There have been many well written/well produced shows that never find/connect with an audience in sufficient numbers to keep them on the air. 'Quaility' doesn't always equal 'viable/successful in the entertainment market'. Just saying.
worst sci-fi TV series of post 1964
- Thread starter jefferiestubes8
- Start date
I remember a friend in school mentioning it, and it might have even been mentioned in Starlog, back when Anderson had a monthly column, but I never actually saw it. Saw and enoyed every episode of Project UFO, though. (Cue the ominous-sounding instrumental of the first couple bars of a well-known spiritual, then Jack Webb's voice-over: "Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw.")
UFO and Project U.F.O. weren't anything alike.
One of the best opening sequences ever.
The tone of your posts has been pretty clear that you think there's something wrong with people who like the shows you've deemed inferior for whatever reason.
One person's masterpiece (aka "the best") may be another person's garbage (aka "the worst"). We all have different criteria by which we judge a show. Reviews don't impress me, and neither do awards. I make up my own mind.
Neither is an artistic masterpiece. All that matters is whether or not people find them entertaining.
Not sure what you found wrong with Voyagers!. It never tried to pretend it was anything more than a kid-friendly time travel show.Best to worst IMO from 1965 to just before TNG, and this it each series overall, even though some started good and went bad, or, like Galactica, started okay, got bad, then slowly started finding its feet. A lot of shows were just dull, which to me puts them behind goofy stuff like Lost In Space.
Best
Worst
- Star Trek
- Blake's 7
- UFO
- Battlestar Galactica
- Space: 1999
- Land of the Giants
- Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
- Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
- Logan's Run
- Lost In Space
- Quark ...................... a funny idea unfunny in execution
- Fantastic Journey
- The Time Tunnel
- Planet of the Apes
- The Phoenix
- The Powers of Matthew Starr
- Galactica 1980
- The Starlost
- Salvage One
Shows I didn't see or have forgotten but were on:
- The Man From Atlantis
- The Invisible Man
- Time Express (1979)
- Voyagers!
- Gemini Man
Speaking of bad, anyone remember Space Rangers?
The Man From Atlantis... the early shows weren't bad. It got more and more ridiculous as the series went on. Thank goodness Patrick Duffy went on to be Bobby Ewing.
Marine Boy was my 5-year-old self's favorite program.
Some of the episodes were clunkers, but a few were pretty good.
It would have been better if it had followed the novels instead of the movie, but it would have required a lot more sex, skimpy clothing, and drugs than could have been shown on TV in those days.
The series was also post-apocalypse. The original novel made overpopulation and voluntary euthanasia at age 21 as the precursor to the Last Day laws and punishments.
Oh, absolutely. And the same goes for books. (I will go to my grave wondering why some books I edited didn't find larger audiences.) Just making the point that the "canon" stuff that the internet obsesses over may not be a deciding factor as far as the general audiences goes. Or determine whether a given show succeeds or fails, commercially.
The problem, of course, is that we often tend to use the same terminology to refer to both commercial and artistic failures, causing us to sometimes talk past each other.
"That show was a total disaster!"
"Huh? It ran for ten seasons and got great ratings!"
"But it sucked . . . "
Or, conversely:
"That show failed big time!"
"Huh? It was really good and got rave reviews!"
"But it was cancelled after six episodes . . ."
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Did I say it was BAD? I was simply ranking them from what I thought were best to worst. The shows above it I thought were better
Some-one mentioned Alien Nation up thread and that's pretty much the fate it suffered. Good reviews from critcs etc but not enough ratings to save it from the can after the first season.
Yes, but at least with the series, the protagonists were, at least part of the time, exploring strange new . . . outposts of Humanity, instead of just running from (or submitting to) hopelessness.
The theatrical film ended on a rather upbeat note.
Hmm. Over a minute for an open?!?
And commercial breaks were only two minutes long....
It's a natural assumption that you thought it was bad, given that it was on your "worst" list.
No need to get testy about it.
Did you read the books (there were three of them: Logan's Run, Logan's Search, and Logan's World)?
The characters in the novel are not stuck in the city, nor is there only one city. There are numerous city-enclaves all over the world, connected by maze cars, and everyone who ever had a crystal implanted in them is subject to the laws of Last Day and Deep Sleep. It doesn't matter if a person lives in a city or has become part of a gang of Pleasure Gypsies or lives a hermit's life outside a city. If a Runner leaves a North American city to try to hide in a city in Asia, DS will still find him/her.
This is why the search for Sanctuary is so difficult in the book - there's nowhere to go - or at least that's how it is for most Runners, since most don't survive long enough to reach the final stages of the journey to Sanctuary (which is a real place).
It was Anderson's first "live action" series. Those who are acquainted with Anderson's work will note how with each successive production, the puppets are constructed with ever more realistic proportions and features. His previous series, "Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons" had reached a point where the puppets looked more like store mannequins rather than cartoon styled caricatures. The next logical step was finally employing live actors.
I'm not being testy. But I posted no "worst list". I posted a spectrum from best to worst and Voyagers! landed behind a lot of other shows that I think were better.
@Timewalker:
@Maurice put Voyagers! in the section labeled "Shows I didn't see or have forgotten but were on." "Best" and "Worst" were the labels of the endpoints of the previous list that began with Star Trek and ended with Salvage One.
@Maurice put Voyagers! in the section labeled "Shows I didn't see or have forgotten but were on." "Best" and "Worst" were the labels of the endpoints of the previous list that began with Star Trek and ended with Salvage One.
Best to worst IMO from 1965 to just before TNG, and this it each series overall, even though some started good and went bad, or, like Galactica, started okay, got bad, then slowly started finding its feet. A lot of shows were just dull, which to me puts them behind goofy stuff like Lost In Space.
Best
Worst
- Star Trek
- Blake's 7
- UFO
- Battlestar Galactica
- Space: 1999
- Land of the Giants
- Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
- Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
- Logan's Run
- Lost In Space
- Quark ...................... a funny idea unfunny in execution
- Fantastic Journey
- The Time Tunnel
- Planet of the Apes
- The Phoenix
- The Powers of Matthew Starr
- Galactica 1980
- The Starlost
- Salvage One
Shows I didn't see or have forgotten but were on:
- The Man From Atlantis
- The Invisible Man
- Time Express (1979)
- Voyagers!
- Gemini Man
Speaking of bad, anyone remember Space Rangers?
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