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New Battlestar Galactica Series Greenlighted
Trunks writes "A few days ago the Sci Fi Channel officially announced a 13 episode season for Ronald Moore's Battlestar Galactica remake. Looks like they'll be bringing back most of the cast members, including Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell. The new series will begin a few days after the miniseries that aired a few months back. Production commences next month in Vancouver, B.C." This had been speculated previously, and the rumors are indeed true.
I live in Vancouver
where are they shooting the movie?
side note: A lot of X-Files eps were shot in Simon Fraser University. The central university building is Academic Quadrangle, name after its quadrangular shape. Whenever the X-Files team needs a shot of the pentagon, they just "cheat" their way out by shooting a section of AQ...
There sure were a lot of drumbeats in the pilot episodes, although we caught strains of it during the ceremony.
I surmise that they may get their own music once the go-ahead is on. It might take a little while to get some decent music unless they prepare well in advance; Stargate hobbled along with snippets of the original movie's music in a not-quite-audio-balanced form for a while until they managed to work in new arrangements more suited to a TV series :)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
Has anyone seen any info on when the Sci-fi channel will be releasing thier mini-series on DVD?
Lets see - Every single character is a total stereotypes. We have a tough as nails, always in trouble ace pilot, a father and son who don't talk anymore, an acerbic commander who doesn't take stick from anyone, and a cowardly scientist who refuses to take responsibility for his actions (Did they get mixed up and think it was a Lost in Space revival?).
Then they take out the few bits that were remotely imaginative from the original series. Rather than having an ancient society with their own political structure, they have a carbon copy of the US political system. All the ancient Egyptian styling has been axed, and the Galactica is simply way too new. Galactica was 500 years old in the original series. It made it seem like it was worth caring about.
Finally, we have the actual script. It's not enough just to throw in random emotive scenes. Yes, they have to leave some people behind. Yes, it's a tragedy. But come-on; three times!?. Talk about rubbing it in. And even though we're meant to believe that it's such a disaster, people make these life or death decisions with hardly a flicker of anxiety.
I think the real driver behind all the remakes is available bandwidth. The number of channels available on a modern direct-broadcast satellite system is astounding! The programmers (in the TV sense of the word) just can't generate enough content or come up with enough new ideas.
There's a glut of video bnadwidth, viewers get spread thin, advertising dollars per channel plummets -- thus we have remakes, re-runs, and 'reality' shows ad nauseum.
(BTW: I thought the miniseries was pretty good! Especially compared to the campy original.)
Excellent!
The Sci-Fi Channel had the guts to air Lexx as well as a host of other ventures. I have caught my co-workers on many a time watching Outer Limits or Twilight Zone.
Has much less commercials than TNT. (Anybody been through the painfull IGEA pore sucker commercial?)
I wish these guys well, and I think they are on course so far.
That's good news. I liked the cylons, they looked more realistic than other robots of that era. Their 'by your command' was impressive. At least they used some kind of voice encoder device to make it sound real, as opposed to actors trying to talk metallic in other series.
When I first watched this, taped to my VCR, I was not impressed. However I later downloaded a bittorrent of it, captured from satellite or similar, and after watching it a few times where I could back up and such I found I enjoyed many aspects of it.
Watching it without the commercials really improved it. Anyone else find otherwise decent programs on Sci-Fi ruined by the deluge of commercials?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Being in the Pacific Northwest, I notice alot of the filming that goes on here. Unfortunatly they have moved to Vancover. From my understanding it's because they will let you get away with alot of shit (see Jackie Chan). I don't know this for a fact, but that's the rumor.
By filming in Canada, the production companies don't have to pay union rates to the hordes of support personal required to make the films. This out sourcing significantly brings down costs, while still providing a location with white, English-speaking extras and close proximity to the US, to accommodate "name" US actors.
The X-Files, for example, was mostly filmed in Canada, with US filming limited to some "location" shots of recognizable landmarks.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Remember, the Cylons won because the humans basically couldn't shoot back. Hell yeah you have superior power when you've sent in a spy to obtain access to the defense mainframe and figure out how to turn off all of your enemy's defensive/offensive capabilities.
There are two main ways to get a programmer's attention. Sexy blond works and the other is really awesome hardware. Hell, I'm not a dog like he was and I'd probably have fallen for the andriod, which is a whole different dimension. Then would come the difficult choice of living with the android you live or mankind... Baltar could have been a tragic romantic figure if they had tried that.
The problem with giving the programmer access to really advanced hardware is it's a bit difficult to explain, even if you say it's a prototype. Um, where did I get this 2 billion Ghz machine? Well, um....
This is spot on. It reminds me of a quote from Ben Elton in his book 'This Other Eden' where he describes Hollywood as "The place where ideas went to die".
Television is slightly better, but only because some production companies are still willing to gamble the relatively small amounts it takes to make a pilot or even a one-off show.
Sometimes the sequels can be done very well, for example I personally consider Rocky II to be the best of that series, although after that they should have stopped. Others, although not as good as the first, can still be well written and entertaining (Toy Story 2 was pretty good). Others they should have stopped after the first movie instead of turning the story into a joke. (I keep telling myself that "there is no sequel")
But some more originality on the big screen would be nice.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Near East
Is that, like, Long Island?
But seriously... Congress is concerned over the Jackson incident because laws they passed establishing guidelines for the content using the airwaves owned by the public were ignored. It's correct for them to be concerned. Since it is likely that the incident was pre-meditated by at least one MTV producer and Jackson herself to create a pocket-lining "buzz," it's correct for Congress to be more than a little bit annoyed as well.
Sci-Fi Channel is on cable. The restrictions relating to the public airwaves do not apply to them. However, they are smart enough to realize that the demographic for a Battlestar Galactica revival is not the same as "Queer as Folk" or "The Sopranos" and will most certainly produce it no harder than a PG. The perception is that the "adults" won't be watching it and that the "kids" won't be allowed to watch it if it contained nudity.
Well, she made a great covert operative. It's actually, in a strange way, realistic, as epsionage agencies regularly resort to sex as a means of obtaining access to sensitive data.
:)
I'm a programmer. Can a sexy blonde android seduce me?