It is the Dimensional Submarine UX-01 Length: 144m Armaments: Bow subspace torpedo launch tubes x 6 Stern subspace torpedo launch tubes x 2 99mm single-mount positron beam turret x 1 (foredeck) 33mm twin-mount laser machine cannon x 1 (aft of sail) Missile launchers x 8 (bow, dorsal) Space minelayers x 5 (aft deck)
I hear you. When I was a certain age, almost any object was either some sort of spacecraft or piece of space equipment for me. I wish my imagination was still as active/expansive now as it was then.
I had much the same experience. For some reason, my station ran it in the morning before school, so I had to get up early to watch it. The Mold-a-rama, they were great. I haven't seen one since the early 2000s, apparently getting parts and repair is no longer practical. I can still smell the plastic though.
Oh, yes. My toy spaceships (many of which I still have in a box) included: A toy water rocket (this model) The launcher for said rocket, which I felt looked more like a spaceship than the actual rocket A Tasco pocket microscope whose light served as its "engine" A plastic insert from a portable typewriter, meant to hold the hammers in place, but which looked to me like a Cylon Raider-esque space fighter The bottom half of a die-cast metal toy jet airplane that I once threw out my 3rd-story window into the backyard and could never find the top half of after that A Rubik's Snake folded into a geometric configuration that looked spaceship-like to me Several electronic connector pieces attached to each other in a way that looked spaceship-like to me A purple plastic thingy I found somewhere that looks kind of like Boba Fett's rear-mounted rocket launcher but not quite A loose button whose shape reminded me of a flying saucer I also had a pocket camera that I pretended was a space station, since it had various sliding/opening hatches for batteries, film, etc. that I could pretend were docking bays. I even made a little cardboard miniature of my half-metal-plane "spaceship" to scale with the "space station," so I could do "long shots" of it docking. (I imagined getting a camera and creating special-effects shots of the ship miniatures, but never actually did so.)
I just assumed you would have watched "Land of the Lost" when it first aired (depending upon your age, of course). It had some "high concepts" you seem to appreciate, like the notion of a "pocket universe" warping light upon itself, a time traveler initially mistaking his degenerated descendants for his primitive ancestors, space/time traveling pylons with interiors larger than their exteriors, etc. At 10 years old, I drooled over stop motion animation so I freaked when I saw preview commercials of this upcoming series during the summer of 1973. At least the Marshalls had a more legitimate reason for being trapped, the seemingly "enter only" pocket continuum, whereas the family in the traditionally animated "Valley of the Dinosaurs" couldn't even climb out of a naturally geological terrain. "Hey, ya' dumb schmucks! You can't even climb up a frickin' hill?!" ("VotD" was one of the competing cartoons on CBS or ABC that year.) Admittedly, the acting was, well, found "wanting". Holly's whining hit a certain pitch that really made one want to grit one's teeth. But the concepts, at least during that first season were really ambitious (given Gerrold and Fontana were involved) and the "causal loop" presented in the last episode of that first year staged the scenario for the show to be endlessly repeated in syndication. (Of course, the green light for a second year kinda' defeated the logic of that "finale".) Plus, there was the enjoyment of watching stop motion dinosaurs, a staple of filmed entertainment since the 1920s with Willis O'Brian's adaptation of "The Lost World" (not to be confused with the Jurassic Park movie of the same name).
None of the LOTL spin-offs, revivals, reboots, or whatever you want to call them have been as good as the original.
Loved LOTL! The Will Ferrell remake was amusing and preserved much of the original premise of the crys-TALS and obelisks but yeah, I didn't find it quite as good conceptually as the original. Strange how it seemed to get caught up in this new trend of trying to remake old dramatic shows into comedy movies. Ben Stiller's "Starsky and Hutch" was one of the first ones I can recall, followed by Dukes of Hazzard, 21 Jump Street, A-Team (sort of), CHiPs and so on. It's like they can't write for a serous remake and instead opt to satire the source material for cheap laughs. I'm glad nobody attempted this tack at BSG (yet).
The earliest and oddest example I can think of is the 1987 Dragnet movie with Dan Aykroyd as Sgt. Joe Friday's son and Tom Hanks as his zany mismatched partner. The weird thing is that it was both a spoof of Dragnet and a direct, supposedly in-continuity sequel, complete with Harry Morgan reprising his role as Bill Gannon. Several of the shows you mention were pretty comedic to begin with, or at least lightweight and kitschy. The Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team were pretty much live-action cartoons, driven by character humor and zany, fanciful action scenes that defied physics and logic. I think the Dukes movie, from what I saw of it, went for a very different style of humor, raunchy and mean-spirited where the original was upbeat, good-natured, and wholesome (leaving aside for the moment the problematical issue of the pro-slavery symbol painted on top of the hero car). But I felt the A-Team movie, if anything, played things a bit more seriously and realistically than the TV show did, while still capturing a similar spirit in its character humor. I think the reason for the comedy remakes is partly that a lot of '70s and '80s TV shows were kind of kitschy and hard for modern viewers to take seriously, so the studios and filmmakers lean into that and go for spoofs. I never got into CHiPs, but I had the impression even at the time that it was considered kitschy and lowbrow.
So happy people here remember The Land Of The Lost. That theme song won't leave me. I know all the words Hey maybe the Sleestak for 2020 Valley Of The Dinosaurs was such a joke even at age 11 I could scream at the TV why the hell don't they get some ropes and climb out of the bloody valley? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck planes flew over the valley and they could see the planes why could they not climb out the valley? For that matter howcome no one flying above them saw all the dinos and shit down there?
Yep. Absolutely. But it had a cool theme. Fun fact: a gun was drawn by police officer in just three out of 139 episodes and he was always the same character (Baricza):
I was old enough to be fanatical about dinosaurs, but too little to get into the story. Every time they went into pylons and started moving crystals etc, I would basically think "Oh no not again." Which brought this to my mind, thanks very much! That show was also responsible, in my neighborhood, for a brief and often unfortunate fad of two kids riding their bikes in side-by-side formation, a few inches apart at top speed.
The new V was the exact opposite of the original in the sense that it portrayed a creeping dystopia coming from the left rather than the right, with a major plot-point oriented around Obamacare of all things.
As Michael Dorn was a regular on ChiPs, I have long wondered if Worf ever had to babysit Captain Kirk (Robert Pine's son Chris, natch).
Holy Christ, check out that 'stache! http://images5.fanpop.com/image/pho...Dorn-as-Jeb-Turner-chips-29585764-995-844.jpg
Funny thing, it was a challenge to bend the 3D T-Rex model into the long discredited "tail dragging" form and giving it a frugally budgeted foam and cast latex appearance. The Pylon is my own modest mesh. The rest, various Poser based models.
V the Series jumped the shark and landed in the enclosure with it when they decided to kill off half the regular cast.