current childrens scifi TV shows and movies

[jefferiestubes8]

I came across something today that got me thinking about the newest generation of TV & movie fans. The age 6-11 year old age bracket.
Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension is an upcoming animated Disney Channel Original movie of the animated series Phineas and Ferbs that airs on the Disney channel.

Phineas and Ferb: Across the Second Dimension (2011)
Animation | Adventure | Family
[longer summary:

When Phineas, Ferb, and Perry follow Dr. Doofenshmirtz through his "Otherdimensionator", they find themselves in an alternate universe where a second, truly evil Dr. Doof rules over his Tri-state Area with an army of iron-fisted robots. To save his friends from certain doom, Perry makes the ultimate sacrifice by revealing his secret identity as Agent P. Phineas and Ferb escape, meet their 2nd dimension selves, and begin their own mission to rescue Perry. So begins an epic battle as our heroes try to save their home from the clutches of Evil Dr. Doof and his sidekick Platyborg. Will Evil Doof succeed and achieve dual world domination? Will Candace finally bust her brothers? Find out in this action-packed, epic adventure - so huge that it crosses over time and space.

Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension airs August 5.

Subsequently, the telepic will air Aug. 13 on Disney XD and Aug. 20 on ABC

Based on the most-watched animated series for kids 6-11 and 9-14

source

originally the series dates from 2007 the animated comedy (non-sci-fi):
"Phineas and Ferb" (2007) [TV G / Animation | Comedy | Family]

What do you guys and gals think about the TV & movie programming rated G or TV-G for the under age 9 crowd to help them become scifi fans and move to PG rated scifi films?
It airing on ABC is good news at that is a network airing scifi programming (even aimed at kids 6-14 years of age.

Are there good series and movies for ages 6-11 in the sci-fi genre for kids at all currently on TV or the cinema? (perhaps non-Disney)
What about specifically the age 9-14 age bracket that can handle more difficult concepts and rated TV-PG for scifi shows (possibly animated).

 

[Argus Skyhawk]

I don't know what's on TV nowadays, but for a recent excellent science fiction children's movie, Wall-E comes to mind.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I miss good old-fashioned stuff like Candle Cove. You really had to use your imagination with those shows.

 

[js]

I thought the Sarah Jane Adventures some of the best family programming I've ever seen - a wonderful spinoff that is a great way to introduce younger ones to the Doctor Who universe. Cannot recommend it highly enough - the show got better and better over the course of its four seasons.

I'm also looking forward to the Tron animated series coming to Disney XD next year - the animated teaser footage from the show on the Tron: Legacy dvd looks amazing.

 

[JD]

I never watched it, but a few years ago I saw a show called The Troop on Nickelodeon, but I don't know if it's still on. From what I read it was basically a teenage MIB. I never watched more than a minuet or two once while flipping around, because the creature designs caught my eye. They also have Supah Ninjas which features George Takei as a hologram of the main character's grand father. Haven't watched that one either, but I've thought about checking it out simply due to Takei's involvement.

 

[Mysterion]

I'd like to see things along the lines of the great Filmation live-action sci-fi of the 70's: Ark II, Space Academy, and Jason of Star Command. (I've got ideas for reviving the latter two.) Even though these shows were made on a reletively low budget, they looked pretty good for the time, and the stories weren't bad. There was also a short lived Saturday morning show called Hypernauts in the early 90s that I recall being pretty good (and wish would get a DVD release).

 

[Sindatur]

There's a sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender coming soon.

Star Wars Clone Wars is airing still.

 

[777]

There is also the long running Ben 10 series.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_10

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Star Wars Clone Wars is airing still.

I would say this is a lot more fantasy than science-based tv series and with the violence the rating is not TV-G.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Star Wars Clone Wars is airing still.

I would say this is a lot more fantasy than science-based tv series and with the violence the rating is not TV-G.

Star Wars is obviously intended as sci fi. Let's not get pedantic. After all, faster-than-light travel is also "fantasy" and will likely never happen.

The Clone Wars is definitely intended for children regardless of the rating. It does a nice job not talking down to kids and including ideas that might go over their heads (partly just to make sure the grownups in the audience don't get bored.)

 

[Sindatur]

Star Wars Clone Wars is airing still.

I would say this is a lot more fantasy than science-based tv series and with the violence the rating is not TV-G.

Ah, I missed that Rated G part.

I don't even think most Disney movies are rated G anymore. A poster on another board, does a movie night for daughter's school on occassion, and the movies must be rated G, and he has a bear of a time finding current things that are rated G. Many suggestions were given to him in a thread he started asking for suggestions, and most of them were rated higher than G, even though they obviously are kids movies (or at least meant to appeal to kids, while having something for the adults as well)

 

[Christopher]

I'd like to see things along the lines of the great Filmation live-action sci-fi of the 70's: Ark II, Space Academy, and Jason of Star Command. (I've got ideas for reviving the latter two.)

So have I.

Even though these shows were made on a reletively low budget, they looked pretty good for the time, and the stories weren't bad.

