No, I’m not attempting to break the record for most YouTube clips on a single page (did I break it?).
Here’s a collection of all the past title sequences that have been used for Doctor Who since 1963.
(Left to right, top to bottom: Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Pertwee, T. Baker, T. Baker, Davison, C. Baker, C. Baker, McCoy, McGann, Eccleston)
And then there’re the two films starring Peter Cushing. Not really canon for the series, but interesting stories nonetheless. I really like Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., mainly for the sheer number and variation of Daleks that were used for the film. Oh, and lots of explosions and humour and all that other “guy stuff.”
Update: Due to a playback problem with the video (stops playing half way through), it’s been removed from the server. I’m told a corrected version will be re-uploaded.
Update: A new version has been uploaded that fixes the problem.
And don’t forget to check out Big Finish Productions for Doctor Who audio releases starring cast members of years gone by.
First Doctor Who Episode: “The Sontaran Experiment” (aired 2/22/75 & 3/1/75; seen on PBS in early 1988)
Favourite Doctor: Tom Baker, obviously. Then Pertwee, Troughton, and McCoy/Davison. Didn’t get enough of Eccleston, sadly, to really form an opinion one way or the other. After seeing more and more previews of Series/Season 2 on CBC lately, it’s looking like Tennant is going to be a kick ass Doctor. I can’t wait.
Favourite Companion: I could go with the obvious and say Sarah Jane Smith, but Jamie McCrimmon is probably my favourite, then Sarah Jane, and Harry Sullivan.
We’ve all seen Firefly, right? We all loved it, right? We’re all saddened to see it gone, right? If you answered “No” to any of those questions, then what the hell’s wrong with you?
I’ll admit, I never caught Firefly on TV back when it was still being aired. I’m not a huge TV watcher. I have a very short list of shows that I will always try to watch when they’re on: The Office, Corner Gas, Amazing Race, MXC, Mythbusters, and (most recently) House. There’s a longer B-list of shows, and a couple of shows that I’ve been auditing given the new fall schedule, but that’s for another time. A keen observer will notice there’s not a single sci-fi related show on that list. During its time, Firefly wasn’t on that list either. It simply was not even on my radar. Ask me then or ask me now to name you three sci-fi shows that are currently running, and I wouldn’t be able to do it.
It finally got to the point when practically everyone at where I used to work had seen Firefly. They would giggle with eachother and share their favourite quotes over lunch ’til it just became too much to bear. So they set me up with the DVDs, and I was hooked (BTW, thanks guys). I soon after went out and bought the set myself. That was two (maybe three) years ago. I’ve still only seen the majority of the episodes just the one time, but I like to consider myself one of the browncoats.
I can only speak for myself when I say why I like the show so much. The biggest thing for me was the writing, particularly the dialogue. For me, it’s the wit and humour that made it so refreshing and memorable. There are so many great lines and so many great scenes, that you can’t help but remember and cherish them. And the show seemed to have a very lively quality about it. Compare the handheld footage of Firefly to the typical rigid/panning shots of your other run-of-the-mill sci-fi show, and then tell me which one seems to have more energy.
It’s basically a western set in space. They’re outcasts and outlaws, just trying to make ends meet, being chased by bounty hunters and lawmen at every turn, but in space. A neat idea; a little Doctor Who-ish is some regards (another show that had no qualms about mixing genres), but definitely not a new idea.
What follows are some shows that, although might not have inspired Joss Whedon to create Firefly, might have influenced those of us who love his show to watch it (and get everyone we know to watch it).
SilverHawks (86/87)
I never watched this show when I was growing up. In fact, I don’t think I had ever heard of it until I started doing research for this post. Developed by Rankin/Bass (yup, the stop-motion Rudolph people), it was a followup series to their more popular show, the ThunderCats (another show I never watched, due to a preoccupation with Transformers). It had an electric-guitar-playing cybernetic cowboy… a sign of things to come, obviously.
(The animation looks really good. Was ThunderCats that good? Whatever… they’re cats. What were the bad guys? Dogs?)
The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers (86 – 89)
Don’t think I ever watched this one either, but I think I might have seen the toys in the Eaton’s Christmas Catalog as a kid. Must have had some success, as it looks like it ran for a couple of years, and has an official web site. It was created by Robert Mandell, who went on to write and direct Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders. Yeah… I know.
