Star Trek, Forbidden Planet and classic space opera....

[trevanian]

B5's problems had more to do with erratic scheduling than an audience with limited imagination.

It also sucked donkey balls.

The audience with limited imagination certainly sucked donkey balls ... that's the best way to sum up their lack of taste.

 

[number6]

No. The show was awful, poorly written and shamelessly derivitive. I certainly hope JMS never gets to write another Sci-Fi series again let alone touch something as sacred as Forbidden Planet. There is a special place in Hell waiting for him as it is.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

B5's problems had more to do with erratic scheduling than an audience with limited imagination.

It also sucked donkey balls.

The audience with limited imagination certainly sucked donkey balls ... that's the best way to sum up their lack of taste.

Yeah, but there weren't enough of them to keep B5 on the air.

My reading is that if folks are tuning SF out then it's much more to do with storytelling than visual attributes.

And the more "science-fictiony" they perceive it to be, the fewer of them will watch. Traditional sf has a niche home on cable - Stargate continues, nuBSG managed to make it to a reasonable end, Farscape still had a devoted audience and could have gone either way. But if the folks in charge are looking for consistent audiences in excess of five million viewers in the U.S., they aren't going to look at space opera to deliver it and for the best of reasons - long experience and hard numbers.

 

[trevanian]

It also sucked donkey balls.

The audience with limited imagination certainly sucked donkey balls ... that's the best way to sum up their lack of taste.

Yeah, but there weren't enough of them to keep B5 on the air.

Hey at least B5 managed to complete its five year mission, which puts it way ahead of TOS (even if yr 5 was a steaming pile ... )

 

[number6]

The audience with limited imagination certainly sucked donkey balls ... that's the best way to sum up their lack of taste.

Yeah, but there weren't enough of them to keep B5 on the air.

Hey at least B5 managed to complete its five year mission, which puts it way ahead of TOS (even if yr 5 was a steaming pile ... )

Doesn't make it suck less. It also ended up on USA Network, best known for its thought provoking, cerebral programming.

Yeah Babylon 5 was kwality TeeVee.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Of course, in Trek TOS the "five year mission" was a throw-away conceit to provide a framework within which to tell some pretty remarkable stories. B5, despite early promise, became the opposite - while other writers including several Trek TOS veterans were encouraged to contribute one-off stories as well as contributions to the metastory in the first year (as was jms's stated original plan) as the series ground on and became essentially a one-writer operation the single measure of success became whether or not the show would get to finish that story. Week after week was dominated by the monotonous drumbeat of this single long, digressive and ultimately simplistic storyline. The show crossed it's self-defined finish line, clawing and wheezing, after only four years because of the threat of imminent cancellation - and then when it was sold to cable for an additional year an entirely new plot had to be spun up around Byron and the telepath war.

 

[Chrisisall]

But after the Star Trek and Star Wars of the '60s and '70s I really feel space adventure and SF generally has gotten in a serious rut both in its ideas and visual style.

The newer Star Wars movies left me cold, in content AND style. Enterprise & Falcon were cool, this new wave of pointed, silvery junk is getting old, fast.

 

[Warped9]

B5's problems had more to do with erratic scheduling than an audience with limited imagination.

It also sucked donkey balls.

I wouldn't know. I really liked B5, but then I never even consider sticking my nose in such close proximity as to get a good whiff of such a scent.

 

[Christopher]

[Babylon 5] also ended up on USA Network, best known for its thought provoking, cerebral programming.

No, its final season was broadcast on TNT, not USA.

And USA has had some good shows. The Dead Zone was quite good in its first season and a half, though it went downhill thereafter. The 4400 was fairly good.

 

[number6]

[Babylon 5] also ended up on USA Network, best known for its thought provoking, cerebral programming.

No, its final season was broadcast on TNT, not USA.

And USA has had some good shows. The Dead Zone was quite good in its first season and a half, though it went downhill thereafter. The 4400 was fairly good.

Oopsie. Doesn't change anything. B5 was bloody awful.

 

[Nerys Myk]

[Babylon 5] also ended up on USA Network, best known for its thought provoking, cerebral programming.

No, its final season was broadcast on TNT, not USA.

And USA has had some good shows. The Dead Zone was quite good in its first season and a half, though it went downhill thereafter. The 4400 was fairly good.

