Wing Commander TV series gone?

It ended up being one of the shows FOX pulls its stupid scheduling on... they played the first bit of the series on Saturdays, in a timeslot that wasn't great for the type of the show... Then they pulled a Futurama, pre-empted it all the time, jumped it around in timeslots, took a big break in the middle, I think they played a couple of the episodes in the wrong order.
Click to expand...

Meh, I still can't buy the "evil conspiracy" theory that all cancelled TV show fans seem to cling to. S:AaB started out with a fantastically rated pilot and then dropped significantly in its single (friday night?) timeslot... so FOX shuffled it elsewhere. Regardless of all this, they still renewed it (at the time, the most expensive show on TV) for second half season - I just have trouble believing there was some crazy high-level plot to kill it. If for some reason a network got into a situation where they paid millions of dollars to develop and air a show and then decided that they secretly hate it, they could just cancel it - or drop it entirely. I just find it unprobable that evil executives at FOX went "Oh, hey, lets keep buying episodes of this show... but do everything we can to get it to fail later on! Hahaha!"

(Ditto for Futurama - they produced ~70 episodes of the show and continued to air it for five years... that's pretty darned good for niche programming that they don't own any assosciated rights to.)


Back to the original topic - seriously, there are lots of good reasons to complain about the movie... but dodgy physics isn't one of them. Anyone looking for realistic spaceflight got off the Wing Commander bus in 1990.
 
McGruff said:
May your home town be hit by a giant bug meteor from Klandathu.
Click to expand...

hehehehe.....
...
...
:o

erm... Space Above and Beyond is great! And so was WC movie!

I mean, the movie isn´t perfect, but, aside from the $20 Kilrathi puppets, overall I really enjoyed it.
 
cff said:
Not to be insulting, but personally I'd not like to be named with professional film critics in one sentence...
If a movie got an oscar its almost guaranteed that I am going to hate it. Only exceptions I remember are of the scifi or fantasy genre.
Click to expand...

Way to sound completely, stupidly biased! :D OMGYOUWIN
 
Bandit LOAF said:
... there are lots of good reasons to complain about the movie... but dodgy physics isn't one of them. Anyone looking for realistic spaceflight got off the Wing Commander bus in 1990.
Click to expand...

I don't know about that. I mean, there is dodgy physics and then just completely wrong. I'll let the questionable stuff go (ie "flying" in space) but when one of the fundamentals of physics known for hundreds of years gets thrown out the window (ie gravity), that's when I draw the line.

Don't get me wrong, I don't thing that the movie completely sucked. It did have it's moments. But, in the end "meh" is how I would describe it.


And onto the FOX S:AaB. I don't think that FOX deliberately sabotaged the series. I just think that the people in charge are so far removed from reality they didn't know that they were doing it. But, on the other hand I did hear that FOX got an offer from a couple different networks (can't remember which ones) to buy it from them and FOX turned them down. Again, not necessarily conspiracy, more probably, stupidity.

I mean, look at the shows we have now :(
 
My doctor tells me I have high blood preassure. This thread is doing nothing to help that.
 
MephistonIV said:
Latest rumor is that James Cameron is planning his next project to be some kind of epic sci fi saga.
He hasnt done anything since Titanic (besides a documentary), but he certainly has a nack for big screen action entertainment.

Just thought I would throw it in here..

- Meph
Click to expand...

If a WC show were to be made, he's probably the one director who could pull it off.
 
MephistonIV said:
Latest rumor is that James Cameron is planning his next project to be some kind of epic sci fi saga.
He hasnt done anything since Titanic (besides a documentary), but he certainly has a nack for big screen action entertainment.

Just thought I would throw it in here..

- Meph
Click to expand...
Cameron's next show is going to be a SciFi epic in 3D! No crap. I've been reading about it over at Dark Horizons. Don't know the title yet, though.

Anyway, my personal ideas of what would make a succesful WC TV series:
1) go back to the style of the games (uniforms, ship designs, etc.) but place it early in the timeline, around say Action Stations and follow a different set of characters, like maybe Tolwyn, Richards, or Turner. This will give the unitiated the ability to more easily acclimate to the cause of the war and we the fans might get to see the Wildcat presented. ;)
2) keep it away from Fox. They cancelled The Tick for smeg sake! Now I would like to see it maybe on HBO where it would be open to more freedom in terms of reality with storylines and language and all that, but if we get lesbian love triangles I'll shoot up the office. :p
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Meh, I still can't buy the "evil conspiracy" theory that all cancelled TV show fans seem to cling to. S:AaB started out with a fantastically rated pilot and then dropped significantly in its single (friday night?) timeslot... so FOX shuffled it elsewhere. Regardless of all this, they still renewed it (at the time, the most expensive show on TV) for second half season - I just have trouble believing there was some crazy high-level plot to kill it. If for some reason a network got into a situation where they paid millions of dollars to develop and air a show and then decided that they secretly hate it, they could just cancel it - or drop it entirely. I just find it unprobable that evil executives at FOX went "Oh, hey, lets keep buying episodes of this show... but do everything we can to get it to fail later on! Hahaha!"

