to be wrapped up very, very quickly. The sequences of the Knights summoning their magic armor often took longer than the battles they armored up for.

So it was a surprisingly good show in every respect except the action, which normally wouldn't bother me, but it was kind of a negative in something that was specifically meant to be an action show.

Oh, and I just decided to look up what the cast of that show has been up to since it ended back in 1999. Not much as it turns out.

Really? What source are you using? I've found substantial filmographies for just about all of the main cast on IMDb, mostly Irish or UK productions. In particular, several of them have been in The Tudors.

EXCEPT that the guy that played Angus, the Mystic Knight of Earth, recently played Lachlan on the 2nd season of Lost Girl.

I hadn't realized that! I thought he looked familiar!

[RAMA]

I've been slowlyyyy rewatching Phantom:2040, it really still holds up for the most part. Love the music, characters, world building and detail. Some of the animation is clever, some is a bit iffy, but it's clearly one of the best 2-3 American animated series of the 90s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3d6G1dt-o

RAMA

[Guy Gardener]

Phantom 2040 was written mostly by prolific trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens who are responsible for a lot of Primeval New-World.

Everything is connected.

Galoping Galaxies!

[Christopher]

RAMA wrote:

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I've been slowlyyyy rewatching Phantom:2040, it really still holds up for the most part. Love the music, characters, world building and detail. Some of the animation is clever, some is a bit iffy, but it's clearly one of the best 2-3 American animated series of the 90s.

Like the earlier The Legend of Prince Valiant from the same production company, Phantom 2040 was a very smart, well-written, well-acted show that suffered from utterly horrible animation, which was a terrible shame. Also, while some might enjoy the character designs that were done by Peter Chung (most famous for Aeon Flux), I hated them.

I always found it a mildly interesting convergence that the lead characters of Phantom 2040, Spider-Man Unlimited, and Batman Beyond, all of which came out within a few years of each other, all had high-tech, cyberpunkish costumes that could make their wearers virtually invisible.

[RAMA]

Guy Gardener wrote:

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Phantom 2040 was written mostly by prolific trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens who are responsible for a lot of Primeval New-World.

Everything is connected.

Galoping Galaxies!

Yup, mentioned that earlier in the thread.

http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?...3&postcount=30

They are working on "Phoenix Rising", the Captain Power remake. Also a series I mentioned.

RAMA

[RAMA]

Christopher wrote:

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Like the earlier The Legend of Prince Valiant from the same production company, Phantom 2040 was a very smart, well-written, well-acted show that suffered from utterly horrible animation, which was a terrible shame. Also, while some might enjoy the character designs that were done by Peter Chung (most famous for Aeon Flux), I hated them.

I always found it a mildly interesting convergence that the lead characters of Phantom 2040, Spider-Man Unlimited, and Batman Beyond, all of which came out within a few years of each other, all had high-tech, cyberpunkish costumes that could make their wearers virtually invisible.

The animation is not polished, it's true, but American Animation had yet to improve to the levels of the 2000s . I do still think they tried to do some unusual angles and persepctives, and some of the design elements were really forward thinking...stuff not seen on run of the mill future based American cartoons, or often in live action either.

Of all those shows you mention, it's the Phantom as the "Ghost Who Walks" who seems most appropriate with cloaking technology.

[Christopher]

RAMA wrote:

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The animation is not polished, it's true, but American Animation had yet to improve to the levels of the 2000s .

Oh, that is so very, very untrue. Prince Valiant and Phantom 2040 looked terrible in comparison to the other animated shows that were on at the same time, such as Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles (or just about anything from Warner Bros. and Disney). Even X-Men and the early seasons of The Simpsons, from the generally execrable Akom Studios, didn't look as sloppy and crude as the animation in Valiant and Phantom -- although the syndicated season of ExoSquad, which was also Akom, looked nearly as bad. There was a wide range of animation qualities in '90s television, ranging from near-feature-quality to utterly awful. And the Hearst shows were just about at the bottom of the barrel.

I do still think they tried to do some unusual angles and persepctives, and some of the design elements were really forward thinking...stuff not seen on run of the mill future based American cartoons, or often in live action either.

Sure, the problem wasn't with the designs (aside from my distaste for Peter Chung's character design style) but with the execution. The way US animation has worked for the past 2-3 decades is that the designs, storyboards, layouts, and sometimes key character poses are done by the production team in America, and then it's shipped (or, these days, e-mailed) overseas to an Asian studio that does the actual frame-by-frame animation, which is then shipped back to the US for editing and post-production -- and sent back for reshoots in the event of errors, which is far more easily done today than when everything had to be physically shipped. So there's not necessarily a correlation between the quality of the design and composition and the quality of the final animation. Depending on which animation studio you end up with, they can elevate the material or drag it down. There was nothing wrong with the US production of Valiant and Phantom, but the animation itself was of far lower quality than everything else.

