Science Fiction done 'cheap'... And 'fake' science fiction.

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Jericho
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Science Fiction done 'cheap'... And 'fake' science fiction.

Post by Jericho » Mon, 17. Jul 17, 17:49

Growing up, there was a dearth of Science Fiction (hereafter refereed to as SF) on TV.

There were endless repeats of Kirk's Star Trek (only the same 12 episodes though it seems), Doctor Who was turning into Sylvester McCoy and therefore was torture to watch. Even Blake's 7 was no longer repeated (If you've never seen Blake's 7, imagine Star Trek but with about 0.14% of the budget)

Then along came Quantum Leap... A truly awful show that pretended to be SF. How exactly is telling a pig farmer "Hey Buddy Holly, why not try 'peggy sue' instead of 'piggy sue' ?" science fiction?

I hated that show, masquerading as Science Fiction.


Anyway, does anyone else really hate when they do this:

1) Here's a cool bad guy/alien race!
2) It's popular!
3) Let's save on budget... Those bad guys now look human!!!


I loved The Replicators on Stargate. There were a great but simple concept (mechanical spiders, just reproduce by 'eating' their environment. And in 1 episode, one gets aboard a Russian sub, and therefore has to replicate new spiders out of the iron of the sub, and so they're easily killed).

But of course, there is a large Special FX budget associated with that... So then they became human.

God that was painful.

Remember War of the Worlds? (The 1960's film, not the Tom Cruise version, or the Youtube version). Well, there was a TV series (2 seasons) where it turns out that the aliens didn't actually die of a cold. They only went into suspended animation. Now they're back!!!!

... And they look human because they were human skin.
Oh, and suddenly the whole world has forgotten that it was invaded by aliens and nearly wiped out, and no one believes in aliens.

(Then again, there are enough holocaust deniers, so maybe...)

And of course, the last season of the original Battlestar Galactica (sometimes called Galactica 80 and Galactica 1980) which is entirly set on earth... and the cylons look human!!!

(Oh, and they had invisible flying bikes, so that you would see a shot of the sky and their voices talking, because they couldn't even afford to greenscreen)

Which brings me back to 'fake' science fiction once again in a neat circle... With Galactica 1980, they didn't really feature the human cylons... More often than not they were just a pair of drifters solving the drama of the week in the town they just arrived in.

Such gripping high SF concepts as sewing seeds on a farm before nightfall!!! Phillip K Dick, eat your heart out.
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Post by brucewarren » Mon, 17. Jul 17, 18:04

Aliens are hard m'k.

Seriously though aliens are always going to be hard precisely because they are outside our experience. Hence insects, reptiles etc. Even the Alien in Alien probably isn't alien enough and that's widely considered one of the best efforts.

In terms of canon I think the best I saw were the silicon creatures in the Star Trek episode "Devil in the Dark". They'd clearly put some thought into it. Silicon isn't nearly as good for the long chain molecules as carbon is but in theory it's just about possible. Seriously alien too.

Then there is alien thinking. Dr Asimov once quoted John Campbell's challenge - write an alien that thinks as well as a man, but doesn't think as a man.

Close Encounters managed the second part, but not the first. They weren't just alien, they were bonkers.

I prefer to pretend Galactica 80 wasn't made Just like Star Trek season 3, Space 1999 season 2 and Star Trek the Motionless Picture. They did not happen !

Lastly to be fair to Quantum Leap they did have a couple of episodes that did hit the Sci Fi Mark. There's one where Al is in trouble and just as the numbers go from 99% to 100% he's instantly replaced by St John (played by Roddy McDowel)
Last edited by brucewarren on Mon, 17. Jul 17, 18:19, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by pjknibbs » Mon, 17. Jul 17, 18:19

It's pretty obvious that having aliens which are completely non-human is going to be a non-starter for budgetary reasons in most SF. Babylon 5, which went a long way beyond the "human with bumpy forehead" approach that passed for aliens in Star Trek, still had almost all of its aliens be humanoid, and move in a recognisably human way.

The other issue apart from the budgetary one is audience recognition. Even if the aliens are the antagonists they need to have recognisably human motivations, or else the audience (who pretty much entirely consist of humans, whatever your tinfoil hat is telling you :wink: ) isn't going to understand them.

So, I fully understand the need for this sort of thing and cut the shows some slack as a result.

