Random SCIFI/Fantasy Thoughts

[Sgt. Pepper]

I wanted to start this thread about random thoughts you might have about tv shows or movies, but those thoughts don't necessarily deserve a whole thread. Perhaps they can be discussed here briefly?

I'll start with a couple of thoughts I had the other day.

Why do the Clones from SW all have the same accent as Jango Fett? I understand that they are clones and would all look alike, but it makes no sense that they would all have the same accent as Jango. I would assume they never even met Jango. I could see how they would have the same accent as each other, but it wouldn't be Jango's.

Second random thought.

Does anyone wish All Along the Watchtower would have played an integral role from the beginning of NuBSG? I think it would have been cool if the song would have been a plot point from the beginning and not just at the end of the series. I think it was a great concept that could have been better executed.

So those are my random thoughts. Feel feel to ad your own or elaborate on my own.

 

[Gaith]

So in this year's movie Maggie, Schwarzenegger plays an ordinary guy whose daughter gets bitten by a zombie, and starts to become sick. He spends the whole movie trying to keep her comfortable and refusing to contemplate euthanizing her.

Spoiler: In the end...

As her self-control fades, she jumps off the roof of her house, presumably sparing him the trauma of actually killing her. That's it. End of movie. (Or so Wikipedia reports.)

A number of people spent a lot of money and, in at least some cases, several years of their lives making this movie. The script was on the Black List at one point, so a number of people must have liked it. Myself, I can't fathom what the purpose of the movie is. Entertainment? Why would anyone enjoy that? Art? If you're going to make a movie of a dying kid, why bring zombies into the equation? Cashing in on The Walking Dead's popularity? Or maybe the writer is a horror fan who experienced a personal tragedy, and wrote this to cope with his grief? I'd understand that, but a different guy directed it, so it doesn't seem to be a primarily one-person effort...

Schwarzenegger is one of my favorite actors, a true one-of-a-kind, and once he left Sacramento I thought that I'd at least rent/stream all his post-Governator movies, especially one that critics say contains his most dramatic performance to date. But though I even got some enjoyment from Sabotage, I have zero interest in Maggie. Life proves me wrong again, I guess...

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Why do the Clones from SW all have the same accent as Jango Fett? I understand that they are clones and would all look alike, but it makes no sense that they would all have the same accent as Jango. I would assume they never even met Jango. I could see how they would have the same accent as each other, but it wouldn't be Jango's.

Yes, that they would all have the same accent as each other is both believable and expected, because they were all trained on the same planet, at which time they largely interacted only with each other and their trainers. There are younger clones shown, but they are being trained at the same facilities that churned out the older ones, under the same training program.

As to why they have the same accent as Jango himself, well, the out-of-universe reason is easy to understand and it involves New Zealand. If you absolutely have to have an in-universe explanation, perhaps Jango thought it could be advantageous to have one or more clones that could pass for himself in a pinch, and stipulated in contract that they would speak as he did*, or perhaps Jango himself provided source material for their training, including voice samples used to teach the clones to speak. I have no doubt that the working model (Jango) would be a really good example to use in a lot of situations.

* - or made sure of it. I know the clones sounding like him wasn't mentioned as part of his payment, but perhaps Jango was sneaky about it. Perhaps he simply didn't agree to be the model, without making sure about how the clones would be trained.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

My theories about nuBSG:

- Original BSG is the sequel. Everyone in BSG-TOS is actually descended from humanoid Cylons, who went back to the original Twelve Colonies, rebuilt them, and repopulated them. Eventually they forgot they were ever Cylons.

- On a related note: The whole of BSG, both old and new, is a time loop. Earth - our Earth - eventually sends an expedition into space to start a colony. The expedition is swept back in time somehow, and does manage to start the colony. This colony is Kobol....

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

My theories about nuBSG:

- Original BSG is the sequel. Everyone in BSG-TOS is actually descended from humanoid Cylons, who went back to the original Twelve Colonies, rebuilt them, and repopulated them. Eventually they forgot they were ever Cylons.

- On a related note: The whole of BSG, both old and new, is a time loop. Earth - our Earth - eventually sends an expedition into space to start a colony. The expedition is swept back in time somehow, and does manage to start the colony. This colony is Kobol....

Remember the freed non-humanoid Cylons? Didn't they go to Kobol? Maybe they eventually went back to the twelve colonies and started the loop all over again?

 

[davejames]

My random thought/complaint: Just how in the heck did the writers and producers of Superman III, IV and Supergirl get things SO completely and hilariously wrong with those movies? I recently rewatched them, and it's just mindboggling to me how those stories ever got approved, or how anyone involved could have possibly thought those were good followups to the amazing Donner movies.

I mean yeah, we've seen some crappy sequels before, but at least with the original Batman series there was a gradual decline-- from Batman Forever to Batman and Robin. But with Superman hardly any time passes at all before you have Richard Pryor skiing off a building wearing a pink tablecloth as a cape. And in Supergirl you've got Kara and a pair of amateur witches all chasing after a dumb groundskeeper... for some reason.

