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?

Comments

Blakes 7

[WED Fan]

Blake's 7. I was in the USAF for the final 2 series. Incredible characters and stories. Horrible sets.

Re:Blakes 7

[Botched]

Vila: "Where are all the good guys?" Blake: "You may be looking at them." Avon: "What a depressing thought." And the best ending a show could ask for!

Re:Blakes 7

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Blakes 7

[jameskojiro]

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!

Re:Blakes 7

[dwye]

> 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.

Reboot should get a Reboot!

[SirDrinksAlot]

Reboot should get a Reboot!

That was a great cartoon.

Maybe C.O.P.S too! Fighting crime in a future time!

Why Firefly?

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Why Firefly?

[LoyalOpposition]

The part that needs to be eliminated in the reboot is the movie. I want to see a series that includes Wash and Sheppard Book.

-Loyal

Re:Why Firefly?

[RealErmine]

The part that needs to be eliminated in the reboot is the movie. I want to see a series that includes Wash and Sheppard Book.

Maybe some things in the movie didn't fit the way they should have, but I don't think that the death of Wash and Book are among these. Were they likable characters? Yes. Are you supposed to be sad that they died? Yes.

Firefly is primarily a story about Mal and his journey. At the beginning of the series he is battle-hardened and stoic while being burdened with Brown Coats' loss to the Core Planets. He is very much a closed-off person and the only glimpses we see of his humanity are his feelings for the ship and a strange sense of loyalty to his crew. He never gives any further explanation to why he protects them other than that they are his crew. There is a common theme throughout the series dealing with the stalled relationship between Mal and Inara due mainly to Mal's inability to open himself emotionally.

The events of the movie bring Mal's humanity back. The uncovering of the atrocities performed by the Core Planets government gives Mal a sense of purpose outside what we saw in the series which was to simply stay alive and flying. The deaths of Wash and Book uncover the real reason that Mal was so protective of his crew and this is alluded to in the last lines of the movie. Mal explains to River that the secret to captaining a ship is love. He protected his crew because he loved them and he is finally able to admit it, but it cost the lives of two good friends for him to realize it. Just previous to this scene Mal expresses to Inara that he would like it if she stayed on the ship, a tacit admission of his feelings for her.

If you don't like the movie because two good characters died, then you are selling the writing short. They died for a reason so that the main protagonist can undergo a change in character. If you felt sad that they died then the writers did their job of good writing.

Re:Why Firefly?

[ElectricTurtle]

That's Vancouver, BC, thank you very much.

Re:Why Firefly?

[Grishnakh]

I don't think the solar system in Firefly is very plausible.

It's not, but neither is FTL travel. To have people traveling between star systems in any reasonable time (i.e., not generation ships or suspended animation taking decades or centuries), you MUST have FTL. But FTL is theoretically impossible with our current understanding of physics, so the idea of a convenient star system with dozens of planets and hundreds of moons able to be terraformed to some extent, and conveniently having nearly earth-normal gravity, is a workable plot device to avoid the overused plot device that is FTL.

As a counterexample, look at the new Battlestar. They had FTL in the form of "jump drive", but it was really out of place, because all the rest of their technology was really not that much advanced from our own: nuclear-propelled Viper ships, machine guns just like our own, nuclear missiles for shooting at planets or enemy ships, seriously low-tech computers, etc. However, because of the nature of Battlestar's story, FTL was an absolute requirement.

The other thing which both shows seem to have which is out-of-place is artificial gravity. But it's nearly impossible to make a TV series that doesn't have artificial gravity (Avatar had a brief scene at the beginning with zero-g, but that was a half-billion dollar movie).

Any imagining of the future is always going to have things which require a suspension of disbelief, because there are going to be things which are necessary plot devices because of reality constraints or budget constraints, and also because we have little idea what technologies will be possible in the future (or else we'd have already invented them).

Re:Why Firefly?

[CompressedAir]

Man, you are way off. Firefly was primarily a story about a really cool guy who wore Hawaiian shirts, played with plastic dinosaurs, married a total badass wife, made funny (ding!) informative (ding!) and insightful comments (ding!), and occasionally flew the ship.

It is no wonder that a show without the main character would lose some appeal.

Re:Why Firefly?

[JetTredmont]

(or for the Americans in the audience, Saved By The Bell: The College Years to Saved By The Bell.)

I do not think you are making your point as compellingly as you believe you are.

How about none?

[Dirtside]

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.

Re:How about none?