Oh, as for the rant about Quantum Leap: by any reasonable definition, that show *was* science fiction. It involved a man from the near future being propelled into the past by technological means. How is that *not* SF? Requiring something to have spaceships and aliens in it before you'll grant it the title science fiction is an excessively narrow viewpoint, IMHO.

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Re: Science Fiction done 'cheap'... And 'fake' science fiction.

Post by Redvers Ganderpoke » Mon, 17. Jul 17, 18:32

Jericho wrote:Growing up, there was a dearth of Science Fiction (hereafter refereed to as SF) on TV.
There's always been patches when SF was out of fashion - but from my era (late 60's to early 80's)I suppose that we had all of Gerry Anderson's efforts (all the supermarinations plus UFO and Space 1999 - Start Trek (original), Irwin Allen's efforts (Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space.), BBC's effort (Doctor Who, The Clangers!, Blake's Seven). ITV (The Tomorrow People, Quatermass). I also seem to remember David McCullum as "The Invisible Man", Ben Murphy as "the Gemini Man" and of course "The Six Million Dollar man", also "Logan's Run" , "Buck Rodgers and Commander Deering's very tight trousers" (I think that's what it was called).


Some of these were dire of course and it went further downhill after Star Wars (SF was cool again) with the original Battle Galactica being the biggest load of codswallop ever. Didn't help that the pilot was given a cinema release in the UK on the back of Star Wars - I will watch any rubbish but I couldn't watch that.

The budget restraints on SF have always been evident though (the Gorn in Star trek rivals some of the awful "monster" costumes in Doctor Who.) It's always easier to have humanoid aliens with a couple of face prosthetics until CGI became nice and cheap.
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Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 17. Jul 17, 18:37

When young, I always thought the puppet SF shows were done rather well. Even then the main 'aliens' were usually humanoid though. I guess that was in order to better explain their human voices and motivations.
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Post by brucewarren » Mon, 17. Jul 17, 19:06

Sometimes lack of funds can lead to ingenious solutions.

I used to love the way the crew were transported into the Thunderbird vehicles. It was only many years later I learned that it was done because of the difficulty of making them climb realistically into a cockpit. To this day I still think it's cool even though I know the reason for it.

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Re: Science Fiction done 'cheap'... And 'fake' science fiction.

Post by Rive » Mon, 17. Jul 17, 21:28

Jericho wrote:3) Let's save on budget... Those bad guys now look human!!!
Well... the new trend is to cut on the plot instead and give first class CGI for 70% of the budget.

As I watch some of these new movies I tend to forgive to those old movies and old ways...

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Re: Science Fiction done 'cheap'... And 'fake' science fiction.

Post by Morkonan » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 00:02

Jericho wrote:Science Fiction done 'cheap'... And 'fake' science fiction.
Science fiction can be done without special effects. I'm not sure there is anything called "fake" science fiction, but there is certainly "bad" science fiction. (Quantum Leap was a good show. :) There was even an overarching storyline that tied everything together. Don't ask me to explain it, though...)

Take a look at a contemporary of Quantum Leap - "Sliders." There's not a great deal of special effects budget in this, aside from romping among various Hollywood back-lot sets.

What happens when you have a great idea, a good story, but little money? Here's some practicalities for ya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders#Changing_cast

So, they couldn't afford to secure a main character actor. What did they do? They figured out how to write a sort of wonky sci-fi reason for it and then went ahead with production.

Famously, Star Trek's "transporters" only exist because the producers couldn't afford the special effects budget for a shuttle descending to the surface of a planet or going anywhere else every time the crew had to leave the ship. So... sci-fic to the rescue! :)

Here, budgetary constraints forced changes in the story, some good, some fatal. :)

"Land of the Giants" - Anyone else remember this show? It was on when I was just a kid. Some travelers, flying in a shuttle, get caught up in some weird sci-fi phenomenon and then transported to a world in the 1060s, but they're trapped in this world where they are only tiny little people. No special effects other than some camera angles, a few dolls whenever one of them is picked up, and some oversized hat-pins if they have to fight a "giant rat", which is just a close-up of... a non-giant rat. :)

The television series "V." It had some weird ideas that approached the unbelievable. (Who the heck would believe aliens would come to Earth to steal our water? Which... wasn't really why they came.) They spent a boatload of money on that series for every single show, comparable to some of the TNG per-episode budgets for special effects et al. And? Some of the story was just plain crap. (Kinda like some of the TNG episodes. :) )

Throwing money at something does not necessarily mean you'll have a good show.

