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What SciFi Should Get the Reboot Treatment Next?
Not long ago Wired ran their own list of which SciFi (not SyFy!) shows were in need of another go 'round in this era of the reboot. Well, it looks like many fans had their own opinions resulting in another list of reboots including everything from Firefly (please?) to The Outer Limits. Which SciFi stories could use the breath of life, and which ones might actually succeed it getting it?
Reboot should get a Reboot!
That was a great cartoon.
Maybe C.O.P.S too! Fighting crime in a future time!
What part of Firefly do you think needed a reboot? The whole point of these reboots is to drop the decades of cruft that have dogged down a series and made it impossible to create anything new thanks to all of the baggage. Firefly has a (too) short lived TV run and a movie. There's not really any baggage to drop.
The only thing I'd change is the dumbass execs that cancelled it before its time.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'd rather see the nice old b&w Twilight Zones, grainy old BSG, the 1 or 2 seasons of Firefly, than ALL NEW DISNEY PIXAR TWILIGHT ZONE 3D ON ICE !!eleventy!!!
Lets get some NEW stuff - the enjoyment from the show should come from the plot/characters/message rather than the latest special effects or rehashes of To Serve Man.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Because the original set of sequels did so much damage to the original (awesome) films, that a series reboot could go nowhere but up.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
How about none? There's a million* SF ideas out there that have never gone much beyond the printed word. Why do we have to keep rebooting old franchises? How about turning the Vorkosigan saga into a miniseries? Or something by Cory Doctorow or Charlie Stross, if you want to be a little more up-to-the-minute? How about a miniseries based on Hyperion, or A Deepness in the Sky?
Or even just forget about things that have already been written -- commission Doctorow or Stross (or someone) to create a TV miniseries based on new SF material.
* Not precisely 1 million.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Well this got a reboot in the 80s with the movie, maybe a re-reboot is in order?
There are too many sci-fi stories out there that need to hit the screen before we get reboots of old ones. Where is? Ender's Game, Antares Dawn, Startide Rising, Fire in the Deep, Armor?
I'd love to see Ender's Game in 3d. "The enemy's gate is down..." and our orientation would switch appropriately....
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
The original was prophetic in more ways than I can count, and groundbreaking in many ways while being entertaining. I would love to see what they'd come up with this time.
I'd love to see that done with darker, grittier feel.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Would make for a couple of life injections.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The mind boggles: We are reading an article about another article about which TV Shows should be re-done. Is there not one self-respecting Creator of Original Stuff left? Is this why Young People Today are so angry about the length of copyright?
You are seriously "just making a childhood memory better than it really was". I watched it through a few months ago. Honestly it is best left in your treasured childhood memories. For me, Star Trek the Animated Series wins hands down as worst piece of crap that I liked when I was a kid.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
A canadian animation that took place initially inside of a game console, although the second series also included the internet. A bit like Tron, but with a richer world inside the computer hardware.
Bob the guardian, his girlfriend Dot and the great villains Megabyte and Hexadecimal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBoot
Actually it looks like they are reviving it already, so -asked and answered as they say.
-I'm just sayin'
That and un-kill Wash and Sheppard Book.
Oh, and get rid of the whole Miranda bullshit. The people who ply the lanes of space would neither "overlook" nor "forget" an entire main planet over the course of less than 20 years. Nor could such a thing be hidden as, outer-most or not, it would show up on everybody's orbital computations as a huge perturbation in their plots. Let alone one ten-year-old with binoculars.
Oh yea, and drop that whole "all the planets orbiting one sun" nonsense since it isn't workable. Miranda would have been frozen ice-ball _or_ the "inner planets" would be molten slag.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the show. The movie needs to be declared out-of-cannon before the series would be workable.
I could have come up with a better "reason for the reavers" in my sleep. The original one from the series (mental erosion from facing the emptiness of space etc) was good enough. Hell, the movie contradicted the series directly. If the Pax caused reaverdom, the the episode where the one guy got tortured and became a reaver himself woudln't have worked unless the reavers carry a supply of the otherwise secret Pax around and deliberately pre-expose potential recruits to it before deciding who to kill, rape, and eat (in that order, if you're really lucky).
So yea, it needs a reboot.
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My thought too. A great premise, good script writing, terrible acting and terrible sets. Blake's 7 with some decent actors and a budget would be great. As long as they don't try to make them into 'good guys'. The great thing about Blake's 7 was that, from a certain perspective, it was about a bunch of terrorists and thieves. From another, it was about a bunch of heroic rebels. Most of the time, the truth was somewhere between the two.
