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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.
Lucite hardening ... must end life in classic Lorne Greene pose from "Battlestar Galactica." Best ... death ... ever!
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...
I watched that show thinking it would be laughable, but I wound up enjoying it.
Ballistic missiles over beam weapons. Mmmm.
But they have to bring back the original theme song.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Just because production is in BC doesn't mean the idea came from there. Lots of American movies are shot in BC and Toronto ("Hollywood North") lately.
Are we really so out of ideas?
You must not have seen the billboard ads for the Starsky & Hutch movie, starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.
Is the entertainment industry out of ideas? In a word... YES.
I watched the mini series and I really liked it. But what really bugged me was the stupid plot surrounding the android Number 6. The Cylons have vastly superior technology and a huge army, but to destroy the human race they create a sexy blonde android that seduces our best programmer. Sheesh. Almost made me stop watching there and then.
READY.
#
I enjoyed Galactica as a kid (yeah, I'm old now), and am looking forward to this new series.
Where, however, is the "buzz" over cool new ideas yet unseen? Many people buzz over remakes of old ideas, but are they done any better?
Star Wars lumbers on with dialogue-ridden prequels (and yet unseen postquels), Gilligan's Island is probably in production for the silver screen by now, I-Spy has been dubiously remade.
Firefly was/is a cool idea and at least got an airing. Star Trek is still a cool franchise, but has been pretty commodotized.
Where's the new, cool stuff.
I'm not a huge Anime fan, but Cowboy Bepop seems pretty cool to me. If there aren't new ideas, why not bring this one from one format to another?
Still; Where's the cool, new stuff?
"The new series will begin a few days after the miniseries that aired a few months back."
That would either qualify this as OLD news, or
one of the most tortured sentences I've seen in a while....
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
More likely, it was some senior exec in Hollyweird deciding that he didn't have to spend millions of extra dollars shooting in the USA just because Ahhhnold was now The Governator. The fact that B.C. has the best marijuana in the world and is relatively unencumbered by the lunacy of the U.S. war on drugs probably had nothing to do with it...
Besides, when Canadian producers want to mine the 80's for remake potential we end up with less grass and more Degrassi...
Are we really so out of ideas?
You're just noticing that now?
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.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
> Can Sci-Fi show nudity? I know they can in the UK, but what about the more repressive US channel?
In the USA, Congress is more worried about a glimpse of a tit than they are about ongoing wars in the Near East.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Has anyone seen any info on when the Sci-fi channel will be releasing thier mini-series on DVD?
To be honest I had serious reservations about them bringing this one back. However, once I actually sat down and watched it I was blown away. Personally I think they hit a homerun with the pilot and can't wait to watch the new series. They did so many thing right IMO: the Sci-Fi wasn't so much "Fi" as I thought they'd throw at a show of this type. For example: Ballistic weapons, somewhat realistic space flight (thrusters), and the cinematic zooms all help add some realism to the space scenes.
On top of all that they nailed the human side of the story. Family ties, personal relationships, etc all played a huge role in the pilot (perhaps even more so than in the original series). For me, this is the element that makes the show so good.
My only fear is that they change the characters or take away from the dynamics of what they were building.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
I have always had a soft spot for "Wagon Train in Space"... and look forward to someone doing something with this highly popular short lived series. I could care less about the lack of beam weapons, or stupid mechanical dog. Give me exploration off the map, cultrual satire, and a cigar smoking hot shot piolt. If you must do that pan and zoom style for battle sequences... so be it.
Battlestar Galactica was, and always will be pulp fiction for the masses, where demographical studies were paramount! I'm looking forward to being exploited.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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.
They are getting into nostalgica - right ?
There just was a movie made from the german series "Raumpatroullie Orion" - here a fan site (I don't know the english series name), where all of the seven episodes were assembled to a movie, completed by new filmed "News Show" (still in B/W)
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
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.)
I really liked the pilot (miniseries my ash). As scifi goes, it was pretty damn good, despite the gaping holes. The ones like how the cylons have all those special communication abilities and glow-in-the-dark spinal cords when they are indistinguishable from us "down to our blood".