What about "Alien Nation?" Here's a series that had everything going for it. The one thing it didn't really have a lot of was a huge special effects budge. "Aliens" just wore painted showercaps. But, there was one problem - Fox ran out of money and just took an axe to its entire lineup to cut costs. Great series, good writing, well-received with a good audience, studio runs out of money...

How about "The Incredible Hulk?" There were o special effects other than styrofoam boulders and some green body paint for Lou. But, it was "Kung Fu" (The tv series) except with a guy that didn't bother with the niceties of jump-kicks. In "The Incredible Hulk", he just picks you up and throws you across the parking lot.

"Outer Limits", "The Twilight Zone" - These are icons of television history and science fiction in particular. How much money went into special effects and how much of an impact did that money really, really, have on the stories?

You don't need flashy special effects to tell a good story.

The point is this - There is bad science fiction and good science fiction. Neither are dependent upon how much money is spent on special effects. If you want to enjoy television and movie presentations of science-fiction or fantasy, look past the budget. Don't even pay attention to the special effects - Watch the story. Is the story good? Then don't worry about how fancy the effects are.

Yes, bad special effects can ruin one's experience, so I get you there. There's a fine line between "Do we really need this scene" and "How much money do we have left." Good producers know how to balance these necessities. But, in the end, it's all about the story. Is a twenty-eleven minute tour of the outside of the new Enterprise in the "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" really necessary? No. But, it sure as heck made the fans, who had been waiting for decades, very happy. :)

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Post by Usenko » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 04:15

Morkonan wrote: How about "The Incredible Hulk?" There were o special effects other than styrofoam boulders and some green body paint for Lou. But, it was "Kung Fu" (The tv series) except with a guy that didn't bother with the niceties of jump-kicks. In "The Incredible Hulk", he just picks you up and throws you across the parking lot.
For laughs it's worth having a look at Clive James' review of Hulk (along with several other programs of its day), written in 1978!
The point is this - There is bad science fiction and good science fiction. Neither are dependent upon how much money is spent on special effects. If you want to enjoy television and movie presentations of science-fiction or fantasy, look past the budget. Don't even pay attention to the special effects - Watch the story. Is the story good? Then don't worry about how fancy the effects are.

Yes, bad special effects can ruin one's experience, so I get you there. There's a fine line between "Do we really need this scene" and "How much money do we have left." Good producers know how to balance these necessities. But, in the end, it's all about the story. Is a twenty-eleven minute tour of the outside of the new Enterprise in the "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" really necessary? No. But, it sure as heck made the fans, who had been waiting for decades, very happy.
The other thing to note is that the balance between story telling and effects is not one which can be simply "got right". And there are all sorts of other concerns. For example, probably the worst episode of ANY Star Trek EVER was the awful "Shades of Grey" in the second season of ST TNG. But nobody blames them for this - it was produced in the middle of a writers' strike, and they had to put something together, so they used clips of previous episodes and a really lame storyline written by someone who wasn't a writing guild member (and it shows!).

When you're producing a TV show you have a certain budget and a certain amount of time, and within those constraints you must produce (say) 24 episodes. Therefore you will ALWAYS get the occasional completely useless episode. And you'll always get aliens impersonating humans in order to save a few dollars (unless the alien costume can be done practically rather than electronically).
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Post by Jericho » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 09:52

pjknibbs wrote:. It involved a man from the near future being propelled into the past by technological means. How is that *not* SF? Requiring something to have spaceships and aliens in it before you'll grant it the title science fiction is an excessively narrow viewpoint, IMHO.
I don't recall saying that it needed spaceships and aliens to be called Science Fiction, I guess that's why you couldn't quote it.

So what if Sam's soul transferred into the body of a different person via a strange time machine (powered by God, don't forget). So just because the opening voiceover involves him taking a new body via time machine, that makes it science fiction? That's an excessively broad viewpoint of SF, IMHO.

It was just a drama of the week, the fact that he was in a different body made no difference and doesn't magically make it SF. It was no different to The Littlest Hobo, but instead of a dog, he's a man. All of these shows followed the same basic idea (The A-Team, Quantum leap, Knight Rider, Street Hawk, Hobo, Galactica 80, Hulk, Highway to Heaven) Drifter shows up in town, solves the local dilemma by defeating the evil mayor or petty thugs.

