With the unforgettable characters:
A completely forgettable simulacrum
“Darwin hates Brandis. Please, kill Brandis or kill Darwin.”
I preferred Sealab 2021
Pudding can’t fill the emptiness inside me! But it’ll help.
Set in “the near future” (the year 2018 in the first season)
Uff.
The 90’s were peak optimism. It’s all downhill from there
Yeah binging 90’s scifi is very soothing.
Until you hit those depressingly real near future depictions.
The third season was a skip forward to 2032 and it was somewhat better, but still pretty stupid.
Like they had an android character who was a great big guy but had a simple, child-like brain. What the hell was the point of that?
android character who was a great big guy but had a simple, child-like brain
kind of AI like, when you think about it.
Except I literally mean childlike. He talked like he was a preschooler. It was super stupid.
And I looked it up later last night since I have not watched that shit since the 90s and it turns out actually no, he’s not an android, he’s part of a genetically engineered species of subhuman slave that most people seem totally cool with in 2032 and some people are bigoted towards them. Also, he looked like he was in his 30s, which means that the ‘breed genetic slaves that talk like preschoolers’ program should have started around the time the show was being made. Weird that no one noticed.
Also also, the bigoted term for them is GELF, which is amusing if you know Red Dwarf. Especially since it’s for the same reason.
Like they had an android character who was a great big guy but had a simple, child-like brain. What the hell was the point of that?
I’m sure there’s a contract that says if you employ one DeLuise brother on a show you need to give the other one a bit part.
It would explain Wormhole Xtreme
Don’t diss Wormhole X-treme, there’s a reason it, allegedly, performed very well on DVD.
From that little room in the back of the video store which was closed off behind a curtain.
I didn’t read that whole comment, because I don’t want any spoilers as I might try this show as it’s one of the rare 90’s scifis I don’t think I’ve seen.
I disagree pretty strongly with Squid here. The first season was great but it went pretty sharply downhill after.
Trust me, don’t. If you want mostly forgotten 90s sci-fi, there are so many better choices: Odyssey 5, Jeremiah, Earth 2, The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr., Lexx.
Even animated ones like Invasion: America and Exosquad are better. Plus, Invasion: America has Leonard Nimoy in it!
Seriously, I would put Sliders above either SeaQuest DSV or SeaQuest 2032 and it sucked.
No no, not “forgotten”.
Seen. I haven’t seen SeaQuest.
Is Lexx “forgotten?” I mean I guess it was mor niche than I felt, because of having watched it from TV as like a late night addition to a new-ish young person channel here in Finland.
We actually got quite a lot of the Canadian scifis, Stargate obviously being the supreme one. I watched Hot Tub Time Machine yesterday, which came out in 2010, and this reference made me laugh out loud, because in 2010 all the Jacobs (and me) would’ve been collectively jonesing for more Stargate, the last seasons and movies (Universe doesn’t count) had just run out. I don’t think we ever got SeaQuest, because I knew all the shows that were on the five-ish channels we had.
I don’t like animated ones as much. I enjoy 80’s-90’s scifi a lot because it’s “bad”. Like the boring one camera angles makes it so you can basically listen to most of TNG for example.
On the other hand shows like Sliders had a bit more action in them and usually kinda large elaborate set pieces. God it was good for the first three series, then… well, without Gimli, son of Gloin, I mean, Pavarotti, I mean, professor Arturo, it just went downhill pretty fast. I’m not even sure I actually have ever watched sliders further than s3 really.
Don’t you dare say Sliders sucked. It was balls to the wall amazing. Just… not all the way through.
Put even for the first 3 seasons, Sliders actually doesn’t work as well as TNG with the stilted long one camera takes. Insofar as being something on the second screen that’s just playing. I don’t enjoy music.
90’s scifi is more like about the hopefulness of the writers than it is about how big of a special effects budget they had. Sort of like old Who. Although I have to admit I have not seen all of old Who. I’ve been meaning to, but…
I don’t think I have seen Odyssey 5 though, that’s a bit new. I don’t know if it ever aired here, I doubt it. That’s too new for “90’s scifi” though, but seems like worth a watch, actually. But I imagine it to be closer to the later seasons of Stargate than the earlier seasons of TNG, in terms of camera angles and other such stuff. Gonna check that out though, thanks. And others which I haven’t seen as well
Tldr 90s scifi is sort of half “supposed” to suck lol. The jilted camera angles and slightly poor production values are to me what I feel like the “warmth” that hifi snobs talk about with their LP-players and whatnot. U know?
Odyssey 5
Do you mean Babylon 5?
I do not.
I think I missed Invasion:America. Know anywhere I could see it?
Yes! For some reason, it is on YouTube in two long parts rather than broken up into episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEzUt4EotkU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohAuAyCBFdM
There are two versions, a prime time version and a version edited down for kids. I believe this is the prime time version with a lot more violence.
The first two seasons (and the first half of season 3) of Sliders were great. The rest, yeah, should join E.T on Atari 2600 in its burial site.
Earth 2! FTW!!
