The Sci Fi Channel (or whatever its calling itself nowadays) is trying to repeat the success of the Battlestar Galactica relaunch with a few new versions of old fantasies. The new shows will be revamps of The Phantom, Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld and Alice in Wonderland.The Phantom sounds like standard superhero fare and unless someone utterly spectacular is behind it, I see it as another Flash Gordon. I could only sit through the first ten minutes of the first episode of that fiasco.
An Alice In Wonderland mini-series, on the other hand, has more potential. Sci Fi will likely give it a modern spin much like their recent Wizard of Oz redux, Tin Man. Alice will be a teen-with-an-attitude who eventually takes on the vampiric Queen of Hearts and stakes her at the end of the story (to me, the entire "young female protagonist" genre started with Buffy).
Riverworld also sounds like a winner if its in the style of their previous Dune miniseries.
So what do you think? Will you be watching any of these?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-23-2009 @ 1:06PM
Miles said...
Is it me or does Kings seem like BSG?
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3-23-2009 @ 2:28PM
GigG said...
I liked the pilot of Kings. My thought about 1/2 way through was that this was a show that was supposed to be on Sci Fi but NBC decided they needed to try something.
What worries me is that the show would probably be a huge hit on Sci Fi but NBC won't stick with it long enough.
3-23-2009 @ 1:29PM
Scott said...
Didn't BSG's success have to do with hiring talented, creative people with a clear vision, and very little to do with "remaking" some old TV show? The heads of the Syphilis network really don't have a clue.
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3-23-2009 @ 1:37PM
Anita said...
I'm interested in the Alice remake. I thought it was already in the works and going to be based on a twisted video game version. However, I'm not crazy about the Phantom. He was second rate back in the day (altho' I love my old school heroes) and they already remade it into a movie with less than lackluster results.
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3-23-2009 @ 1:39PM
TVFAN said...
They should have picked up Jericho.
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3-23-2009 @ 1:44PM
Brian said...
They already did Riverworld as a mini-series in 2003.
So are they going to be remaking that?? The mini-series was actually pretty OK, but it left a bunch of unanswered questions at the end, and there was nothing else to go on, so it felt incomplete.
It just seems weird that now, only 6 years later, they would do a do-over on this one.
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3-30-2009 @ 3:02PM
Chris Keller said...
I thought the remake of Riverworld was awful. The new main character created for the mini-series was bland and awful. The scope of the story (all of humanity reborn along a giant planet covering river) was lost. There was some good use of New Zealand's landscape in the South Island but the cast was terrible and uninteresting. If they do reboot it I hope they at least use more of the books' material.
3-23-2009 @ 3:39PM
Gordon Werner said...
Riverworld was a backdoor pilot ... to see if the audience was there ... then they would make a series out of it. That is why it seems so open-ended. Interesting idea though I must say and the movie wasn't that bad
Regardless, it didn't seem to work for that show ... the process did for BSG though.
3-23-2009 @ 2:52PM
Argus said...
"to me, the entire "young female protagonist" genre started with Buffy"
Joan of Arc would like her title back please.
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3-23-2009 @ 3:20PM
Juan Carlos said...
Ummm they could have just given BSG another season... now they are all trying to recreate success. Not gonna happen, with that said, I probably wont be tuning in to scifi anymore.
RIP BSG
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3-23-2009 @ 4:18PM
Midnight13 said...
Tim Burton is doing a "Alice In Wonderland" film too. With Johnny as the Mad Hatter. His might be more faithful to the Carrol book rather then trying to put some weird twist to it like Sci-Fi will probobly end up doing.
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3-23-2009 @ 6:38PM
purpleslog said...
They really screwed up with Flash Gordon.
It should have been done as a sort of science fiction 24 with a version the Queen soundtrack.
Instead, it was just a suck fest.
Both Riverworld and Alice, if done right could be very interesting.
I am not sure about the Phantom. I suspect it will be cheesy. How about a Shadow though? Or a Green Hornet.
I would like them them to consider:
++ Adapt Pride & Prejudice and Zombies into a series.
++ Steampunk alt-history series (lifting Victorian literary characters)
++ MoonBase (riff off the Ben Bova books)
++ An adaptation of Pohl's Heechee 'verse
++ Adaptation of the "Danger Boy" books into a series
++ Riff Off/Adapt Heinlein's Friday 'verse
++ Cyrano Bergerac, Alien Hunter (or perhaps after a riff on the Ctlulue mythos)
++ re-imagination of TV's "The Invaders"
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3-24-2009 @ 7:25AM
Jason said...
Those look interesting. I'm looking forward to Alice and Riverworld. We'll see about Phantom.
I think inspiration for new series needs to come from the fans themselves. There's plenty of comic-happy, sci-fi lovin' basement-dwelling, jar-peeing geeks out there who have great and elaborate story ideas that would make for great entertainment. I know, I game with them every Friday.
My idea was a series continuation of the Thing TNG.
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3-24-2009 @ 11:22AM
Deadpan said...
You lasted 10 minutes? I couldn't make it 40 seconds!
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