Brian Johnson announces updated SPACE:1999 series.

[Skipper]

The moon wasn't a spaceship[...]!

Yes! I know that the moon wasn't literally a spaceship in the series! But storywise, it was often just a narrative device used to transport people from point a to point b which our heroes couldn't control!
Conceptually it wasn't so different from the Destiny from StarGate Universe! Ending every sentence with an exclamation mark is exhausting!

 

[mos6507]

by definition, the point of doing a new version of a property is to attract a new audience.

Yeah, like there are a lot of 20-30 somethings that think "gee, remember that 70s show Space: 1999? I'd love it to come back, but only if they drop the bell-bottoms and people walk around with lumberjack beards, tats, and ear-gauges like me."

For pop culture that has totally permeated no matter what age (like Trek) you can get away with that approach, but for pop culture that has sort of fallen below the noise floor, the best way to bring it back is to use the retro as a selling-point.

I mean, look at what's at the top of today's album charts: Greta Van Fleet. Take a look at those out-of-style outfits. What once was seen as old and unhip can be a novelty (sometimes).

Does that mean some bean-counter might think of doing hipster Space: 1999? Sure, but it doesn't make much sense. Most likely nothing will get greenlit at all.

 

[Skipper]

IMHO a new version they did right is Yamato 2199 (Star Blazers 2199 for you American people )

It was both innovative and respectful of the original version.

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[137th Gebirg]

Yep! Damn fine upgrade to a great show.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, like there are a lot of 20-30 somethings that think "gee, remember that 70s show Space: 1999? I'd love it to come back, but only if they drop the bell-bottoms and people walk around with lumberjack beards, tats, and ear-gauges like me."

Missing the point. The target audience is the people who've never seen the original, maybe never even heard of it -- the people to whom it's just a new show that's interesting on its own merits. It's worth remaking something for a new audience because it will be new to them. It will be something they haven't seen before. The purpose of a new version is to expand the audience, not just pander to the ever-shrinking audience that already knows the property.

When I was a kid, I watched Buck Rogers on TV. I didn't know the Buster Crabbe serial or the comic strips or the incredibly racist prose novellas that started it all. I watched Batman and didn't know the comic books it was based on. I watched reruns of The Lone Ranger and didn't know it was based on a radio show. All I knew was what they were in the present. That's going to be most viewers' experience of a remake or reboot.

For pop culture that has totally permeated no matter what age (like Trek) you can get away with that approach, but for pop culture that has sort of fallen below the noise floor, the best way to bring it back is to use the retro as a selling-point.

No. Nostalgia alone cannot make something good. All the nostalgia in the world won't help your show if it doesn't have the fundamentals, if it isn't well enough written and made to hold an audience that knows nothing of the original.

I mean, look at what's at the top of today's album charts: Greta Van Fleet.

I have no idea who that is. Which just proves my point. Just because you know something, that doesn't mean everyone out there knows it. There are millions of people who've never even heard of the things that are timeworn and familiar to you.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Yeah, like there are a lot of 20-30 somethings that think "gee, remember that 70s show Space: 1999? I'd love it to come back, but only if they drop the bell-bottoms and people walk around with lumberjack beards, tats, and ear-gauges like me."

These days I think they're called "hipsters".

 

[flandry84]

But putting the characters in what passes for “sci-fi fashion” today will date the new show too.
Lemme guess...a lot of black,utilitarian uniforms.Body armour,cargo pants,t-shirts.See any one of a dozen shows on air right now.
I’m not advocating the bell bottoms but it would be nice to see the costume designers break from the norm.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yeah, like there are a lot of 20-30 somethings that think "gee, remember that 70s show Space: 1999? I'd love it to come back, but only if they drop the bell-bottoms and people walk around with lumberjack beards, tats, and ear-gauges like me."

For pop culture that has totally permeated no matter what age (like Trek) you can get away with that approach, but for pop culture that has sort of fallen below the noise floor, the best way to bring it back is to use the retro as a selling-point.

I mean, look at what's at the top of today's album charts: Greta Van Fleet. Take a look at those out-of-style outfits. What once was seen as old and unhip can be a novelty (sometimes).

Does that mean some bean-counter might think of doing hipster Space: 1999? Sure, but it doesn't make much sense. Most likely nothing will get greenlit at all.

I'm seeing a lot of 70's inspired fashion these days The "kids" are into it. SF future fashion often reflects current fashions. Mini skirts in Star Trek and new wave/punk in Blade Runner for example.

 

[Skipper]

No. Nostalgia alone cannot make something good. All the nostalgia in the world won't help your show if it doesn't have the fundamentals, if it isn't well enough written and made to hold an audience that knows nothing of the original.

Yep. And, guys, we are talking about a show made 45 years ago. Two generations have passed and, while I know that someone considers it a cult show, I'm quite sure that just the name alone can't bring a huge audience to watch a remake. There are a lot of failed reboots out there and it means some people are overestimating the power of "nostalgia"....

 

[Christopher]

Yep. And, guys, we are talking about a show made 45 years ago. Two generations have passed and, while I know that someone considers it a cult show, I quite sure that just the name alone can't bring a huge audience to watch a remake.

