Yeah, B7 didn’t start showing in the Chicago area until the late '80s.
Darn, now I want to look for V again!
In addition to a35362’s cast summary, I remembered something else that bugged me: the young-hunk turncoat human. Dark, curly hair, apparently smitten with the alien-babe leader chick, he’s shown as selling out humanity.
In the section I watched, he’s patrolling some sort of party, and he catches a rebel spy, an older woman posing as a housekeeper. The whole “agony of deciding to kill her” (in a stairwell, telling her to freeze, but she ignores him) couldn’t have been more broadly overplayed. And leading up to that point, he’s the most arrogant, sneering bastard imaginable. I kept expecting him to run out and get a mustache so he could twist the ends.
I’m rather pleasantly surprised that I’m not alone in my feelings about this show. I felt violated by my own memories: what happened to this program between then and now to suck all the coolness out of it? Besides me growing up. Couldn’t be that. Nah.
And you guys who actually still like it? Please report to the conversion chamber, where we will bombard you with slow-motion pictures of giant snakes until you change your mind. 
V was da bomb when you’re six! a few years ago i read about a proposed sequal mini-series, where the aliens return, Willie is killed as a traitor, Marc Singor has been sent to the Alien homeworld in chains, and baseships are sitting over world cities again. The humans call for help from some aliens that are enemies of the Visitors, but the Visitors attack, and Ironside’s character dies, but destroys the mothership above LA with his death. then the other aliens arrive, who turn out to be more lizards. I can’t remember much more. (it was in Starlog or one of the other sci-fi mags that i read in the bookstore when i was in highschool)
I still think that it is cool cheesey sci-fi.
I don’t have it on tape, but I have both miniseries on DVD. The cheesy dialogue, the bad acting, paper-thin plot points. I love it.
After the miniseries when I was a kid, I doodled so much “V” crap, it was astounding. And I dreamed of them releasing the action figures that Josh and Sean played with in the first series. And Julie Parrish…sigh! What better crush for a 13-year-old kid than a blonde hotty who kicks alien ass. Mrowr.
Of course, I bought every badly written follow-up novel afterwards…
Aguecheek: At least you didn’t commit suicide by driving your motorcycle off a bridge when they cancelled V: The Series.
Hmmm…I vaguely remember bits of V. My very religious folks frowned on the show and therefore I only got sneaks at the set.
Two scenes I (think I) remeber:
-Man/lizard eating a mouse. I remember seeing him hold it above his open mouth and watching as his throat expanded as he swallow the mouse.
-Man/lizard getting his arm sprayed with liquid nitrogen. He spun around and struck and object causing his arm to “snap off”.
Am I remembering either of those scenes accurately?
WHAT?!
Yep - very accurately, actually. The mouse thing happened when Donovan snuck onto the LA ship and into the ventilation shafts. The other happened at the manufacturing plant/refinery operated by the husband of Donovan’s mother (was his name Arthur?) - that’s where one of the visitors saved Caleb (future resistance fighter and father of two of them (one died early in the miniseries).
And there was a lizard birth - Robin had twins, Elizabeth and the lizard one, who died from the germ that killed the visitors. That one came crawling out from the drapes on the surgery table on it’s own.
Even as a child I found it odd that she couldn’t have an abortion because the baby wouldn’t let them kill it, but they could do a c-section and slice into the abdomen and uterus with no problem once it was time for the baby to be born.
I have only vague memories of this show, but the most vivid is the childbirth. I remember one was a lizard baby and they all freaked out, but then the 2nd one looked normal and they were all relieved…until it stuck out it’s lizard tongue! Queue the dramatic music, run the credits. Did I remember that right?
Damn. I have such a desire to chuckle knowingly or roll my eyeballs at some people’s extremes on this one, but I can’t. I’m gonna have to cave on this and admit that all you’re gonna get from me is a “Ha! Yeah! …uuuhhh whaddyamean?”
Pray enlighten me - this sounds juicy!
Baker says:
Don’t forget that there was another female lizard in conflict with Diana. I forget her name but she was a blonde woman with a British accent. I’m pretty sure she poisoned Charles. Diana found out and took pretty nasty revenge upon her. The blonde lizard lady was put into Charles coffin and the coffin was shot off into space. The last shot you see of her is screaming her head off, lying next to a lizard skeleton.
