Sci-Fi TV Shows that you're pretty sure only you watched.

[JD]

John Doe was on Fox at the same time as Firefly and got much better ratings than it. Still not enough to not get cancelled though. Fastlane was on at that same time too.

My mom and I watched John Doe and we both enjoyed it.

To this day though one of our shared favorites is Special Unit 2. It's one not a lot of people have heard of but we loved it. They showed it for a while a couple years back on Syfy and we were ecstatic. For those who aren't familiar with it, SU2 followed a special branch of the Chicago PD who deal with monster and legendary creatures.Baisically they were a whole team of Grimms who worked for the cops. It drives me crazy that the show was never released on DVD because if it was I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Another one we watched and really enjoyed was New Amsterdam, which was about an immortal cop living in NYC. It starred a pre-GOT Nikolaj Coster-Waldu and a pre-Lost Zuleikha Robinson. The whole series is available on Hulu.
One of my personal favorites (it's not a mom kind of show) is Ugly Americans. It follows a guy who works in the Department of Integration in a alternate universe version of New York which is inhabited by all sorts of crazy creatures along with humans. A Clip. There is some crude humor here in case anyone is easily offended.

My contribution to the land of sci-fi obscurity would be:

Black Heaven
Denno Coil
Fantastic Children
Figure 17
Galaxy Railways (both seasons)
Glass Fleet
Heroic Age
Kurau: Phantom Memory
Kurogane Communication
Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Moonlight Mile (both seasons)
Real Drive
Rideback
Solty Rei
Soul Link
Space Symphony Maetel
The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye
Toward the Terra
Tytania

I watched the first episode of Heroic Age a few months back and really enjoyed it.

 

[trekkiedane]

Loved SU2

 

[Melakon]

Project UFO - A lot of people I talk to remember the show but say they never watched it.

I saw it. William Jordan starred (replaced by Edward Winter), and his partner had previously done car commercials. Jack Webb produced, so its style was procedural investigation, like Dragnet. Supposedly the stories were based on cases from Project Blue Book. Sometimes they'd show flying saucer type stuff, but they could look worse than any scratchbuilt model you'd built yourself. Even though they were by Brick Price.

I watched an ep of Alfred Hitchcock Presents just now, and never would have known who Skip Homeier (by name) was but for your avatar.

Good to hear. Skip had a beautiful voice but never hit it big, even after having his own show (Dan Raven, 1960-61), which I don't remember ever seeing. It was on opposite Rawhide, and my parents liked westerns. I didn't notice Skip until he did Outer Limits' 1964 episode "Expanding Human" (ugly dude in avatar), which has James Doohan as a cop, and Keith Andes (Akuta in "The Apple").

 

[sojourner]

Project UFO - A lot of people I talk to remember the show but say they never watched it.

I saw it. William Jordan starred (replaced by Edward Winter), and his partner had previously done car commercials. Jack Webb produced, so its style was procedural investigation, like Dragnet. Supposedly the stories were based on cases from Project Blue Book. Sometimes they'd show flying saucer type stuff, but they could look worse than any scratchbuilt model you'd built yourself. Even though they were by Brick Price.

I remember the effects being pretty good on the show for what it was. Of course, I also for some reason remember the title of the show as Project: Blue Book, so take that for what you will.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Raumpatrouille, despite the cheap sets (plastic-beakers n the ceiling and the infamous clothes-iron on the engine control panel) IS a fantastic series with an enormous following; they even cut up the old (black and white!) episodes and made an entire feature-film that ran in theatres in 2003!!! out of it
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it has a greater following in Germany than even Star Trek

Yeah, that's what I've heard. There was a site that had transcripts in English that I was going to download, but I lost the link.

^^ I guess I was hedging my bets a bit that it might not appeal to everyone. It has a mod/swinging/retro vibe that some people dig and some can only see as cheese.

I am of the Digger Clan.

And anybody else remember The Sixth Sense with Gary Collins? As I recall, he played a parapsychologist who investigated strange events.

I remember that. And it's triggering a half-remembered memory that it was syndicated as part of another series. I can't quite remember....

Captain Nice.
Mister Terrific.

Oh, yeah! One of them used a potion and the other had a little box with three pills-- two little ones and a big one. I think they only showed them during the day, because I seem to remember that I only got to watch them when I was home sick from school.

 

[Melakon]

I remember the effects being pretty good on the show for what it was. Of course, I also for some reason remember the title of the show as Project: Blue Book, so take that for what you will.

You are likely remembering correctly. Outside the U.S., it was Project Blue Book, to avoid confusion with Gerry Anderson's UFO series.

I'm not sure why I was disappointed by the effects, I've not seen it since it first aired. Maybe there was depth of field thing that bothered me. Or maybe I thought they looked like video effects instead of film.

 

[Andrew_Kearley]

Outside the U.S., it was Project Blue Book, to avoid confusion with Gerry Anderson's UFO series.

It was definitely Project UFO in Britain - at least in the Southern region.

 

[Christopher]

At least Captain Nice starred William Daniels.

And more importantly, it was created and produced by Buck Henry of Get Smart.

Project UFO - A lot of people I talk to remember the show but say they never watched it.

I watched it quite loyally. Back then I was gullible enough to believe in all that UFO stuff and I just ate up everything I could find on the subject. I even halfway remember the theme music to Project UFO.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Star Cops
Moonbase 3

I never saw Space Island One - did anyone?

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Invisible Man

The David McCallum version? I remember that one!

