At my sister’s, taking advantage of Pluto TV’s Stargate channel. I have heterofore only caught it many years ago in bits and pieces (the channel is currently in the middle of Season 9).
Now, don’t get me wrong, it can be suspenseful and a fun roller coaster ride, and can be enjoyable on that level. It certainly has constructed a pretty vast intricately interlocking menagerie of races and personalities, and is at its best when going for an intrigue-style puzzle-style storyline.
But as an original Trekker it almost completely lacks that franchise’s exploration of deeper themes. It is basically skiffy action-adventure–very well-done on that level, avoiding the camp or cheese of lesser works for the most part, but typically nothing more. I keep waiting for those deeper Aesops or a Kirk Summation at the end or such, but never get it; the writers simply were never interested in going there.
I agree totally about Combat! The scripts seemed to be recycled from cliched cop shows. Also, the liberation of France took less than four months in reality, but the series for five years showed Americans, and occasionally the British, fighting Germans with hapless French civilians looking on.
I rewatched MASH last year, the one that has been HD remastered into 16:9 ratio (It was amazing how that was enough to make it feel contemporary, as its period setting does a decent job of avoiding feeling dated).
And aside from the often intrusive laugh track, it was a good watch. Looking at it with adult eyes, so many of the events that happen take on a different light, not just in comparison to modern times, but via my more rounded comprehension of what the show was actually about.
Also the oft-complained about sappiness, or heavy-handed agenda, or whatever it is that people grumble about, is not that bad, and as it’s a show about a stupid unnecessary war (and a commentary on Vietnam) I forgive it having a strong opinion on that.
I went to a Trek convention in Plano, Texas circa 1998 and Leonard Nimoy was there. “The episodes that were good thirty years ago are still good today. The episodes that were bad thirty years ago are still bad today.” I agreed with him then and I still think he was correct.
Over the last few years I watched a few classic science fiction movies.
Blade Runner from 1982 is still a good movie. The visuals of a bleak future cityscape is still stunning, the story is compelling, and the actors did a great job.
Alien from 1979 still holds up and is a movie I can talk about at lengths with no preparation. The visuals are amazing, the actors are believable in their roles, and the producers didn’t feel the need to treat the audience as if they were idiots. i.e. They trusted us to get it instead of spoon feeding us information like “Why did the Company send a bunch of truckers to do this?”
That’s really interesting, because I feel almost totally a mirror image of that. I rewatched a number of the Marx Brothers movies lately and was just reveling in the pacing of the dialogue. I could literally just listen to Groucho talk circles around the supporting cast for hours, especially the stuff from Animal Crackers. The musical numbers are always a terrible drag, but if I’m alone I’ll fast forward through most of those. I adore His Girl Friday though…one of my top five comedies of all time, I’m sure.
I gave Laugh In a try…it was on one of the free services you get when you buy a Roku, and barely made it through an episode. Unbearable and confusing. Get Smart has its great moments, and I loved it as a kid (it was on in reruns when I was six or so), but there’s a certain stiffness about it that I find really alienating. (“A clip-clop sound?”). I started with episode one and the opening scene is Max, at a public phone, loudly enunciating his name, code number and the name of the secret agency for which he works…I know it was a fantasy and a comedy, but that yanked me right out of caring what happened to him.
Diff’rent strokes…I’m finding this thread fascinating in terms of everyone’s tastes.
Yeah I’d say it’s held up way better than the sequel. They are both good movies. But Aliens is a good but somewhat cheesy 80s sci-fi action pic. Alien is a great movie that could have been made this year. The whole thing about Aliens being the only sequel other than Godfather that is better than the original has not stood the test of time IMO
I just rewatched that on a plane a month ago, and it was great.
Dog Day Afternoon hasn’t aged a bit – even the gracious, understanding way the cops treat the cross-dressing character seems more 2023 than (say) 2018.
Yes! My then-ten-year-old kid enjoyed it, just a couple years ago. The only problem was he was expecting the chest-bursting scene (unlike the actors, when they filmed it!), so he actually laughed.
I’d disagree with this. Not only do I think Aliens holds up, I still think it’s better than the original.
Alien, to me, still has too many logical lapses and things that take me out of the movie. Even though it has its own problems, I much prefer Jerome Bixby’s It! The Terror from Beyond Soacw
I have to agree with Mr. Meacham; I even like the director’s cut even though it’s mostly additional hardware displays.