Oopsie. Doesn't change anything. B5 was bloody awful.

I veiw it as a lot of missed potential. Mostly from sub-par dialog and sub-par acting.

 

[number6]

No, its final season was broadcast on TNT, not USA.

And USA has had some good shows. The Dead Zone was quite good in its first season and a half, though it went downhill thereafter. The 4400 was fairly good.

Oopsie. Doesn't change anything. B5 was bloody awful.

I veiw it as a lot of missed potential. Mostly from sub-par dialog and sub-par acting.

No kidding. Hidden Frontier had better acting, and Roddenberry on Patrol had better writing.

 

[Warped9]

I just finished reading Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malatre's Beyond Human, a nonfiction work regarding the current state and reflections on future possibilities regarding robotics, cyborgs, artificial intelligence and everything in between and related. This is nonfiction and most of what we get in film/tv sci-fi looks pedestrian in comparison.

Trek rarely seemed to do well with this sort of thing. When I look at how contemporary Trek (let alone TOS) handles machine intelligence in the like it seems antiquated in comparison to the real deal as well as what's being done in SF lit.

 

[Basil]

^^ I think your point ties in to a measure of cynicism that has become ingrained in society in general. However, I must point out that in the real world new tech and hardware generally progresses to cleaner and more streamlined forms that are also easier to use (usually and supposedly). In that respect then contemporary SF may not be depicting a more believable hardware reality.

I don't think it is, but as Dennis points out, I do think mainstream audiences see it that way.

I cringe, though, when I see that the miracle fabric of the future will be the same staticky, linty cotton I put on to mow the lawn or that hundreds of years in the future, we will weld starships together with the same hodgepodge of seams that resulted in WWII battleships, freighters, and iron ore ships.

 

[Basil]

It's certainly easier to recycle props and clothing by giving the future a contemporary look--machineguns and coveralls--than it is to create from whole cloth a very different aesthetic that must be realized.

It's not only easier, but advantageous because people in the main do have a preference for things which appear real. The answer to "what do we buy ourselves by creating a futuristic or alien aesthetic" is usually "hopefully a more devoted audience, but almost certainly a smaller one."

To build a world from scratch but do it plausibly enough to reduce the "gimme a break" factor - for want of a more elegant term - for many in the potential audience requires a huge financial investment. Lucas can do it, Cameron can do it, Abrams did it for his Star Trek movie where it made sense to him to do so...but it carries a price tag in the hundreds of millions.

One reason among many that Babylon 5 may not have reached a larger audience is that the producers seemed to reason that given a certain level of creative effort in the visualization of their universe - something on a par with Trek TOS, in most respects, falling short of that in some and exceeding it in others - that skiffy fans would make the imaginative leap, the commitment to fill in the blanks for themselves that they had made with Trek. Only that assumption made the idea of doing B5 on a limited TV budget plausible at all, and it did work - just for not an enormous number of people. The folks that like such things like them a lot, but most people change the channel.

True, though the trend has been to go "maximal" rather than minimal in design. I love the 50s and 60s aesthetic, even TOS, that used simple geometry, space, and contrast to create minimalist sets. Today, it's like somebody's garage.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

True, though the trend has been to go "maximal" rather than minimal in design. I love the 50s and 60s aesthetic, even TOS, that used simple geometry, space, and contrast to create minimalist sets. Today, it's like somebody's garage.

It's also a matter of money, though. Limited resources required designers to be creative in some pretty specific ways.

 

[xortex]

So that means the more money you have, the more cluttered it's gonna be? That is just a lack of vision. I hate the gritty nautical look that Berman brought and the TNG bridge was just ridiculous and too big. TNG marching orders was basically to do a space opera similar to TOS. There was more money than there was vision. the next Roddenberry may never come. I'm sorry he's underappreciated.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

So that means the more money you have, the more cluttered it's gonna be?

Certainly the more detail there will be, and probably the more movement.

"The next Roddenberry" or whoever would do things appropriate to the entertainment industry and fashions of his time, not imitate something from decades ago.

 

[xortex]

The new always borrows from the old.

 

[Maurice]

Of course, in Trek TOS the "five year mission" was a throw-away conceit to provide a framework within which to tell some pretty remarkable stories...

And, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, it was the number of seasons then-needed to "strip" a how in syndication.

...I hate the gritty nautical look that Berman brought...

Pardon?