I gotta get a plug in for Farscape . They are going to have a 4 hour miniseries to tie up some of the loose ends and to make a package of shows that is big enough for syndication. The main reason they are doing this much is that the fans wouldn’t let it die… even going so far as to make commercials asking that it be put back on the air.
Part of the problem with Farscape was that it had a high cost of entry for the viewer. You had to get past the distractingly bad prosthetics, the floating muppet and a theme song that sounded like it was done by the same lady who did the original star trek series theme song having a bad LSD flashback. The dialogue was fast and witty and you had to watch a couple of shows to understand the dynamics between all of the characters. That’s where a good marketing department makes all the difference. Too bad they don’t have one. They also P O’d their fanbase royally with the way they handled the whole cancellation. I make it a point to no longer watch the Sci Fi Channel because they cancelled my favorite show after promising me two more seasons. I have to admit though that they make it awfully easy not to watch. Other than the Galactica mini I haven’t even been tempted to watch anything they show.
In fact it’s embarrassing just reading their lineup in the tv listings. If they think psychic frauds or The Attack of the Killer (insert animal or vegetable name here) are going to appeal to science fiction fans then they don’t know their audience. How many snake movies are there anyway?
I don’t watch that channel much anymore, but I do like some of the movies they show. My main problem with them is that there is not much variety in their schedule. Most of their movies are fairly current CGI stuff which is ok, but I also like pre-CGI movies. In fact I would prefer a guy in a bad monster suit than crappy CGI.
Also, I don’t know why they don’t have a show similar to the Joe Bob Briggs Monster Vision or USA’s Up all Night. There are so many good or interesting movies from the silent era to the 70’s that unfortunately are just ignored while they show the same stuff every few months. Unfortunately most channels seem to be in this mode, which is why I watch less and less TV these days.
> The target audience isn’t geeks, it’s people who will sit thru Boa vs. Python,
> the same kind of free spending dolts who watch crappy action movies. There
> must be some geeks in there who read Farmer and Herbert, but the higher-
> ups seem pretty indifferent to the concerns of geeks, and a geek only show
> like the one you describe would be the equivalent of setting a pile of money on
> fire and then urinating on it for them. Besides, there aren’t numbers low
> enough to describe the ratings filk concert coverage would get.
I agree. There’s nothing on the Sci-Fi Channel to appeal to real science fiction fans. (If nothing else, just consider the name of the channel. Real science fiction fans never use the term “sci fi”. Taking that as their name was pretty much blowing off all real science fiction fans from the start.) My reaction to the channel, and the reaction of many real science fiction fans, I suspect, was instant horror. “Why are they showing reruns of all these bad movies and TV shows that I didn’t want to watch the first time?” I have no idea if there’s any money to be made by appealing to real science fiction fans. Nobody has ever tried.
I call BS on that. I am a science fiction fan and I use the term “sci-fi”. I’d never describe Harlan Ellison’s stuff as sci-fi (everyone knows it is Magic Realism) but I feel free to toss that label around as I see fit.
Friday night they aired the NBC remake of Huxley’s Brave New World (Peter Gallagher & Leonard Nimoy), if I’d remembered it was airing I would have taped it, lame as it was.
If they’d aired it back-to-back with the 1981 NBC version of Brave New World (Bud Cort & Keir Dullea), I’d have certainly remembered it.
The best movie 2-pack on SciFi (when they also included Classic Horror in their schedule)- the original & remake of NOSFERATU!
I loved SciFi Buzz & Dr. Ruehl! I akways thought at the end of the show, he combed his hair, took out the buck teeth, changed his glasses & become quite dapper.
Every once in a while Sci-Fi can be good for something. I used to catch Quantum Leap reruns and the Anti-Gravity Room (has there been another show about comic books since?) back in the day, and they’ve been good for letting me see Star Trek: TOS. They also used to run a block of animated shows in the morning that included Starship Troopers: Roughnecks and Sonic Underground (not that Sonic Underground was good, mind you, I’m just a Sonic Fan).
I gave up on the channel when they started showing Field of Dreams all the time. The Hell?
That’s a controversial bit of fandom history . . . The term “sci-fi” was coined – back in the '60s, I think – by uberfanne Forrest J. Ackerman. Harlan Ellison declared war on the usage – he compared it to “the sound of crickets making love.” (I had a message-button made up special a few years back: “I [heart] copulating crickets!”) Some fans use the term “sci-fi” to refer only to what might be classed as “SF lite,” such as the Logan’s Run movie. (Which at any rate was much better than The Starlost – take that, Harlan!) But most of us regard it as a more-or-less acceptable synonym for SF.
BTW, the term “sci-fi” has been elided into the latest ultracool bit of fandom slang, “skiffy” – as in the Michael Resnick anthology, Alternate Skiffy.
Ellison hated the show. He wrote a rather lengthy account about how the “seiries” came to be. I think it was called Somehow I Don’t Think We’re In Kansas Anymore, but I don’t remember.
“Latest”? My friends and I were saying “skiffy” back in the late-1970s. Anyone who’s saying it now, owes us royalties!
Interesting to learn that I’m not a real SF fan. I should think my book-a-day SF habit as a teen might have qualified me. I guess reading those thousands of SF novels is for naught. Or the SF novel I’ve written might have qualified me.
I watch Stargate pretty regularly, but that’s about it. The rest of what they have these days doesn’t seem pitched at me. Lots of horror and big snakes. Yawn.
> The term “sci-fi” was coined – back in the '60s, I think – by uberfanne Forrest
> J. Ackerman.
It was coined by Ackerman in the '50’s. Where did you get the spelling “fanne”, incidentally? I’ve never seen that before. I’ve spent most of my adult life hanging out with other science fiction fans at conventions and clubs and the term “sci fi” is never used. It’s one of those things that marks you as a newbie to science fiction culture.
A newbie? For awhile I made a point to use it whenever I was at a L.A.S.F.S. meeting and I never saw anyone wince or shush me or correct me. Some random last names present were Pournelle, Niven, Freas, Foss…
It’s a joke. There is no controversy about it’s use unless you have not read anything more recent than a Starlog magazine from the 1970’s.
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