Good vs Evil

Wow! I watched this series; it is close to being so forgotten, and that's sad, as it had much potential.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

And anybody else remember The Sixth Sense with Gary Collins? As I recall, he played a parapsychologist who investigated strange events.

I remember that. And it's triggering a half-remembered memory that it was syndicated as part of another series. I can't quite remember....

The Sixth Sense did not have enough episodes to meet syndication requirements (only 25 were produced), so it was tacked on to the badly edited syndicated package for the great Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Rod Serling (after divorcing himself from NG/Universal due to too many internal struggles), was paid a hefty sum to return & shoot more Night Gallery-esque intros with paintings based on The Sixth Sense episodes.

This manuver convinced a couple of generations to follow that the largely inferior Gary Collins series was a part of NG--leading to the impression that NS had a pile of crap episodes in its "fourth" season.

 

[Mike Farley]

Outside the U.S., it was Project Blue Book, to avoid confusion with Gerry Anderson's UFO series.

It was definitely Project UFO in Britain - at least in the Southern region.

And it was Project Blue Book when I watched it as a kid in Texas.

 

[sojourner]

Outside the U.S., it was Project Blue Book, to avoid confusion with Gerry Anderson's UFO series.

It was definitely Project UFO in Britain - at least in the Southern region.

And it was Project Blue Book when I watched it as a kid in Texas.

Yeah, I was raised in Florida, so, not so sure. I do distinctly remember the opening credits actually showing a Blue Book and the opening narration mentioning "actual case files from the Airforce's Project: Blue Book". But that doesn't discount that the show may still have been called Project: UFO.

 

[Sindatur]

It was definitely Project UFO in Britain - at least in the Southern region.

And it was Project Blue Book when I watched it as a kid in Texas.

Yeah, I was raised in Florida, so, not so sure. I do distinctly remember the opening credits actually showing a Blue Book and the opening narration mentioning "actual case files from the Airforce's Project: Blue Book". But that doesn't discount that the show may still have been called Project: UFO.

It may have been marketed as Project Blue Book in some markets, because it does have an aka Project Blue Book on IMDB and so forth.

 

[Christopher]

There's a discussion thread debating the show's title on IMDb, and it's suggested there that the title was really Project UFO all along but that a lot of people remember it as Project Blue Book because that name was featured in the opening titles, which sounds plausible to me. The show was about Project Blue Book, and that name was probably spoken aloud or shown onscreen a number of times in the course of the show, whereas the title Project UFO was probably only seen once during the main titles, plus the occasional commercial bumper or promo. So the name "Project Blue Book" probably loomed larger in people's memories about the show, and since it's similar to the actual title, they could easily have conflated the two in their minds.

However, the name "Project Blue Book" isn't actually mentioned in the first-season title sequence available on YouTube. There is a lot of blue in the sequence, however, which is telling. In experiments where people are shown, for instance, the word "RED" written in blue letters and asked to read the word, they're often more likely to say "blue" than "red." Their awareness of the actual color they see trumps their awareness of the word they read. So a title sequence dominated by the actual color blue could easily fool people's memories into thinking that "Blue" was actually in the title, especially when the show is about a project with "Blue" in its title.

As for myself, I definitely remember it being called Project UFO when I watched it. And I only had black-and-white TV at the time, so I would've been immune to the color-confusion effect.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I remember watching Project UFO as a child (and I clearly remember it being called that, as it contrasted with the "Project Blue Book" repeatedly referred to within the show), that is until the show became a monumental bore. I don't think this is going to qualify as a show that no one else watched.

 

[RAMA]

There's a discussion thread debating the show's title on IMDb, and it's suggested there that the title was really Project UFO all along but that a lot of people remember it as Project Blue Book because that name was featured in the opening titles, which sounds plausible to me. The show was about Project Blue Book, and that name was probably spoken aloud or shown onscreen a number of times in the course of the show, whereas the title Project UFO was probably only seen once during the main titles, plus the occasional commercial bumper or promo. So the name "Project Blue Book" probably loomed larger in people's memories about the show, and since it's similar to the actual title, they could easily have conflated the two in their minds.

However, the name "Project Blue Book" isn't actually mentioned in the first-season title sequence available on YouTube. There is a lot of blue in the sequence, however, which is telling. In experiments where people are shown, for instance, the word "RED" written in blue letters and asked to read the word, they're often more likely to say "blue" than "red." Their awareness of the actual color they see trumps their awareness of the word they read. So a title sequence dominated by the actual color blue could easily fool people's memories into thinking that "Blue" was actually in the title, especially when the show is about a project with "Blue" in its title.

As for myself, I definitely remember it being called Project UFO when I watched it. And I only had black-and-white TV at the time, so I would've been immune to the color-confusion effect.

I remember it as Project UFO too. I remember it because A) I wasn't allowed to stay up and watch it, and B) because I thought it was real.

 

[RAMA]

Other short-lived horror anthology series: The Dark Room, Ghost Story, and Circle of Fear.

And anybody else remember The Sixth Sense with Gary Collins? As I recall, he played a parapsychologist who investigated strange events.

(No relation to the much later Bruce Willis movie.)

Masters of Science Fiction. The network gave it NO chance to succeed. It could have been the best SF show ever. I own all 6 episodes.

RAMA

 

[Melakon]

Anyone remember "Science Fiction Theater" with Truman Bradley? Circa 1950s, color, I think it was only syndicated. Really low budget, I don't remember any good special effects.

 

[trekkiedane]

Masters of Science Fiction. The network gave it NO chance to succeed. It could have been the best SF show ever. I own all 6 episodes.

It definitely had lots of potential I have it too