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Watching Buck Rogers In The 25th Century

Well, you know. Aliens. They are mysterious and inscrutable.

Like the time a Visitor decided to tan her fake skin. Fake skin she adorned with typical and, err, conspicuous mammal characteristics...
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I, um, missed this episode. Who she?
 
Diana was one of the main draws, which was why her role kept getting bigger from original mini to sequel to series. This was the age of Dynasty and its celebrated catfights, and the rivalry between Diana and Lydia let V: The Series do something similar. Plus Jane Badler was hot, and a better actress than V probably let her be most of the time. (She was a high point of the generally mediocre Mission: Impossible revival in '88-'90.)

But yeah, killing off Martin was a bad idea, which was no doubt why they later brought in his "identical twin brother" despite the fact that Visitors wear human masks so why did they even need to be twins underneath?
Interviewed Jane, her comment was "Oh God, you know about everything I've done, and I did so much c--p."
 
Maybe Frank Ashmore had connections with NBC. He did DAYS OF OUR LIVES before V, and during the mid-'80s NBC seemed to re-cast certain players for many of their shows (John P. Navin for example). I've only seen Ashmore in the AIRPLANE films besides NBC product.
It's more simple; viewer letters persuaded that killing Martin was a mistake, so the producers tried to solve it by having the same actor play his brother.
 
Off the top of my head I can think of one really great sci fi show from the '70's. The Incredible Hulk with Bill Bixby. It had smart writing, good acting for the most part and in some episodes nice use of locations. By the time the '80's rolled around we were getting more intellectual programming with a mix of the more dumbed down stuff.

The Incredible Hulk was garbage, a show that had little to do with the original comic book it was based on other than the use of the main character. Instead of bringing to life the universe, characters and STORIES that Lee & Kirby created, we got a second-rate clone of The Fugitive where all that Bruce David Banner does is do the same thing that Richard Kimble did back in the '60's. Where's Rick Jones, Betty Ross, her dad General Ross, Major Talbot, Jim Wilson, The Leader, Emil Blonsky/The Abomination, or any of the other situations and characters from the comic book (in reason-I'm not expecting the Avengers to show up) in this show? The cartoons and the two live action movies were much, much, better, especially the second one.

Another thing that got me about this show; why the fuck should anybody care about Banner even with the Hulk as a factor? Unless he harmed the military or was well known as a scientist like in the comic books, nobody's going to give a shit about Banner, and because society wasn't as connected or wired as now, no one's going to notice the Hulk/Banner or even connect two plus two to equal four because nobody's going to believe those who said that they saw a large green monster wreck things (the whole doubting of sanity thing). All that Banner's doing in his running away vs. Kimble's running away is keeping a monster a secret (yes, I know about the New York thing and the consequences that followed, but Banner's still 'dead', he's living off of the grid, and society back in the early 80's isn't like society is now, so there's no real way to connect him with the Hulk, plus people will be treating the Hulk as a urban legend like Bigfoot.) The Incredible Hulk's just as bad as the other shows mentioned by you and Christopher, but for a different reason; it didn't stick to the original source upon which it was based, but then used another, older similar source to tell a story that makes no sense with this character.

Hulk was a standout, yes. But most early-'80's sci-fi TV was still quite dumb; this was the decade of Knight Rider, Automan, Voyagers!, and Manimal. We got the smart, allegorical V miniseries in '83, but its sequel mini and weekly series got progressively dumber. It wasn't until later in the decade that we started to see glimmers of intelligence. The Twilight Zone revival started in '85 -- though it was alongside the well-produced but often staggeringly stupid Amazing Stories on a different network. We got the heartfelt Starman in '86, Max Headroom and ST:TNG in '87, and Alien Nation and Quantum Leap in '89. So it wasn't until the end of the '80's and into the '90's that we started to see multiple smart, successful genre shows coexisting.

Don't forget all of the other shows (some of them animated) that were good, like Robotech, Tales From The Darkside, Monsters, The Real Ghostbusters, Captain Power & The Soldiers Of The Future, Max Headroom, The Ray Bradbury Theater, plus a lot of others.
 
The Bixby/Ferigno Incredible Hulk was a horrible adaptation, but still a great show. These kind of man on the run/traveling the country shows were a pretty common thing back around that time, so it's not just doing a take on The Fugitive, it's just one of several shows that are done int that style. Honestly, watching the Incredible Hulk back when it was on MeTV was one of the things that really helped me to realize something can be a lousy adaptation, but still a great thing on it's own.
 
So I'll get booed for this but I liked The Man From Atlantis. But it was such a short lived show. I tink it got canned didn't it?

That show's a gap in my '70s SFTV knowledge. I remember seeing it occasionally back in the day, but I remember next to nothing about it.

And yeah, it was short-lived -- four TV movies and 13 episodes, so about 2/3 as much content as V.
 
I liked the design of the submarine in The Man From Atlantis. It looked kind of different to what you usually see, was never in proper scale but I just liked the design.
 
The Man From Atlantis episode I remember was when he visited an alternate dimension where water was invisible. There was a scene with Patrick Duffy miming swimming upstream in an empty sluice. That was kind of a nadir in the show's ideas.
 
The Weinstein effect.

I don't understand. How does that make it inappropriate to show the villain of the story engaging in unwanted touching? Surely it just underlines her villainy, her disregard for others.


I saw probably 70 percent of the shows. I might be generalizing, but what I disliked about it was that they always, always seemed to bring out Ferrigno for two five-minute segments...and always at the halfway and end points. At the time there seemed to be precious little variation. Obviously the network needed a hook in order to viewers not to switch to a sitcom, but it got very predictable for me. Another trope was the Bill Bixby beatup, inevitably followed by the choir-like music and the shirt-ripping.

Well, yes, but the "two transformations per episode" pattern was imposed by the network and was a standard formula of virtually every superhero show of the era. What made TIH impressive was how much it managed to transcend that imposed formula.

I'd say that the use of the formula in Wonder Woman seasons 2-3 was even worse, because it was so arbitrary. Those seasons focused more on Diana Prince than Wonder Woman, and often they'd have Diana briefly change into Wonder Woman to do some simple thing that hardly required a transformation -- also, people would routinely see Wonder Woman appear chasing a bad guy that Diana had been chasing moments earlier, or see Wonder Woman escape from a trap that Diana had been caught in moments earlier, and would not think that they might be the same person even though Diana had stopped wearing glasses by that point and was only distinguished from Wonder Woman by her wardrobe and hairstyle. At least the Hulk didn't have the exact same face and voice as David Banner.


NBC brilliantly debuted it on Friday nights even though that trick almost never works for sci-fi.

Not back in the '70s, no, but The X-Files aired on Friday nights in its first three seasons (though it didn't become a huge hit until it moved to Sundays), and the Sci-Fi Channel/Syfy's "Sci-Fi Friday" was their featured programming block for years, the home of hits like Farscape, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, and Warehouse 13.
 
Weinstein was always a villain, and all his actions were always inappropriate. But it still took Hollywood nearly 30 years just to-------actually I was simply punchlining. Just tell Diana to keep her fingers to herself.
I'm confused. So they couldn't make a hypothetical movie about Weinstein?
 
Weinstein was always a villain, and all his actions were always inappropriate. But it still took Hollywood nearly 30 years just to-------actually I was simply punchlining. Just tell Diana to keep her fingers to herself.

The point's not about Weinstein, it's about Diana. I don't know why you think that television shows would now somehow be unable to show villains doing inappropriate things. You'd have a point if you were talking about the depiction of good guys doing it, but it makes no sense to say that there would be any taboo against showing clear-cut villains like Diana doing bad things.
 
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