[CRCulver]

How about a miniseries based on Hyperion

I was recently reflecting on Simmons' Hyperion myself, as I read it several times in my teens. I know there's long been talk of making a film or television adaptation of it, but I now see a number of obstacles to trying to bring this book to a more mainstream audience. One is that it's just a bit too nerdy. I mean, one of the major structural points of the book is the life of the early Romantic poet John Keats, and people want explosions instead of sensitive young men who write verse. Also, the subplot of the cruciform or the Jewish man drawn to sacrifice his daughter might offend religious sensibilities.

Hyperion is a decent work of science-fiction (though I think of it more as a young-adult choice than a universal classic), but it might just not be right for Hollywood.

Re:How about none?

[spun]

Cory Doctorow? Really? Stross is a solid, workmanlike writer, but Doctorow? He's a hack. I could name a half dozen current Science Fiction writers better than Doctorow and Stross combined. Greg Bear. Stephen Baxter. John Barnes. Iain Banks. Peter Hamilton. Greg Egan. And that's just current authors, off the top of my head.

Twilight zone

[flogger]

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....

Re:Twilight zone

[MightyMartian]

Where the hell is Asimov's Foundation series? Where is Zelazny's Lord of Light? We have well over a century of science and speculative fiction that has barely, if ever been touched, and yet all anyone can ask for is retreads of Star Trek.

Re:Twilight zone

[frogzilla]

Have you read the Foundation series as an adult? It's not really very good. There are certainly some good ideas but the writing is trapped in the 1950s. It seems really awkward in places and overall (in my opinion) it hasn't aged well. It's nice to have classics in whatever genre but don't live in the past. There is a lot of fine writing now.

The movie and TV business is risky and they want to minimise their losses so they rehash what has worked in the past.

Re:Twilight zone

[MightyMartian]

I reread it about seven years ago, and enjoyed it as much as I did when I was first read it at 15. Yes, some of the ideas are caught in the "atomic age" notions of the period, but the main plot line, of a Foundation preserving technology in a fading empire, and of a Second Foundation of psychics, along with an extraordinary antagonist like the Mule, well, that's a damned good set of stories. Modernize it a bit, and you're on your way.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

[Artifex]

Princess Ardala, Col. Wilma Deering, and little robots that want to be your best friend.
What more could any nerd boy want?

Re:How about something new?

[houstonbofh]

The problem isn't the new shows, or the old shows. It is production companies that aren't really SciFi fans... There have been lots of good things dropped after one season because the producers did not understand the product or the market.

they should turn 'land of the lost' into a movie

[circletimessquare]

maybe anchor it with a hip contemporary comedian?

i'm sure it would make lots of money

Max Headroom

[Mashhaster]

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.

There is only one worthy

[Quiet_Desperation]

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

Re:How about something new?

[PapayaSF]

Rather than remake something, or have some ignorant Hollywood producer create some new but clichéd and/or stupid story, why not go look to the great science fiction writers and put them on the screen (suitably updated)? Now that special effects are no longer any sort of obstacle, how about something based on Cordwainer Smith's stories of the Underpeople? E.E. Smith's classic Lensman series? Why not a TV series based on Pohl's Heechee stories? Maybe an Iain Banks novel, as someone mentioned above. How about Heinlein? Asimov? Charles Stross? Larry Niven? Keith Laumer's Retief (sort of a tongue-in-cheek James Bond-ish diplomat dealing with various troublesome alien species) could be huge, and there are enough stories for a dozen films. Any sf fan could list more.

It's annoying when all Hollywood seems to consider is remakes, "original" stories that aren't often good science fiction, and maybe things by Philip Dick. There are literally hundreds of great sf stories that could make fine films and TV series.

Star Wars

[wizardforce]

Which SciFi stories could use the breath of life

Starwars. Episodes 1, 2 and 3 especially.

ALF!

[SlappyBastard]

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.

Slashdot

[Zarf]

... 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?

Re:Why Firefly? Here's why...

[chrysrobyn]

Agreed, un-kill Wash and Shepard Book. Although, honestly, a 7 year run could take place in the intervening year between the end of the series and movie. Not sure a sane genius class River would improve a continued show any.

Miranda is easy to accept, though. She's not a planet that's forgotten or overlooked, not a perturbation on plots or anything. She was a young colony that was still new to people's minds. Mal even knew "terraforming didn't take or somesuch". She was publicly known to be a failure, and even the mangnitude of the failure was known. The nature of the failure was the only unknown.

Human history is filled with similar misdirected failures.

UFO - No Question

[Phrogman]

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.