The General Knight Rider thread.
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I remember the first season with Colonel Ironhorse who was then inexplicably replaced!
The Wizard starred Time Bandits' David Rappaport as a genius inventor who'd left his job designing weapons to become a toymaker, but who still consulted with the government to solve weird-science cases. I thought it was a fun show, if kind of silly, and Rappaport was a terrific actor who died too soon.
I did a rewatch-review of the first season of War of the Worlds: The Series on my free blog some years back, but I refused to subject myself to season 2 again.
@Christopher, did you ever watch VIPER back in the day?
I watched the first season and liked it, but I wasn't fond of the later syndicated revival. I'd gotten sick of lethal action heroes long before that (around the time of Airwolf, where the helicopter was constantly gunning down hordes of henchmen), and I liked it that Dorian Harewood's character in season 1, the creator of the Viper, insisted that it only have nonlethal armaments. It offended me when the syndicated seasons abandoned that and put machine guns on it.
It's weird -- in the early '90s, Danny Bilson & Paul DeMeo's shows -- The Flash (1990), Human Target (1992), Viper -- all had heroes who took strong stands against killing, but in their later shows like the Viper revival and The Sentinel, they seemed to abandon that. I wish they'd stuck to their, err, lack of guns on that point.
I can appreciate you wanting consistency in their protagonists sticking to their modus operandi and not changing it once the show gets a new owner.
It is jarring.
A couple of episodes. I remember almost nothing. But I liked the movie.
Oh yeah, I liked that one. It was from the same producers who'd previously done RoboCop: The Series, which I'd quite liked (and am about to start reviewing on my Patreon along with the other RoboCop movies and shows, in chronological order).
I hated the original F/X movie. The premise of a Hollywood special-effects artist using his skills to fight crime should've been a fun, Mission: Impossible-ish sort of caper story, but the movie was a dark revenge thriller where the protagonist went on a murder spree against the people who'd framed him for killing his lover, finally stupidly murdering the only person who could've cleared his name. The sequel movie had him inexplicably cleared and back in his normal life, which made no sense, but it was much more light-hearted and fun, as I felt the concept always should have been, and the series continued in the same vein.
A quite decent one!
A show where we get the actors for Highlander the TV series.
Well, you can learn all about it on my Patreon soon. It's actually my favorite incarnation of the franchise. A lot of people objected to it toning down the violence and making RoboCop family-friendly, but the producers understood that RoboCop had always been popular with children and there was no way to keep them from watching, so it was the right choice to make. (When I saw RoboCop 2 in the theater, at least two separate mothers had brought their toddlers to the R-rated movie and had to take them out bawling and screaming when the ultraviolence kicked in.)
Actually there were four RoboCop TV series -- RoboCop: The Animated Series, which ran for 12 episodes in 1988, just a year after the original movie; RoboCop: The Series in 1994, whose pilot movie was written by RoboCop's creators Edward Neumeier & Micheal Miner based partly on their rejected script for RoboCop 2; RoboCop: Alpha Commando in 1998, a second animated series that had little connection to the original concepts and turned RoboCop into a wisecracking action hero with an Inspector Gadget-like array of devices and transformations; and the miniseries RoboCop: Prime Directives in 2001, which went back to the original dark and violent approach but was generally terrible.
RoboCop: The Series is actually the longest-running incarnation of RoboCop, with 23 42-minute episodes (counting the pilot movie as two) vs. Alpha Commando's 40 22-minute episodes, Prime Directives' four 95-minute installments, the movie trilogy's collective five-and-a-third hours, R:TAS's dozen 21-minute episodes, and the single 2014 movie remake.
"Robocop: The Series" was one of those 1990's kind of lose continuations of the films they were based on. It's not just what was pointed out above, but during the opening theme music (which is good), there is an interlude of Basil Poledouris' theme from the original film just to let you know for sure. And he gets a credit for that original film theme, buried in the end credits.
Well, sort of, in that it substituted alternate or renamed characters for the movie characters, because for some reason the studio's license didn't include any of the characters except Murphy/RoboCop himself and his son. But if you squint a little, it's easy to reconcile the series with the first movie, though it's incompatible with the sequels. The show takes place at Metro South, which was the precinct Murphy transferred from at the start of the movie, so it's easy to assume Madigan and Sgt. Parks were his former colleagues before he met Lewis and Sgt. Reed. And Murphy's wife was never named in the first film, only called Ellen in the end credits to the second and third movies (and on a tombstone in Prime Directives), so there's no real conflict with the series calling her Nancy instead.
Since the pilot episode is the only RoboCop sequel with the same writers as the original film, I consider it the most authentic continuation, although Ed Neumeier at least was not happy with the more overtly humorous direction the producer and director took it in (though the show adopted a somewhat more serious tone as it went on).
I was pretty young when it aired, and didn't enjoy the at-times surprisingly graphic violence, but otherwise I at least enjoyed it enough to keep watching, though I was always a bit disappointed that we never saw anything quite as impressive as the return of the original ships in the pilot. In the one episode where they did power up another ship it seemed rather spindly by comparison, IIRC. I also seem to recall that they set up a fair number of plot elements that ultimately never really had any follow-up (maybe they would have been followed-up on if S2 hadn't gone where it did?).
