While I never saw it, the old BBC series "Doomwatch" sounds intriguing. Will it continue ITTL? Will it get broadcast in the USA?
I apologize for overlooking this question earlier. The show looks very much like a product of its time, and though I suppose environmentalism
would be in general more successful ITTL (thanks to Moonshot Lunacy), I still suspect that it would rise and fall in periodic waves, just as IOTL. Therefore, it wouldn't continue
for very much longer.
NCW8 said:
In one of their pantomimes, I remember them using the line "Once a King, always a King, but once a Knight is enough!"
Groan-worthy puns. Sounds like my kind of people!
NCW8 said:
For that, you should really see
Rainbow. OK, I should say that, although those are the genuine presenters of Rainbow, this isn't actually a genuine episode. Apparently it was made as part of a tape given to staff of Thames tv as a Christmas present.
Wow 
That even made
Are You Being Served? look subtle!
I don't really disagree, but didn't the Lone Ranger & Superman do much the same in the '50s? I agree, "Star Wars" raised the bar, & the profits, enormously, but...
Let's just say that after
Star Wars, no studio
ever allowed
anyone to keep control of
any aspect of their IP. But beforehand, Lucas managed to convince them to do so.
phx1138 said:
By putting it that way, didn't he just do that?
I was referring facetiously to an incident a few years ago, when Ebert declared that video games could never be true art (in other words, the exact same thing that stuffy theatre or literary critics no doubt said about motion pictures a century before). His argument was that they could not be art because they were "interactive", that each consumer would therefore have an individual, subjective experience with them (because that
never happens with non-interactive media
). The key element of this declaration, and what drove many people against him, was his utter refusal
to actually try playing a video game. He knew, because he said so (and he is
far too stubborn to ever go back on his word). Some time later, he eventually conceded that - even though he was
still right about the issue, no matter what anyone else said - he would agree to disagree.
phx1138 said:
Actually, it didn't. The "dark ages" really weren't as dark as they're commonly made out. (Just don't ask me to source it...
) Yes, some major civilizations fell or ran into trouble, but it's not as if all Europe went back to living in caves.
Hence the qualifier "using the classical definitions"
Seriously?
I suspected but wasn't sure.
As far as I know, yes, ma'am
Lizzie_Harrison said:
Hope the next update is flowing! Anything we can discuss to help your creative juices flow?
It should be along tomorrow. You've all given me plenty of inspiration to get it written already, but you're more than welcome to discuss anything I've mentioned in my updates so far. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. If you have any
guesses as to what might happen, feel free to record them for posterity
Actually you're in a somewhat similar boat to me. I never saw any of the Star Wars films until 1997, and the first one I saw was the special edition of Episode IV, which I have always found underwhelming because I saw every eighties ripoff of it (e.g. Battle Beyond the Stars) first and therefore the original always seems very 'generic' to me. I decided Star Wars wasn't for me, but then I got into the EU material because I wanted more ideas and influences for my interest in starship design, and from that I eventually watched Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on VHS and found them to be far superior films. I generally find that the Star Wars EU, especially nowadays now that many of the inconsistencies have been patched over, is rather dissonantly much, much better and more interesting than almost any part of the actual films put on the screen, especially if you include the prequels.
Expanding on your point about how
Star Wars has been
genericized by parodies and ripoffs, it's interesting to compare it with
Star Trek, which is (of course)
also the subject of these. But
Star Wars parodies (which, per the law of
First Installment Wins, are overwhelmingly of the original film) are largely plot-driven, whereas
Star Trek parodies (per the same law, overwhelmingly of the original series) focus much more on character quirks and interactions. How many
Star Trek parodies have you seen where the plot is throwaway nonsense about the most generic elements (Klingons, energy clouds, evil robots or computers)? Whereas
Star Wars parodies generally hit every action beat from the movie, like clockwork. Speaking from personal experience (as I did not start watching
Star Trek until I was well-aware of all the parodied elements), it doesn't diminish your appreciation of the actual series. Kirk is a lot more subtle and dignified than parodies would have him (except maybe in the Turd Season), the character interaction is much more nuanced and clever, etc., etc. But
Star Wars is exactly as all the parodies have it. We as a popular culture know that plot down cold. Perhaps part of the reason you valued
Empire and
Jedi more is because we know less about them through
Pop Cultural Osmosis. I mean, obviously we know
some things, but definitely not as much as with the original film.