BraveStarr (Sep 87 – Feb 89)
Now I’m pretty sure this was on TV in my area as a kid. If you guessed I never watched it, you’d be right. And if it looks like a cross between the animation styles of The New Adventures of The Lone Ranger and He-Man, that’s because they were all produced by the same animation company, Filmation. A horse that winks? No, thanks. Wouldn’t happen.
I was never a big fan of He-Man, either. Darn those Transformers. They really monopolized a lot of my time as a child. Besides, The Mighty Hercules could kick He-Man’s ass six ways from Sunday.
Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs (Sep 87 – Sep 88)
I saved the best of the 80′s for last. Every Sunday morning on YTV, I’d sit at the dinner table with a hot steaming slice of corn bread smothered with butter and maple syrup, and watch Saber Rider. Not my first anime by any stretch, and I was I little old for it, but it sure had the (pardon the term) raddest theme for a cartoon up to that point in my life, TMNT notwithstanding (with X-Men having since claimed that title).
I’d watched Astroboy and Speed Racer when I was younger, but Saber Rider definitely kick-started my love for Anime. You’ll have to pardon the overuse of all the whip cracking. It’s just so goddamn cool.
Outlaw Star (Jan 98 – Jun 98)
So here we are. It’s a new decade with a new generation of kids. The whole “cowboys on horseback” stuff is gone. The new hero is the outlaw, being chased by bounty hunters. Being good is bad, and being bad is good. Big, complicated, chrome-plated guns are in. Spikey hair… in. What’s a horse? Let’s give him a fancy ship. Oh, and you have to give him a trenchcoat so we can show it flapping in the wind. He is a bad guy after all.
Trigun (Apr 98 – Sep 98)
Haven’t seen it, but I know someone who has recently. Maybe I can get him to say a few words. Looks like the same basic premise as Outlaw Star.
Cowboy Bebop (Apr 98 – Apr 99)
Here’s a bit of a departure. We’re back to following upholders of the law (maybe benders of the law would be more appropriate); bounty hunters. Not very good ones, though. Their bounties usually end up killing themselves or dying in some fashion before our heroes can cash in. A great theme, great animation (with a mix of CG), great characters, and if you listen to the English dub, great dialogue, make this one of the better anime of recent years. I don’t think I need to go further. Enough people have done the whole Cowboy Bebop/Firefly comparison thing.
Firefly (Sep 02 – Dec 02)
And just because I can, here’s the opening to Firefly.
So what does this all prove? Clearly, the idea of the space western is meant to be ingested by the public in stages. Here we have four shows that all came out in the late 1980′s, and three shows that came out in the late 1990′s. I don’t know how much more proof you need that Firefly was simple released completely out of sync of the space western sine-wave. I fully believe, that if Firefly would have been released two years from now, instead of four years ago, it would’ve reached far loftier goals than it has.
Didn’t get to do a whole lot of the stuff I wanted to do. Still haven’t watched the last few minutes of Lupin III: Voyage to Danger after falling asleep the last time. I only managed to watch the first 5 or ten minutes of City Hunter: .357 Magnum. And, when I finally had some time to myself, I was going to watch my long-awaited episode 2 of Neon Genesis Evangelion, only to find out that the sound wouldn’t play (which I only just found out is because I unknowingly had it encoded in 5.1 AAC audio and not stereo).
I guess the good news is my brother and I finally got around to playing our copy of Wizard’s Quest that we bought at a garage sale, like, 20 years ago brand new. And Carcasonne, too. Oh, and we watched Terror of the Autons.
Do you like aliens? Do you like talking about aliens? Do you like talking to aliens? Then you might like seeing one dissected.
Yeah, you might remember seeing this a decade ago. Remember that story about the alien craft crash landing in small town America years ago? They even made a show about it. Wait, sorry, this one. This was supposedly a video secreted out of Area 51 showing an autopsy of the alien that was recovered from the site.
I say “was” because shockingly the men who “discovered” it didn’t so much discover it as they did fabricate it. Shocked, yet? Yeah, me neither. A comedy, Alien Autopsy, just hit theatres in the UK retelling the events leading up the now famous footage. I’ll definitely have to keep my eyes peeled (pun intended).
