Tv shows or movies that would transition well to Sci-Fi elements being added?
- Thread starter Jayson1
- Start date
I remember Diagnosis Murder doing a vampire episode that starts out where it seems like it's just a nut who thinks she's a vampire, but in the end, they show that there are definitely real vampires.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of TV and Film science fiction has for the most part has never gotten past end of the 1950s where literary science fiction is concerned. Thankfully, streaming science fiction is starting to crash through the classic/new wave barrier but still has a ways to go before any of it really pushes the envelope like new wave science fiction was doing by the time TOS aired.
I would feel the same but the ill-fated tv series "Mercy Point" begs to differ.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164097/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Across the Sahartic Divide from mid-twenty-third century Earth is the Jericho colony and its port of entry/hospital space station Mercy Point. Staffed by human, alien, and even android medical personnel, Mercy Point provides desperately-needed health care for the colony and any ship passing through the area.
Canceled after 8 episodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_Point
Cancellation and unproduced episodes
Callaway said he was surprised by UPN's cancellation of Mercy Point because of their strong support of the show. He felt the decision was made in part because of the show's high production costs.[15][16] He also concluded that the decision to broadcast the pilot at the same time as the World Series resulted in the loss of Mercy Point's target audience. To better connect with UPN's teen viewers, Callaway shifted the show's focus from medical and ethical cases to the characters' relationships. Despite these revisions, he said that UPN executives preferred to air shows like Moesha over science-fiction programs.[15] When UPN announced the show's cancellation, the eighth episode was in the middle of production. Scenes originally written for the episode were revised and edited into the seventh episode to form a complete series finale.[8]
In an interview about the series, Callaway said that he had developed complete story arcs for each character for the rest of the first season. Hayden would have continued to deal with feelings of "homesickness", which is defined as "a crippling interstellar condition unique to humans that ultimately linked their survival to returning to Earth" in the context of the show. Batung would have suffered consequences for rejecting "the protective fold of his species", and ANI would develop an antidote for a virus that spread from computers to humans in the pilot episode. Callaway described ANI's future character development as "the ultimate clash between the organic and technological worlds". The status of Grote's missing family would eventually be uncovered after he conducts a rescue mission with C. J. to the "Sahartic Divide". Dru would be confronted by her "old addictions" and Cooke would test her theory that the temporal lobe houses a human's soul and is connected with "homesickness".[8]
@Christopher I think that even more sci-fi, as in out of the realm of possibility, is the composition of the Priority Homicide/Major Crimes Division from TheCloser/Major Crimes. It's got what, three lieutenants,a sergeant, two detectives and a dedicated civilian media guy, plus a deputy chief all working one case at a time.
@Shawnster I really wanted to watch Mercy Point when it was on. They advertised it as "Deep Space 9-1-1". How could you not be interested in that?
@Shawnster I really wanted to watch Mercy Point when it was on. They advertised it as "Deep Space 9-1-1". How could you not be interested in that?
Fantasy is out of the realm of possibility. Science fiction is called that because it's supposed to be within the realm of future possibility, or at least to create the illusion that it could be once science advances far enough.
It's also called that because its imaginary concepts are based in science, discovery, and invention, not just implausible organizational structures. I was somewhat kidding about CSI, although it does employ a fair amount of implausibly advanced (or at least implausibly swift) forensic technology.
Reminds me of a credibility issue I had with Law & Order. What are the odds that every homicide investigated by the same pair of detectives from a single Manhattan precinct would then get prosecuted by the same pair of assistant DAs?
I don't know if this counts but since you brought up Starsky & Hutch, there was that 2-parter from season 2 'The Set Up' that was inspired by the Manchurian Candidate about brainwashing people into becoming hitmen/women. You could argue that it was sci-fi given the methods used for the time. It also broke continuity as the iconic Ford Gran Torino was blown up (not very convincingly, they used a completely different make of car), only to return unscathed in the next story. Also the villains behind it were never Identified and got away, the mob, the US Government?
I always joked that the series was going to inevitably wind up with the team breaking up a cartel / spy ring on the Moon with the help of a lunar buggy street racing challenge and the power of familia.
Person of Interest started out as a fairly standard procedural with its scifi elements largely suppressed in order to appease CBS execs and meet audience expectations, but as it went on the artificial super-intelligences behind the rival factions in the show became more and more prominent and involved in the plotlines and indeed the universe itself, with one threatening to take over the world.
Just as a fun thought exercise I would imagine what Game of Thrones would be like if Westeros and Essos and the rest were all part of a game preserve for the Predator species transplanted from Earth at different times, hence the existence of Ice Age Earth creatures. Things like the Children of the Forest and dragons could be explained as aliens and magic could be explained as alien or super advanced tech beyond normal human comprehension.
The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent 7, and The 7 Samurai have all been retold successfully in various Star Wars series, an episode of Star Trek DS9, and an episode of Battlestar Galactica. In fact, TOS BSG remade several made for tv films from the day including The Towering Inferno (Fire In Space). Star Wars ANH is basically a retelling of King Arthur complete with an old wizard, a young knight with a mystical sword, a Lancelot and a Guinevere and a Black Knight.
The Black Hole is basically a Gothic horror story complete with Gothic looking space ship. It also has the Captain Ahab element. I think Moby Dick has been retold in various scifi movies.
Alien is a rehash of the typical haunted house/scary monster/slasher flicks.
Any war movie, especially a WWII Nazi movie can easily be remade as a space opera.
