Yes, of all the original cast that I've met at one convention or scifi show (and I've met everyone except William Shatner) James Doohan, George Takei and Walter Koenig are the most friendly regular guys that really take time out to talk to you and seem appreciate the love the fans have for the characters they created. My grandfather, a veteran of two world wars (the army air corps in WWI and the Navy in WWII) who after the service became a chemical engineer suffered alzheimers and watching someone you love go through that (and at that time, there was no available treatment whatsoever) is about one of the most heart breaking things. My heart goes out to Jimmys family.
The last time that I saw him, about a year and a half ago is was clear that there was something seriously wrong with him. He appeared very thin, (considering all the weight he'd put on over the years) and his hand was noticably shaking as he signed, he didn't appear very alert and either didn't have his hearing aid on or wasn't wearing it.
I'm really surprised that he didn't get a star years ago, as I understand it all it takes to get one is a petition to the city and someone has to pay for it.. god knows all it would take was one or two shows with someone taking up a collection and I'm sure all the fans (myself included) would have been happy to donate some money towards it.
You've got that right, I think one of the most appalling aspects of this whole mess is that it's a backhanded effort by Microsoft to shutdown / discourage adoption / consideration of Linux as an alternative to their products. All while the justice department looks the other way while the MS machine continues to engage in blatant anti-competitive behavior.
About the only ray of sunshine is that it's generated a terrific amount of publicity for Linux and that when all is said and done it will have had the opposite effect that MS intended.
As I've said to many people, although I liked Scott Backula in Quantum Leap he's just coming off way too wimpy as the Captain. It seems like he's getting beat up at every turn and that's just not the captin people want to see. I'm also not very fond of the Malcolm character either and he has zero chemistry with the rest of the cast.
Having been ripped off once myself and getting no satisfaction from eBay at all, not even any confirmation that they ever suspended the guys account and hearing some pretty bad stories from others I can say they really need to police themselfs better. I've never read the sellers agreement that (I'm sure) ebay makes the sellers agree to but I think a case could be made that eBay is acting as the sellers agent no different than an auctioneer or auction house like Christies and that in case of fraud that they should make every effort to set things right. (insurance aside)
Another problem that eBay seriously needs to address is sellers having friends or relatives bid up their items to force the price up. I have no idea how you would catch people doing this but I've heard that it's a serious problem and from what I see I can't help but wonder about it. I used to bid on and occasionally get DVD's on eBay but over the last year and a half I've seen people consistently bidding up DVD's to within a buck or two of the full retail price and then add shipping to that (these days usually $3 to 5$). For gods sake you could buy it for that at Buy.Com, or wait a couple months from the release date and get it from Half.com for less than that, or BlockBuster frequently sells used DVD's two for $20 (of course no guarantee that you'll get what you're looking for but I've had pretty good luck) which amounts to $10.60 each here in NJ... how often can you get a really good movie for that on eBay? (very rarely, if ever)
the Super Duper Ultra three movie set, 10 DVD's with 300 hours worth of extra's...
I simply won't waste money on individual copy's of trilogy's when you know that there'll be an edition with even more stuff on it out for the holidays. And what about The Hobbit, if that movie gets made will there then be a twelve DVD set of all four movies with even more extra's...
Another great example is Indianna Jones, it seems that even if the fourth movie is delayed that there will be a fourth movie sometime.. what about all those people who went out and bought the complete Indianna Jones set, it won't be complete anymore after the fourth movie's released.
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.
Yes, absolutly true.. the complicatedness of the show was one of the things that made it great and I also wouldn't have it any other way but from a commercial standpoint what good is a show that can't pull in new viewers. Or if it does the number is so small that it can't be measured in the ratings, I personally don't believe that ratings are a good tool to decide how good a show actually is.
Also I think a lot of people were hoping for a movie to resolve the cliffhanger but it would be impossible to have a two / two and a half hour movie that everyone would watch since the whole backstory would have to be explained for anyone other than existing Farscape fans to understand it.
Great News If True...
on
Farscape is Back
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There's seems to be a lot of unanswered questions about if this is actually going to happen or not and Henson & Co. aren't talking...
Truthfully I loved Farscape but I could also see where the show had serious problems. The major one being that the story arcs were so long and the stories so complicated (often based on things that happened in previous episodes / seasons) that it just couldn't attract new viewers.. I know that for a fact since I tried to get a lot of my friends to watch it and they always had a 1000 questions about why things were happening and why the characters were acting the way that they were which pretty much required giving them a two hour synopsis of every significant event from the last two or three seasons. So far everyone who I've loaned my season one and two DVD's to have really loved it once they managed to watch them all.
