One show that hasn't been mentioned yet: Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. Anyone else remember this? It was sort of a medieval Power Rangers rip-off that ran on Fox Kids for 1 season in the late-1990s. (It was originally supposed to get a 2nd season but, at the last minute, Saban stole its budget for Power Rangers Lost Galaxy instead.) It was a decent show. Unfortunately, they never really had enough money to make it look good. Unlike most of Saban's other shows, they didn't have any pre-existing Japanese footage to build the show around.
Actually I thought it looked great; the production values were much better than those of the
Power Rangers shows or their
Super Sentai source material. They actually got Foundation Imaging -- then the top digital-FX company in television, responsible for the pioneering work in
Babylon 5 and later the CG effects in
Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and
Enterprise -- to create CGI monsters and effects for the show, which were a lot more sophisticated than anything in the Ranger/Sentai shows at the time. They also did impressive location filming in Ireland itself, had a strong cast of Irish actors, and had pretty smart writing too. It was an astonishingly well-made (and decently-budgeted) show for a Saban production.
The main problem with
Mystic Knights was with the action sequences. The weekly swordfights were hampered by the show's inability to depict any real violence, so they were all kind of inconclusive, just going through the motions. And the Knights' battles with the monsters were weak because they didn't interact much; you didn't have anything like a Megazord to battle the monsters directly, so you just had the actors standing around pretending to shoot stuff at a CGI monster in the sky, which wasn't all that interesting or dynamic -- and which tended to be wrapped up very, very quickly. The sequences of the Knights summoning their magic armor often took longer than the battles they armored up for.
So it was a surprisingly good show in every respect except the action, which normally wouldn't bother me, but it was kind of a negative in something that was specifically meant to be an action show.
Oh, and I just decided to look up what the cast of that show has been up to since it ended back in 1999. Not much as it turns out.
Really? What source are you using? I've found substantial filmographies for just about all of the main cast on IMDb, mostly Irish or UK productions. In particular, several of them have been in
The Tudors.
EXCEPT that the guy that played Angus, the Mystic Knight of Earth, recently played Lachlan on the 2nd season of Lost Girl.
I hadn't realized that! I thought he looked familiar!
At least Star Trek picked up more casual viewers.
