Nope. This is factually wrong.
Could "The Starlost" be remade today?
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Nope. This is factually wrong.
I don't know if it's what you're thinking of, but the Voyager episode "Displaced" had a biosphere vessel with a number of different habitats in it.
People-who-live-in-a-starship-and-believe-it-is-all-their-universe is one of the oldest trope in sci-fi.
(fist edition - 1941)
So I think it's a bit difficult to tell something really new about this concept, especially if we want to do a whole television series about it. What would a hypothetical Starlost remake look like? Our heroes in each episode go to a new habitat and have bizarre adventures?
In an age of strongly serialized shows, the spectator should be given something to return week after week to see what will happen. A clear goal, towards which the characters move. Obviously this goal can change, new ones can take over, etc., but something should really happen, not the reset to the status quo typical of your average 70's show.
So, virtually any old IP out there has some kind of potential. Everything is in the execution.
ETA. I never watched the Starlost, so I read some episode synopsis on Wikipedia.
For example....
"Circuit of Death"
(fist edition - 1941)
So I think it's a bit difficult to tell something really new about this concept, especially if we want to do a whole television series about it. What would a hypothetical Starlost remake look like? Our heroes in each episode go to a new habitat and have bizarre adventures?
In an age of strongly serialized shows, the spectator should be given something to return week after week to see what will happen. A clear goal, towards which the characters move. Obviously this goal can change, new ones can take over, etc., but something should really happen, not the reset to the status quo typical of your average 70's show.
So, virtually any old IP out there has some kind of potential. Everything is in the execution.
ETA. I never watched the Starlost, so I read some episode synopsis on Wikipedia.
For example....
"Circuit of Death"
"Well, this seems interesting, a metaphor about the futility of existence and..."
"WTF!?!"
Saw a tape in the video store for 2 decades.
Didn't know what it was, so I didn't bother.
Looked through the entire season recently.
Petty good.
Didn't know what it was, so I didn't bother.
Looked through the entire season recently.
Petty good.
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I think that might be it. I took a quick look at the episode on Hulu and it looks right.
see also Deep Space Nine's "One Little Ship," which was a fun episode.
Well, the main character could be a guy/girl/fembot or group that finds a door when there playing, and they open it, and they find a computer terminal, find out what the "World" actually is, and the computer wants to open up the ship after the accident 500 years ago and needs help, so It gets an android body, or hologram, or some type of thing the group can take, and they start exploring the ship.
Possible story arcs:
1st year, to get to the engine section to change course away from a star, planet, black hole etc.
2nd year, aliens try to take the ship
3rd year, ship approches a solar system with possible livable planet, barely habbitable, who gets off the ship?
4th year, discovers a FTL drive, or given and flt by the aliens for some reason
5th year, ship is breaking down after 1000 years in space, need to find a planet.
With most episodes going from dome to dome, seeing how people have coped with being sealed away.
Possible domes:
Amish dome
Religious Zealot dome
Sea dome with Genetically engineered gill people
Dark dome with blind people
Communist dome
Dictator dome
Desert dome
Alot of possibllties with alot of topic going on.
Possible story arcs:
1st year, to get to the engine section to change course away from a star, planet, black hole etc.
2nd year, aliens try to take the ship
3rd year, ship approches a solar system with possible livable planet, barely habbitable, who gets off the ship?
4th year, discovers a FTL drive, or given and flt by the aliens for some reason
5th year, ship is breaking down after 1000 years in space, need to find a planet.
With most episodes going from dome to dome, seeing how people have coped with being sealed away.
Possible domes:
Amish dome
Religious Zealot dome
Sea dome with Genetically engineered gill people
Dark dome with blind people
Communist dome
Dictator dome
Desert dome
Alot of possibllties with alot of topic going on.
Unfortunately, it seems that this was played deadly serious...
It's one of the most common criticism toward this series (I actually never watched any episode): it was always so boring and serious. And bad, but not in a fun way.
Does not compute.
Original Battlestar Galactica was incredibly popular to begin with. It just was very expensive and ABC messed up its schedule. It wasn't the last extremely expensive TV show that got ruined by being bounced around the schedule (Young Indiana Jones.. ABC.. sensing a pattern)
Meh - said Orville episode was more a riff on TOS S3 - "For the World Is Hollow and I have Touched The Sky" than anything from "Starlost".
Did one or more of those ABC execs eventually go to Fox? They're pretty good at f-ing up good shows by moving tham around too (Firefly? Orville?)
It was also not that good. It lost ratings very quickly after the pilot, because there was a run of very weak standalone episodes after the first couple of movie-length stories. Modern BSG fandom has invented this total fiction that it had some huge Star Trek-level fan following in its day, but I was one of its original viewers, and the truth is that it was a flop, quickly cancelled and forgotten along with so many other cheesy '70s SF shows. It stayed visible on TV through its syndicated "movies," but it was rarely paid any attention to in magazines like Starlog that were constantly talking about Trek and Lost in Space and other classic shows. It never had a following anywhere remotely close to that of Star Trek or Star Wars. Nothing else did back then either (not in the US, anyway -- Doctor Who fandom in the UK was probably comparable).