The second problem is that the fourth season (for the most part) just plain sucked.. there were very few good episodes from the first part of the season but it really didn't get good until the last six episodes (I think the writers realized that they needed to pull it together).. I loved the last couple with Criton running around with the fusion bomb that had "Hi There!" (a reference to Dr. Strangelove) written on it strapped to him.. that made the rest of the bad episodes somewhat worth while.
I'm seriously looking for a replacement for my vcr's, I'm disgusted by the fact that the heads on my Sony have worn out after less than two years. It seems to me that all the hardware nessesary: video capture / DVD-rw / computer w/ 250gb+ hard drive to build a generic tivo (just program it ahead of time with what you want to record) is available and only the software is missing (though how the computer would switch channels on the cable box is beyond me) doesn't anyone make something like this or does the riaa etc. have everyone scared?
I'm with you all the way on that, if I remember it did alright in the theaters but wasn't really promoted well. It was only after it was out on video that I even heard about it with half a dozen of my friends saying "You've got to see this movie, you'll love it!". It has all the right elements, drama, action, suspense and comedy all in the right proportions and with a cast of great actors.
I very much doubt that a movie will ever be made (I'd like to see that but let's be realistic), the thing that I think killed Farscape (even though I liked it) was the very long story arcs. If you'd never seen the show before you couldn't just join in. My girl friend who'd never seen the first two seasons just felt like she couldn't follow what was going on. So a good movie that finished the cliffhanger ending (without having to explain how they ended up at that point) would have too limited an audience it would almost without a doubt get bad reviews and not be a money maker.
Please, if you're going to insult me at least use correct spelling and grammar. By the way "Dude" went out with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, remember we're in the 21st century here.
By the way, glad to see the reports of your early demise have been greatly exaggerated.
We had one of these in high school (25 years ago), looking back I thought it was pretty cool but man that single DEC tape drive was a royal pain. We also had an old teletype with a paper tape punch, haven't seen one of those since. In my junior year we got a grant from the state and got a PDP-11 with dual 8 inch single sided floppies, now that was living!
I have to second this, I've worked on eMachines for a few people who were either ignorant enough or tricked into buying them by a slick sales person out to make their quota and they were absolute GARBAGE.. so why would I ever buy anything made by people who were former eMachines people.
Sure I'll agree that this last season was disjointed and disappointing but I have (or had) a feeling that the writters were setting up for something big for the next season.
The 63,000 little icons that you're talking about is their "Application Director" which is very annoying but easy to remove. I think it's just a program in the Start group, just delete it and it won't bother you any more.
This is my whole problem with the show, they are essentially rewriting Star Trek history as it was laid out in the original series, essentially invalidating a number of things. In the episode Balance of Terror the Romulans only had vessels with impulse power and it was established that the war with the Romulans that took place was conducted before warp drive was discovered. So in the original series human's met the Romulans before the Klingons, but in Enterprise we met the Klingon's apparently before the Romulans. And not to nit pick but as I watched last season there were at least half a dozen other major continuity issues.
Not on the verge of collapse given the information here that non-RC2 DVD's are illegal in Germany but aren't there several ongoing legal challenges by some country's where region encoded DVD's may break existing laws? Wasn't there an article that Australia and some other country's were challenging region coding?
The official story (despite what others have stated) is that the Klingon's always looked the way they do (did?) in the movies, Next Generation, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise it's just that they weren't acuratly represented in the Original Series. (budget and makeup not being up to today's state of the art) The authors of some of the Star Trek books attempted to explain this by saying that either the Klingon Empire was made up of many conquered races and that the original Klingon's were just one of the various races that made up the Empire (versus the Imperial Klingon race with the head ridges), or that the altered appearance of the new Klingon's was the result of genetics gone wrong. Michael Dorn's remark in that DS9 episode was just a poke of fun at the bruja that everyone makes over this.
It does in fact rather annoy me that the Enterprise series does in many ways seem to rewrite Star Trek history as we have always known it.
I really hope that you're joking, the remake of Planet Of The Apes was possibly one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time. Mark Wahlberg's performance was so bad it was pitiful.
This is the first I'd heard about this feature, I searched with Google to find details and the description I found goes like this:
Commercial Advance is how I spell "relief." Available on some RCA, ProScan and GE VCR models
of the past few years, it almost completely frees us from the clutches of the Eveready Bunny and Mr. Whipple. It works by poring over your freshly-made recording, seeking out and marking each commercial break. Then, when you play back the tape, it finds these markings and fast forwards through the commercials, turning a four minute advertising assault into about thirty seconds or so of fast-scanning bliss.
this is without a doubt an improvement but why record the commercials at all and use up the extra tape if it's technically possible to not record (or pause recording) during the commercials. Again I think that this is just a sop to the networks and people who make money off of advertising, though I agree without advertising there wouldn't be any network programming.
