Oolite Bulletins

Will they actually do it, I wonder? Done right, it could be excellent!

Cult classic sci-fi series Blake's 7 is to be remade for the Syfy network, it has been announced.

I wonder: isn't the Syfy network reasonably fabled for bad shows, and beset by its inhabitants' ingrained silliness? Or something like that…

Commander McLane wrote:

... reasonably fabled for bad shows, and beset by its inhabitants' ingrained silliness

<wonders which planet that description could be applied to> Hmm...

Well this looks promising I must say
I'm guessing the costumes will be less 70's-ish and the SFX will hopefully be better than the original series

I remember the shaky sets and costumes rather fondly. The thing about a small SFX budget is that the story tends to be much better--it has to, because you can't hold the viewer's attention with super SFX. Just look at how crap Dr Who is these days (runs and hides).

Mad Dan Eccles wrote:

The thing about a small SFX budget is that the story tends to be much better--

Which is why Blake's 7 worked so well as a radio drama too.

*nods fervently*

Mad Dan Eccles wrote:

I remember the shaky sets and costumes rather fondly. The thing about a small SFX budget is that the story tends to be much better--it has to, because you can't hold the viewer's attention with super SFX. Just look at how crap Dr Who is these days (runs and hides).

Ooh, I don't know about that ... Blake's 7 did tend to rely very heavily on Terry Nation's only plot, i.e. there's been a nuclear war and it's turned the entire planet into this quarry, right, and everyone lives underground on videotape and wears plastic. Aaand ... action!

Small budgets can force people into being inventive, it's true - but it can also hamstring a production and force it down to a level of terrible mediocrity because it's just not possible to portray enough grand-scale SF mindboggliness with bubblewrap and half a tin of Swarfega. An example would be the original TV version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere: visually, it looked like a spinoff of The Adventure Game, and suffered because of it. The recent radio adaptation, where the special effects budget is essentially unlimited, works far, far better.

I suspect that many memories are being rose-tinted by distance. Try watching an old Dr Who episode now - even something reasonably classic and (when I first saw it) frightening, like The Talons of Weng-Chiang. There was a giant rat in it: in my memory (from 1977, when I was 9), I can see this great big actual giant rat. I've since seen this episode as an adult, and it's clearly - clearly - two blokes under an old carpet, to which a couple of bicycle reflectors have been pinned. And don't get me started on the epic disappointment of rewatching the originally terrifying The Seeds of Doom, which put me off broccoli for years ... or the "Sutekh's cushion" debacle from the at-the-time psychologically scarring Pyramids of Mars. Children these days, I fear, are exposed to much higher production values at a much earlier age, and wouldn't put up with this sort of thing at all.

Anyway, I digress. But Blake's 7 was, in all honesty, a load of ropy old tosh, with the seeds of a great idea buried inside it underneath the BBC's inability to take SF seriously, and to give it a concomitantly serious budget. Look at what they lavish on costume drama: the money for bonnets alone would dwarf anything they've ever spent on any non-mainstream production. The Beeb have never made any really good, adult, SF*: they can do it for kids (Dr Who, old and new), and they can do it for laughs (Red Dwarf, at least for the first few seasons, and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide), but they've never managed it straight, for grownups, because they've never managed to commit to it wholeheartedly.

*with the possible honourable exception of Quatermass, although that's before my time ...

Disembodied wrote:

the BBC's inability to take SF seriously, and to give it a concomitantly serious budget.

I agree with that, completely.

Disembodied wrote:

*with the possible honourable exception of Quatermass, although that's before my time ...

Unfortunately, not before my time - Quatermass was brilliant!

Oh, no. Not SyFy. Please.

When SyFy (or its previous incarnation, the SciFi Channel) get hold of a concept, they turn it into a shadow of its former self.

The dark, evil plots will all go out in favour of girls in skimpy costumes fawning over the criminal main characters. There will be Sex. It will be Blake's Threesome, with wobbly scripts and underpaid, overworked actors.

The sets and effects for B7 were rubbish, definitely, but what made it work at the time were the characters and the story. The acting could be cheesy, but then all 70s acting was cheesy by today's standards. Nowadays everyone expects perfection and there's no room for error. Sets, effects, acting, continuity and storytelling ALL have to be perfect.

I fundamentally protest at remaking old TV series for one good reason - classic TV series worked for the audience at the time, and updating them will always fail because for it to work in current society the base premise has to be changed - often beyond recognition. Another aspect of it to consider was that often most series were successful because they were ORIGINAL. By definition a remake can't capture that originality and make an audience say "hey, we haven't seen this before!"

As an example, look at V - the 80s series concept worked and was successful (until they tried to flog a dead horse with a weekly series). The 2009 remake was so different to Johnson's original concept that they tried to have his name removed from the "created by" credit!

It was panned for being a "poor copy" of the original. The newly crafted story was then panned for being rubbish (again often compared to the original). It was also panned for bad acting and characters that weren't consistent. So they tried to link it to the original by using some of the old cast - despite their previous attempts to "distance it" from the original!! WTF??

Sorry. High horse again.

It won't work. It's too late. The original audience won't like a new version and the new demographic will say it's all been done before.

Now an Elite TV series. That would be new and original for TV. I'll write the script and Allen Stroud's Students can film it.

EDIT: just looked at the press release:

The year is 2136, Blake wakes up on one side of the bed. He reaches for the other side. There’s nobody there. As reality sets in, this handsome ex-soldier sits up, and looks at a photo of his wife Rachel. Beautiful. Deceased.

Angst and relationships in the FIRST PARAGRAPH! Not a good sign.

Wait, I get you can tell from the photo she's beautiful, but dead? It's some kind of necrophilia kink?

I just read the press release to the end:

Leon Clarance, co-founder of Georgeville Television and CEO of Motion Picture Capital, the finance arm of Reliance Entertainment, said, “Joe Pokaski and Martin Campbell have worked tirelessly with the Georgeville TV team to create an amazeballs reboot of this classic space opera which I watched with my father when I was a child.

"Amazeballs"? Really? The CEO of a production company uses that word in a press release? I don't hold out much hope for a professional production.

Selezen wrote:

I just read the press release to the end:

Leon Clarance, co-founder of Georgeville Television and CEO of Motion Picture Capital, the finance arm of Reliance Entertainment, said, “Joe Pokaski and Martin Campbell have worked tirelessly with the Georgeville TV team to create an amazeballs reboot of this classic space opera which I watched with my father when I was a child.

"Amazeballs"? Really? The CEO of a production company uses that word in a press release? I don't hold out much hope for a professional production.

No, that's not a good sign ... I blame the remake of Battlestar Galactica. Because it worked, everyone seems to think there's TV gold waiting to be extracted inside any elderly TV SF if you give it a gritty remake.

Selezen wrote:

girls in skimpy costumes...There will be Sex.

I doubt it will be that good!