[RAMA]

Christopher wrote:

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Oh, that is so very, very untrue. Prince Valiant and Phantom 2040 looked terrible in comparison to the other animated shows that were on at the same time, such as Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles (or just about anything from Warner Bros. and Disney). Even X-Men and the early seasons of The Simpsons, from the generally execrable Akom Studios, didn't look as sloppy and crude as the animation in Valiant and Phantom -- although the syndicated season of ExoSquad, which was also Akom, looked nearly as bad. There was a wide range of animation qualities in '90s television, ranging from near-feature-quality to utterly awful. And the Hearst shows were just about at the bottom of the barrel.

Sure, the problem wasn't with the designs (aside from my distaste for Peter Chung's character design style) but with the execution. The way US animation has worked for the past 2-3 decades is that the designs, storyboards, layouts, and sometimes key character poses are done by the production team in America, and then it's shipped (or, these days, e-mailed) overseas to an Asian studio that does the actual frame-by-frame animation, which is then shipped back to the US for editing and post-production -- and sent back for reshoots in the event of errors, which is far more easily done today than when everything had to be physically shipped. So there's not necessarily a correlation between the quality of the design and composition and the quality of the final animation. Depending on which animation studio you end up with, they can elevate the material or drag it down. There was nothing wrong with the US production of Valiant and Phantom, but the animation itself was of far lower quality than everything else.

I'd still say the animation of the 90s was not as consistently good as equivalent type shows of the 2000s across the board. I was actually not a huge fan of the Batman stylization, I didnt want to see the heroes looking bloated and smooth and unfortunately they carried that over to Superman and then to a slightly lesser extent to JL. The stories usually made up for it.

I'm still on board with you saying Phantom's animation was not great but I chalk it up more to inconsistency rather than general animation. I find it adequate and slightly less annoying than Batman's style.

RAMA

[Christopher]

RAMA wrote:

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I'd still say the animation of the 90s was not as consistently good as equivalent type shows of the 2000s across the board.

Consistently? No, there were a number of different overseas studios that work was subcontracted out to, often by the same show. So a given series would have different levels of quality depending on which studio did the work. But the really good studios like TMS and Spectrum did amazing work.

The difference today is that animation is digital now so it's easier to make corrections and reshoots and otherwise ensure quality control. Another key factor is that we no longer have 65-episode seasons stripped in daily syndication, so production isn't as rushed and doesn't have to be farmed out to as many studios. That means a show can stick with the same overseas animators throughout a season and maintain a more consistent level of work.

I was actually not a huge fan of the Batman stylization, I didnt want to see the heroes looking bloated and smooth and unfortunately they carried that over to Superman and then to a slightly lesser extent to JL. The stories usually made up for it.

But again, you're not talking about animation there, you're talking about design. When I say that Prince Valiant and Phantom 2040 were badly animated, I'm talking about the technical skill with which the actual animation -- the process of drawing, painting, and shooting the sequential cels and the backgrounds they were placed over -- was done. For instance, there would often be shots in Prince Valiant where the ink and paint process was inconsistently done from one cel to the next, so the color of a character's sleeve would change as their arm moved, or a shadow on the side of their face would blink in and out as they talked. Or there would be errors in the drawing process so that a body part would disappear, or the cels would be misaligned so that smoke from a chimney would be coming from the middle of the chimney instead of the top. I'm talking about sloppiness and errors in the execution, the actual physical process of creating the animated images frame by frame, drawing by drawing. You're talking about design, which is an entirely different aspect of the process done at a much earlier stage by different people on a different continent.

[RAMA]

Rewatching VR5 now, I have all of them plus 3 I've never seen. Wow, its amazing what a difference 18 years makes...I considered VR5 part of the new crop of 90s shows that changed the way later tv was made...serialized, glossy photography, quicker edits...but without a transfer to HD, the show loses its glossiness. When did the grunge thing wind up looking so dated?

Still, while the mysterious part of the show could have had a creepier edge the story holds up pretty well. VR didn't become big in the way everyone thought, but the second wave of VR seems to be picking up. Even Second Life looks better than the non VR5 VR from this series. I think a remake is in order.

[RJDiogenes]

RAMA wrote:

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When did the grunge thing wind up looking so dated?

1987.

[Silvercrest]

Silvercrest wrote:

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After all these pages, I'm still convinced I'm the only one who has seen Marine Boy.

And now, after over 300 posts, I can make no other conclusion. It's a fact: No one but me has ever seen Marine Boy.