I always remember watching the The Langoliers and even then the CGI effects weren’t that great in 1995, given the budget.
However, the story was actually very solid and the acting good, and rather than reboot it, I wonder if they actually do the effects correctly relatively cheap on the original movie.
Even if not, I do wonder if any others could go that way…
I’ve thought this about SO many movies… but of course, I’m blanking out on my mental list right no…oh! The Last Starfighter! Such fun, especially with Robert Preston… “Welcome to Rylos, m’boy!”
Just a few tweaks to the special effects and it’d “hold up”… at least as classic '80s not-too-serious sci-fi.
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Thanks, Smid, The Langoliers is perfect example of *Should’ve updated the FX before it was aired! I’m betting it was a case of ‘It’s not a real movie, it’s just TV. And not even a show, it’s a mini-series. And it’s Stephen King, and for some reason he never gets a good adaptation…’
In its day, Babylon Five’s SFX were as good as we were going to get on a TV show’s budget. Today, people love to complain about them. Perhaps we should update the effects, just to get people to stop whining.
The Dune and Children of Dune miniseries on Scifi were really great, actually. Kind of accurate to the book(especially the first one).
The second one, which covered the second and third books, are great and where I first met James McAvoy. My wife and I still call him “Leto II” sometimes when we see him.
This is a great answer. They committed to CGI in 1992 or so and their minimal budget could not render much very well except for the B5 station itself. I think updating them would really show how great a show it is.
My wife and I watched in 2003-2004 and my wife already thought those S1 and S2 effects were atrocious.
The B5 fx isn’t really what I was thinking here. I can see the advances between every season, but it doesn’t really detract from the plotline. I think they got redid for the remaster too, so better than they were. Weirdly DS9’s effects, which were of the same time, have not dated as much. But there’s no loss with these. If they updated them, I’d barely notice the difference.
Although I’m not generally a big fan of “fixing” effects we now think of as substandard, there are a few cases that I think looked sub-par even when the films came out. So, like Ray Harryhausen colorizing Merian C. Cooper’s She (because the film was originally supposed to be a color film, but had its funding yanked at the last minute), I have no problem with these:
The Ten Commandments – Don’t touch most of the effects – they’re gorgeous, and not only “for their time”. The Angel of Death wouldn’t be improved by CGI, and the impressive multi-layer matting that produced the Parting of the Red Sea is still great, even if we’re so jaded now that we see the flaws.
But the cartoony animation of the Pillar of Fire and the Finger of the Lord up on Mt. Sinai doesn’t fit in with the rest of the film’s look. Even in 1956 it looked like a cartoon. Replace it with CGI-rendered flame.
Also, the bane of matte effects is the fluttering of small objects and of water droplets. You can see that some of the shots in The African Queen are effects shots because the water drops glow green. Similarly, when the Egyptian signals with a flag during the Raising of the Obelisk during the Construction of the Treasure City scene, you get annoying color separation and the flag abruptly vanishing. Fix it with CGI, and no one will even notice that you did it. But Effects are generally supposed to not be noticed, unless they’re spectacular.
The Hunt for Red October – It was early days for CGI, and they certainly hadn’t nailed down keeping things from looking non-cartoony and making things have proper shadows and not appearing to glow. Re-do every underwater CGI effect, because they look terrible. And did when the film came out. And, while you’re at it, fix the shots of Alex Baldwin and Sean Connery talking on the conning tower at the end as they move down the river – the background is bleeding through.
The Last Starfighter – I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s a groundbreaking CGI movie. The renders I’ve seen of some still frames – where they took a lot of computing time and power – look photographically real. But they evidently didn’t have enough computing time to do the film that way, because none of the effects looks even close to real. The live-action portions and the makeup effects are still good, but it would be interesting to see how the film would look with mature CGI effects. (The filmmakers sent George Lucas a test reel, showing X-wing fighters done using their system. Lucas passed, and used model effects for Return of the Jedi, which looked very good. Years later he used CGI for his films, but only after the technology was sufficiently mature.)
They weren’t redone apparently (there’s another thread about the B5 reboot where this is discussed at length).
And at the time of the first couple of seasons, they were sort of a weird mix of surprisingly good for TV (ship models, lighting, other not-so-dynamic stuff) and laughably bad (explosions, jump gates, etc…) CGI effects. They got noticeably better as the seasons went on; IIRC the season 4 effects were not at all bad by the standards of the day. Still, even the bad effects were pretty good considering that Foundation Digital / Netter Digital were basically figuring it out as they went, breaking new ground the whole time. The first seasons were done in the early 1990s; considering the level of computing power available at the time for this sort of thing, they were amazing. The big problem is that CGI wasn’t quite mature at the time.
After reviewing some old B5 footage on YouTube, I think half of the problem was more artistic style related- too many scenes have brightly lit nebulae and dust clouds and what-not; the backgrounds are too much, especially in comparison to shows like the Star Trek series and more modern ones like “The Expanse”. That, and a lot of shots have a LOT of visible detail. I’m suspecting that modern CGI software renders details differently, and that detail may be on the model, but not always visible, or not visible in the same way as they were on B5- things just seemed to have too much texture or something, and I’m not talking about the super-crisp CGI look.
The big thing with the difference between DS9 and B5 effects was that DS9 still primarily used models and practical effects for the majority of its effects and its run. CGI was only sporadically used, and mostly for parts of scenes, not entire scenes.
I went and rewatched the old version of The Stand after the new one came out. In some ways it was superior but the FX really did not age well. They were pretty bad for the time and even worse now. A nice CGI touch up would be welcome.
The old Gary Sinise/Molly Ringwald/Rob Lowe one?
I honestly don’t remember any CGI effects in that one, except at the very end (the hand) and even that wasn’t all that bad relative to the other effects that were done on the cheap (bad masks/prosthetics, matte paintings, etc…)
I don’t know if it’s considered CGI but there are some really back FX. Like when Flagg transforms into a crow or devil face. There aren’t a lot of them but when it happens it is really jarring.
Those are the bad masks/prosthetics I was talking about! They were godawful.
Yeah, some of the effects were very much of the time, probably a wonder when watching them, but not now.
However, there’s not enough of them to ruin the series, and the improved effects of the one last year did not make up for it being nearly unwatchable (I would have binned it myself if I hadn’t seen the original and knew the story, the original kept me bolted in my seat for six hours, I was “meh” when the remake came on).
Not just the prosthetics but the effect used for the transitions.
I think the budget was pretty small. The effects were not a wonder for the time either.
The old one as a whole does not stand up as well as I had hoped. There are good, bad and awful things with both versions.
I don’t recall them being uniquely bad when I saw it when it came on TV back in 1994. Maybe nothing impressive, but certainly not so bad that they were worth commenting on.
What gets me when looking at it on YouTube is that 1990s filming style; it’s almost soft-focus or something. It’s both not crisp, and weirdly illuminated at the same time. Babylon 5 had some of it as well.