Just because Sam used a God-powered time machine to transfer his soul into the body of other people, doesn't make it science fiction. The SF concept is basically the opening voiceover, everything else is just a morality play. If instead of a time machine, the opening voiceoversaid that Sam was a ghost and took over the body in the opening voiceover, the show would be EXACTLY THE SAME, but by your definition, it is now a supernatural show. If Sam instead was a cop and put on a disguise in the opening voiceover, it would be EXACTLY THE SAME, but now it's a cop show by your definition.


For Example: Way-back-when, I owned an Atari ST, and the fabulous side-scroller game Robocop. The graphics on the disc were all loose image files. So my friends and I altered them and made whole new back drops and different enemies and different Robocop. It looked nothing like the original game. BUT IT WAS THE SAME GAME. All we changed was the graphics. Is the game still Robocop? The weapons behaved the same, the bad guys attacked in the same patterns, the sound effects were the same. It was the same game. We changed Robocop to a scantily-clad-lady-wizard that shot fireballs, is the game now a fantasy game?


Every episode of NCIS:LA involves them undercover pretending to be someone else, without all the information, while their 'Al' talks to them (i.e. an earpiece feeding them not quite enough information, so they have to wing it, and get by on charm and luck). It's basically the same show, but with more guns and fewer holograms.


Bones must be a Science Fiction show... Every episode is solved by their superholographic-computer that won't exist for another 400 years, and rivals the Star Trek Holodeck in terms of computing power, where a single keypress will demonstrate how this single thighbone belonged to a white male who fell exactly 924feet, 3.2 inches, from a helicopter while being shot in the head with a specific type of hunting rifle that was discontinued in 1999, using ammo that is only available from these 3 stores. Seriously, that is how they get their big break in every case, with their magic hologram computer. The show hinges on Angela using her stolen technology from the future (She's a caricature artist practically living on the street, and now she's capable of upgrading this super hologram machine, because she's an artist. I would argue she's a time traveller). It's scifi deus ex machina. Far more sci-fi than Quantum Leap, yet it isn't on the SciFi (Or SyFy) channel.



The 'modern' Battlestar Galactica (I say 'Modern', it will be the 15th anniversary before long) did a wonderful job of making the Cylons human, and made it work to their advantage with their infiltration. I would argue that many of the episodes were not really science fiction, but more about politics, morality, and the military. Set the show on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, and it is practically the same show... Yes I realize that contradicts my argument, but then I don't have a clear definition of what 'Science fiction' is other than a dictionary definition which is too black and white... (See my comment about the opening voiceover for Quantum Leap).


If Star Trek Voyager had stuck around for longer, I think it would be inevitable that The Borg would return again and again, and eventually just be humans with borg brains (actually, Battlestar Galactica was supposed to be what Voyager was originally envisioned as, and you have the cylon infiltrators, so... that basically)
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Post by Jericho » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 10:01

And another thing!

"Let's make a Live Action He-Man film!!!"
"We don't have the budget for a whole fantasy world."
"Don't worry, we'll set it in contemporary LA and film it in Vancouver!"


AAAAGGGGHHHHHH I HATE THAT SHIT!!!!!!

I get that this is still Science Fiction (I would argue it has the moniker of SciFi rather than Science Fiction), but it is just 'cheating' once again. Just like all the superhero movies that have endless origin stories.

"Hey! Everyone loves Superman and Spiderman! Let's make a movie!"
"What do people love about them?"
"Well, they have super powers and they fight bad guys in epic battles!"
"Great, we'll make it an origin story and they only fight a bad guy in the last 10 minutes."


AAAAGGGGHHHHHH


Seriously, the next Superman reboot is going to feature his first 9 months of cell-division in the womb.
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Post by brucewarren » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 10:59

As it happens Sam's leaps aren't powered by God.

The tragedy of the whole thing is laid out in the final episode. All of the leaps are in fact powered by Sam himself but he refuses to accept this, and this is why he cannot go home.

The Barkeep asks him outright why he built the Quantum Leap accelerator in the first place and explains the truth behind the whole thing but Sam doesn't believe him.

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Post by CBJ » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 13:11

I'd just like to add a few more series to the discussion, though my memory of some of these is a bit vague:

• Sapphire and Steel (with Joanna Lumley, pretty awful and probably fits into the "fake" SciFi category).
• Star Cops (dire, just a cop show in space, watched only because it was pretty much the only new "SciFi" on TV at the time).
• Max Headroom (again the TV series, not the film or the music video host, or indeed the cameos in various songs - I seem to remember enjoying this one).

And then of course there's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series (not the film) which shares with Red Dwarf the rare accolade of being both good SciFI and good comedy, regardless of (possibly even partly because of) budget restrictions.

