"Space 1999" reboot in the works

POSTED BY: whozit
UPDATED: Friday, February 24, 2012 03:49
VIEWED: 13635
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IMNOTHERE

Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Suasor:
In the original the acting was wooden and the scientific basis non-existent. Not Sci-Fi, but Sci-Fantasy pretending to be Sci-Fi. Why reboot this turkey?

Virtually all Sci-Fi is really Sci-Fantasy. Hate to burst your warp bubble but science hasn't worked out a way of traveling fast enough to visit a new solar system every week yet.

S:1999's problem was that it tried to use known phenomena in ways that just didn't add up: a nuclear fission explosion blowing the moon out of orbit fast enough to travel interplanetary distances in weeks... Switch to fantasy physics: replace the nuclear waste with "the unstable results of a failed attempt to harness zero point energy", fling the moon through a wormhole/anomaly/swirly thing and you're no worse off than the typical Trek episode.

S:1999 was bedwettingly scary, dark, and with excellent (for TV, at the time) special effects and ship designs. If they could capture that, in updated form, then it could have legs.

OK: so they should avoid having the best design for a vacuum/low gravity space pick-up this side of a B5 Starfury and then having the things land on Earth-type planets every week. Also, memo: moon bases don't usually have opening windows...

PIZMOBEACH

Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:38 PM

http://space2099.tv

They want to undertake what seems like an amazing amount of work (go to the 6 minute mark if you want to see some of the changes) - not hard to do (some are kind of funny), just wonder what the return would be. Obviously, if you're a fan then it's just in the doing of it.
This vid does make me curious - I wasn't a Landau fan, never saw the show, could be worth seeing. I like the music.

Scifi movie music + Firefly dialogue clips, 24 hours a day - http://www.scifiradio.com

IMNOTHERE

Monday, February 13, 2012 9:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by pizmobeach:

This vid does make me curious - I wasn't a Landau fan, never saw the show, could be worth seeing. I like the music.

Hmmm.
No.

Old SF makes mistakes and gets predictions wrong - I think that's part of the fun. E.g. like most 60s/70s SF, Space 1999 was vastly over-optimistic about the progress of space travel but woefully failed to predict development in electronics and computing. That's interesting, and it seems wrong to Lucas(tm) it.

I'm wondering about the whole explosion thing vs.space warps/wormholes. Gerry Anderson must have known a bit about relativity, the speed of light, black holes etc. because he did a TV Movie about it pre-dating Space 1999: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074690/ - and, of course, black holes featured in S:1999. Maybe the producers thought that using something like that to propel the moon to other stars would require spending a whole episode explaining it... Nowadays everybody would be like, "sure, yeah, wormhole, I get it - bought that book by the wheelchair guy and looked at the pictures - cool".

Then the SFX. Generally, S:1999 had brilliant special effects. It seems almost disrespectful to tart them up. OK, the re-CGI'd Star Trek TOS seems to have been well received, but when did you hear anybody say "Star Trek? Oh yeah, the spaceship effects were brilliant..." Gerry Anderson stuff was all about the great model work. It might be OK to fix a few scenes where they over-reached themselves (I can recall a few) but this vid looks like they're planning to do the full Jar Jar on it.

I know this doesn't make the original go away, but I don't quite get the motivation. Remaking is a bit different: the story gets re-worked to suit the times. In the future, people might have great fun comparing, say, 70s Galactica with 00s Galactica and what they might say about society. But you wouldn't want to re-do Galactica with 21st century visuals and the original 70s scripts.... would you?

I think, as a kid, the only three Airfix kits I ever bothered to do a half-decent (even in kid terms) job on were the Eagle, the, uh, other Eagle and the Saturn 5 (although the special effects on "Apollo" were a bit crap - now there's something that could do with a CGI re-work).

JONGSSTRAW

Monday, February 13, 2012 11:29 PM

It was a very good show in its' day. At least half the episodes were terrific.

MACBAKER

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 1:29 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by whozit:
http://www.deadline.com/2012/02/contemporary-reboot-of-1970s-sci-fi-se
ries-space-1999-in-the-works

Why? It's already 2012, and I believe that most people noticed that our moon didn't leave orbit at faster than light speeds in 1999.

This a series that got the design of things right, but ignored actual science in the worst possible ways. If the moon was moving fast enough to reach other worlds as often as depicted in the series, it would pass by those worlds so fast, they wouldn't even have time to launch an Eagle to visit it! This series is better left dead!

I'd given some thought to movin' off the edge -- not an ideal location -- thinkin' a place in the middle.

CLJOHNSTON108

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 8:42 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by ImNotHere:
Gerry Anderson must have known a bit about relativity, the speed of light, black holes etc. because he did a TV Movie about it pre-dating Space 1999: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074690/

Here ya go!

CLJOHNSTON108

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 8:53 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
It's a 'face lift' to the original series!
Cool....

io9's been covering it...
http://io9.com/5883885/space-1999-remake-will-be-called-space-2099
http://io9.com/5884500/why-space-2099-wont-be-a-dark-and-gritty-reboot
-of-space-1999

Although I can't believe it's being produced by this guy...
http://www.jacehallshow.com/
They show episodes from that on Metro buses, and he just seemed like a big goof-ball.
Never would've guessed he'd been the guy behind the remake of V!

http://www.space2099theseries.com/

IMNOTHERE

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 3:12 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by cljohnston108:
Quote:
Originally posted by ImNotHere:
Gerry Anderson must have known a bit about relativity, the speed of light, black holes etc. because he did a TV Movie about it pre-dating Space 1999: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074690/

Here ya go!

Ah, lovely.
"Max Speed: 186,500 miles/second" printed on the dash. Can't be to careful when the speeding tickets can arrive before the violation :-)

Love the laser beam bending round the black hole, too: even allowing for the magic smoke machine to make the beam visible, that has to be soooo wrong but I'm giving myself a headache trying to work out exactly why (guessing that it would appear straight...)

See: picking holes in the dodgey science is part of the FUN of SF! Getting it all right would be boring.

TRAVELER

Friday, February 17, 2012 2:32 AM

This whole thing is a joke to me. How many people would want Firefly messed with? I hope to never see it. Will make every effort to not see it.

http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=28764731
Traveler

CHRISISALL

Friday, February 17, 2012 2:54 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by traveler:
Will make every effort to not see it.

I don't know... I liked the 'tweaking' of Star Trek TOS- VERY much so. I've seen similar stuff added to Galactica TOS that I've liked as well.
But somehow... Space 1999 (as well as UFO, Lost In Space, and a bunch of other SF shows) doesn't seem to warrant such changes or additions...

I must an-al-yze...

The laughing Chrisisall

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