[Movie] Classic Sci-Fi and you a.k.a. God damn you're old, Shin

Let's face it, Sci-Fi these days is rubbish. An over-dependance on flashy computer graphics, plots that read like they were written by a bunch of kids who wanted to study physics but were kicked out of school for being unimaginative retards and an obsession with including large-breasted women in tight lycra to keep nerds watching have meant that the creativity that so characterised Sci-Fi in the 60's, 70's and 80's has been mercilessly crushed and we now are fed a stream of identikit shows which are entirely uninspiring.

So fuck that, this thread is about classic Sci-fi, made the way it should be by men with beards and a costume department with access to limitless buckets of latex rubber. What are your favourite Sci-fi programmes from yesteryear and what made them so great?

There are a few shows everyone knows about obviously; Dr Who, Star Trek, The Prisoner spring immediately to mind but there are some other real gems that aren't so well known now.

Modern programmes play at being bleak. That fucking awful Australian thing, Farscape is it? That tried to present a grim vision of the future but failed miserably through a combination of dressing the badguys in bondage gear, making everything colourful and using muppets. No, if you want grim you need England in the 70's because frankly, England was fucking grim in the 70's. This gave birth to some really bleak Sci-Fi shows, including the indredibly wonderful and awesome Survivors. Launched in 1975 and written by Terry Nation, the guy behind Dr Who and pretty much everything else great in the 70's, Survivors told the story of England after a deadly, manufactured plague had basically wiped everyone out. There are a few thousand Survivors in England and they try to survive in country with no remaining infrastructure. It's awesome primarily because it's so very British. The main characters are normal, middle class people with no particular survival skills who move from place to place trying to find more survivors and a place to settle. One the way they encounter skinhead gangs, weird religious cults and all kinds of crap like that. It's always overcast, the use a smoke machine in pretty much every shot and it's just grim and all fuck. There's no super-soldiers, no incredible feats of military might or scientific genius, just some normal people acting how normal people would. It's very John Wyndham and I believe an inspiration for 28 Days Later.

Another thoroughly British show but in a quite different vein was Jerry Anderson's UFO. Everyone knows the Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet but UFO isn't so well known. The programme follows a top secret organisation who are Earth's last line of defense against hostile Martians. It being Jerry Anderson, the space ships and submarine they use are all Supermarionation and as such, hilariously rubbish. The two guys who run the organisation wear brown leather jackets, sharp suits and drink a lot of whiskey. They then drive around the countryside in a sportscar. If you've seen Life on Mars, it's a lot like that only not a pisstake, people really were like that in the 70's. It's cheesy and crap and I love it for that.

Blakes 7 was very popular in the UK but I'm not sure it ever travelled stateside. It was about a bunch of escaped convicts led by a guy called Blake and their adventures around the galaxy in a stolen spaceship. Essentially, it was what Farscape ripped off. It was another BBC Radiophonic Workshop triumph (The guys who invented dance music, fuck you Kraftwerk) and filmed almost entirely on loaction in disused, Welsh slate mines. Again, it was pretty grim, people got killed a lot, including at one point the main character Blake. By the end, the show should technically have been called Avon's 4, seeing as how everyone else had carped it. It was pretty badly acted but the story was great and the monsters were better made that their Dr Who counterparts in my opinion. It was slightly more mature than Dr Who in theme and basically great.

Other shows I used to love were Buck Rogers (A fat guy from the past travels through time and finds out that 500 years in the future spaceships are still controlled the way they are now and all the women are fit and find him irrisistable), The Tripods (Earth is taken over by big, ugly green blob things who mind control everyone and drive around in bit tripedal walking machines, it was scary as fuck), Chocky (A kid gets visited by an alien, everyone thinks he's a weirdo) and Archer's Goon (An odd thing about some guy trying to mind control kids and take over the world, was probably 90's but whatever, it was great).

So yeah, share.

Jam it back in, in the dark.