My idea for a DS9 movie is based on The Manchurian Candidate featuring Thomas Riker and Ro Laren as sleeper agents working for the Dominion and set during the aftermath of the Dominion War and the reconstruction of Cardassian space.
Oh, I liked it and was disappointed it was canceled. I thought there was potential.
I first got interested in Law & Order when I was working nights back in the late 90s. The show was on A&E. They would show a Law & Order, a Northern Exposure, then another Law & Order. The confusing thing was that the 2 Law & Orders were different seasons. Sometimes the characters were the same, sometimes not, sometimes they were a mix. The Lieutenant was usually the same. I honestly thought the show was featuring different cops in the same precinct investigating their individual cases. Took me forever to piece together I wasn't watching the same season.
The Black Hole is basically a Gothic horror story complete with Gothic looking space ship. It also has the Captain Ahab element. I think Moby Dick has been retold in various scifi movies.
Alien is a rehash of the typical haunted house/scary monster/slasher flicks.
Any war movie, especially a WWII Nazi movie can easily be remade as a space opera.
My idea for a DS9 movie is based on The Manchurian Candidate featuring Thomas Riker and Ro Laren as sleeper agents working for the Dominion and set during the aftermath of the Dominion War and the reconstruction of Cardassian space.
Oh, I liked it and was disappointed it was canceled. I thought there was potential.
I first got interested in Law & Order when I was working nights back in the late 90s. The show was on A&E. They would show a Law & Order, a Northern Exposure, then another Law & Order. The confusing thing was that the 2 Law & Orders were different seasons. Sometimes the characters were the same, sometimes not, sometimes they were a mix. The Lieutenant was usually the same. I honestly thought the show was featuring different cops in the same precinct investigating their individual cases. Took me forever to piece together I wasn't watching the same season.
More precisely, The Black Hole is very much 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in space, which Disney pretty much acknowledged at the time. The Maximillian Schnell character is more Nemo than Ahab.
It's often been likened to the movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space and to a segment of A.E. van Vogt's fix-up novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle, though screenwriter Dan O'Bannon has cited numerous other influences, saying, "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!"
Although I wish they wouldn't. Assuming that Earthbound war tactics could work in space makes as much sense as assuming tanks and jeeps could work underwater. The physics and logistics of the environment are completely different. And my problem with a lot of military SF is that it tends to ignore technological advances. IIRC, we're already at the point where the US Air Force has more drone pilots than fighter pilots. I suspect that future wars will be fought mainly by drones and cyberwarfare, that the whole nature of armed conflict will change to the point that trying to transpose historical war stories into a future setting will just be ridiculous. (Deep Space Nine was particularly bad at this. Its Starfleet troops in the Dominion War were running around in cloth uniforms, without any kind of helmets or body armor at all. Not only were they riffing on WWII movies, but they couldn't even bother to use WWII-level technology!)
We seem to be approaching this from different angles.
For example, TOS "Balance of Terror" was basically a science fiction version of two World War II movies; "Run Silent, Run Deep" and "The Enemy Below." While there are complaints, BoT is one of the better Star Trek episodes.
All of Star Wars could easily look like a WWII movie. Just put the Imperials in Nazi uniforms. That's been a pretty successful series of films, as I recall. George Lucas even based the fighter scenes on WWII dogfight films. Yes, the realism leaves a lot to be desired, but that's not hindered that franchise.
Not sure if your post was in jest or not, but the DoH already veered into sci-fi territory. There was an episode where the Duke boys meet an alien. It's been many, many years since I've watched it, so I don't remember how or why.
Which is kind of my point -- that fiction tends to approach it from the angle of "Let's take a kind of war story that's been done a million times before and dress it up with superficial spacey trappings" when I'd rather see more works that take the angle of "Let's figure out how combat would actually work in space, because that would be something new and different."
BoT is actually not that implausible at TV/movie space battle stories go, since two ships hunting each other in the vast darkness and never being close enough to appear in the same shot is enormously more plausible than the cluttered space battles of post-Star Wars cinema. Although it does have some major implausibilities, like the way random fire in the immensity of space coincidentally comes close enough to cripple the Romulan ship, and like the unexplained "motion sensors" that fill the role of sonar in a submarine movie.
Star Wars has never remotely aspired to realism, though. Its whole deal is nostalgia, riffing on past genres and mashing them together.
Look, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with stories that don't bother with realism. But there's room for more stories that do. It's not a binary choice between them -- there should be room for every approach. But more realistic SF is woefully underrepresented in the mass media.
Starting a tangent. If you want more sci-fi tactics, I'd recommend the Succession duology by Scott Westerfeld. Much more imaginative than most of what we get. The one oddity is that it was written before the advent of smartphones. There's this part, I can't really remember exactly, but a character rigs their mobile to do something tat a smartphone should already be able to do.
At least that was the original intent. Not much of that was left in the finished version.
Murdoch Mysteries already does this to some extent. Set in the 1900's, Murdoch periodically comes up with inventions that help him in investigations that are ahead of time for the time-period. Also, it has several times had episodes directly inspired by Jules Vernes, one with a tunnel-burrowing machine, and one featuring a rocket clearly stylized and patterned after his stories.
https://murdochmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Journey_to_the_Centre_of_Toronto
https://murdochmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Pendrick's_Rocket
https://murdochmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Journey_to_the_Centre_of_Toronto
https://murdochmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Pendrick's_Rocket