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Post by Redvers Ganderpoke » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 17:06

CBJ wrote: • Sapphire and Steel (with Joanna Lumley, pretty awful and probably fits into the "fake" SciFi category).
.
And David McCallum - I'm still trying to work out why I never watched this - It could be that there was something on the "other side" .
CBJ wrote: And then of course there's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series
Still funnier / better than the film.
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Post by pjknibbs » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 17:22

Jericho wrote: It was just a drama of the week, the fact that he was in a different body made no difference and doesn't magically make it SF.
The original Star Trek was basically "Wagon Train to the stars"--it had exactly the same structure as a Western, but happened to be set in space. Does that make Star Trek not SF, or does it mean Wagon Train was actually SF? Star Wars is basically a fantasy tale of a hero rescuing a princess and defeating the evil wizard--is that SF?

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Post by Redvers Ganderpoke » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 18:00

pjknibbs wrote:
Jericho wrote: It was just a drama of the week, the fact that he was in a different body made no difference and doesn't magically make it SF.
The original Star Trek was basically "Wagon Train to the stars"--it had exactly the same structure as a Western, but happened to be set in space. Does that make Star Trek not SF, or does it mean Wagon Train was actually SF?
And some of the same actors (Deforest Kelly was known for appearances in TV Westerns ). Star Trek also used the Carry On Film's trick of fitting the story around whatever sets they had to hand. (See Return of the Archons, Spectre of the Gun, A Piece of the Action and Patterns of Force (Nazis!!))
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Post by Morkonan » Tue, 18. Jul 17, 18:50

Usenko wrote:... But nobody blames them for this - it was produced in the middle of a writers' strike, and they had to put something together, so they used clips of previous episodes and a really lame storyline written by someone who wasn't a writing guild member (and it shows!).
One bad apple, or a missing one, can spoil the whole bunch!

Last night I watched "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children." I had seen the title on the YA shelves, but hadn't paid attention to it. It's YA, so I thought I wouldn't be interested. Bored, with not much on TV, I saw it on and decided to watch it. I was pleasantly surprised, as well as bheing a little bit concerned, with the storyline. But.. in the production, there was one serious flaw - The music was, for many scenes, terrible. The choices and compositions were just plain bad. (Really bad ElectroPopDance music for a fight scene? Nothing but broken "thrumming" for a dramatic scene?)

Unlike a novel, a movie or a television series is a compilation of efforts. Even a good director can't always shine through to produce their vision of the story. Visible faults throughout a piece can snowball with viewers unable to forget them. (MPHPC is a good movie and story, though, despite that one flaw.)
When you're producing a TV show you have a certain budget and a certain amount of time, and within those constraints you must produce (say) 24 episodes. Therefore you will ALWAYS get the occasional completely useless episode. And you'll always get aliens impersonating humans in order to save a few dollars (unless the alien costume can be done practically rather than electronically).
Exactly. That's one issue that feeds into the compilation of efforts. In cases where the story absolutely requires exceptional effects, the lack of them or required complex scenes is always telling. Imagine "2001" without spaceships... What's the impact on the audience of the commercial flight to the spacestation? The rotating cylindrical quarters scene on Discovery? All done well, all presenting added-value to the audience, because of their quality, and all vital to the overall presentation of the setting.
Jericho wrote:...So what if Sam's soul transferred into the body of a different person via a strange time machine (powered by God, don't forget). So just because the opening voiceover involves him taking a new body via time machine, that makes it science fiction? That's an excessively broad viewpoint of SF, IMHO...
There are a lot of things that feed into that storyline. It's one of the things that makes it interesting. But, the underlying premise is driven by technology/science and that's really what matters when defining it. Whether or not that technology somehow allows us to reach into the spiritual or changes us or allows us unique insights into ourselves is it's "theme."

My favorite example of a science-fiction setting and plot contrasting with a much broader theme is "The Night's Dawn" trilogy by Hamilton. In this story, the setting is in the far future where much of what we imagine today as being very advanced scientific concepts has been realized. But, humanity is still, despite its knowledge, trudging along, trying to figure itself out. And then... the question of our ultimate fate is realized, reaching deeply into fantastical, even spiritual, realms, where "good" and "evil" are questioned. And, perhaps, that question isn't even answered...

The point is that a story's theme doesn't define its genre anymore than a genre requires a particular theme. That's the beautiful thing about fiction - You're free to tell any story you want in any setting you want using any sort of character you want. :)

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