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Milestones in Bad TV
Jun. 25th, 2006 11:08 pmMost of you are familiar with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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...