Such a great show! The world building was amazing! (Plus, Clancy Brown!)
Similarly, I’ve been re-watching the Alien Nation TV series lately. I forgot the extent of the world-building done in that show. It’s truly impressive for just one season and a few TV movies.
Clancy Brown is great but Tim Curry is amazing, poppet
peak Tim Curry for sure
I haven’t seen that. I’ll add it to my list!
Oh definitely! And don’t bother watching the film first. They change a lot from it like Stargate SG-1 did. If you don’t know the plot, a space ship of alien slaves breaks down over Los Angeles and after several years, it’s decided that they get to be made citizens. A “Newcomer” cop works with a bigoted human that slowly learns to respect their culture.
Edit: And, of course, there’s a Trek connection or two- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Pierpoint
No mention of Space: Above & Beyond?
I thought I knew you, dude
I never got into it back then and I never got back to it. I should.
It would be nice to have another human who understands what I mean when I say “Raymond T. Butts has ate his last pancake”
The reason it failed was that it didn’t mimic Star Trek enough, with geopolitics and court room episodes.
But Star Trek could learn something by having an astrophysicist come on at the end of the show and talk space science like this show did with Robert Ballard.
Also, I had no idea that his bit at the end of his 30 Rock episode was satiring that in particular.
The episode where Roy Scheider talks to Jonathan Brandis about using a condom was one of the most cringey things ever put on American TV.
how… ho wwas this?
This show is pretty fire back in the day, they had some hyper intelligent dolphin doing recon for them
Named Darwin. They had some way of translating his dolphin sounds to a weird synthesized voice that was probably voiced by an actor.
I only watched it because I fell in love with Stacey Haiduk watching her as Lana Lang in Superboy
The first season was really good. The second was labored at times. The third was… something else.
But it’s got Mark Hamill so that’s not nothing.
Was he the dolphin?
No, he was a shapeshifting reptiloid alien trying to get back home
i just recently downloaded this/added it to my library last year. it did not age well. it was pretty awesome back in the day, but its kinda hard to watch now
I’ve been wanting to as well out of nostalgia but I know it will be bad by today’s standards, or even adult standards in general.
So I’m not going to do it… Yet.
I feel obligated to subject myself to this. But I appreciate the warning.
I did exactly the same thing.
I remember being fond of the first season, but it was definitely “wet star trek,” complete with a Tiger Beat suitable version of Wesley (RIP Jonathan Brandis, who got chewed up and spit out by Hollywood), especially by the end of season 2 when I stopped watching, apparently along with everyone else.
I watched all the seasons.
It was kind of poetic that a show about a submarine went so far off the deep end.
Did they ever jump a shark though?
There were dozens of us who watched season 3.
Dozens!
This would have been a great show … because we haven’t really explored the ocean depths in real life … I think only 20% of the ocean floor has been mapped so far and of that mapping it wasn’t very detailed.
Nah that’s a common misconception, a lot of the ocean is mapped to enough resolution to know there’s basically nothing there. A lot of the ocean floor is a barren desert with nothing much going on. Some parts have been thoroughly studied, where interesting stuff is going on and where we’ve put infra like all of the undersea cables (which are a lot). All of it is mapped to some resolution and some parts at higher resolution (you can see on Google maps lines where ships have gone through with better mapping abilities). So saying it hasn’t been “explored” or “mapped” is simply false, it has been mapped and has shown to be not interesting. So no nobody went down there, nobody got pictures or centimeter level mapping, but we know how water and sand looks so why bother? It’s this implication of something unknown and mysterious, whilst in reality we’ve just been efficient in what to find. And yes there are new species found in the ocean every day, but you’d need to be an expert to even tell them apart from other species we already know about. There isn’t something big and interesting we don’t know about. It’s a nice story to tell, but it isn’t real.
That said, we still get surprised.
This is a myth, and my heart aches for this show might have contributed to it. We have detailed maps of all the ocean floor, with more or less the same variance as our dry surface maps. We have been to most of the more interesting, extreme and dramatic parts of the depths. Hell, there are oceanographic channels that live stream from deep under on the regular. Sure, there are surely still some things we haven’t found, thousands of sunk ships too small to know exactly where they ended up in, or natural phenomenon we probably haven’t documented yet. But, on the grand scale of science, we know the ocean floor rather well.
Shout out to EVNautilus.
Here’s a neat podcast that talks about this specific myth.
I don’t think it’s a myth. It’s just boomer-era info that kept getting repeated until it was out of date.
I have never seen this show.
Live action Sealab with joxer/ted raimi
That’s Countess Regina Barthalomew front row second from the left.
So this is what she and Moriarty got up to.
So it is! And Jonathan Brandis on the right…I rember him from that awful Rodney Dangerfield movie Ladybugs. Brandis died not long after.
Also from a crappy Neverending Story sequel.
No! R2D2 got lost in the stargate! Quickly, Spok, send in the troopers to save him from Lord Zedd!
Sir, I’m afraid the troopers got their hands full with Emperor Ming at the moment.
Oh man, I forgot this ever existed. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
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