Re-watching Star Blazers on DVD, I thought that it would make an excellent live-action remake.
Then I realized it would end up being exactly like BSG. Rats.
I’m still surprised no one has done a remake of The Prisoner. Such a great premise—guy trapped in a sinister but innocuous ideal suburbia from which he cannot escape (Wisteria Lane-style?), in which a different guest star plays Number Two every single week. Imagine the chain of actors you could have rolling through that!
Seconded. I recently finished watching the series on DVD, and it held up remarkably well… although I found myself annoyed with Cannell’s little tricks to extend the running time, and I’m amazed that as a kid I never noticed how much they recycled effects. Oh, and The Greatest American Heroine was simply wretched.
Wasn’t Earth: Final Conflict pretty much that?
As a counter to that, everyone else I know that has seen the pilot (I myself have not) said it’s horrendous and will be lucky to last the season.
So we’ll just see.
I’ve also seen the pilot which is easily available online if you know where to look.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s horrendous, it’s really, really, umm, not good. Yes, they do try to update and de-campify the original but it’s only partly successful. The biggest problem is that the lead couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. This leads to some real laughable line readings which completely negate the intended sense of gravitas.
Live action Robotech: Macross. Star Wars meets Transformers with more attractive young stars (including the obligatory girly pop star). Transforming robot battles, aliens, relationship dramas, shocking deaths, and more. They have the technology for the SFX, and the human angle (with the right casting) could rope in a young female demographic that tends to elude sci-fi properties.
Hodge and Push, thanks for the different point of view. Like you said, we’ll have to wait and see.
Ooh, I would love to see an update to V. The old one scared me to death as a kid, but renting it recently it really hasn’t stood up to the test of time very well.
I’ve been hoping that they could do for Buck Rogers what they did for Battlestar Galactica. As a friend of mine pointed out, Ben Browder has made a career out of playing basically that character. Let’s let him do it for real. But after Flash Gordon, I’m less sanguine that TV has learned any lessons for keeps.
I’d also like to see them re-do Firefly, this time for a whole season at least. I think that would add a lot.
John Carter would be a great idea for at least one reaon – it’s cold on Mars, but people wear a lot less clothing. That will at least help it reach out beyond the traditional sci-fi audience.
E:FC, at least the first season, was a fascinating examination of how Earth would respond to an apparently benevolent alien presence. Large numbers of people embraced the taelons, significant numbers of people didn’t, and the protagonist was someone who wasn’t sure one way or the other.
Then they killed off the interesting protagonist and re-tooled the show to remove any moral ambiguity of the Taelons. I started losing interest and the last I remember there was another alien race and alternate dimensions and the whole thing was an enormous mess. I’m still sad about the downturn of a great show.
Y’know there’s a whole lot that could be done with an updated Bionic show. You could get into some really meaty issues…posthumanism, how the bionic replacements are “improvements” but the character has lost part of their humanity forever, and so on. I mean, in the original shows the bionic replacements were superior in every way to regular body parts, with NO DOWNSIDE. Except what if the bionic limbs were realistic? Like, a bionic hand doesn’t provide normal sensation, even if you’ve got a sensation of “feel” it won’t feel normal in the same way the hearing restored by present-day cochlear implants don’t compare to normal hearing. Even after the addition of bionic limbs, the character still deals with chronic pain and other chronic medical problems. A bionic arm might be strong, but it is anchored to human flesh and bone, even if the arm could lift a ton you would rip your bionic arm out of its socket if you try to lift a car. Since the bionic limbs are prototypes, you could focus a lot more on the “pit crew”, instead of one saintly inventor who is always right you’ve got a giant team of engineers who all have their own ideas and goals and can just barely keep everything working.
As the original show was presented, there seemed no good reason why people shouldn’t volunteer to have all their limbs amputated and replaced with bionic limbs. Bionic limbs were in all ways superior. And it would just cost $6,000,000. That’s not so much.
Horny nerds isn’t the traditional sci-fi audience?
But who will star in the new Wonder Woman when they get around to it?
I know who they *should * cast as Wonder Woman- Morena Baccarin. Granted, she’s not tall or, well, amazonian… but I think she could pull it off, and she’s got the exotic look down pat.
A retooled version of Lost In Space might work - done as originally intended with a darker, more serious tone, and pitting the ‘space family Robinson’ and their unwilling ally Dr. Smith against serious threats - not ‘carrot-head people.’
Or alternately, the short-run 1980s series Otherworld might be given a second chance. It had an interesting premise, but never got off the ground.
Not true, at least not on “The Bionic Woman.” She had great difficulty initially, including IIRC almost rejecting her bionic parts. She also had psychological conflict over her bionics and her role as an agent. She wasn’t a military person like Steve Austin was, she was a tennis pro with no interest in “serving her country.” There were at least a few episodes that dealt with her “draftee” status.
They did deal with this at least in the novelization of the Bigfoot episode (that I got from the Scholastic Book Club along with my Dynamite magazines). The book talked about how Austin’s body had structural reinforcements beyond the limbs. Still probably not enough to account for the lifting a car business (but on the other hand, non-bionic people can lift cars and pull buses for Strongman competitions).
For the 1970s?
Not likely even to be considered now that Joss is off the project. And it’s an open question whether she’s a good enough actress.
I wish they’d made the Wonder Woman movie a few years ago, so they could have cast Charisma Carpenter. Now, she’s too old.
A moma’s boy? Is that a New York modern art aficionado?
Oh I disagree. They sometimes play the entire miniseries (V and V the Final Battle) on Showtime or HBO or whatever and it’s still pretty good (except the ending which always sucked).
Other than Buck Rogers, I’m about all out of Sci-Fi shows.
The Amber series by Roger Zelazny would make an incredible SF soap opera – because it IS a soap opera, with two incredibly extended monarchic families: the Courts of Chaos and the Court of Amber – vying for control of reality itself. It would absolutely ROCK, and the special effects budget cuold be really cheap.
But for the series to be any good, the writing would have to be topnotch and there’s the rub …