I guess the old TV series Voyagers! must be selling reasonably well on DVD — either that, or studio execs are running out of product to release and still have a bunch of blank discs they want to burn — because the rumor mill says two more obscurities from the early ’80s, Salvage 1 and Tales of the Gold Monkey, may be coming next year. Of the two, I’d say Gold Monkey is more likely, if for no other reason than the opportunity to ride the coattails of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and maybe make a few more bucks than this series would on its own. For me, it’s also the more desirable of these two possibilities. (If you’ll recall, I wrote about Gold Monkey a while back; I always loved that show.)

As for Salvage 1, I remember watching it and can easily recall the basic premise — a post-Mayberry, pre-Matlock Andy Griffith builds a backyard rocket ship so he can go to the Moon and retrieve all the equipment left behind by the Apollo astronauts — but the details have gotten pretty hazy. I didn’t realize this show had enough of a fan base to support a DVD release, but I could be wrong.

The way things are going, I guess everything will become available for us crazy collector-types one of these days…

From this guy via this guy:

 

A good way to make fun of someone who loves the new, super-serious remake of Battlestar Galactica: tell them the show inherently makes no logical sense to you without Muffit, the robot dog. Sci-fi fans are so pissy and serious these days they become infuriated at the mention of anything cute.

Next time I’m called upon to defend my love of the old Battlestar and my utter indifference to the new one (which seems to happen fairly often, sadly enough), I’m going to give this strategy a try. If nothing else, it should be fun to watch those smug Neo-G fans splutter incoherently for a little while…

(Incidentally, if you decide to backtrack to the source of that quote, be warned that SamuraiFrog can get a little… off-color… at times. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

I was surprised and amused recently to learn that Galactica 1980 — the abortive first effort to revive the Battlestar Galactica franchise, years before anyone ever heard of that Ron Moore fellow — is coming to DVD. I was less amused when I got a look at the cover art and saw that some marketing genius somewhere has tagged the show as “The Original Battlestar Galactica‘s Final Season.”

Come on, guys… hasn’t the reputation of the original Galactica suffered enough in recent years? G80 was a spin-off of the original show, not another season, and I don’t know of any fans of Classic BG who consider it to be “official” in any way. Mostly, we try to forget it ever happened. Saying that it’s part of the original series is like claiming that you haven’t seen every episode of M*A*S*H until you’ve seen AfterM*A*S*H, too. Or, as my buddy Dave put it when I IM’d him with this news:

Talk about spin in order to sell more DVDs. Let’s face it, if they called it, “A really crap show that has almost no connection to the original series, and is so low budget they couldn’t afford Cylon costumes, but it’s cool if you’re a fan of Cousin Oliver,” I don’t think many people would buy it.

Yeah, that about says it all…

This is getting into some very tall grass on the Plains of Geekiness, but I can’t help it… I love this cheez-ball stuff:
The Bad Astronomer reminds us that today, September 13, would have been the eighth anniversary of the Moon blasting out of Earth orbit if the premise of Space: 1999 had come true.

(If you don’t remember it — and not a lot of people do — Space: 1999 was a TV series back in the early ’70s. It begins with a nuclear explosion — a superimposed title informs us that the date is September 13, 1999 — that sends the Moon hurtling into deep space, carrying with it the 300 or so inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, who then proceed to have various far-out adventures every week. Whoever was writing the show had a weaker grasp of basic science than my inbred, semi-feral pet cat, as common-sense things like the immense distance between star systems were routinely ignored — not to mention the fact that Alpha apparently had an inexhaustible supply of its Eagle shuttlecraft, considering that one or two got wrecked every week — but what the show lacked in sense, it made up for in style. The aforementioned Eagle, for instance, is still one of the coolest-looking spaceship designs ever put on film, in my humble opinion.)