It just seems like such a massive, wasted opportunity.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

My random thought/complaint: Just how in the heck did the writers and producers of Superman III, IV and Supergirl get things SO completely and hilariously wrong with those movies? I recently rewatched them, and it's just mindboggling to me how those stories ever got approved, or how anyone involved could have possibly thought those were good followups to the amazing Donner movies.

I mean yeah, we've seen some crappy sequels before, but at least with the original Batman series there was a gradual decline-- from Batman Forever to Batman and Robin. But with Superman hardly any time passes at all before you have Richard Pryor skiing off a building wearing a pink tablecloth as a cape. And in Supergirl you've got Kara and a pair of amateur witches all chasing after a dumb groundskeeper... for some reason.

It just seems like such a massive, wasted opportunity.

I always thought the scene with Richard Pryor talking about Superman was hilarious. I haven't seen Supergirl since it came out, but I thought the actress was awesome. As for the plots, yeah, they sucked. I always heard that the super computer in Superman 3 should have been Braniac.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Brainiac got the good end of that deal.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

Brainiac got the good end of that deal.

You could also argue that Evil Superman was actually Bizarro Superman.

 

[davejames]

I always thought the scene with Richard Pryor talking about Superman was hilarious. I haven't seen Supergirl since it came out, but I thought the actress was awesome. As for the plots, yeah, they sucked. I always heard that the super computer in Superman 3 should have been Braniac.

They do have their moments, and almost work on a cheesy guilty pleasure level, but they're still a big step down from the first two movies that actually took themselves fairly seriously and kept the campiness down to a minimum.

But clearly the producers just didn't understand what made those movies work at all. Or maybe were so upset with Donner that they decided to do the exact opposite of everything he did. Lol

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The Donner version of S2 should have definitely left in this line:

"General, would you care to step outside?"

 

[Doctorwhovian]

The first two Superman films did have quite a bit of comic relief with Luthor/Otis/Teschmacher. I think it was mostly Donner's influence that went for the more serious approach (Although he did film all of Hackman's II scenes). Once he was let go, things kind of got sillier for parts of Superman II and of course III. As for IV, part of the problem was that it was made by the largely cheap production company Globus/Cannon, who made mostly low budget b-movies, such as some stuff for Chuck Norris, the Richard Chamberlain "Allan Quartermain" films (obviously meant to cash in on the Indiana Jones series) and the Masters of the Universe (He-Man) live action movie. Although they had a few pretty good films, such as Street Smart (Also with Reeve) Lifeforce, and Runaway Train.

They also made the 90's Captain America film, and almost made a Spider-Man film.

 

[Richard Baker]

IIRC Superman & Superman II were original one single film, they were mostly filmed at the same time. It turned into an epic nightmare and they split the film into two sections and added stuff to fill out the time.
I try to ignore Superman III/IV.

 

[Dales]

Low fantasy are a lot more harder to write than high fantasy because with low fantasy you cant just do whatever you want.

 

[Velocity]

I always wondered why there weren't more Farscape books. Those were great characters in an interesting world and I would have loved to read more books about them. I know there were comics but I still would like full length books. Why did they stop at only 3 books? Or are there more books I'm unaware of?

 

[JD]

Based on what I've heard, the only one that was actually any good was KRAD's, so maybe since the rest weren't very well received they decided it wasn't worth doing anymore.

 

[Greg Cox]

I always wondered why there weren't more Farscape books. Those were great characters in an interesting world and I would have loved to read more books about them. I know there were comics but I still would like full length books. Why did they stop at only 3 books? Or are there more books I'm unaware of?

It was a three-book contract, sub-licensed through the British publisher. When that contract was fulfilled, I looked into doing a new deal with Henson directly, but, for various boring business-related reasons, things didn't work out.

It happens.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

Here's another random thought.

In Star Trek 4 Kirk mentions that they don't have money in the future, but in Star Trek 6 Scotty mentions that he just bought a boat. What gives, do they have money or not?

 

[sidious618]

Does anyone wish All Along the Watchtower would have played an integral role from the beginning of NuBSG? I think it would have been cool if the song would have been a plot point from the beginning and not just at the end of the series. I think it was a great concept that could have been better executed.

Weirdly enough, All Along the Watchtower was going to be in the first season finale when Starbuck and Helo (I believe) walked into a cafe and turned on a juke box.

 

[Greg Cox]

So, I recently watched all the "Paula, the Ape Woman" movies from the forties. So how come Paula (who is an ape turned into a woman, or maybe a woman turned into an ape, depending on which movie you're watching) only speaks in the second movie, but is apparently mute in the first and third movies? And how come nobody ever comments on the fact that she (apparently) can't speak in the first movie? It's actually unclear in the film if Paula can't speak or simply has no onscreen dialogue. There's never any expository dialogue along the lines of "You must forgive Paula. The poor girl is mute." Or anything like that.

Weird.

(Hey, nobody said we couldn't have random thoughts about less-than-modern movies!)