I greatly enjoyed the novelization of the pilot, in particular the parts that focused on the alien POV and the dissension between the ruling class and the warriors. I wish the show could have done something with that. In keeping with everything else about the aliens there was probably a third class as well, but I can't remember anything about that.
S2 was a really bizarre transformation, especially if you missed the first episode of the season. I don't know why they thought Ironhorse and Norton needed to be replaced (unless it was the actors choosing to leave?), and there were so many changes to the established lore of the series at that point that it felt like there was room for a flashback episode or two explaining how things had gotten from where they were in S1 to where they were in S2. While I don't approve of the cast shake-up, I guess it was fortunate enough that they at least got Adrian Paul (he of the Highlander series) to be a new regular? But then the show seemed to either get preempted or start jumping around timeslots and I lost track of it well before the end.
I've got the show on DVD but haven't brought myself to rewatch it yet. It does feel like one of those things that maybe could have been pretty great if it had had more time and less tampering.
Robocop the TV series also had a fairly successful run, and I remember it being quite popular at the time it ran. It also went into syndication.
Given that WOTW was the syndication-package partner of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it's startling how low its budget was and how crude its visual effects and production values were in comparison. We forget how impressive TNG's production values were for 1980s television.
They brought in a new showrunner for season 2 to retool the show completely, so naturally none of the season 1 producers' plans got carried forward.
It's always been pretty clear to me that it was straight-up racism on the new producers' part. They killed off both the nonwhite actors and had an all-white regular cast in season 2. And new showrunner Frank Mancuso Jr.'s excuses for killing them off were deeply unconvincing. He claimed he didn't know that Ironhorse was the most popular character -- how negligent do you have to be to take over a show and not find out something like that? And he claimed he killed off Norton because the team would be on the run in season 2 and a person in a wheelchair wouldn't have been able to keep up, but that was an obvious lie, because the team moved into a new permanent base in the second episode of the season and stayed there throughout, so Norton could've managed just as well there as in the season 1 base.
Not only that, but Harrison Blackwood was stripped of his entire charmingly neurodivergent personality and reduced to a generic male lead whose only distinctive character trait was that he had a beard. And the aliens lost their monstrous appearance and weird alien speech and just became a bunch of pretty white people speaking English. There was just a general rejection of diversity of any kind.
I never found that fortunate, because Paul has all the talent and charisma of a store mannequin.
It was a syndicated show, so it would've been the decision of each individual local station to decide when to air it. If your local station was shuffling it around, it was probably because it was getting lousy ratings in its time slot. Syndicated shows are sold as complete seasons, and thus the stations that carry them are obligated to air the entire season, unlike network shows, which can be pulled from the air midseason with unaired episodes. If a syndicated show bombs, the local stations can't cancel it, but they can shuffle it out of the way by moving it to a less important late-night or weekend-morning slot.
The first season was largely written by non-union or strikebreaking authors during the 1988 writers' strike (which is why some episodes have pseudonymous author credits like "Sylvia Van Buren," the name of Ann Robinson's character from the movie and series), which somewhat explains why the writing was often so bad. No telling why season 2 was such a wreck, though.
RoboCop: The Series was syndicated from the start in the US, though it was a network show in Canada where it originated. And it was cancelled after one season, which is the least successful a first-run syndicated show can be. (It's also really hard to find a decent version. The only options are a DVD transfer of mediocre quality that at least gets the aspect ratio right, and a lousy Blu-Ray version that chops off the top and bottom of the standard-definition image to fake widescreen format, yet occasionally distorts the aspect ratio anyway. Unfortunately, only the lousy Blu-Ray version is available on streaming, and even that just got pulled from Tubi, though Prime still has it.)
Although the producers evidently knew or expected that they wouldn't get a second season, since the finale was clearly written as a big finish and a farewell to the audience. And this was before season-arc plotting became widespread, so it was able to wrap up without any unresolved plot threads. So it was a short run, but at least it had a satisfying conclusion.
It's made me realize just how different the broadcast systems can be, and how complicated their popularity can be between two countries. Yeah, it was a network show in Canada, but I also think it ended up in syndication over here after its original run, which is often the case for us with shows from that period. The fact that it was shot in Canada might have also had something to do with it. And I remember it getting lots of airplay and attention. It was kind of hard to miss.
Another similar situation was with the Due South series, which had originally been a CBS/CTV co-production. CBS aired the first two seasons, but cancelled the series on their end, but where it differs it that it continued in Canada with a revised cast. Out was David Marciano as Ray Vecchio, in was Keith Callum Rennie as Stanley "Ray" Kowalksi, and the reason they gave for Ray leaving was for him being needed for a big sting operation. Without CBS's involvement, the show had a decidedly lower-budget feel to it, and initially I disliked the new partner, I warmed up to him eventually. I wish we could get a reunion followup of some sort for this series. The interesting thing about that is that it unfortunately made the 3rd and 4th seasons hard to find on streaming services. About a decade ago, I had been watching it on TV, but noticed they had omitted the 3rd and 4th seasons, and I think it's because in terms of the production agreements, 3rd and 4th have a different set of licensing agreements to them.
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