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Premature Rumors about Stargate Season 7?
An anonymous reader writes "While some were excited about the news of Stargate's renewal, others remained cautiously skeptical. Those is who did might be interested in reading this story posted on Zap2it." I for one hope the show keeps going. With the loss of Farscape, SG1 is possibly the best straight up sci-fi on TV- and the last show on the SciFi channel I watch.
The last show I watched regularly on the SciFi channel was Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I can never find on anymore. By the way, what happened to anime week during the summer? Or saturday morning anime? My SciFi channel viewing has gone down a lot over the past few years and no SG1 (which I only watch every now and then) would shoot it down to zero.
I'd very much like to see another Stargate movie. While the TV-series was cool, it didn't have quite the impact of the precluding movie. We've had enough same-ol-same-ol trek movies, perhaps Stargate could throw a new spin into things (hopefully without making it just a long episode).
In the case of Earth 2, they just pre-empted too many shows due to football on Sunday nights and kept moving around the timeslot. I was an avid viewer and couldn't find the show half the time. No wonder the ratings weren't what they wanted. As far as SG-1 goes, I kept Showtime for two years just for that show... and dropped it as soon as it moved over to sci-fi.
Aside from purely subjective impressions, consider this... SG-1 consistently maintains full continuity with every previous episode, so that the entire series is, in a sense, one giant story. Although it's not as carefully pre-plotted as Babylon 5, that feature makes things a lot more interesting... it's much more difficult to recycle an old plot. On the other hand, that may render the show more difficult for a newcomer to understand (you could always buy the 1st and 2nd season DVDs...).
The writers are also very, very good about keeping the science real and the technobabble to a minimum, while still keeping things entertaining. I've seen them carefully avoid just about every silly movie and TV cliche you can think of (OK, they still make things go whoosh in the vacuum of space... the only people who get that right are the guys who produce Firefly).
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
SciFi is starting to pull an MTV. They don't seem to play that much sci-fi anymore. Slasher flicks are NOT sci-fi. Hellraiser is NOT sci-fi. They seem to play more horror movies than anything else. And not just because of Halloween.
i think sci fi could redeem istelf from its lack of orginal programming by maybe showing reruns of good sci fi shows that got canned, i'm thinking earth 2, space above and beyond, sliders, hell, even seaquest(please reply with other good suggestion). they could show like 2 episodes of a series at 7, an episode of their defunct original programming at 9, farscape, sg-1, lexx, MST3K, then maybe give john a spot after prime time. theres so much more they could show besides crossing over and horror movies, which IMO are not SCI-fi at all, they could show old eps of unsolved mysteries and stuff like that, any other ideas about what they could do for non original programming thats good and actually is sci-fi?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
"With the loss of Farscape, SG1 is possibly the best straight up sci-fi on TV- and the last show on the SciFi channel I watch. "
What the frell are you smoking?
Well it seems that every channel is doing that these days:
The first problem with a Ringworld movie is the Ringworld itself. Any big-ticket Hollywood producer is going to want the Ringworld to look cool, right? After all, it's a big space ring, better make it look like a big space ring!
From space, the Ringworld would look like an astronomical object until you got close enough, at which point it would look like an infinite black wall, or like an infinite flat plain, depending on your orientation to it. From the surface, it would look just like a planet, only with an almost-invisible arch over it. It wouldn't even look cool from altitude above it; it's just too big. (There is a series of 3D renderings of the Ringworld available here. They're interesting, but they're definitely not gripping movie material.)
So any attempt to make a Ringworld movie is going to be crippled by the fact that they either have to make special effects that aren't that cool, or they have to make ones that aren't that accurate.
But-- as if that weren't enough-- the biggest problem is that the plot would pretty much have to be gutted. There's a ton of back-story in Ringworld: the Puppeteers, the Kzinti, the Man-Kzin wars, lucky Teela, invulnerable spaceship hulls, sunflowers, stasis fields, hyperdrive... it's a great book, but as a movie it would either be incomprehensible to most of the world, or include five minutes of exposition for every ten minutes of action. I mean, there's more intricate background in Ringworld than there is in The Lord of the Rings! LOTR got away with, "Once upon a time there was a bad man who made a magical ring." Ringworld would need to go into detail on-- or at least mention-- a dozen or more key ideas that are basically unrelated to each other. It would be a tough screenplay to write.
The alternative, of course, is to get rid of Niven's characters and back-story. Just get the main characters-- just humans, none of those pesky and expensive aliens-- to the Ringworld, have 'em crash, and have 'em find a way off. But that's not a particularly interesting story. It'd be difficult to make it interesting without going into some discussion of who built the Ringworld and why, and Niven's own explanation is unacceptable unless they make a Protector movie first and release it as a prequel.
I hate to say it, but I suppose I'd rather not see Ringworld on the big screen.
I write in my journal
Stargate is a syndicated piece of crap on par with Andromeda/Relic Hunter/Tracker with $50 (Canadian) production budgets.
Sure you might watch it once in a while but you would never admit it. What's wrong with you guys?
b.
the SciFi Channel? I thought it was the Stargate Channel as that is the only show on that channel. Open up the TV guide and all I see is SG-1, SG-1, SG-1, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Kinda like the misnamed History Channel. It is actually the WWII Channel as that is the only stuff they show.
I have been steadily widdling down the number of channels I actually watch since getting my satellite dish. Hundreds of channels but nothing of note to watch. I USED to watch the SG-1 Channel when it had B5 and Farscape running. Now, it's just crap (X-Files reruns don't cut it...I've seen 'em all already several times over).
It is almost to the point that it makes just as much sense to ditch the satellite and go back to my aerial with its 3 or 4 available channels. It has about as much variety as the Satellite at no cost. SciFi Channel indeed! My @ss!
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.