Infernal Machine. Terrific episode, though having Leo McKern play two roles (Barry Morse's suggestion, ISTR) makes no sense unless Companion is the original Gwent (or Gwent has adopted his voice, which is possible, but not quite consistent with Gwent's fierce sense of ego and personal preservation).
Watching Buck Rogers In The 25th Century
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
That's basically what I did, saw the three UK episodes (Ripper, Energy Eater and Horror in the Heights) then the tv movies.
I thought Voyagers! was super cool. It was one of my favorite shows when I was in junior high. I always wanted an Omni.
There were some things about it that I never understood (such as why Bogg's Omni was hard-coded not to go past 1970), but generally it was solid. Any show that encourages kids to read, can't be all bad...
As for why the guidebook contained the "real" history that voyagers were supposed to fix: Perhaps there were evil voyagers messing with the timeline, like the evil leapers from QL, and the good ones were dispatched to fix it. Or maybe an accident with time travel technology caused multiple points in history to be changed (as in the remake of The Time Tunnel).
Actually the "evil voyagers" concept is more likely, as there actually WAS one (Drake) in the series.
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I understand Space:1999 season two being belittled like the original Lost In Space '60s series, but Space:1999 season one has always been impressive to me.
Yes season one was and still is considered superior. The show has high production values for the time and was an original idea. Soon someone will remake and call it Space 2099.
Back to Buck Rogers. I think the first season was actually fantastic and the special effects were amazing for the time period. The second season while not as good and having a different setup from the first season still had some spectacular effects as well as a few good episodes. All in all it was a really good show that ushered in later shows with high production value like TNG. Much of the effects of that show really hold up well today. The space battles, the star fighters and even the planets look great. They were able to at times get a Star Wars look on a tv budget. Not bad.
The FX were from the same company that had made Battlestar Galactica's effects, an in-house unit that John Dykstra had set up at Universal before moving on to Paramount to do Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I thought their work in the pilot movie was weak compared to their BSG work, with only the matte paintings really being impressive. But there was some decent work in the series that followed.
The BSG work was quite excellent. But The model work on the Star Fighters and Adalas ship were well done. The quality even spilled over into the second season. Though I was not a huge fan of the searcher. A really boring model. The producers did manage to do excellent work on Hawks fighter. I haven’t seen most of the episodes in years but what I have seen and remember was well done. I suspect the show was just to expensive to produce and along with the ratings it just wasn’t worth it to NBC.
That was pretty much par for the course back before modern digital FX, the reason so few SF shows made it past a season or two. They were more expensive to make than typical shows and yet had smaller, niche audiences, so they could rarely turn a profit. The sea change came with Babylon 5 and the Video Toaster, a system that made CGI effects and video editing practical at a fraction of the previous cost. After that, we got a proliferation of FX-heavy SF/fantasy shows, and it was easier for them to succeed in the ratings. The rise of first-run syndication with ST:TNG and after probably helped too, since TV stations had to commit to airing an entire season when they picked up a syndicated show, and thus couldn't yank a show off the air after a half-dozen episodes or less like networks could, so syndicated genre shows had more time to build an audience.
And no doubt the remake won't be anywhere near as good but I am prepared to be surprised.
There was rumour of a remake of Blakes 7 but they wanted the ship to be a bit grungy and such, so glad they never did that.
I wish Dark Matter would get the 4th season it never got. Only 2 years have passed the cast still looks the same pretty much.
Exactly. I am surprised that expensive shows like Star Trek and Lost in Space got 3 seasons. I know LIS was pretty popular at first but it was effects heavy for 1965. Actually I was surprised how well some of the effects were in the beginning. Even in the 2nd and 3rd seasons they had some good space scenes and effects. If course it could be a mixed bag once the camp started but the first season was by far the best. Still I watch all seasons because so many of my childhood memories are locked in them.
And then you have the other kind of shows like Automan which were fun but purely ridiculous, and trying to cash in on Tron. Although in the pilot episode Automan pretty much kills the bad guys.
In ST's case, reportedly, it was because the show helped NBC's parent company RCA sell color TV sets, which they had the patent on. So that profit for the parent company helped offset the loss for the network. Although they still had to slash season 3's budget considerably, with hardly any location work, fewer guest stars and extras, more minimalist sets, more bottle shows, etc.
As for LiS, it was actually fairly successful in the ratings, unlike TOS. And its ratings held pretty steady from season to season rather than dropping off. So it's not that hard to understand its renewal.
Worth remembering that there's a difference between the network (and their reasons for renewing), and the studio (and their reasons for cutting costs, or rather minimising episodic losses, given the usual gap between costs and network fee).
But season 3 of LIS was its final run because the camp ratcheted up to 11 and it was competing head on with shows like Star Trek and Batman. And of course there is the vegetable episode which I think singlehandedly killed the series. By then the writers had run out of ideas. That's what I've read on various LIS blogs and director commentaries. I don't know why that particular episode sounded like they had run out of ideas. Didn't they have capable writers?
True. Sometimes the minimalist budget actually worked for them. One of my favorite episodes of the third season was spectre of the gun. They didn’t have enough in the budget to make a complete western set so they made it that the melkotians had limited data etc. so the town was incomplete. That gave the episode a strange and alien feel. Really great episode.
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I'd say the camp was worse in season 2 overall. Season 3 at least tried to dial it back some in the first half, though it went off the rails in the end.
It was the norm for Irwin Allen to put less care into his shows once he'd established them. They'd start out with these strong, well-defined concepts and then degenerate into lazy, stock sci-fi plots that were pretty interchangeable from show to show, so that even Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel ended up with episodes about alien invaders, underground secret societies, genuine sorcerors, and so forth.
Some years ago I tried to watch some episode of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". I don't know if I was unlucky, but they were all episodes on aliens, ghosts or some permutation of these two. I had read that in theory there are more serious episodes, but during my (brief) watching I didn't see any ...
It started out fairly serious in its first season, which was in black-and-white and thus probably left out of a lot of syndication packages. It got lighter and more fanciful in subsequent seasons.
There was a movie before the series also titled Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and the movie was fairly serious in tone. It was actually kind of OK.
It still had weird Irwin Allen science but it was mostly OK.
City Beneath The Sea was another kind of OK movie.
It still had weird Irwin Allen science but it was mostly OK.
City Beneath The Sea was another kind of OK movie.
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