Thande said:
I think the idea of the computers being separate is understandable given the technology of the period in which the show was made. They were still in the 'a computer is a big thing in the room you go to when you need some calculations doing' stage. Remember it was pre-Apollo programme, which I think was largely responsible for inculcating the idea that 'a computer can be something small that's responsible for effectively actually piloting your ship' into the imagination of sci-fi writers. I remember being surprised when reading up on how nuclear missiles in this period (e.g. the Cuban Missile Crisis) worked and finding that they basically had no electronic components at all as we would understand them, it was entirely based on gyroscopes.
That's fair, and I would accept that answer wholeheartedly if it weren't for an episode like "The Ultimate Computer", in which M-5 controls the ship
exactly as computers control things in the modern day (all systems routed through a central, automated mainframe), so surely it must have occurred to
somebody that it was a possibility. (The episode was apparently meant as an allegory of how computerization was resulting in the loss of jobs - so
that was already happening by the late 1960s).
Thande said:
The idea of the evil computers (and androids) is also very much emblematic of its time: again it's because a computer was considered a mysterious black box in a room that nobody really understood, and was not something everyone encountered on a daily basis like nowadays. So it's the technological equivalent of summoning a Faustian demon or genie, if you like: the potential for great power, but the sense that your lack of knowledge of it will lead to you paying a heavy price. The same is true of the idea of being mind-controlled by your TV that was a typical Twilight Zone type plot from a few years earlier: it works because TVs were still new, rare and mysterious. The modern equivalent is perhaps the idea that the Large Hadron Collider can do basically anything from ending the world to reversing time to opening portals to dimensions filled with evil invaders to whatever: few people have actually seen it or know how it works, so you can fill in the gaps with whatever you most fear. Nanotechnology, too: as a chemist who works in a related field, it never ceases to irritate me that most people's first thought is of tiny little robots turning everyone into grey goo.
But this is definitely something I can understand. The potential evils of modern technology. The television example tickles me because it often seems that the harshest criticism of television as a medium is produced within the television industry itself! (Though movies - their main competition in this era - weren't far behind, as we may soon discover.)
I guess that I was just the right age to appreciate Star Wars when it first came out (before it became episode 4). It was quite a phenomenon - there was even an extended radio series of it broadcast on BBC Radio 1 - the pop music channel that didn't normally broadcast drama.
Indeed, one might argue that you were a little too old (you were about the same age that
I was when Episode I came out, actually, and
I definitely felt too old - that movie produced without question
the most overly saturated merchandising blitz within my living memory). But then again we're looking at two different situations: the "timeless" and "universal" appeal of
Star Wars vs. the "kiddy"
Phantom Menace. And another contrast: with
Star Wars the blitz came
after; with
The Phantom Menace, it came
before.
NCW8 said:
It's easy to overlook now, but it actually wasn't a particularly high budget film. The studio scenes were filmed at Elstree, which made it easy for some of the characters to appear on the Muppets. It also wasn't expected to be a great success. I remember an interview with Alec Guiness where he said that friends had called him foolish for accepting a percentage of the gross rather than a fixed fee.
Sir Alec may have hated the end result, but it kept him living in luxury for the rest of his long life. He, too, was a canny businessman, no question.
NCW8 said:
It's the only film I've seen in the cinema that had an advert for instant mash potato shown before it. The advert started with a parody of the now well-known Star Wars Opening Crawl describing a war taking place in a far off galaxy and ending with a line something like "but away from the fighting, people carried on living their lives". It then cut to the Smash advert at 02:45 in
this clip.
Mashed potatoes in a bag? Frightening. And them laughing at that woman cooking
real food at the end... how
distasteful 
