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Brian Johnson announces updated SPACE:1999 series.

By the way, there was indeed a Space Submarine in the series!
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Oh I love that. What a sexy beast?
 
Oh I love that. What a sexy beast?
It is the Dimensional Submarine UX-01
A special combatant ship designed not only for operations in normal space, but to also be able to cross over into subspace and navigate there. Her captain is Wolf Flakken. When in normal space, it operates using the same wave motion propulsion (the Geschtamm Engine) as other Gamilas vessels, but switches over to subspace propulsion (the Geschvaal Engine) for navigation when she dives into subspace. To minimize propulsion energy expenditure while in subspace, she is equipped with multidimensional ballast tanks whose discharge is used to regulate her surfacing and sinking. Furthermore, her maximum subspace dive duration is a top-level military secret and has not been made public.

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)
 
Sometime in the early '80s, I went on a school field trip to the Smithsonian and I got a souvenir of a toy submarine from some machine that made them for you out of soft gray plastic while you watched. I liked to pretend the submarine was another converted spaceship in the Star Blazers reality, and I'd play with it while humming the show's music to myself (because the music was the best part), but eventually it, err, took too much battle damage and I broke it.

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.
 
Star Blazers was kind of a revelation when I saw it in '79. An animated show with a serialized story arc, serious violence with real consequences, character growth and change, and even a nuanced, morally ambiguous villain.

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.

Sometime in the early '80s, I went on a school field trip to the Smithsonian and I got a souvenir of a toy submarine from some machine that made them for you out of soft gray plastic while you watched.

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.
 
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.

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).
 
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).
 
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.

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?
 
I never got into CHiPs, but I had the impression even at the time that it was considered kitschy and lowbrow.
Yep. Absolutely. But it had a cool theme.

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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

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."

Makes me want to get down! :cool: :shifty: (no actually it does :lol:)

Which brought this to my mind, thanks very much!
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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.
 
Let's not forget V... The re-imagined version looked pretty slick, but had nothing of substance to offer.

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.
 
Yep. Absolutely. But it had a cool theme.

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It made me want a motorcycle. It probably got me into riding.
 
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).
 
V the Series jumped the shark and landed in the enclosure with it when they decided to kill off half the regular cast.
 
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