All this talk of aliens and autopsies reminds me of a guest that was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. On Nov 11, 1998, Dr. Jonathan Reed tells his story of how he encountered an alien in the woods, knocked it out (yes, knocked it out), brought it home, and stuck it in his freezer. Several days later, some men in vans came and stole his freezer. You have to understand, it was like 2:00 in the morning, pitch black, in the middle of the prairies, on the highway, on the way back from a Grey Cup in Winnipeg; it sounded pretty compelling. It was at that same time of night you find yourself needing a Ginsu knife. I don’t know about the validity of the claims of Ginsu, but people sure seem to think that Reed’s story isahoax. Really?
If you like aliens… if you like conspiracies… if you like vampires, or ghosts, or bigfoot… pantookas, dang-donglers, or bizilbix and wums*, then definitely check out Coast to Coast AM if you’re up at night having trouble sleeping, or on the road driving long distance. It used to be on one of our local radio stations, CJME, before they changed format and frequency. There are still a handful of Canadian affiliates carrying the show. For those without a local affiliate, I recommend listening on-line to 1410 CFUN out of Vancouver, as they seem to have the longest coverage. My favourites are when they open a phone line for time-travellers.
There are people that say the Star Trek film and television franchises are dead. They say that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are the ones who killed them. Now I don’t know if those two statements are true, but what I can tell you is that I am a computer scientist. I believe only in facts.
The fact of the matter is that there is clearly a curse on the Star Trek franchise; this is a well documented fact (I will leave finding such sources as an exercise for the reader). However, the origins of the curse are sketchy at best, as no one has documented or proven when or how the curse was first placed upon the franchise. Experts only have evidentiary support as to when the symptoms of the curse first manifested.
The consensus among experts is that the curse retroactively manifested with the release of Star Trek IV, when it was discovered that it was “really good.” Further discoveries also showed that Star Trek II was also “pretty darn good,” and newly uncovered evidence of the time revealed that Star Trek I and Star Trek III both “sucked donkey balls.” The curse continued on throughout the later releases of all the Star Trek films, leaving all odd numbered releases destroyed in its wake, and raising all even numbered movies to glorious success.
In an unexpected twist, the curse was able to spread across mediums, infecting the well known television series of the same franchise, albeit with a slightly different array of symptoms. There are two schools of thought on this matter. The first school of thought proposes that each Star Trek series is “inherently good,” but lays dormant for two seasons until its “true goodness” flourishes upon the broadcasting of its third term. The second school of thought argues it unlikely for a strain to have mutated so wildly in the jump to television to cause such vastly different symptoms, and that it is more plausible that the series exhibit similar and only slightly different symptoms. This second school of thought proposes that during the jump to television the polarity of the “curse-aligned entity” reversed, thereby causing all odd numbered series to be a success and all even numbered series to be failures. Indeed, there is strong evidence supporting this theory as it has been proven beyond a doubt that the original Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Enterprise were all “really great shows.” This is again further strengthened by the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager both “blow chunks.” You will notice the curse is particularly virulent, as it was able to detect that the animated series is not officially part of the canon.
Skeptics have argued that the curse has since been broken (or never existed in the first place) with the release of Star Trek: Nemesis. Incredulously, said skeptics attribute the successes and failures of the various films and series to mere coincidence. Throughout history, science has shown us that there is no such thing as coincidence; that for every effect, there is a cause.
A controversial recent theory shows why the curse is still in effect. Paraphrasing, it states that the earliest findings based what was known of the curse at the time were, in fact, misinterpretations. The oft-quoted mantra that “all even numbered films are good, and all odd numbered films are bad” which the majority of Star Trek-ologists take for truth is only partly true, as it only applies for numbers less than 10. In much the same way that early philosophers’ theories of time, space, and relativity, held true for what they knew of the time, those theories needed to be altered or updated to still hold true for newer findings of string theory and quantum mechanics. To this day, we do not consider those early philosophers as fools or ass clowns; they were simply misinformed, or rather, not altogether there.
The new theory states “all even-summed numbered films are good, and all odd-summed numbered films are bad.” This new theory can be neither proved nor disproved until the release of an eleventh film. As for what will become of the strain affecting the television series, only time will tell. Will it die out, or will it mutate yet again? Thus, we can only assume the film curse is indeed still in effect until such time as an eleventh film disproves the theory, or until some other theorist comes up with better bullshit than I.
