Howyadoin, This thread got me thing about a sci-fi pilot that aired after the Super Bowl one year. The network (NBC maybe?) was promoting this thing like crazy during the game, so I, being the good little consumer I am, hung around to watch it. It was hideous! It was some space-ark kinda thing with some of the cheeziest acting I’ve ever seen, physics bloopers you could pilot an Imperial Star Destroyer through, etc. I never saw the show hit the regular network schedule, and I can understand why.
I’m trying to find information on this POS, for reasons I really don’t understand… I thought the title was something like “Mayflower2” or something, or maybe that was just the name of the space-ark?
Arrgghhhh…
-Rav
P.S. This isn’t Earth 2 I’m talking about, that show premiered in November. This was definitely a post-Super Bowl premiere (and finale).
the synopsis reminds me vaguely of what I’ve heard of ‘the starlost’ (possibly the crappiest piece of sci-fi to make it to television, by reputation, I’ve never seen it myself.) But that was back in the 70s or something, and you’d probably have mentioned if it was that old.
I doubt this is it, but there was a telemovie called “Earth Star Voyager” about 15 years ago that had some of the ingredients you’ve mentioned, though I don’t recall it being all that bad.
Quick hijack: I also used to love Jason of Star Command which was very closely related to Space Academy. My queerness was evident at a young age when I had a crush on, not the Han Solo-like Jason – no!, but on Nicole! swoon
I totally loved both Space Academy and Jason the Ark II show was also cool at that age.
Oh, I know it was a spinoff, but they also seemed to be more closely related than a lot of spinoffs. Granted I was really young when the shows were on, but I thought of them as being less independent of each other than say… All in the Family and The Jeffersons.
I don’t recall any crossovers happening but as a wee tyke there was no doubt in my mind that JOSC and SA where like two plots of some bigger “Star Command” show. I kind of thought of them as one big show split in two.
JOSC was a secret section of SA, and Jason and the gang would have to conduct their operations without the folks at SA figuring out what was going on. Of course, even as a little kid, I realized that this didn’t make a whole helluvalotta sense while watching an episode where JOSC pissed off some villian who promptly sent SA hurtling towards the sun, yet the folks at SA didn’t notice. How the hell do you explain that? (Well, they didn’t, but you know what I mean.) 'Cause, you know, like the entire front of the asteroid half of the asteroid had started to melt, but nobody noticed.
That show was hilarious. All the crewmembers sat in little consoles that had computer keyboards in front of them. The whole show you heard tick-tick-tak… as the crewmembers typed furiously to contol and navigate the ship.
If it’s recent, I remember watching a really bad pilot for a series a couple years ago. The Clean People of the world were living in walled cities with force fields over them that kept out the mutating effects of some post-holocaustic radiation. The Unclean People lived outside.
The Clean People sent out an away team in a big ATV to look for… something… and ended up finding the sister of the leader of the away team, who had been lost outside years before…
Everybody wore amulets around their necks. Since they were in a controlled ecology, they had to keep the kids down to a minimum. Their amulets were like matchmaking services–they only lit up when they were near their perfect match.
Was this show about a bunch of teenagers joining some kind of space academy to fight an alien invasion of Earth? A pale imitation of Starship Troopers? Came out in the mid-nineties? I remember laughing because they used modern vehicles (like a schoolbus) and listened to contemporary rock and roll, despite being set several centuries in the future.
Well, it was 15 years ago. I suspect that all sci-fi shows and films that project a “distant” future are going to look pretty ridiculous in the decades to come. I really doubt that even a hundred years from now we’ll still be using some form of TV screens and push button controls–technology will have advanced to allow a better interface between people and equipment. “Star Trek” in all of its incarnations is laughable for its depiction of the human population onboard starships–Asians already make up 60-65 percent of Earth’s population, for instance, yet if you watch “Star Trek,” you get the impression that a united Earth will some day resemble the United States, circa 1960. The funny thing is that the original show seemed to do a better job in this regard than the newer ones. Of course, all of these “predictions” of the future are less the result of futurist thinking and more the result of contemporary marketing, just something to fill in the gaps between the commercials.
BTW, check out “Fahrenheit 451,” the film. Some of the concepts–flat screen TVs, modular furniture, mod fashion–seem pretty accurate to today’s lifestyle.
I used to pass by Dean Jefferies’ car lot every day on my way to work, nothing reminds you that you’re living in Hollywood more than to see the Landmaster, the Green Hornet’s Black Beauty and the car from Logan’s Run TV show just sitting there in a parking lot behind some chain-link fence.
I seem to recall *Strange New World * being in proximity to a superbowl. However, since I was eight years old at the time, my recollection could be off.