Definitely not, considering that Space: 1999 was never all that highly regarded to begin with. It was appreciated for its visual effects and production design, but that was about it. If it has cult value today, that's probably because it's part of the overall Gerry & Sylvia Anderson family of shows and rides on those coattails.

I think a lot of people today don't realize how few SF shows in the '60s and '70s were actually popular. They weren't all Star Trek. In fact, Star Trek's widespread, enduring popularity was a unique phenomenon in American SFTV, unmatched by anything except Doctor Who fandom in England, and by Star Wars fandom a decade later, although to an extent it was Trek fandom that laid the groundwork for Star Wars to succeed (since part of how Lucas was able to get funding for the movie in the first place was by citing Trek to prove that space opera could attract a mass audience). Nothing else in SFTV from the era was remotely as huge, and most of it was seen as forgettable and trashy, and it usually was. Battlestar Galactica fans have somehow invented this mythology that the original show was a huge favorite in its day, but it was only the pilot movie that made a big splash, and the ratings plummeted thereafter because it just wasn't a very good show.

And Space: 1999 struggled to find an audience too. The proof of that is the drastic season 2 retool. If season 1 had been successful enough, they wouldn't have felt the need to make radical changes. Also, it was first-run syndicated in the US, rather than a network show, so that might've made it harder to gain visibility or a sizeable audience.

 

[Skipper]

I think a lot of people today don't realize how few SF shows in the '60s and '70s were actually popular.

Yep! IMO this is one the problems of online echo chambers. We can choose our segments of Internet so we can believe that our preferred piece of fiction was a misunderstood masterpiece killed by executives' short-sightedness.

The reality is before TNG there were very few examples of popular (and good) tv scifi fiction. But people tend to mix their opinions with facts...

 

[Christopher]

The reality is before TNG there were very few examples of popular (and good) tv scifi fiction. But people tend to mix their opinions with facts...

There were popular shows made for kids in the early days -- Captain Video, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, Rocky Jones: Space Ranger, Adventures of Superman. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space were popular, but were children's/family shows. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and maybe The Invaders were about it for adult-oriented SF in the '60s, and only TZ was really a hit (Star Trek struggled in the ratings and didn't become a phenomenon until rerun syndication years later). Between TOS and TNG, the most successful and intelligent genre show I can think of was The Incredible Hulk. I'd say The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman aspired to some intelligence at first but got dumbed down over time. There was a lot of network pressure in the '70s for genre shows to be kept simplistic and formulaic, since executives at the time didn't trust their audiences to understand anything challenging or sophisticated. There were a couple of smarter things in the early to mid-'80s like the Twilight Zone revival and Max Headroom, but they weren't especially successful.

It wasn't until the late '80s and early '90s that SFTV started to become the major genre it is today, with multiple shows that were both high in quality and at least somewhat successful in the ratings -- TNG, Quantum Leap, Alien Nation, Babylon 5, etc. (Alien Nation was short-lived, but it was cancelled because of budget, not ratings. FOX was expanding its lineup to more nights and calculated that they could produce four sitcoms for the cost of that one expensive show. And they did bring it back as a series of TV movies a few years later.) Part of it was the breakthrough in digital visual effects that Babylon 5 and Foundation Imaging pioneered, allowing elaborate (if not particularly realistic) VFX shots to be created far more inexpensively than ever before, and thus allowing low-budget SF and fantasy shows to proliferate.

 

[Skipper]

The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and maybe The Invaders were about it for adult-oriented SF in the '60s

By the way, didn't they make a sequel to The Invaders in the 90s? Is it any good?

 

[Christopher]

By the way, didn't they make a sequel to The Invaders in the 90s? Is it any good?

Yeah, a 1995 miniseries with Scott Bakula and Elizabeth Peña. I don't remember it well, but I think I didn't like it much.

 

[johnnybear]

Yes, you are correct.

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That show was pretty bad, even for youngsters I always thought!
JB

 

[johnnybear]

Yeah, a 1995 miniseries with Scott Bakula and Elizabeth Peña. I don't remember it well, but I think I didn't like it much.

No, there were some unpalatable elements in it like the aliens continually smoking everywhere, and when they vapourized they turned into a group of flies! We did get some good bits like when they took humans and placed them in telephone boxes and took their shape while their look was adapted from the classic series episode, The Enemy!
JB

 

[marillion]

Let's not forget V... The re-imagined version looked pretty slick, but had nothing of substance to offer.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

The update will probably do something like that. Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds was rebooted and is in it's third season; still in production. So, I think Gerry Anderson's Space:1999 will be a great series to reboot.

original Thunderbirds:

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reboot in third season Thunderbirds:

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I liked the comparison of old and new. Still riding that oversized tray into Thunderbird 2 seems kind of scary still. What if Virgil was sleepy and it was 4am? He'd fall to his death.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well they could have strapped engines onto the Moon. If they wanted to.

 

[Maurice]

https://www.facebook.com/BrianJohnsonSFX/posts/2201047740212470
Brian Johnson, who worked on the original series, Alien(1979), Empire Strikes Back(1980) et.al. states that there will be a new updated Gerry Anderson's SPACE:1999 television series.

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If this is what I think it is it got derailed. I know of one 1999 show pitch to ITV that got jammed up between different offices of that company.