(Ditto for Futurama - they produced ~70 episodes of the show and continued to air it for five years... that's pretty darned good for niche programming that they don't own any assosciated rights to.)
Click to expand...

To add on this, the "timeslot shuffle" is simply one of the realities of the cutthroat media wars ... there are dozens of pilots waiting in the wings; if a new show doesn't blow everything away the networks are forced to push it back to make room for the new stuff. I don't think it's a "conspiracy", per se, but you can see when the network eventually gives up on a show - I'm sure many FOX execs loved S:AaB. Ditto with Futurama. But this is a business they run, not a charity, and personal feelings inevitably come second to simple economics.
 
I don't think they loved Futurama - I just think they expected another cartoon from Groenig to last for 586 seasons just like the Simpsons, which is seriously out of steam.
 
Don't put any hope in Fox, especially when it comes to sci-fi shows. Anyone remember Firefly? Came out about a year ago? Made by the same guy who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer and wrote Toy Story (had to add that in)? Really cool show. An entire season was produced, but they didn't even get halfway through the season before getting cut. Fox is big with scifi shows, but they never last.

Now, UPN, that's a network I can see a WC show on.
 
ChanceKell said:
Don't put any hope in Fox, especially when it comes to sci-fi shows. Anyone remember Firefly? Came out about a year ago? Made by the same guy who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer and wrote Toy Story (had to add that in)? Really cool show.
Click to expand...
Well, as wonderful as Firefly was, it did very poorly in ratings... most people seemed to be turned off by the western-in-space thing. Indeed, the fact that they didn't even bother showing the rest of the episodes that had been made is very telling. If it makes you feel better, though, apparently Joss Whedon is trying to get a Firefly movie made.
 
You forgot Joss Whedon also wrote the Marburg, Germany trainwreck that is "Alien Resurrection"
 
Now I would like to see it maybe on HBO where it would be open to more freedom in terms of reality with storylines and language and all that, but if we get lesbian love triangles I'll shoot up the office.
Click to expand...

Over the course of its development, Privateer: The Series apparently went from a noble game/TV crossover concept to stories about the main character visiting the "Planet of the Amazons" very quickly.

... and I thought John Lasseter wrote Toy Story.
 
Toy Story was written by everyone and their mother... it went through a lot of script revisions and different writers. However, the writers' guild has very strict rules about how much of a script you have to write in order to get any credit, so you can never really be sure about how many people worked on a script. Heck, there are writers out there that are up to their ears in script-doctoring work, but have never been given credit for anything.

LeHah said:
You forgot Joss Whedon also wrote the Marburg, Germany trainwreck that is "Alien Resurrection"
Click to expand...
Heh, unsurprisingly, people prefer to forget that particular stage in his career. Supposedly, this was a reverse of the Toy Story situation - instead of being one of the anonymous writers brought onto a script and managing to improve it, here Whedon was the guy whose script got hacked up by other writers and the film's director, but still left with the credit (and, therefore, the blame). Of course, it's difficult to tell whether that's really what happened, or if it's just an excuse to explain away his responsibility for that thing. Probably a bit of both.
 
There was no ghost writing on Resurrection. Whedon has been approached en masse by people at cons and has stated that he hates the script he wrote. Basicly, they gave him a bag of cash to write something in 2 weeks. He takes complete credit for the shitty script, while Jeunet correctly blames the studio and producer intervention for screwing up his original directoral attempt.
 
Starkey said:
...think about the Freespace fans. They don´t even have one. (heck, they don´t have a GAME either) :D
Click to expand...

Hahaha...Freespace 2 is being re released only through Interplay's online store in the near future. So technically we have a game again...but sadly...FS2 didnt make enough money to warrant a FS3. FS2 ended in a cliff hanger that I would have liked to see finished but when Interplay/Volition got bought by THQ I think they decided to drop the project and persue the production of bad wrestling games. I remember a bunch of us were making a CG movie of Freespace. I believe it was HG squadron. Didnt go very far... Oh well.
 
Well... I've been watching battlestar galactica... and that is a pretty good show I believe. I could see a similar resemblance in that an WC, so if they did create a series for WC on sci-fi or UPN, something would have to make WC stand out and much better of a series to steal some of those Glactica fans away ;)
 
The one that was playing on the Sci Fi channel? The remake one or the old ones with Lorne Green. Cause I saw the remake one and it was pretty cool. But I dont know if they are continuing it or the even premiered it.
 
The new battlestar galactica that premiered on sci-fi... i thought that was really good. I hope they continue and create a season. I heard many positive comments about the premire..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top