Also Starbuck is incredibly annoying and ugly to boot. As much as I liked the pilot, I don't know if I could stand watching her so much. They really should have left her as a man. Or, if they are going to leave her female, at least they could go all the way and make her a lesbian. Or better yet kill her off early in the show. Now that would be a 24-like kind of surprise.
OTOH, I could watch the hot Asian "Boomer" all day long. I really like her face. I like Trisha's performance. She's very intense. I like that she's just a virtual person.
So what's good about the show? The eerie, almost spooky feeling of floating in space alone, forever, with everyone else in your entire species, your whole civilization just gone. I thought they were pretty successful at pulling off those kinds of subtle feelings. The blade runner-esque music certainly helps with this.
It is kind of Blade Runner meets Terminator (I wonder if it was pitched that way), but both were classic SciFi movies, the more mature and powerful of the two being Blade Runner of course. Makes me wonder if Edward J. Olmos will end up being a Cylon in the end. It seems apparent to me that the director was really moved by Blade Runner, by the whole kind of world created in that film.
To question the difference between humans and intelligent machines, of which is which, to see our own machines become so succesfull as organisms that they destroy us.
These are wonderful ideas to explore. No they are not completely original anymore. But, as long as the miniseries retains its own unique feel and is not blatantly imitative with its storylines there is a great deal of potential here.
I like the idea of machines coming to worship their own emotions (like "love"). A lot could be done with this material. That's for sure.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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.
The new series will begin a few days after the miniseries that aired a few months back
Now THAT is Sci-Fi... Giving the green light NOW and have it begin a few months back...
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.
Near as I'm aware, cable stations don't have to conform to the same set of standards that broadcast stations do. For example, the writers for South Park were shocked to find out there was really no issue saying SHIT on C.Central. I think it's just a choice so they don't offend anyone rather then a clear cut rule. Heaven forbid that a kid might see a 1/2 nakid woman... but not a problem with senceless violence... or just senceless like pokeman. Personaly I think a 1/2 woman is less offencive... well depending. Public access nudes are not a problem, in fact i've seen live sex on public access, or at least a handjob.
I'm not up on the current FCC rules, why PBS can show 1/2 nakid women like in Unwed Lesbian Indians for Nuclear Engery, and how the system has broadcast rules have changed since the 1980s.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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?
The problem is that totally unimaginative people are holding the purse-strings. They don't want to gamble on something they haven't seen before. They want to sell something they know has already sold once before.
That's why you don't get big budget "new" movies, you get sequel after sequel of The Matrix 6, Charlies Angles 3, Scooby Doo 2, etc., and the crap just gets churned out, but they know they can market it because the auideince for that crap is pre-existing.
Lord of the Rings was such a fluke because there's no way that should have gotten done, or done as well as it was, via the Hollywood system. Because Hollywood crushes creativity, it eschews original thought, and it despises anything it can't reference as something else.
When you're committing millions of dollars before even a frame of film is shot, the boardroom people want to be comfortable about it by knowing it's really something they can already relate to. That's why Gene Roddenbury had to "sell" Star Trek as "Wagon Train to the Stars", and couch it in relation to a Western, which was the TV staple of the 60's.
Unless you can make your "new idea" seem like *exactly* something everyone has seen before, you'll never get funding for your production. You've got a better chance of winning the lottery and self-producing it.
And that, my friend, is why there's only crap on TV and Movies. Because Hollywood hates "new ideas".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Showing nudity or a pair of boobs is OK, as long as there is a bullet wound between them.
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.
I was really impressed with the quality of the mini-series, and how it stayed true to the original without just being a straight remake. It makes me wonder, though, if its easier to make a new series when there's only 22 original episodes to follow, as opposed to the 4 series and couple of hundred episodes that result in a follow up like Enterprise, where continuity is raped on a regular basis. Mr. Moore can probably keep 'em all in his head.
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
I just bought the original series, all 24 epsidoes (not 22 like the article says!) and I'm loving every minute! Not only do they go through all the normal rigmarole of launching etc, but they deal with problems like humans would, rather than like other programmes would (like suddenly finding the obvious answer, like why not use antiflasmagron drive...) and so it's always been a favourite. Hopefully, when the new series comes to the UK, it's not on Sky(^H^Hhite) and instead either Ch4 or the BBC get it. Here's to the new series being any good!
