Except the one epic fail of showing modern day jet fighters still in use. I don't know if that was just the pilot or the first few episodes but it was uber anachronistic in a way that screamed "cheap".
Did you like "Space Above and the Beyond" back in the 90's?
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Except the one epic fail of showing modern day jet fighters still in use. I don't know if that was just the pilot or the first few episodes but it was uber anachronistic in a way that screamed "cheap".
Anyway, so long as we're talking short lived mid-to-late 90's sci-fi, 'Earth 2' was way better. It had 100% more Clancy Brown AND Tim Curry. QED.
Nah, Man. Earth2 was gah-bage. I made it through like three episodes and was bored out of my mind.
Yeah, the whole series touched a chord with WWII buffs, especially those with any interest or ties to the Pacific Campaign. I imagine it was like that for you given your dad's career. How have you and M been?
Doing fine, thanks.
2 more years till 62 and retirement.The ground-pounder thing was actually addressed on the show, after the producers had heard about the way fans were complaining about it online. The Col. called the Wildcards to attention and said (paraphrased), "I've heard complaints about pilots being used on ground missions. Well, you are Marines, and every Marine is a rifleman first, and you will damn well go and do what you are ordered to go and do without question or complaint. Do I make myself clear??"
Sir yes sir and that was the end of that!
I think TPTB also recognized the weakness of the soap with young fighter pilot hoping to find his girlfriend on an island in space and then thinking that at best she was interned in an enemy camp. By the second half of the series when the opening credits shifted focus to the racial minority squadron commander it was too late. But along with Tour Of Duty it was the only combat series on the air not counting cops who went into combat 24 times a yearI got it for $20. Canadian. New. Pretty quickly after it came out.
Great sci-fi war show, which was really a pretty thinly-disguised more typical war drama (of the Vietnam war type, like Tour of Duty or China Beach) with sci-fi stuff dumped in. The thing I liked the least was the main character and his motivations, but pretty much everyone else was awesome and their ensemble shows were overall pretty good.
And the sci-fi tech was awesome. Loved them Hammerheads and their capital ships!
Mark
The ground-pounder thing was actually addressed on the show, after the producers had heard about the way fans were complaining about it online. The Col. called the Wildcards to attention and said (paraphrased), "I've heard complaints about pilots being used on ground missions. Well, you are Marines, and every Marine is a rifleman first, and you will damn well go and do what you are ordered to go and do without question or complaint. Do I make myself clear??"
Sir yes sir and that was the end of that!
Cute, but I feel it rather misses the point.
The problem isn't that pilots shouldn't be able to use a rifle so much as ground troops--particularly those of the the broad stereotype persuasion that were on display--should not be top gun pilots.
As someone who grew up around both the army & air force, I can say it's a WHOLE different culture and mentality.
I thought the pilot (aka first) episode was okay. It went downhill fast from there. Soon, many people were lampooning the series title as: "Space: Away And Begone" .
I dunno, I thought it was pretty cool, though admittedly I'm a big fan of the F/A-18 they used in the background. To be fair, they shot the pilot in Australia and those were pretty much all they had available in the background at the time to stand in, except for the ONE mockup of the Hammerhead they rolled by the cameras multiple times in the same camera setup to awkwardly show the individual painted wing art.
Also, we currently have squadrons of B-52 bombers that are 55-65 years old, C-5 transport planes that are 28-32 years old, and so on. The USAF's F-15C fighters are on average at least 25 years old, based on a design that first started flying fifteen years before that, and current versions are still being built!
The F-18s shown in SAAB are out of production in real life, but the ones my Canadian Air Force (and the Swiss, and the US Marines, and the US Navy) are all upwards of 30 years old. I don't see why they couldn't still be flying in the SAAB universe of 2063 if they'd continued in production of uprated versions into the 2020s or so.
Mark
I just want to mention if you want to watch this show and you don't have the DVDs it's also on Youtube. I just checked it at, literally just minutes ago out of curiosity. Granted I have a long line of shows I want to see that I haven't so far but I got to admit I do want to go back and watch this show again
Jason
Jason
Agreed - just thought it was worth mentioning that the show at least bothered with what was basically "We know, but we're going to keep doing it anyway."
Think it was the pilot from when they filmed on a Royal Australian Air Force base (the RAAF has been flying Hornets since they replaced the Dassault Mirages in the mid 80s).
That's true but there is a lot of them up their so I'm thinking that they have been allowed to stay because the show has proably been forgotten by most except us sci-fi fans. I think Farscape and Hercules went up their as well once Netflix dumped them, which kind of angers me. Netflix seems to be loosing boatloads of old shows to either Hulu or to nowhere.
Jason
Netflix is too busy making scads of money offering original content to worry about holding on to older stuff forever. Meanwhile, holding onto the older stuff is how hulu makes its scads of money. Everybody has his own business model.
It's probably more like whoever produced the show doesn't know their there. Either way the show is available both for sale on Amazon, and from Netflix's disc delivery service, so there's no excuse in my mind to break the law. The only time I've ever watched something like that on YouTube was Blake's 7 and that was because it was literally the only way I could find to watch it in the US. And I will confess that I half expected the FBI, or Homeland Security, or whoever handles that stuff, to come busting down my door the entire time I was doing it.
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