Uh, I’m not really a nerd for remembering this detail, am I?
No, you’re not a nerd. Not anymore than I am for remembering the commercials for the wedding episode, billing it as a “royal wedding”. I mean, come ON, we got the joke!
You remembered it almost right. You got the order backwards. First the normal-looking baby with the forked tongue was born, then the lizard baby crawled out from under the birthing drapes to the tune of dramatic end-music.
When the TV series Battlestar Galactica was cancelled, 15-year-old Eddie Seidel Jr. of St. Paul, Minnesota, really did ride away from home on his motorbike and commit suicide by jumping off a bridge.
Now that’s dedication!
With all due respect, if that suicide story is true, and I’m not being whooshed, I don’t find it in the least amusing. Call me stodgy, but a smiley and a joke about a kid who killed himself is
not funny.
A story I heard during an interview with the actor who played Dr. Green on ER:
The makeup guy on V later got a job on ER, and while they were shooting a particular episode where a woman goes into labor, delivers her baby, but then bleeds out and dies, things . . . well, things were a little depressing, and they were having trouble getting the take they wanted. So, the makeup guy called Dr. Green over and explained that he wanted to play a practical joke with a prop he had left over from his V days. Dr. Green agreed to help out, and on the next take, when the doc is supposed to deliver the woman’s baby, he instead pulled out the green alien lizard baby. Doc then screamed shrilly, threw the alien baby at the nurse, who screamed even more shrilly, and the entire cast lost it.
But they got the scene right on the next take.
Call me insane…but I also taped the entire series when it first ran back in the '80’s…the entire miniseries (both times it aired) and the entire 1-season run of the TV show.
I am, to this day, dismayed at how the final episode played out. I was young and new to the cliffhanging ways of the television world.
Kyle (the motorcycle dude) fell in love with Elizabeth (the alien-baby). Anway…Elizabeth is supposed to be used as some sort of an ambassador to the Visitors’ supreme leader back at their home planet. At the end of the episode, she boards one of those cool Alien shuttles (one of the reason I loved the show so much…the cool shuttles and the cool laser pistols). However, the final scene of the movie has Kyle turn up missing (as if he has boarded the ship with Elizabeth).
Sounds pretty cheesey now…but I still look at it as an unfinished story. However, these days I find myself wondering how they were going to make the next episode interesting more than I wonder about what is going to happen to Kyle and Elizabeth.
I also love the way the got rid of one of the most popular actors in the show (the guy who played Martin) only to return him later in the season (as Phillip…the new supreme leader after Charles died).
I also remember the scene where Daniel shot his grandmother (housekeeper? neighbor?) in the back. Elizabeth’s father was named Brian. He was the Red Dust’s second victim. Ironically, Robyn was the one who poisoned him after she had discovered what he was by seeing her babies. William was the name of the character played by Robert Englund…he was the geeky alien and, ironically, a vegetarian. Jon was the original supreme leader on the show. I especially love the way the high school band is playing the theme to Star Wars when the aliens first arrive. I also love the bright orange suits…orange happens to be my favorite color.
And, yes…I have watched the miniseries recently. Unfortunately, the TV series was lost years ago.
Oh lordy.
Well. Now I can definitely roll my eyeballs at some people’s extremes. Thanks for the info.
No, I think the most I did when they cancelled the show was pout for about 10 minutes. “Man, why the hell did they have to cancel such a kickass show like that? Now there’s nothing ooo! Knight Rider’s on!”
Yes. Yes, it is.
HAH! I call “wrongo” on you and zap you with my Star Trek disc gun.
The blonde was Lydia, played by June Chadwick. In the episode you (badly) describe, Diana was married to Charles and were presented with matching ceremonial bowls. The bride’s bowl was poisoned but at the last moment (in a contrived random plot twist for which V was well-known) Diana breached etiquette and gave the bride bowl to Charles. He drank and keeled.
The woman sent off in the space coffin with Charles’s body was a patsy convicted of the murder on faked evidence.