...shouldn't it be "New Battlestar Galactica Series Greenlit?"
from all the negative press the show got before and after airing i had some pretty low expectations, but couldn't check it out for myself until it played in canada. frankly, while i grew up at just the right age to adore the original and forgive it's shortcomings, the remake far outstripped the old one by a long mile. the combat sequences were shot in a handheld style that i loved in attack of the clones and loved just as much here. the story itself was pretty solid, but with a few, ahem, issues. i did find the religious byline a bit curious, a little unexpected in it's heavyhandedness. the show seems to have a decent cast so far, with probably a few tweaks sometime soon. if i had one suggestion for the series though is that it goes back to the planet and follows up with what's left, from a tempoary survivor view. the handheld style might enhance the impact a little and the religion could be played hard. anyway, interesting schtuff.
While it does hit some formulaic parts, Andromeda, is a pretty good sci-fi series, especially when compared to a lot of the swill out there.
The setup: Hunt, commander of a high guard star ship, one of the most powerful in the Commonwealth screws up and gets to close to a black hole. A few hundred years (500?) later, thanks to an event that took place hundreds of years ago, his ship finally breaks free of the pull of the black hole and he emerges into a universe where the Commonwealth no longer exists anymore. Hunt who is completely lost decides, with a rag tag group who was trying to salvage his ship, to rebuild the Commonwealth. So along they go traveling all over the universe breaking the occasional law of physics but never to the point of completely insulting you repeatedly in each episode.
The best part overall, Commander Hunt, much like the first great space commander (Kirk), sees it as his duty to hit lots of alien booty.
--- I do not moderate.
I figured the 13th episode would be the "lost" one.
I'll admit it, I watched the original series back in the 80s, and I liked it. It's no excuse that I was a kid at the time, I should have known better. It was crap and I liked it. I also liked Buck Rogers, which was an even bigger load of crap. I was so starved for science fiction entertainment I religiously watched what the tv execs threw out at us.
So I watched this latest version of Battlestar Galactica, and you know what? I liked it. I really should know better...
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Actually what is truly disgusting is that they replaced Farscape with "Treamors The Series", that is totally unfathomable.
As I've said before, Yes the fourth season was bad but in my book they really pulled it out the last six episodes which were fabulous.. my personal favorite was "We're So Screwed: LaBomba"
As so many have lamented, the people running the Sci Fi channel know nothing about science fiction.
New series greenlighted. New nouns verbed. Here's Tom with the weather!
Facts and FiguresLists, tables, and other amazingly organized data.
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.
There's nothing stupid about it at all. It's called a covert operation. It was done during the Cold War all the time. Someone is seduced into giving away the crown jewels. Yes, people in real life have done that.
--- Ban humanity.
Dude, I'm really sorry, but your taste is in your ass. The acting was fantastic. Mary McDonnell's performance alone was worthy of an Emmy nomination.
And, when you write things like, "It wasn't true enough to the original, I saw several technical inconstancies," we must all collectively reply, "Don't be such a freakin' geek."
Have they changed Starbuck's name to avoid and law suits?
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Where else would you film a show with a character named Starbuck but in Vancouver. There has to be about a thousand Starbucks in Downtown alone. (I've never been to Seattle but I can't imagine they have more Starbucks then Vancouver.)
I call hooey on you. You can't make a feature-length mainstream in Vancouver without relying heavily on IATSE local 891. They're just too useful.
No, every Amurrican producer/director I've talked to about working in Canada describes the experience as dominated by working with extremely skilled and unassuming crews and actors (the phrase that keeps coming up is that they don't have the 'sense of entitlement' that crews in LA do).
The Hollywood North thing isn't about union-busting so much as about exchange rate and financial incentives, great locations, and really good resources when it comes to crew, facilities, and post.
California Bud's pretty legendary too, so I don't think it's that... uh,
Damn those pesky terrorists
What's even worse, they choose this over buying the rights to and producing Firefly.
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.
Not only can we speak English in Canada, we can even spell personnel. You're of English descent... learn the language!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
First of all, I can't see how anyone could have honestly modded this as off topic.
Second, God I hope so! The biggest difference to me between the SciFi channel series and the original is that I really want to see Starbuck naked in this one.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score