It's one of those that I keep meaning to try again, but on my first go, I couldn't really get in to it. Same with Farscape actually (I came back to that in the middle of season one and ended up enjoying it a lot so picked it up on dvd a few years ago.)
I just found this thread and it funny as hell the different ideas that people have on what they consider old. I am with you there Greg. I saw 2001 as a child on a giant theater screen in "Panavision" and had no friggen idea what was going on but it looked really cool. I read the book years later and had to go back and watch it again. Much easier to understand after reading the book. I remember sitting in the theater to see Star Wars for the first time and the Star Destroyer just going on and on and on from the top of the screen. I was 13 and it blew me away. For me I guess the cut off pointt for what I consider old vs new is TOS. Pre TOS, old. Post TOS new. But I'm an old fart.
I would mostly agree that TOS is the cutoff point. I think for me, in general, anything before 1970 is old. Probably since a lot of things were still black and white in the 60s. That definitely gives it the older vibe. (Personally, I think cinematographers were, in general, much better back then. Due to the constraints of black and white, they had to be MUCH more skilled in getting the proper feel and atmosphere, the right shots, etc. simply because of shadows and light. Horror in particular, I've always felt was best captured in black and white.)
I can imagine audiences in the 40s discussing filmed entertainment and the "cutoff" for them would have likely been the advent of audio, "silents" being the "old" stuff" and "talkies" being the "new" or "recent".
When my son was young and I watched anything that was filmed in black and white he would always ask "Is this The Three Stooges?" Because that was the only thing he watched that was in black and white. Many a night I got suckered into watching a black and white show hoping it was a Twilight Zone or an Outer Limits only to be disappointed when Raymond Burr showed up in the courtroom as Perry Mason.
What about Alien Nation - the movie and the TV show. I think that this would be a good candidate for a reboot of some sort, just because it has a message that is very timely...dealing with racism and xenophobia directed at immigrants, and how immigrants try to fit in to our society and contribute to it. These alien immigrants just happen to be actual aliens...
I don't want a reboot, I want an in-continuity sequel. I want to see how that world has developed a generation later.
I grew up as a child in the 80s and looking at sci-fi in TV and movies there was about 30 years of stuff that existed. At the time, the movies were sporadic and the TV shows not generally long-lived so it was quite possible to actually consume a good percentage of it. There were a handful of channels and they would show a mix of the old and new. Movie theaters would only have one or two movies at a time. It was manageable. Now there's 40 more years of TV and movies that have been produced, many of it running 7+ seasons, on hundreds of channels and streaming platforms. I can't even consume everything that comes out within a given week so I imagine it's hard for younger people to try to familiarize themselves with what we might think of as the classics.
That's an interesting observation, and I never thought of it like that before. Some valid points. Christopher, I'm with you about ALIEN NATION. I loved the movies and the series, and it would be great to see where they are at now. I'd like to see the Newcomers not only fit in, but also be responsible for some of the better advances in society... whether it be technological, philosophical, political, etc. Great premise and great show... Rockne S. O'Bannon created some of the best concept series in scifi. ALIEN NATION, seaQuest DSV, DEFIANCE... and, of course, FARSCAPE.
Created, perhaps, but he didn't have much to do with actually making them work (if and when they did). The Alien Nation movie was disappointing, squandering its potential for social allegory in favor of a routine buddy-cop action thriller; it was Kenneth Johnson who embraced its potential on TV, and who deserves the credit for its greatness (along with collaborators Diane Frolov & Andrew Schneider, Steven Long Mitchell & Craig W. Van Sickle, and Tom Chehak). And O'Bannon only wrote the pilots of SeaQuest and Defiance, nothing after that. He did showrun season 1 of Farscape, but I don't think it really got good until he left in season 2 and was replaced as showrunner by David Kemper (who also wrote the one really great episode of SeaQuest, "Bad Water").
Oh, I agree that Kenneth Johnson really made ALIEN NATION work... the same with V. David Kemper... totally was the big driving force of what made FARSCAPE great. Can't forget about Justin Monjo's episodes, as well. Kemper did great episodes across a lot of scifi. (One of my personal favorite TNG episodes is "Peak Performance".) My point, though, was Rockne got the ball rolling, and it led to some great stuff. Very few shows are made great by primarily the single creator... BABYLON 5 might be the single exception.
Yeah, but people tend to give him credit for what was really the work of the people who came after him. He's created his share of flops too.
I am glad that there are others who appreciate that great episode. I learned some actual science watching that episode! 'Better Than Martians" is a pretty good one too. Unfortunately, back when Scifi re-aired SeaQuest, they edited down the episodes to make room for more commercials, so they cut out the whole subplot about the Martian marine fossils from BTM.
You know, seaQuest was great the first season...but then when they re-tooled it for the second then dumbed it down and the result was crap. Another show on at the time Earth: Final Conflict, basically pulled the same thing. I really really liked the first season of the show. And they had a plan of where they wanted to go. But they threw it all out the window for the second season, and the rest was crap. But Final Conflict basically invented the smartphone. They were called "globals", but there were essentially smart phones. They did basically what a smartphone today does...even down to having a version of Google Maps.
Big fan of SeaQuest here. I truly loved the first season and felt it was a perfect mix of science fiction and fact as well as being a perfect family show. Then the second season really took a dive (pun intended as all puns are). The third season was actually a huge improvement. Still more science fiction than fact but a solid adventure series with legit character arcs. And if Roy Scheider had to go (he really hated the series by this time), Michael Ironside was the perfect replacement for where the show was headed. I loved the guy even tho he has a tendency to “exhale” the latter portion of his sentences.
It was frustrating, because it showed how poorly science fiction is understood by the general public. In the first season, the producers stressed, "Oh, no, we're not doing science fiction, we're doing plausible extrapolations of real scientific and cultural trends into the future" -- which is exactly what hard science fiction is. And then in season 2, the new producers said "Now we're going to start doing science fiction," and what they did was utterly idiotic fantasy that made the dumbest seasons of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea look plausible. As a fan and then-aspiring author of science fiction, I found that profoundly insulting. They actually canned the original showrunner, Richard C. Okie, halfway through season 1, pretty much right after "Sandoval's Run," which was the best episode of the series. Even by late season 1, you could see the dumbing-down process beginning, notably through the prominent role given to the one-note baddie Zo'or as an alternative to the intriguingly alien and morally ambiguous Da'an. It was typical of Tribune Entertainment to fire its showrunners and retool shows repeatedly, since they cared more about saving money than investing in high-quality productions. Okie's firing after half a season is probably a record. Beastmaster: The Series's Steve Feke lasted a season before being replaced (though I think he still wrote some for season 2), while Robert Hewitt Wolfe of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda lasted a full year and a half before they kicked him out. And yes, the globals were cool.
I also really liked Earth 2. I was actually really surprised when Spielberg took his name off the credits for Earth 2, but not for the second season of seaQuest which was garbage...because E2 was pretty good.