FOX gets a bum rap. The only reason it's cancelled so many SF shows is because it's bought so many more SF shows than any other network (although UPN, The WB, and The CW have rivaled it percentage-wise), and the majority of all shows get cancelled quickly, so the more genre shows you buy, the more will inevitably be cancelled. Sure, it's made some bad decisions from time to time, but the execs responsible for the cancellation of shows like Sliders and Firefly left the network ages ago. For the most part, FOX has been one of the networks that's most consistently been open to making SF/fantasy shows (unlike something such as CBS, which almost never airs science fiction), and at times they've gone out of their way to be supportive of genre shows they really believed in. For instance, back in the '90s, they had to cancel Alien Nation because they needed to divert its budget to expand their lineup to more nights, but they kept striving to find a way to balance the books that would let them bring the show back, and they eventually revived it as a series of TV movies four years later. And they renewed both Dollhouse and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for second seasons despite low ratings, because they really believed in the shows and wanted to give them every chance to succeed.
And they made a lot of noise when the remake was announced. And said very unpleasant things when Starbuck's change into a female character was announced...
Yeah, once there was a remake, suddenly people loved the original. Like how nobody paid much attention to Pluto when it was called a planet, but as soon it was redesignated a dwarf planet, suddenly everyone was all "Oh, we love Pluto so much, don't change it." People didn't love it, they just hated change.
Fanning through the heavy clouds of smug, let me reply once i get a few clear breaths. Right. "Good" is subjective. It had some good and not so good episodes. It certainly wasn't any worse than most of the crap on TV at the time, but the production values are outstanding. It had better ratings than TOS.
I was probably much younger than you, but as a kid at the time, me and most of my friends had our Cylon raider and colonial viper toys as much as the SW kenner stuff. Do I get to strut around with an "Original Viewer" pin too? We watched the show when we could, which wasn't easy since it bounced around. It was my second sci fi show after watching trek reruns in the late 70's. Did it have the fanbase of Trek? No. But that doesn't really mean much, in this context. ABC didn't cancel BSG because of the lack of a letter writing campaign (there was one) or hopes for a lucrative line of paperbacks (there were some) or the aforementioned toys. BSG cost too much. 1 million per episode of BSG in 79 vs $200,000 in 67 for TOS (rounding up there) which itself was an expensive show, even adjusted for inflation, BSG cost over 3 times per episode as TOS.
If ABC had no faith in BSG, they wouldn't have tried to attempt a sorry sequel in 80 without all the special effects and costuming needs. Galactica 80's failures are another matter and at least it led to Quantum Leap in a roundabout sort of way.
Back to StarLost: I don't think it was a bad premise. Looking at shows that have had multiple restarts like Doctor Who, Star Trek, Tomorrow People, Lost in Space, BSG, they all had various factors that made them attractive for relaunch. Star Lost just didn't. Ellison muddied the waters by claiming that the series used Canadian writers writing scripts based on the ideas he gave them (which is at least partly false, and considering the source, probably mostly false), so there might be some question of who owns the IP. All for a premise that wasn't that great to begin with and could be redone without reusing any of the old scripts or names.
If they're relaunching an old sci fi series, Tripods please, or Otherworld
You're cancelling out your own argument here. What matters is the relationship between ratings and budget. A show with a higher budget needs commensurately higher ratings to survive. So just saying "it had better ratings" is meaningless without the context of the budget, the competition, the time slot, and other considerations. How much better? All else being equal, if BSG cost over 3 times as much, then it would've needed over 3 times TOS's ratings in order to do as well. And since TOS was a ratings failure, BSG would've needed to do considerably better than that. Especially since it was competing with All in the Family for its time slot.
That had nothing to do with "faith." ABC lost a ton of money on BSG. They wanted to improve their chances of making up that massive financial loss in syndication by adding more episodes to the syndication package, and to amortize the cost of BSG's expensive assets by recycling them in a cheaper show. It was a decision made exclusively for business reasons rather than creative reasons. Nobody on the creative side or the studio side wanted to make Galactica 1980, but they were forced to by the network accountants. That's why it was such a crap show, because there was no inspiration behind it, just fiscal calculations.
ABC wanted a flagship product. They probably did expect to lose money on it eventually. Their main mistake was pulling the plug early, and then replugging with a vastly inferior product that didn't deliver what viewers wanted. You're looking for an arguement where there is none. That BSG failed is beyond dispute. But it did no fail because of a lack of viewers it failed because it was bounced around on the schedule. And yes, it did go up against some very popular competition, but that was what it was for.
As far as 3 times the budget requring 3x the audience: no. TNG had a budget not all that different from BSG, adjusted for inflation and it did not capture the kind of ratings BSG did had early on. But it also had was first run syndication and did not have the kind of scheduling issues that plagued BSG. Both shows looked gorgeous. TNG had a built in fan base from TOS and the Trek movies, while BSG was propelled by Star Wars fever and used very good fx for the time, arguably better than TNG, and the writing was better than TNG first season.
Glen Larson had ideas for the series but the were not put into effect. They got it right finally with ABC didn't know what to do with a sci fi show at the time but they were not alone. Automan, Matthew Star, Otherworld, Buck Rogers, Manimal (Glen Larson flinging crap at a wall constantly till he hit success with Knight Rider, I take it back.. Matthew Star wasn't one of his. . .. 80's network television is strewn with bad ideas for sci fi shows. I don't think we're really arguing about anything but finer points.
but again, sunk cost fallacy. What exactly was ABC getting back from their initial investment with Galactica 80?
I believe you meant to say "Universal", and not ABC. The network had no ownership stake in the show, so it was the studio that would be motivated to keep the ship afloat by attempting a revival in a cheaper format.
No, it was ABC.
http://members.tripod.com/john_larocque/tns/acole.html
Different interview with the same writer and his partner (magazine scan, so not quotable): https://www.byyourcommand.net/cylongallery/displayimage.php?album=1645&pid=50664#top_display_media
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