Return of space adventure???

[Warped9]

I am stoked for the forthcoming Prometheus somewhat prequel in the Alien franchise launched in 1979. I not only hope it's damned good, I also hold the faintest hope that if such it might spark renewed interest in space adventure in film and television. I think there's still a sizeable audience for it and it's the Hollywood dead heads that need to be convinced.

I remember the late '70s and early '80s. We had Star Trek and Space: 1999 and Battlestar Gallactica and Star Wars and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Alien and Aliens and Star Trek - The Motion Picture and The Wrath Of Khan and The Search for Spock and others and eventually Star Trek - The Next Generation. I might not have liked all of them, but if you loved space adventure there was plenty. It also extended into the '90s when we got Deep Space Nine and Voyager and Babylon 5 and Stargate: SG-1.

I miss those days. So much of the sic-fi today seems so small scale or narrowly focused on superheroes and the like. Fantasy has stepped up large as well as magic and vampires and zombies galore. I don't begrudge folks who like those things, but there's so much that could be done I'd just like to get some of the good ol' stuff again.

I know we still get some bones thrown our way, but Prometheus is the first thing I've seen in such a long time that has me really stoked. Yeah, I know we had Avatar, but I wasn't really impressed with it. It didn't really feel like space adventure, not to me.

Here's hoping...

 

[DeadmeatDiggory]

I couldn't agree more. I miss the Star Treks and Farscapes and Babylon 5s. Now everything has to be grounded in reality. Bullshit! If I want reality, I'd go outside and have a life, not watch TV.

 

[Warped9]

If I want reality, I'd go outside and have a life, not watch TV.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Space adventure has never been gone from movies that I've noticed. Avatar was just as much space adventure as anything, due to it being set in space and also an adventure.

But TV is a totally different thing. It doesn't have the budget to rely so strongly on dazzling SFX and has to deliver a story every week, not two hours every two or three years (and that's only if you're talking about a steadily produced movie series.)

Syfy has a couple space-based pilots in the works, but it will be a while before we see them. If we see them. Defender is the one I'm really rooting for. I'm not nearly as interested in space adventure in the movies as I am on TV.

High Moon - Based on the novel, The Lotus Caves, by John Christopher, this imaginative, out-of-this-world series explores a world where the countries of Earth have established colonies to mine the Moon's resources. When a new life form is discovered, chaos erupts as various factions race to uncover its powerful secrets. Executive producer: Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies).

Defender - In the aftermath of an intergalactic war between humans and transhumans, the starship Defender, populated by a combustible mix of former enemies, is sent on a seemingly simple goodwill mission, which turns into a fight for their lives and for the safety of the Universe at large. Executive producer/writer: Robert Hewitt Wolfe (Alphas).

Here's the press release for more info. And yes, Syfy has waaaay too much reality TV crap.

 

[Warped9]

Space adventure hasn't disappeared so much from film, but television is really left wanting.

I admit I'm skeptical that network television will ever gives us the kind of shows we once enjoyed. Of course, I could be wrong and one could always be surprised. But maybe if one of the cable networks tried something.

It could be interesting to see what someone like HBO could give us in terms of SF and maybe space adventure (aka space opera). I could live with a quality series of 13 solid episodes a season as opposed to 22-24 on network TV.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Every so often, I hear about HBO or Showtime thinking about a sci fi series, but not space adventure, which might seem too low-brow for them. They'd be more likely to do some dystopian future scenario set on Earth, or something about cloning or intelligent androids. Adapting a well-regarded space-based sci fi book series would be the most likely way for them to go, so they can have that cachet.

And keep an eye on the new players like Amazon, YouTube and especially Netflix who are getting into doing original series. Space adventure would be very expensive for them, but otoh, any genre that has an avid following easy to reach on the internet would be of particular interest.

 

[Warped9]

You know I look at some of the animated shows from the '90s I liked (the animated Batman and Superman) as well as Futurama and Star Wars: The Clone Wars and if well done I could also get behind a really well done animated series.

 

[stj]

Print SF isn't very popular right now but space adventure keeps on trucking. Neither HBO nor Showtime would ever dream of something genuinely imaginative and original (they do very little creatively original programming, they do stuff that benefits from convincing ordinary dialogue, aka cursing and sex and violence, stuff that advertisers are afraid of.)
However, Iain Banks in particular has both cachet and a nice library of works in an invented universe that could make a wonderful series. And Vernor Vinge has cute multi-bodied aliens. Sooner or later someone will do an Outer Limits or Star Trek and adapt a lot of more recent print ideas to television. Maybe not in this country, but somewhere.

 

[xortex]

I don't think budget has to be a major issue. Fan films create interesting bridge sets with no money, It's the money part and too many cooks that F's it all up. On the cheap and a lot of yakking is fine by me as long as there's interesting pacing, creative direction, good writing, etc., but you don't need fifty line producers or make up artists or a production team small army.

Netflix runs a competition for pilots, so really anything similar suits me just fine. Like anything else, behind the scenes is about the people story and what we got were the wrong greedy people. Trek is not a show about people, it's about starships and fancy gizmos and plot driven not ego driven like all it's incarnations were. JJ is Never gonna let it come back to tv while the movies are so lucrative. He'd be crazy to divide it up like that especially while he's doling out the crap like he is in small incriments to space junkies. That's greed.

 

[23skidoo]

I don't think budget has to be a major issue. Fan films create interesting bridge sets with no money,

Plus with today's greenscreen technology it's easy and cheap to do films with virtual sets. They're even doing it for TV (a good chunk of V and Once Upon a Time involves people interacting with screens).