It! The Terror From Beyond Space just popped up on my YouTube feed this afternoon. Yay! Guess where I’m going to be tomorrow afternoon while my wife is out for a couple hours?
A couple of years ago, I showed my wife the infamous turkey episode from WKRP In Cincinnati which led to us watching the first couple of seasons. It held up well and the clunkers weren’t really time-based just clunkers (Carlson’s kid, for instance… bleah)
Ten years or so ago, we watched the first season of St. Elsewhere (all that was available) and she enjoyed it. She was working at a Chicago south side hospital at the time and said it still really captured the vibe despite the difference in years.
I rewatched the first couple of seasons of Newhart within the last year and still enjoyed it.
For a failed attempt, there’s been a couple points in the last twenty years where I think “I’ll watch Clerks again” and can’t get past the 30% point before turning it off. I was, like pretty much everyone else, in love with it when it came out but just find it plodding now.
I agree with you on Aliens holding up. While I think Alien is the better movie, I can’t fault anyone for preferring Aliens both because it’s a great movie on its own and it’s so very different from the first. I’d rather geek out with someone about how awesome Aliens is than debate whether it’s better than Alien.
I’m going to go with The Thing, also from 1982, which is one of the best science fiction horror movies out there. I watched it a few years ago and the movie holds up remarkably well. The gross out special effects didn’t have the same affect on me when I first saw it when I was six (my parents didn’t love me) but the plot, acting, pacing, etc., etc. were great.
And for a weird one, I’m going with the animated series Robotech which made its debut in the United States in 1984. I don’t feel like explaining the convoluted history of the series as it was adapted for American television, but basically a bunch of pilots in airplanes that can transform into robots fight off an alien invasion. A few years back the series was on Netflix and I gave it a watch for the first time since the mid 1990s. It was a bit cheesy, but it held up a lot better than many of the cartoons from my youth.
Way back when I was in 4th grade, I used to run home after school every day so I could make it there in time to watch a complete episode of The Thunder Cats. I. Loved. That. Show. Cartoon Network aired the original series back in 1999 and I decided to give it a watch just for fun. I could not make it past the first episode I tried to watch. The episode did feature the Ro-Bear Berbils who have the most annoying voices possible, but I was surprised by just how vapid and stupid the show really was. No wonder my mother hated it so much.
Each time some 80s cartoon gets remade and people lose their shit about “ruining their childhood” because now it’s in an anime style or someone is a different race/gender, etc I think “Have you people actually watched that cartoon since 1986? It was shit! Sure, it was fine when you were 9 years old and hopped up on Capri-Sun but it wasn’t actually good.”
Once I came to accept in my heart that many of the cartoons I loved were simply 22 minute advertisements for toys I stopped caring about remakes or changes. Not that I cared that much to begin with.
I think Terminator 2 still holds up but just barely. The CGI for the T-1000 does look a little cartoonish by today’s standards - see for example when the T-1000’s liquid metal powers are revealed for the first time. But I really love and appreciate that this was filmed back in the day where when you wanted a big explosion you actually went and blew something up. When Cyberdyne explodes you can feel it in a way that never comes through with CGI explosions. I wonder how Cameron got his hands on that nuke.
The Fifth Element is more enjoyable to me today than when I first saw it. The only thing that really stands out is the animation for the stones at the end which looks very cartoonish.
I have been a big Star Trek fan since I was a kid but I had never seen TOS. I started watching The Cage and got about ten minutes in before deciding I couldn’t take it any longer. I also remember cringing hard in the theater when watching Star Trek: Nemesis as the Romulans mwa-ha-ha’d in a very human sort of way. I remember thinking “I hope this is not somebody’s introduction to Star Trek!”
Alien is a horror movie, but does a creditable job of obscuring that. Aliens is an action movie and wears that on its sleeve. But both are elevated above those genres, by quite a margin, from being directed by distinctive talents.
The scene that struck me as most unrealistic was when he was doing something goofy in the backyard. The neighbor gets involved, and the next thing you know he’s got a crowd of spectators around him. That just couldn’t happen in any suburb I’ve ever been in. The population density is wrong for it.
I always enjoy the lasting legacy of Robotech is the rights holders are desperately holding on to this very second trying to get a “Robotech Cinematic Universe” made because they still think people care about Robotech and not the animes that it was spliced from.
Disney Plus is getting ALL the Macross animes EXCEPT the original because of this, which is a shame.