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Milestones in Bad TV
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msmemory's and my monolithic stack of videotapes -- 20 years of taping on the theory of "videotape is so cheap that we might as well just hold onto it" has left us with about 1200 tapes recorded off the air. We're in the process of getting rid of pretty much all of them. Mostly, they're just getting thrown out: anything that either is already available on DVD, or which I'm reasonably certain will become available, falls under the "we're not their archivists" argument. (And a good deal of stuff I just don't care about enough to even check.)
That said, a modest fraction of the collection -- something shy of 10% of the total, I'd guess -- is both less certain to come out on DVD and interesting enough to hold onto. To that end, I've picked up a VHS-to-DVD burner, and am gradually dubbing stuff. Most of it is being kept because it is good, but a bit is because it's so bad.
Today's dub was Genesis II. For those coming in late, this is the Gene Roddenberry movie that Andromeda was very, very loosely based on. Dylan Hunt is put into stasis as part of an experiment, just before Society Comes To An End and he is buried for a century. When he wakes up, it falls to him to help everyone begin to rebuild. The movie was intended to be the pilot of the series.
I caught a little of it as I dubbed -- just enough to remind me of how very bad it is, from the hokey writing to Dylan's 1970 hairdo. This is one that might well not come out on DVD, because I suspect that most people would prefer to forget it existed. But it's an amusing historical relic, reminding us that, while Gene Roddenberry may have done a bunch of things quite right, the man did not have a perfect touch as a writer...
msmemory's and my monolithic stack of videotapes -- 20 years of taping on the theory of "videotape is so cheap that we might as well just hold onto it" has left us with about 1200 tapes recorded off the air. We're in the process of getting rid of pretty much all of them. Mostly, they're just getting thrown out: anything that either is already available on DVD, or which I'm reasonably certain will become available, falls under the "we're not their archivists" argument. (And a good deal of stuff I just don't care about enough to even check.)That said, a modest fraction of the collection -- something shy of 10% of the total, I'd guess -- is both less certain to come out on DVD and interesting enough to hold onto. To that end, I've picked up a VHS-to-DVD burner, and am gradually dubbing stuff. Most of it is being kept because it is good, but a bit is because it's so bad.
Today's dub was Genesis II. For those coming in late, this is the Gene Roddenberry movie that Andromeda was very, very loosely based on. Dylan Hunt is put into stasis as part of an experiment, just before Society Comes To An End and he is buried for a century. When he wakes up, it falls to him to help everyone begin to rebuild. The movie was intended to be the pilot of the series.
I caught a little of it as I dubbed -- just enough to remind me of how very bad it is, from the hokey writing to Dylan's 1970 hairdo. This is one that might well not come out on DVD, because I suspect that most people would prefer to forget it existed. But it's an amusing historical relic, reminding us that, while Gene Roddenberry may have done a bunch of things quite right, the man did not have a perfect touch as a writer...
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I wouldn't wholly despair of it coming out on DVD -- I think the odds are still decent that the lists are going to get a lot deeper yet, even of the crap. I'm just not *counting* on stuff doing so...
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Mercyfully the names have been driven from my head.
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John Saxon also playing Dylan Hunt.
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Dubbing is pretty much trivial so long as you don't want to do anything interesting to it: put in the VHS and the DVD-R, and hit the "dub" button. My only real disappointment is that there is no "dub for the next 60 minutes" feature -- combined with the fact that it only dubs in realtime, it means I have to remember to set an alarm to turn the dub off when I expect it to be finished. The only saving grace is that the machine is sensitive to the track-separator signal used by modern VCRs, so more recent tapes that need to be completely copied can simply be slapped in, and the tracks will be laid automatically...
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I had heard of this film, though I haven't seen it.
It is important to recall the time passing. What counted as "good writing" in the 1970s and what counts today just aren't the same. By most of today's standards, most of TOS and TNG are bad writing, for example.
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But I have to agree with the other reply -- bad was bad, even then. There's still plenty of bad today; it's just that most stuff of that quality dies in well-deserved obscurity. This particular example happened to live on to be remade, mostly because of its connection to The Great Bird of the Galaxy...
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Concept was interesting. Execution, not so great.
Been long enough since I'd seen it that I forgot the character name...
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