The problem is since 9/11 there's been a real pushback against fantasy that isn't grounded firmly in reality. It's rarely (no, never) discussed, but I feel the fact it debuted a few weeks after 9/11 was one of the factors that damaged Star Trek: Enterprise's chances - people at that time didn't want to see shows that were set hundreds of years in the future on alien worlds (Nemesis' failure at the box office was not because the dwindling number of hardcore Trekkies hated it - it bombed because the mainstream wasn't interested in seeing such a film in 2002). Battlestar Galactica got around that by doing stuff like filming parts of it in downtown Vancouver and not even bothering to cover up the street signs and I still remember one episode shows in full HD closeup a stack of Readers Digest Condensed Books on Adama's desk. Having said that, when NBC aired the pilot mini-series, it tanked, and it only ever had a small audience on Sci-Fi. It wasn't a mainstream hit. Had NBC aired nuBSG as a regular series, it would have been cancelled in 6 episodes.

Firefly is an excellent example of a series that attempted to find a middle ground, yet was simply too "space bound" to attract a mainstream audience. Yeah, it's got a huge fanbase, but Joe and Jane American had no interest in it.

It even extends to Doctor Who. One valid criticism of the Russell T Davies era is that he rarely allowed to series to leave Earth and if he did, it was 99.99% of the time to visit human colonies. At the time it was felt that to reintroduce the series they wanted people to identify as closely as possible with the characters, and apparently doing episodes in which the Doctor and his companion were the only humanoids on screen might have been seen as alienating (pun intended) to new viewers. Steven Moffat has loosened the reins a little, but he's still kept going in that direction for the most part. The result: a huge mainstream success in the UK, growing interest in America, a similarly earth-bound franchise of spin-offs, and it also (directly or indirectly, your call) led to shows like Being Human, Primeval, and even Merlin, all of which are firmly based on earth rather than featuring people travelling through the cosmos. Even the last Red Dwarf series was primarily based on Earth and even was titled "Back to Earth" to emphasize the fact there was no "Rimmerworld" to alienate viewers.

I think a full out space adventure could still fly. Certainly the last Star Trek movie did well. I don't consider Avatar a space adventure in the traditional sense, but it still captured the mainstream interest even though many of its characters weren't human and didn't even speak English. (Though how much of that was due to the novelty factor of the 3-D or the fact Avatar became a bit of a fad is a question worth pondering. Had the film been produced in traditional 2-D would it have done the same business?) But the genre is simply too tough a sell for mainstream audiences unless it's a special event film like Prometheus.

Alex

 

[Sindatur]

I'm excited for Prometheus, and anxious for Space Opera to return to TV, but, I'm confused by so many people putting forward the thought that Prometheus may usher in a new wave of Space Opera on TV?

We have at least one Space opera Theatrical movie come out every year, so, what is it about Prometheus, that makes so many believe it'll have any impact for Space Opera on TV? I understand many didn't think much of Avatar, but, bottom line is, it made insane amounts of money, which is all the folks making decisions about what movies/shows to make care about. So, if Avatar didn't usher in a new Golden Age of Space Opera TV, how can Prometheus do so? I think the movie will be awesome, but, I don't see it beating the pants off Avatar in Box Office take, which, I believe, is what it would take to have the kind of effect so many are expecting?

 

[Deckerd]

I don't think many people think it will herald a new tv show.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, there's this Space Command indie thing...

 

[Sindatur]

I don't think many people think it will herald a new tv show.

Look at the first paragraph of the OP, and I've seen this put forward quite a bit over the last month or so, that people are expecting Prometheus to provoke a rise in Space Opera on TV.

Sure, since posters on BBS are a very small percentage of a movie's audience, that doesn't translate into a whole lot of people overall, but, it does seem to be becoming a prevalent thought amongst BBS posters.

 

[Professor Zoom]

I don't think budget has to be a major issue. Fan films create interesting bridge sets with no money,

Fan films aren't PAYING people either. Because they're made by FANS. It's not just the sets that cost... it's the people. Professionals don't work for free.

 

[Leroy]

I know I'm waiting for the next space show, here's hoping Defender gets made and picked up. This is the first time since before TNG was on the air that we've had no space based shows on TV.

 

[Kegg]

Way I see it it's only been a couple of years after Battlestar Galactica left the airwaves, and even less time since Caprica went under (actually, the last episodes of that series aired last year here.) We may not be living in the glut years of the 1990s anymore, but I'd like to keep a chin up and assume the genre ain't dead yet.

Syfy has a couple space-based pilots in the works, but it will be a while before we see them. If we see them. Defender is the one I'm really rooting for.

Obviously want to see Defender, but High Moon's title just makes me smile... also Bryan Fuller, sure, why not. Could be fun.

 

[Warped9]

I don't think Prometheus could have a direct influence on space adventure on television. I'm hoping that it does really well and generates interest in more space adventure in film. From there, with enough presence and success in film, we might get more interest for stuff on television.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Movies and TV just seem to be on completely divergent paths. Space adventure and superheroes are kicking butt in the theaters, but hardly exist on TV. TV is full of cops, doctors and lawyers, but not so much at the movies.

A big difference is the way that movies generally cater to teenage males (who buy lots of junk food - theater owners make big bucks off the concession stands) while TV increasingly caters to middle-aged women (since they watch more TV and control more of the household budget, which advertisers like.)

So it all comes down to what you're really trying to do - sell junk food to boys or household goods to moms. We're missing the big picture by focusing so much on the content of the movies or TV shows, which are merely a means to an end.

 

[Warped9]

If those are the choices then we're doomed.