Space Academy benefitted from snapping up a number of FX artists and designers who'd just finished work on a little film called Star Wars. They really did terrific work with their micro-budget. In fact, I think SA's in-camera miniature shots tend to look better than Jason's more high-tech bluescreen work, because the bluescreen shots have pretty obvious matte lines.

Star Wars is obviously intended as sci fi. Let's not get pedantic. After all, faster-than-light travel is also "fantasy" and will likely never happen.

First off, George Lucas does not refer to Star Wars as science fiction; his own term for it is "space fantasy," in the vein of Flash Gordon or John Carter of Mars. At least, that was what he called it when the original trilogy was being made.

Second, the distinction between SF and fantasy has nothing to do with likeliness. Both are grounded in speculative and unreal postulates, but the difference is that it's fantasy if those unreal elements are grounded in the supernatural, magic, or folklore, and it's SF if they're grounded in science and technology. There is, in fact, a very solid theoretical understanding of how FTL propulsion could work as a special case of the General Theory of Relativity. It's profoundly unlikely, probably unattainable in practice, but nonetheless, the idea is grounded in science, not mysticism or wishful thinking.

Science isn't just a list of facts, it's a process of building analytical, predictive models. A lot of science is about proposing hypotheses, "If this were the case," and extrapolating what the results would be. That's what science fiction does -- it's basically a literary thought experiment. There is some SF that starts out with a postulate that we know to be impossible or counterfactual -- for instance, a universe where the speed of light is different or an alternate history where Mars is bigger than Earth or one where Neanderthals never died out -- and then explores the consequences of that one counterfactual element with as much scientific rigor as possible. It's certainly never going to happen in our reality, but it's still hard science fiction, because science is very much at the core of the fiction.

Conversely, something like Star Wars uses the trappings, the semantics, of science fiction (or specifically space opera) to tell a story with the syntax (story structure and approach) of fantasy. SW (at least the original trilogy) is basically a sword-and-sorcery epic crossed with a WWII dogfight movie and transposed into a space-opera idiom. It's not really about postulating a scientific, technological, or social advancement and exploring its ramifications or using it to generate the story; it's more about telling a story that could be told in another genre while using the science and technology as elements of the setting. This could be called "soft" SF, or simply "sci-fi" (since most of what that label gets applied to by the general public falls into this category), or space opera, but Lucas's "space fantasy" description works well too (and why shouldn't it, since presumably he knew what kind of story he himself was telling), given the central role of the Force.

 

[23skidoo]

I thought the Sarah Jane Adventures some of the best family programming I've ever seen - a wonderful spinoff that is a great way to introduce younger ones to the Doctor Who universe. Cannot recommend it highly enough - the show got better and better over the course of its four seasons.

And there's every hope the remnants of the 5th season will also be just as good.

The thing about SJA is it scores the same magic as the early Doctor Who - it's a show aimed at children, but the whole family can enjoy it. And some of the episodes rival its parent show for darkness.

Yeah, I definitely second the recommendation.

Alex

 

[Kegg]

Star Wars is obviously intended as sci fi. Let's not get pedantic.

Indeed.

Second, the distinction between SF and fantasy has nothing to do with likeliness. Both are grounded in speculative and unreal postulates, but the difference is that it's fantasy if those unreal elements are grounded in the supernatural, magic, or folklore, and it's SF if they're grounded in science and technology.

Or pseudoscience. Mind reading magic is fantasy, psionics is sci-fi.

Star Wars uses pseudoscience (midichlorians being perhaps the most notorious example) to explain its fantastic logic, when it explains at all, so it fits in the second category.

 

[Vendikarr]

I never watched it, but a few years ago I saw a show called The Troop on Nickelodeon, but I don't know if it's still on. From what I read it was basically a teenage MIB. I never watched more than a minuet or two once while flipping around, because the creature designs caught my eye. They also have Supah Ninjas which features George Takei as a hologram of the main character's grand father. Haven't watched that one either, but I've thought about checking it out simply due to Takei's involvement.

The Troop reruns air on NickTeen.

 

[Christopher]

Star Wars uses pseudoscience (midichlorians being perhaps the most notorious example) to explain its fantastic logic, when it explains at all, so it fits in the second category.

Well, the prequel trilogy does; clearly Lucas's approach to the prequels is more science-fictional than his approach to the original trilogy. The two trilogies are very distinct works made by a creator at two very different points of his career, and I prefer to treat them that way. The Lucas who made the original trilogy was just trying to make fluffy popcorn movies that paid homage to the fantasy space-opera serials of his youth. The Lucas who made the prequels was trying to tell an Important Story commenting on Bush-era politics while detailing the elaborate history he'd spent decades devising.

And people greatly overstate the role of midichlorians in "explaining" the Force. In the prequels, the Force is the same thing it always was, a mystical energy field that unifies all life. The midichlorians do not create the Force, they're simply a conduit to it, allowing organisms to sense and interact with it. Lucas wasn't replacing the mystical with the scientific; that's too Western a way of looking at it, rooted in our culture's assumption that the material and the mystical are mutually incompatible. Lucas's portrayal of the Force has always been more grounded in Eastern philosophy, in which the material and the mystical are facets of the same thing. So what Lucas was doing with midichlorians (an obvious analogy for mitochondria, the symbiotic microbes that live in our cells and provide their energy) was attempting to unify the biological and the mystical. The fantasy element is still there at the core, it's just blended with the scientific.