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Starwars. Episodes 1, 2 and 3 especially.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Isn't it just a split timeline in the multiverse? That's how I see it. The original continuity exists but a few Planck distances away... I generally don't like time travel stories, but I have to admit using it to reboot a series *was* sort of an interesting idea. I just wish the villain had more reasoned motivations.
Used to race home from school to watch this. I wanted them to fire the wave motion gun in every episode. :-)
http://www.starblazers.com
There are no more Original Ideas, there are only rehashes of existing ideas, set in places nobody has imagined before.
This is why I liked Avatar. The plot was a rehash of a couple other movies, done on some alien world.
Of course, the geeks who didn't like the movie because it was "too spiritual" or failed on some Physics law or whatever, entirely miss the point.
Avatar did for me in my mid 40's what Star Wars did for me in my teens, it was awesome spectacle to watch. And looking at StarWars today, it seems kind of cheesy, and the plot was, as many have already mentioned, a rehash of other works, just set in an alien "galaxy".
If you want original, stop watching movies, you'll only be disappointed.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Do it right this time; the world is ready for power armor.
Do it for the Lieutenant!
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
The actors who played Avon, Vila and Blake were great actors, the rest were mediocre. Orac and Zen were also acted superbly for being machines. Oh and you cannot forget Servelan. She played hot sexy strong in a way I haven't seen yet the only person come close was the visitor leader in V the new series.
The thing is most of the crew needs to be made up with criminals both political prisoners and otherwise. They need not be acted like they are feral animals, the original show did a good job at that, they need the "Violent Offender with Neurochip suppression" otherwise known as Gan. The team needs to be made up of a group of amoral people led by a complete Idealist (Blake). Of course in the original series when Blake left, he took their morals with it and it become a power play between all of the amoralistic bastards left in the crew, save Cally and Dayna. Though season 3 and 4 were fun as well!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The Stainless Steel Rat could be a lot of fun.
I imagine most of you have never seen this excellent British SF Series but you should. Despite those elements which date it horribly, it was still far far ahead of its time. This was my favorite show as a kid without doubt and in many ways its still an excellent show and aged well. It deserves a reboot if anything does.
However, it needs to be redone by the British, not Americans, or at least a co-production. Letting American writers and producers loose with it would ruin the show I think - it had an air of understatement that American TV shows and Audiences seem unable to maintain. A US production would be totally over the top and I think that would be a mistake.
By far the best show in the entire list - and amazingly ignored in all the comments I read.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The whole "Evil Bill" thing got old too. Perhaps we could make a new enemy?
You're right. Hating Microsoft is like hating the Ottoman Empire or Prussia today. They're irrelevant. The real threat today is Larry and Sergie.
> Originally, robin Hood stole, but did it with style.
> The whole protect the poor thing is probably a disney thing.
I have read several Robin Hood books from the early 19th Century and the "robs from the rich and gives to the poor" trope was firmly established then. Disney is not responsible for EVERY non-cynical idea in the world.
Personally, I just assumed that it was obvious, tactically, just as it was later obvious to Mao in the Little Red Book. If you pay back some of your take to help the "poor" or disenfranchised (aka peasantry, in Mao), they cover for you against those who only take (landlords or their agents)(even if you only pay a few pennies of the pounds that you take). This idea also occurred to the Medellin and Cali Cartels in Columbia.
You mean Farscape?
Had they stuck with the Trek story, and had the Temporal Integrity Commission go back and set things right, again, great movie.
No, that would have been awful, because it would have meant we're stuck with the forty years of canon that has been bogging the series down so badly. The series was toppling under its own weight, but trekkies wouldn't let go of a single scrap of that history. Such that their opinion of any Star Trek media is based almost entirely on how well it sticks to that history to a tee. Ugh.
Splitting off the timeline, freeing the series from that history while simultaneously respecting it, was the best thing that could have happened to Trek. And if doing that means going against Trek's standard temporal theory where time is linear and the Time Cops come around and "fix" it whenever someone mucks with it, then so be it. Actually, expunging that piece of Trek canon was in and of itself a great move by itself. Because when your sci-fi series shares the same theory of time travel as a Van Damme movie, that's a hint that your theory is dumb.
Thank God JJ Abrams came along and saved the series from the Trekkies.
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