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Yes, of all the original cast that I've met at one convention or scifi show (and I've met everyone except William Shatner) James Doohan, George Takei and Walter Koenig are the most friendly regular guys that really take time out to talk to you and seem appreciate the love the fans have for the characters they created. My grandfather, a veteran of two world wars (the army air corps in WWI and the Navy in WWII) who after the service became a chemical engineer suffered alzheimers and watching someone you love go through that (and at that time, there was no available treatment whatsoever) is about one of the most heart breaking things. My heart goes out to Jimmys family.
The last time that I saw him, about a year and a half ago is was clear that there was something seriously wrong with him. He appeared very thin, (considering all the weight he'd put on over the years) and his hand was noticably shaking as he signed, he didn't appear very alert and either didn't have his hearing aid on or wasn't wearing it.
I'm really surprised that he didn't get a star years ago, as I understand it all it takes to get one is a petition to the city and someone has to pay for it.. god knows all it would take was one or two shows with someone taking up a collection and I'm sure all the fans (myself included) would have been happy to donate some money towards it.
You've got that right, I think one of the most appalling aspects of this whole mess is that it's a backhanded effort by Microsoft to shutdown / discourage adoption / consideration of Linux as an alternative to their products. All while the justice department looks the other way while the MS machine continues to engage in blatant anti-competitive behavior.
About the only ray of sunshine is that it's generated a terrific amount of publicity for Linux and that when all is said and done it will have had the opposite effect that MS intended.
As I've said to many people, although I liked Scott Backula in Quantum Leap he's just coming off way too wimpy as the Captain. It seems like he's getting beat up at every turn and that's just not the captin people want to see. I'm also not very fond of the Malcolm character either and he has zero chemistry with the rest of the cast.
Having been ripped off once myself and getting no satisfaction from eBay at all, not even any confirmation that they ever suspended the guys account and hearing some pretty bad stories from others I can say they really need to police themselfs better. I've never read the sellers agreement that (I'm sure) ebay makes the sellers agree to but I think a case could be made that eBay is acting as the sellers agent no different than an auctioneer or auction house like Christies and that in case of fraud that they should make every effort to set things right. (insurance aside)
Another problem that eBay seriously needs to address is sellers having friends or relatives bid up their items to force the price up. I have no idea how you would catch people doing this but I've heard that it's a serious problem and from what I see I can't help but wonder about it. I used to bid on and occasionally get DVD's on eBay but over the last year and a half I've seen people consistently bidding up DVD's to within a buck or two of the full retail price and then add shipping to that (these days usually $3 to 5$). For gods sake you could buy it for that at Buy.Com, or wait a couple months from the release date and get it from Half.com for less than that, or BlockBuster frequently sells used DVD's two for $20 (of course no guarantee that you'll get what you're looking for but I've had pretty good luck) which amounts to $10.60 each here in NJ... how often can you get a really good movie for that on eBay? (very rarely, if ever)
the Super Duper Ultra three movie set, 10 DVD's with 300 hours worth of extra's...
I simply won't waste money on individual copy's of trilogy's when you know that there'll be an edition with even more stuff on it out for the holidays. And what about The Hobbit, if that movie gets made will there then be a twelve DVD set of all four movies with even more extra's...
Another great example is Indianna Jones, it seems that even if the fourth movie is delayed that there will be a fourth movie sometime.. what about all those people who went out and bought the complete Indianna Jones set, it won't be complete anymore after the fourth movie's released.
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.
Yes, absolutly true.. the complicatedness of the show was one of the things that made it great and I also wouldn't have it any other way but from a commercial standpoint what good is a show that can't pull in new viewers. Or if it does the number is so small that it can't be measured in the ratings, I personally don't believe that ratings are a good tool to decide how good a show actually is.
Also I think a lot of people were hoping for a movie to resolve the cliffhanger but it would be impossible to have a two / two and a half hour movie that everyone would watch since the whole backstory would have to be explained for anyone other than existing Farscape fans to understand it.
There's seems to be a lot of unanswered questions about if this is actually going to happen or not and Henson & Co. aren't talking...
Truthfully I loved Farscape but I could also see where the show had serious problems. The major one being that the story arcs were so long and the stories so complicated (often based on things that happened in previous episodes / seasons) that it just couldn't attract new viewers.. I know that for a fact since I tried to get a lot of my friends to watch it and they always had a 1000 questions about why things were happening and why the characters were acting the way that they were which pretty much required giving them a two hour synopsis of every significant event from the last two or three seasons. So far everyone who I've loaned my season one and two DVD's to have really loved it once they managed to watch them all.
The second problem is that the fourth season (for the most part) just plain sucked.. there were very few good episodes from the first part of the season but it really didn't get good until the last six episodes (I think the writers realized that they needed to pull it together).. I loved the last couple with Criton running around with the fusion bomb that had "Hi There!" (a reference to Dr. Strangelove) written on it strapped to him.. that made the rest of the bad episodes somewhat worth while.