 

[Kegg]

Well, the prequel trilogy does; clearly Lucas's approach to the prequels is more science-fictional than his approach to the original trilogy. The two trilogies are very distinct works made by a creator at two very different points of his career, and I prefer to treat them that way.

That's true. Midichlorians is a pat example of the dividing line, but one can find similar uses in the original trilogy - the Death Star, for example, is pointedly presented as a triumph of technology. The first film is mildly interesting in this sense because while science exists, it's somewhat opposed to Jedi mysticism - be it Han Solo's incredulity at Obi-Wan's hocus pocus and his preference for a blaster, the sneering of an Imperial functionary about how awesome a technological marvel the Death Star is as opposed to Vader's faith, Tarkin's pragmatic observation that the belief in the Force is increasingly passe, or Luke having to abandon his targeting device and rely on faith to make the final shot.

As Jedi powers are increasingly normalized in the two sequels - and you pretty much can't drop a hat without hitting a Jedi Master in the prequels - that's kind of peculiar to the original film.

The Lucas who made the prequels was trying to tell an Important Story commenting on Bush-era politics while detailing the elaborate history he'd spent decades devising.

The political element is a little evident in his rough draft scripts for the first film, though. The galactic politics were kind of increasingly sidelined as the drafts went on, and The Phantom Menace in particular regurgitates some of the scrapped ideas for the first film.

There's definitely some repurposing for the Bush years, though, just like Avatar - a film whose concept originated in the mind-nineties - keyed in to some more contemporary criticism of American policy.

 

[Christopher]

Well, just including technology in a story doesn't make it science fiction on a fundamental level. An SF story is a story that's about the consequences of a particular technological or scientific advance, that's driven specifically by that and couldn't be told without it. If the technology and alien planets and such are just surface trappings on a story that could be told as fantasy or a Western or a WWII picture, then it's "soft" SF at best, or space opera, or simply "space fantasy" to use Lucas's own term for SW.

There isn't really much in the way of scientific speculation or extrapolation in SW; the aliens and the advanced technologies simply exist as part of the setting, and the story is about a farmboy becoming a knight and tearing down an evil empire's fortress with the help of a mystical force. Overall, the original trilogy treats technology as something that exists in opposition to the heroes, a cold, ruthless power that must be overcome by forces more in tune with life and nature and emotion. (Which makes C-3PO and R2-D2 an odd counterpoint to the prevailing theme.)

In the prequels, I think that theme is still present, though a bit more muddied. Technology is still seen as dehumanizing, in both the droids and the clones, and it's all in service to Palpatine's evil ambitions, but to see that you have to realize that Palpatine is orchestrating the creation of both armies and the state of war between them in order to further his destruction of the Republic. The clones seem to be good guys for a while, but then they turn on the Jedi, so it could be a cautionary tale about tampering with nature or some such thing. And yet the Force itself is portrayed in a more "scientific" way, and the Jedi and other protagonists exist comfortably within the uber-technocratic environment of Coruscant, so the thematic opposition of nature good, technology bad is less clear. (Not that I'm complaining. I have little patience for that kind of Luddite sentiment.) Maybe it's because Lucas has become so much a master technocrat himself.

 

[Kegg]

Well, just including technology in a story doesn't make it science fiction on a fundamental level.

It doesn't if the technology ain't real. That's obviously how William Gibson, say, was able to transition from writing sci-fi to writing modern novels - when he penned Neuromancer, cyberspace was just some word he'd coined. Now it's where we're having this discussion.

This said, definitions of science fiction that are dependent on it being a genre that is about testing any 'particular technological or scientific advance' aren't just untrue to how the term is used - they omit a lot of really good sci-fi (plenty of Philip K. Dick's novels would fail to the fit this bill).

Nobody would reasonably claim Star Wars is speculative sci-fi, and Isaac Asimov's derisive moniker of 'eye sci-fi' fits fine, but the name itself is what it is.

Overall, the original trilogy treats technology as something that exists in opposition to the heroes, a cold, ruthless power that must be overcome by forces more in tune with life and nature and emotion. (Which makes C-3PO and R2-D2 an odd counterpoint to the prevailing theme.)

That's true, and the Ewoks are the most obvious example of this. I think much of the apparent anti-technologism - besides the favouring of the mystical Jedi training, as noted - also just comes from favouring the underdogs. The scrappy rundown ship with no working hyperdrive versus the supermassive pristine Star Destroyer scenario, basically. That's less basic opposition to technology and more favouring the guy who's stuck with a souped up old car versus the person with the latest gadgets.

 

[Mistral]

Getting somewhere back on topic, Ben 10, as mentioned previously, is a fine example of kid's scifi. Also, there was a Spiderman series that took place in an alternate universe that certainly acted like science fiction.