Topic: The TV Show Thread

@RogerRoger Lois & Clark was great!
I do - I also recall they'd squeezed Frakes in to Dean Cain's costume for a scene too 😲😂

As show it really was great. The initial 'Moonlighting' with superpowers set up was actually genius. It helped bed-in the characters before the change in direction and production team to focus on more comic/sci-fi stories.

It's also responsible for my weakness for lounge jazz, which kept me playing Hustle Kings more than the game itself! 😂

Everything was better in the 90s. It was a pretty cracking decade.

@RogerRoger also, yes - Tempus! If only for the Clark Kent is Superman 'duh!' 😂

I also have a major like of Lord Nor! I assume that they just weren't allowed to use Zod, since WB were constantly trying to develop another Superman movie throughout the series' run - but Nor was great.

@KALofKRYPTON People often ask me why I don't have a television licence, and my stock answer is my favourite Tempus quote: "There are 9,000 channels and nothing on!" His performance is a masterclass in making ham tasty, and the H.G. Wells episodes were always a high-concept delight.

Trivia Burst: The woman playing Riker's wife in that episode was Genie Francis, his real-life spouse. As for that costume, he was probably used to breathing in, as it was filmed in 1995, the year after he'd been forced to wear Sisko's one-size-too-small jumpsuit in Star Trek Generations. And yes, you're right! I can tolerate lounge jazz, too! The show had excellent music, and a cracking theme tune.

@RogerRoger 😂
'Oh, c'mon Herb...'

Oh I think I'm going to have to revisit L&C. The dvds are probably pretty cheap now.

Riker, and Xanatos, and a Superman villain! Frakes can do no wrong (apart from not turning up to conventions for photo shoots! 😡😂)

I agree. The theme is a cracking piece; not quite as good as TAS, but that's not only Shirley Walker's greatest DC TV theme (which is saying something) - but easily on par with Williams' theme.

Did you ever watch Superboy?

@KALofKRYPTON The complete series (all four seasons) is on Amazon for £28.39 right now.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lois-Clark-Adventures-Superman-Compl...

I once base-jumped off the highest mountain in Just Cause 3 and used SHAREfactory to set the footage to the Lois & Clark theme. It worked surprisingly well.

No, I never did watch Superboy. I've heard average things. Would you recommend it?

@KALofKRYPTON Oh, and whilst I liked it for what it was, Frakes did direct the live-action Thunderbirds movie. Just in case you wanna revisit that assertion of yours up there!

@RogerRoger Nice! That could see me through any impending lock down 😁

As a curio, yes. I don't think it was ever officially broadcast over here. I didn't even know it was a thing until I stumbled across it being shown in German in the early days of us having cable TV.

Didn't actually watch any of it properly until years later by getting it from a peer to peer network.

It is... Awful for the most part. In pretty much every respect.
The story goes that following the poor performance of Superman III and the box office bomb of Supergirl, the infamous Salkinds sold off the Superman screen rights to Canon (and we all know how that turned out). But, always savvy enough to want to make more coin, they retained the rights to make Superboy content.

As I recall, it is a mess really. A cheap mess. For the first couple of seasons (I think), Superboy/Clark was John Hames Newton. Without doubt looked the part, and wasn't an entirely terrible actor - not that he was given anything like quality material. Imagine Smallville being made in the 80s but with the super suit and that's pretty much it.
Newton was replaced for the last two seasons with Gerard Christopher, better actor, but not as good looking - but crucially wasn't as demanding and got to switch out the TV show suit for one of Reeve's movie suits, or parts of one at least; I think they both at least had a Reeve cape.
As Christopher comes in, the show has a format change from high school to college (again, I think - it's been a while) for the 3rd season then on to Clark and Lana working for a local coastal newspaper for the fourth.
The final season feels quite like a bit of a blueprint for Lois & Clark in many ways - which is why I brought it up 😂

There are clips on YouTube. It's all pretty bad.

@RogerRoger Yeah I knew he did Thunderbirds. I didn't hate it - I mean, what else could they have done with it - other than go Gritty BAFTA? 😂

@RogerRoger did a spot of checking on the Superboy stuff. I mis-remembered a couple of things (they were in college from the start), but it's pretty much right.
Some interesting cameos that I didn't recall too.
Most interesting thing, which I'm not sure I'd ever seen before, is that the year Superboy ended ABC were starting preproduction on Lois & Clark. Gerard Christopher autitioned for and got the Clark Kent role. The production team only went with Cain after they'd discovered Christopher had played Superboy for 3 years!

@KALofKRYPTON Yeah, Superboy is definitely one of those somewhat-obscure shows outside of Americaland, I think. Germany picks up a lot more US television than we do! Similarly, I didn't know about it until very recently, and the average reviews turned me away before I looked in any detail.

