Not too long ago I watched a TV series where people woke up in another world. Mark Twain was one of these people. They fought some sort of medieval magical bad guy and they were all somehow manipulated by these otherworldly type people, so that, when the star of the show was “killed” by the bad guy, these otherwordly types just put him right back in the action.
Please tell me I did not hallucinate this show.
Riverworld. “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” From the books by Phillip Jose Farmer.
Ha ha! Thanks!
Now I can tell my husband that, although I may be crazy, it ain’t because I hallucinated whole TV shows out of whole cloth.
But wait, maybe I am crazy. This wiki entry says it was one (or two) movies and not a short-lived series. Did the movie air in more than one part? Did I miss the end of the movie? Or did the movie end with the star being returned to Riverworld?
What bought this up is that Hubby is watching a movie with the guy who played Jesus Christ in that Mel Gibson movie about Jesus getting the living shit kicked out of him. Only in this movie he isn’t Jesus but some space traveler who crashes his spaceship with an evil alien in it amongst the Vikings. Until hubby explained that Jesus was a spaceman I thought this was Riverworld revisited.
I told you that maybe I was crazy.
In 2003 the Skiffy Channel showed a pilot for a Riverworld series, but the series didn’t get picked up. In 2010 they made a telemovie based on the same.
And it sounds like your husband is watching the Sci-Fi channel as well; they tend to go completely nuts during the summer, with any kind of weird monster/space alien/goofy movie they can shoot for cheap.
I gotta say that the whole Riverworld concept strikes me as being as close to hell as makes no never mind.
The first two books actually aren’t too bad. After that Phil starts losing it, but the initial concepts are interesting.
That’s Outlander, and it’s pretty outland-ish.
I didn’t care much for Riverworld when I read it a young man and the SciFi channel’s version didn’t do anything to change my opinion about it. I swear I remember an earlier television version of it but I can’t find any mention of it on IMDb.
I don’t know a lot about Farmer but what little I remember reading about him back in the '70s was weird. He seemed to be obsessed with other author’s characters. If I’m not mistaken, at one point he wrote a book as Kilgore Trout and that he had his name legally changed so that Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t stop him. (I’m pretty sure the first part of that last sentence is correct but the second part may just be my neurons misfiring.)
Indeed. It’s a good concept (dragon myths originate from visiting extraterrestrial monsters) slightly ruined by being formulaic, and going on a bit too long.
It is. Farmer got permission from Vonnegut to use the pseudonym.
There were some disappointments in the Riverworld boos. But, overall, I loved them. They are of course massively superior to the SF channel movies.