Any Other Non-Sci/Fi Fans In Love With This Show?
POSTED BY: dietcoke
UPDATED: Monday, December 6, 2004 19:10
VIEWED: 8577
PAGE 4 of 4
What I am in denial of is that I like ~Westerns~.
Actually, there isn't a lot of sf on the SciFi Channel anymore unless it's in the middle of the night. (Someone needs to tell them that crappy reality shows aren't SCI-FI.)
But you might give Farscape another try if they re-air it. I lost track of it half-way through the 2nd season and then a friend lent me his 4th season dvd set prior to The Peacekeeper Wars and I was blown away by the humor, pop culture refs, angst and kick-butt special effects. And under all the latex is a message. ;-) Or not. Almost as good as a Whedon fix. (The ultimate compliment, for me.)
You might also try Blakes 7 if it ever gets here on dvd. Not as much humor but it wrestles with some serious issues as our freedom fighter hero drags his unwilling fellow travellers into the rebellion against the evil Federation - which is more like the Alliance than the Trek Federation. Blakes 7 fandom is still arguing some of the moral implications of certain episodes 20 years later.
Terry in Iowa (delurking for an interesting thread)
p.s. I loved B5 after the unimpressive first season (seasons 2-4, really) but luckily had never seen Animal House. Watching the characters of Londo and G-Kar develop over the years will break your heart, after you get used to (past) the hair and makeup. The main characters are cliched but there aren't many scenes on tv as memorable as Londo watching .... oops, probably a spoiler, there. Or Michael York in A Late Delivery to (from?) Avalon. Or Walter Koenig in any episode as Bester.
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Quote:
Originally posted by nedward:
Amusingly, Delenn was supposed to transform into a male Minbari, not a female Human, but they couldn't handle the technical side of making Mira Furlan's voice sound convincingly "male". So, does this mean Sinclair "turned gay" in jms's original outline?
Ah, you're remembering this a trifle sideways compadre. In JMS' original conception Delenn was supposed to start out as a Minbari male who would eventually metamorphose into a hybryd female. That's why the prosthetics in the pilot film were so exaggerated; Delenn was supposed to look androgenous by human standards, and Mira Furlan's voice would have been electronically distorted to add to the alien/male effect. Somewhere in post-production, the voice distortion proved too difficult and was dropped. By the time the show went to series JMS had decided that changing species was sufficient without gender bending on top of it, and declared Delenn a Minbari female from the get-go.
As for the changes the vaunted five-year plan went through -- well, to quote Heinlein, "The marvelous thing about a dancing bear is not the delicate grace of its dance, but that it dances at all."
"Hermanos! The Devil has built a robot! Andale!" -- Numero Cinco
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'Lish replied:
Quote:
Does it change how you feel about me if I tell you that I am kneeling in the photo because I am saying my rosary??
That depends...
What did you do that warranted a full rosary? I'm not Catholic; so if you thought I'd be put off by the mental image of you kneeling chastely and saying your prayers...
Let's just say it's having a somewhat opposite effect.
Penitently,
zoid
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zoid....uhhhhh, wow!
I'm not quite sure what I said that prompted all of this, or if I was just a convenient springboard to get you up on your soapbox, but anyhow, well said, zoid! 
Don't read too much into the fact that I "do" Klingon....a "devotee" of Trek is a bit overstated as far as my interest goes. I liked TOS as a kid, but only because there wasn't much else on. TNG was better, but DS9 was darker, and my favorite Trek spinoff. I have, however, always been a scifi reader since early childhood, and that, not Trek, is what I consider "real" scifi. Trek was mostly escapism, but as you stated, often much too uptopian for me to want to spend a lot of time in (except for the Klingons...much more fun than boring Feddies).
I think I avoided cons for much of my life and hid my scifi interests from most people because the most obvious entity the general public knew of scifi WAS Trek, and they just lumped it all together. Most of the public still does this...try to explain Firefly to a non-scifi fan, or discuss the social discourse found in Heinlein or Herbert to anyone else BUT a scifi fan! As soon as the word "scifi" or "science fiction" leaves your mouth, the first thing they generally say is something like "oh, you must be a Trekkie", or they do some bad Darth Vader impersonation or Force joke... No matter how proud and confident I try to be about scifi as a "serious" hobby, I find I still sometimes mumble my way through explaining something like Serenity or Dune...I can see eyes glazing over and smirks forming...maybe it's just me, and somewhat aof a painful remnant from my teenage years when my interest in Star Wars was a standing joke among some of my classmates (and no, I wasn't dressing in costume or trying to "be" any of the characters, but just the fact that I was passionately talking about it to my friends was enough to cause taunting).
It is really sad that science fiction isn't often seen as a serious form of literature/film, and I agree, zoid, that it is so much more interesting to see how your average Joe responds to changes in technology, social structure, etc. that we project as "the future" than all these perfect people in a perfect setting....ick. If I wanted that, I wouldn't read scifi, I'd read romance novels....
Not that space opera can't be fun, especially with some humor and great personalities thrown into it, but I want the personalities to be the defining factor, not the gimmicks.
Personally, I think must have a "costuming gene" or something, and I do like to create characters and dress up on occasion, but it's certainly a very small part of my life and does not encompass my entire scifi fandom...it's just the most obvious manifestation of it these days (I didn't start going to cons until I was in my 30's!). And I always look to create "antihero" characters that are a bit eccentric ...much more interesting for me.
Again zoid, great insights and analysis...looking forward to reading more in the future!
"We gotta go to that crappy town where I'M a hero..."
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Quote:
Originally posted by terryo:
What I am in denial of is that I like ~Westerns~.
Yep...that's the kicker for me with Firefly...I had to own up to my deeply rooted love of the old West! My dad was a huge fan of Westerns; all the old spagetti westerns, John Wayne movies, country-western music, and lots and lots of Louis Lamour novels around our house! I grew up with that, and was raised in a rural farming community. I have no problem putting on boots and a cowboy hat and being seen in public that way. I've driven a tractor down Main Street of our small town...I've driven grain to the elevator...I've herded pigs, hand weeded soybean crops, and had more axle grease and fertilizer (both natural and man-made) on my clothes than I care to remember.
Firefly felt like coming home, in a way, and I know that if my dad was still alive, he would have been a big fan of it...makes me feel a little closer to him, I guess.
"We gotta go to that crappy town where I'M a hero..."
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