I'm seriously looking for a replacement for my vcr's, I'm disgusted by the fact that the heads on my Sony have worn out after less than two years. It seems to me that all the hardware nessesary: video capture / DVD-rw / computer w/ 250gb+ hard drive to build a generic tivo (just program it ahead of time with what you want to record) is available and only the software is missing (though how the computer would switch channels on the cable box is beyond me) doesn't anyone make something like this or does the riaa etc. have everyone scared?
Well I'd really like to see if that face carved out the mountain is Elvis or not!
I'm with you all the way on that, if I remember it did alright in the theaters but wasn't really promoted well. It was only after it was out on video that I even heard about it with half a dozen of my friends saying "You've got to see this movie, you'll love it!". It has all the right elements, drama, action, suspense and comedy all in the right proportions and with a cast of great actors.
I very much doubt that a movie will ever be made (I'd like to see that but let's be realistic), the thing that I think killed Farscape (even though I liked it) was the very long story arcs. If you'd never seen the show before you couldn't just join in. My girl friend who'd never seen the first two seasons just felt like she couldn't follow what was going on. So a good movie that finished the cliffhanger ending (without having to explain how they ended up at that point) would have too limited an audience it would almost without a doubt get bad reviews and not be a money maker.
Please, if you're going to insult me at least use correct spelling and grammar. By the way "Dude" went out with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, remember we're in the 21st century here.
By the way, glad to see the reports of your early demise have been greatly exaggerated.
I checked all available news sites and can't verify this. I'm no Stephen King fan but if you post stuff like this you better damn well be right.
We had one of these in high school (25 years ago), looking back I thought it was pretty cool but man that single DEC tape drive was a royal pain. We also had an old teletype with a paper tape punch, haven't seen one of those since. In my junior year we got a grant from the state and got a PDP-11 with dual 8 inch single sided floppies, now that was living!
I have to second this, I've worked on eMachines for a few people who were either ignorant enough or tricked into buying them by a slick sales person out to make their quota and they were absolute GARBAGE.. so why would I ever buy anything made by people who were former eMachines people.
Sure I'll agree that this last season was disjointed and disappointing but I have (or had) a feeling that the writters were setting up for something big for the next season.
The 63,000 little icons that you're talking about is their "Application Director" which is very annoying but easy to remove. I think it's just a program in the Start group, just delete it and it won't bother you any more.
This is my whole problem with the show, they are essentially rewriting Star Trek history as it was laid out in the original series, essentially invalidating a number of things. In the episode Balance of Terror the Romulans only had vessels with impulse power and it was established that the war with the Romulans that took place was conducted before warp drive was discovered. So in the original series human's met the Romulans before the Klingons, but in Enterprise we met the Klingon's apparently before the Romulans. And not to nit pick but as I watched last season there were at least half a dozen other major continuity issues.
maybe Microsoft has such poor faith in their products that they don't think they can compete against anthing else without a hugh advantage.
or possibly their products are that bad.
Not on the verge of collapse given the information here that non-RC2 DVD's are illegal in Germany but aren't there several ongoing legal challenges by some country's where region encoded DVD's may break existing laws? Wasn't there an article that Australia and some other country's were challenging region coding?
The official story (despite what others have stated) is that the Klingon's always looked the way they do (did?) in the movies, Next Generation, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise it's just that they weren't acuratly represented in the Original Series. (budget and makeup not being up to today's state of the art) The authors of some of the Star Trek books attempted to explain this by saying that either the Klingon Empire was made up of many conquered races and that the original Klingon's were just one of the various races that made up the Empire (versus the Imperial Klingon race with the head ridges), or that the altered appearance of the new Klingon's was the result of genetics gone wrong. Michael Dorn's remark in that DS9 episode was just a poke of fun at the bruja that everyone makes over this.
It does in fact rather annoy me that the Enterprise series does in many ways seem to rewrite Star Trek history as we have always known it.
Always said Klaar, my first thought was sounds Klingon...
I really hope that you're joking, the remake of Planet Of The Apes was possibly one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time. Mark Wahlberg's performance was so bad it was pitiful.
This is the first I'd heard about this feature, I searched with Google to find details and the description I found goes like this:
Commercial Advance is how I spell "relief." Available on some RCA, ProScan and GE VCR models
of the past few years, it almost completely frees us from the clutches of the Eveready Bunny and Mr. Whipple. It works by poring over your freshly-made recording, seeking out and marking each commercial break. Then, when you play back the tape, it finds these markings and fast forwards through the commercials, turning a four minute advertising assault into about thirty seconds or so of fast-scanning bliss.
this is without a doubt an improvement but why record the commercials at all and use up the extra tape if it's technically possible to not record (or pause recording) during the commercials. Again I think that this is just a sop to the networks and people who make money off of advertising, though I agree without advertising there wouldn't be any network programming.