Monday, October 13, 2008

Trust your alien friends

Lidzville reports that V is back! Scott Peters, the creator of "The 4400" and "The Sarah Connor Chronicles," is apparently putting together an update of V on ABC.

If you never watched "V" back in the mid-80s, it was just an awesome mini-series about a race of technologically advanced aliens who come to visit Earth and share their discoveries with us. It turns out they have a much darker agenda, though, which involves eating us and stealing our water. Oh, and they're lizards. Anyway, it's got lots of stuff in there about patriotism, control of the masses, resistance to oppression, etc. Lots of good politics and Holocaust parallels. The original miniseries eventually spawned "V: The Final Battle," which was a pretty entertaining conclusion to the series with a ridiculous ending. Then that spawned "V: The Series," which sucked in about 80 different ways. But I'm hopeful for the new effort.

This news totally made my day, and I can assume it's the reason that the stock market rallied.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the one hand, I'm not sure that you could do a good remake of original material as silly as _V_, in which aliens come to Earth to drag water out of our gravity well.

On the other hand, the original Galactica was pretty silly too, and we've all seen how that went.

On the gripping hand, if you're going to remake another show from the 80s with better effects and, probably, a darker/grittier storyline, you should choose Buck Rogers instead of V.

Seth Masket said...

Buck Rogers was one of the cleanest, happiest, cheesiest sci-fi shows ever. How do you make it dark/gritty? Maybe work on the relationship between Tweekie and Dr. Theopoulos. There's lots of potential there. You have this brilliant scientist who's dependent upon this fun-loving micro-dork for transportation. Also, Princess Ardala had potential.

Anonymous said...

Well, one thing you could do is highlight the tragedy of the Earth being a radioactive wasteland, and how everyone Buck knows is dead and lost to history, and how rotten and miserable that would be to deal with every time you look out the window.

And you could call into question just who's running the show in New Chicago. How do we know it's not the same bunch of clowns that ended the world? Maybe "Dr. Theopolous" is just the uploaded personality of the 2050 equivalent of Jon von Neumann or Dr. Strangelove.

Or, along with that, there are mutants out there in the radioactive wilderness. Dirty people that the Ruling Crowd keep out of the nice, clean cities and oppress in various ways.

And maybe the Draconians aren't so bad. Maybe what Buck sees now is the continuation of a war that Earth started. Or, they could go all Martian Successor Nadesico and have the Draconians be descended from people not allowed into the sheltered cities when the bombs flew.

But they gotta keep Wilma Deering in spandex.

Seth Masket said...

Good stuff. There's got to be some way to play up dissent over the fact that New Chicago seems to be under the leadership of a computer. There's no way all the citizens are on board with that. Does anyone ever rebel against Dr. Theopoulos (and doesn't that translate to "city of God")?

Damned straight Wilma stays in the spandex.