What I’m thinking of is some movies or TV shows where the acting and the writing is awesome - but it was made many years ago, or made on a small budget, arguably too small to really depict the subject matter of the production (but could not be done today because you could not get the same iconic actors to play the roles, and if remade, a modern director would probably screw it up).
An example of this sort of thing is I, Claudius. A truly amazing set of actors, a wonderful script - but they simply didn’t have the cash to really depict ancient Rome.
Another would be the Sharpe series. Sean Bean just owns the role - but the effort of depicting Napoleonic battles with ten extras does tend to show.
I’m going out on a limb and saying Game of Thrones. It had a big budget for TV but not big enough to accurately show a lot of the action. Did a decent job of having some of the battle happen off stage. I have no idea how they are going to keep doing that. There are a lot more battles to come. I hope they just don’t talk about them.
Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995): He was a monster created from the Oxygen Destroyer, which extracts oxygen from water. It was also the one device that actually killed Godzilla. In the 1954 original movie, it pretty much dissolved Godzilla.
Destoroyah and Godzilla finally meet, and you’re thinking “How does Godzilla get out of this one?” Easy. Have Destoroyah not actually destroy any oxygen. His breath ray staggers and knocks down Godzilla, but doesn’t dissolve any skin or deprive him of oxygen.
Two reasons: 1) you’d have a very short movie if Destoroyah really had that power. And 2) it was beyond Toho’s $11 million budget to show kaiju skin dissolving. In 1995, photo-realistic CGI was fairly new, and they simply couldn’t have Jurassic Park style production values.
It’s kind of hard not to view every TV show from before my generation this way but I can think of a few examples…
Buffy comes to mind immediately, mostly in the early seasons. My after-the-fact mentality insists camp was a part of the early seasons, but as much as I love watching it there are some laughable-ass moments in those first three seasons.
The original Star Trek was and continues to be pretty memorable despite the pitiful special effects.
And the wonderfully cheesy British sci-fi “Blake’s 7” was pretty cool tv despite awful special effects.
(yeah I know neither Re in a league with I, Claudius)
A Midnight Clear was not super low-budget but for a war movie, it hardly shows any big-effects battles or scenes. That’s not really the focus, so it’s not until you think about it that you realize how little is shown of the war around them.
I mention it all the time on the Dope, but Primer is IMO an amazing, detailed, engaging film with a complicated, thought-provoking science fiction plot, yet it has absolutely no special effects and was made for US$7000.
I also loved The Man From Earth, another SF movie with no special effects and a budget of only US$200,000.
Doctor Who, I think I’ll give you. I don’t think any producer of the show ever said “We couldn’t possibly achieve that on our budget” without following it immediately with “Fuck it, we’ll try it anyway.”
I, Claudius, though, no. That was something that we seem to have lost, to some extent: television as television. Not a stage production, not a big budget motion picture, but a televised drama. This isn’t television as a poor relation of film, this is TV drama as an artform in its own right. The style may have fallen out of fashion, but its faults aren’t due to a lack of budget.