It’s strange, sometimes, being a science fiction fan in the 21st century; as all these iconic dates for made-up events that never occurred recede into the distance, it’s hard not to feel an odd twinge of disappointment, of loss for what might have been. For instance, NASA did not launch the last of America’s deep-space probes in 1987 with Captain William “Buck” Rogers at the controls… there were no Eugenics Wars in the mid-1990s that ended with a group of genetic “supermen” stealing an advanced DY-100 spacecraft and slipping away from Earth (that’s a good thing, actually)… and the spaceship Discovery did not explore Jupiter and the secret of the black monoliths in 2001. The result is that our fictional worlds are now harder to believe in, if only for an hour or two’s viewing time, and the real world just isn’t as cool as we grew up thinking it would be. Consider, for example, the fact that we never see anything like this anywhere but our imaginations:

Sigh.

Image source.

One of the charges that is frequently leveled at George Lucas by his detractors is that he cares only about expanding his already considerable (i.e., unbelievably immense) fortune. I’ve never believed that one, myself. Whatever his faults, however inscrutable his motivations, greed simply cannot be among them. If it were, he’d be a lot smarter about what he’s trying to sell to his fans.

No, this isn’t another rant about Uncle George’s stubborn refusal to put out a decent DVD release of the pre-Special Edition Star Wars, although that is a good example of what I’m talking about, because you know he’d sell those by the truckload if he’d just relax a little.

I’m actually talking about the upcoming DVD release of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles… or, as the series has been retitled, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. (I told you he’d change the name, didn’t I?)

Continue Reading…

Speaking of remakes, I’ve run across a potentially interesting LiveJournal that, aside from one entry on the new Flash Gordon series, seems to be predicated around a defense of the original Battlestar Galactica and a denunciation of the “reimagined” version that’s attracted so much love the last couple years. So far, Countess Baltar (as the LJ author is calling herself) hasn’t made an argument in her own words, preferring instead to let carefully selected quotations from Ron Moore, Glen Larson, and various literary critics make her points for her. It’s an interesting approach, although I would like to hear more from the Countess herself as to what, specifically, she dislikes about the remake.

Despite giving the new series a grudging thumbs-up after seeing a few episodes, I have to admit that I’ve never warmed to it, and indeed I’ve never watched more than just those first few installments. I can’t deny that the series appeared to be well-made and intelligent, but it simply didn’t appeal to me. It wasn’t my Battlestar, and those weren’t my Apollo, Starbuck, and Adama. The reimagined versions of those characters may have shared the same names as characters played by Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Lorne Greene — well, sort of, since these exotic monikers have been turned into “call signs” in the new show, rather than actual names — but there was very little else about them I found familiar.
Whatever Countess Baltar’s specific gripes — and I look forward to finding out more about those — I certainly echo her concise statement of opinion in the “about me” sidebar:

Battlestar Galactica (1978)?:
Yes
Battlestar Galactica (2003)?:
No
Starbuck (male)?:
Yes
Starbuck (female)?:
No
Baltar, Count?:
Yes
Baltar, Gaius?:
Hell, no!

Well, the Sci Fi Channel’s new Flash Gordon series premiered over the weekend. I didn’t see it myself — I don’t have cable, because I’m too cheap to pay a monthly fee for another hundred channels of The Same Old Crap™ just so I can catch the occasional novelty — but from what I’m finding on the web this morning, I gather it wasn’t good. One fellow is even calling for a “jihad against the Sci Fi Channel” before it can “reimagine” any other older properties. (Someone should’ve thought of that following the crappy Dune miniseries a few years ago — arg! It still burns!)

I’m reserving final judgment on the show until I manage to see it for myself, but based on what I’ve been reading, I think it’s pretty unlikely I’ll approve of it any more than anyone I linked above. I can’t say I’m surprised, given the Sci Fi Channel’s spotty record and poor reputation among its target audience, but I am disappointed. While I tend to oppose remakes in general, I think Flash Gordon is a hero that can (and perhaps should) be revived and reinterpreted for each new generation, just as Batman and Superman have been revisited many times; as the premiere has inched closer, I’ve honestly been looking forward to a 21st Century take on what’s been called “the original space adventure.”

Continue Reading…