[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.

I'm not sure if its sad that I know of all the shows you've mentioned.

A sure sign of the times is the recent quote from JJ Abrams about his forthcoming Star Trek movie... where he used Star Wars as his influence since Star Wars was more action and Star Trek was more, well, talking.

That said, probably the last great sci-fi show was Space: Above And Beyond. All it was was Combat! (an early 60s show about WWII), put in space with some very good casting. Not every show was perfect but there was certainly more than one gem for the season it lasted.

And yeah, some of you are thinking "That can't be classic, its too new!". And then you realize that the show is thirteen years old. Jesus Christ, I remember seeing the commercials for it before it even aired.

Other shows include The (original) Outer Limits and the super-silly Disney answer to Star Trek TNG - Earth Star Voyager.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I remember seeing Silent Running years ago and while my memory of the movie isn't that great, the message of "don't tear down all the rain forests and plant life you fucks" was clear. Given that it was made in 1971, I think it would count as 'classic'. The look of the movie reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which as I found out was also directed by the same guy.

Skipping ahead ten years, another movie I enjoyed to different degrees over time was Heavy Metal. I'm not entirely sure it melds with the traditional visual image of science fiction, as there were some notably fantasy elements. For an animated and well... 'adult' film (So would say the nudity was simply there for the "Hey look, tits!" factor) it was fairly enjoyable, along with the odd message of "Don't fuck with green marbles". Plus it had John Candy in one part, so that's something.

How ya doing, buddy?

If there was ever a movie where "ahead of its time" applied to, Silent Running was it. Its eco-friendly message pre-dated the recycling and earth-aware trends by about a decade. If the movie came out in 1981, it would've done *much* better.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Asides from the stuff already mentioned (Beware the motherfucking Rover, bitches), I'd have to say most of my Sci-Fi exposure is in book form (Best Star Wars stuff that would make horrible movies is there, cuz Zahn is god on that front). Movies I can say that are fantastic classic Sci-Fi that I can think of (and seriously, why are you bitching about bleak? That's half of the entire genre, both written and visual) include The Quiet Earth and BOTH versions of Solaris. God Solaris is so gorgeous, and I honestly didn't mind the remake. Plus the original is miles better than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Maybe I was misled by the reviews for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and expected more than a talky semi-sci-fi thing, cuz I swear there was stuff about it being more visual and less cerebral.

Anyway, as far as books go, best classic sci-fi that I've read has to be the Ender series. I know it's not STRICT hard-sci but who needs that all the time? Oh and the Tripod books that inspired the series Shin mentioned. Fucking creepy shit we read for 6th grade lit. Now that I think about it, most of the really good sci-fi I read was required for classes (sup Vonnegut's semi-stuff); Alas, Babylon comes to mind.

How ya doing, buddy?

I don't know if 1989 qualifies it as classic but I'd have to say, if anything, the best sci-fi for me is The Hyperion series.

It makes Star Wars it's bitch.

And, Shin? Agreed, most Sci-Fi today is rubbish. The new Star Wars movies and the horrific Babylon A.D. movie.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?