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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?
Blake's 7. I was in the USAF for the final 2 series. Incredible characters and stories. Horrible sets.
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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.
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
Oh wait. That'd be Heros.
Princess Ardala, Col. Wilma Deering, and little robots that want to be your best friend.
What more could any nerd boy want?
Get off my launchpad!
maybe anchor it with a hip contemporary comedian?
i'm sure it would make lots of money
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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?
Far Out Space Nuts
You know you want it.
But, seriously, I agree with others who say "Do something new".
How about some retro space opera? Lensman or Perry Rhodan? Maybe a Stainless Steel Rat series?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
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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Starwars. Episodes 1, 2 and 3 especially.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
New doesn't always mean good. There are things like the original Battlestar Galactics, where the premise had a lot of potential, but the execution was terrible. Then there are things like Babylon 5, where the setting left a huge amount of unexplored scope. There's nothing wrong with taking a good idea from a poor execution, and producing something good from it, and there's nothing wrong with expanding existing good shows (although not like B5 Crusade). There's no reason to abandon good ideas just because they aren't new or original.
That doesn't mean that original ideas are bad, and that you shouldn't create them, but some people consider the reimagined version of The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet to be one of the greatest works of English literature, so you shouldn't discount recycled ideas.
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I've said it before, but I'll say it again -- the darker re-imagined ALF would be a blockbuster (I'm seeing this version of ALF as a movie, just to be clear).
We could establish with the big effects piece: the destruction of Melmac. We could shock the audience right away by killing off Lucky. Pretty soon it's a hunted man movie -- this year's District 9 -- and away we go!
We'd do all the big character surprises, too. Willie would be a female, maybe a hard-drinkin' fighter pilot with a bit of the reckless sex streak. The nosy old lady next door could be a transvestite (very edgy). Before the first act is done, ALF is halfway across the country -- a vast break from the original series, I should add -- and has left a trail of broken lives and broken promises behind him. There would the climactic fight. Willie avenging her dead cat. Lots of dialogue -- total ripoff of Kill Bill's climax. And the final blow. ALF is dead.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
... no seriously. Slashdot needs to have a reboot with a younger cast. The cast of Slashdot had too little diversity. I'd like to see some more female leading characters... maybe a range of ages and some interesting quirky characters. The whole "Evil Bill" thing got old too. Perhaps we could make a new enemy?
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What about Sliders? Fun show, great ensemble cast, interesting concept that postulated about alternate Earths. The first couple of seasons were great, but then they changed the tone to become a lot more dark and dreary. They whacked John Rhys-Davies, added Kari Wuhrer and started ripping off various sci-fi films for plots. Cleavant Derricks's character became serious and less of a comic relief character. They started fighting an unnecessary recurring antagonist, the cro-mags. Sabrina Lloyd was written out, Jerry O'Connell got his brother on the show and then they had some weirdness about two Quinn Mallories merging or something.
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This show is a sit com in which Schrodenger's cat was explained.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bang_Theory#U.S._standard_ratings
The reason most sci-fi tanks is that it's so poorly done.
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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
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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