Of course it'd be the Salkinds. I also just did a quick Google Image Search on the two actors you mentioned and have to politely disagree; I'd say the second guy, Gerard Christopher, is more handsome and Superman-esque than the first but hey, each to their own! I might go looking for a few clips, or perhaps a trailer for its home video release. It'd have to be real cheap, or included on a streaming service for free someday, for me to give it any serious attention. Thanks to our conversation last night, I'm now more determined to re-watch Lois & Clark in the near future!

That and then maybe Due South. That was another big favourite of mine from the era.

Although your story about Gerard Christopher nearly being the lead in Lois & Clark makes me laugh, as you'd think television executives would know the most about television! "Hey guys, we're gonna make a Superman television show..." [in walks the lead from the most recent Superman television show] "Hello stranger, and who might you be?" That's just bonkers!

Best thing about the Thunderbirds movie was that gorgeous FAB-1 they built, and its overhead shot as it transformed into a jet and drove off a cliff. Ben Kingsley was also superb.

@RogerRoger
I wouldn't say it's worth buying. At all!
Some of the guest stars and links with other shows make for interesting trivia, but that's about it.

I guess my biggest issue with Christopher was that just looked quite a lot older, and his massive jaw! 😂
He also came across as just a bit too pious.

I don't think it did particularly well as shows go. It was overshadowed quite a lot by Burton's Batman releasing a year after it debuted, then a year after that the similarly toned Flash TV show started. That I did watch at the time and absolutely loved!

@KALofKRYPTON I keep hearing good things about 90s Flash, and not just because the new show has given it a handful of neat nods over the years. Anything with Mark Hamill basically playing a live-action Joker will invariably get my attention someday, I'm sure!

And yeah, on closer inspection, Christopher's five o'clock shadow isn't quite befitting a Superboy!

@RogerRoger It was just a bit... Cool I suppose. The producers ran with (boom boom) the successful dark tone of '89 Bats (thinking about it, I think it was probably the first project after Batman to do so) but also embraced a nice neon aesthetic to go with it.
They took a fair amount of liberties with the source of didn't really use a great deal of comic material. But it was pretty earnest, and that first costume was just incredible.
Shirley Walker's theme was great too. It's basically a lifted reworking of Elfman's Batman theme with a lighter, more triumphant cadence.

@KALofKRYPTON What's that? A darker narrative tone, but drenched in neon? Joel Schumacher called. He wants to know why his name wasn't in the credits.

I looked up the show's theme on YouTube (because I adore Shirley Walker's music, and have all of her soundtrack albums from Batman: The Animated Series) and the reason it sounds like Danny Elfman's Batman theme is because he composed it; Walker just did the episodic scores, but the theme was by Elfman. Which is awesome, as those two work really well together. From the looks of things, the marketing for the show deliberately referenced the Tim Burton bat-films anyway, so any similarity was intentional.

Lalaland Records did a soundtrack album of Walker's work on the show but, alas, it's out of print. They're pretty good at covering the DC Universe (past and present, film and television) so it might pop back up again someday. I keep meaning to put another order through with them.

@RogerRoger ah! I always thought Walker had done The Flash theme!

Oh yeah, it was very much designed to play on the success of Batman.

@RogerRoger I think it was just the characters that got me through it. Every character and actor who played them was loveable. I'm not sure if I recall the Andromeda galaxy bits, maybe they didn't stick out to me but I always assumed that the Warp 14 stuff was just redefined by the next gen era. Like within canon, they just decided on a smaller scale for warp speeds.

I think it helped that I was a fan of special effects in general and I found it really fascinating to work out how they did or could have done all the effects (probably because it was quite easy). I specifically sought out the non remastered DVDs from eBay at the time, which were the ones that came with the magazine's (I didn't have a blu ray player at the time and the then current release of the DVDs had only the remastered versions though I know you could switch between them on the blu ray.)

I know canon is a bit flimsy and can be with all of it tbh, I do find it amusing when they go to great lengths to retcon reasoning into it even if they don't retcon the blip itself.

I feel like that T4 line up had WWF Heat as part of it too, it was a really dumb show where all the wrestling was censored. It would have the storyline but (at least in its channel 4 showing) all the slams, hits and steel chairs etc wouldn't be shown and the camera would just cut to the crowd. Of course it took me a while to realise this as I tuned in for it every Sunday for a good while!

I think Powerless just got dropped mid season by its US network and they did release an unaired episode after Adam West died. I haven't done any research to see if any networks from other countries managed to pick up and air the whole show but I would be interested to see it, but only if it was in its entirety.

@ralphdibny Oh yeah, as a case study in the evolution of special effects, the original DVDs of the original Star Trek would be invaluable. They managed quite a few impressive shots back in the day! My favourite was the zoom-in on the Enterprise saucer section, down through the top of the dome and onto the bridge set. Very ambitious stuff for 60s television.

Usually I'm not that picky over canon; I recognise the details, can't help it, but mostly try to let inconsistencies slide in favour of giving the story a chance. I think I must've just watched the original Star Trek too late, s'all, and after I'd seen the Berman-Era shows multiple times through (enough to quote verbatim). With respect, I think people who say that an entire episode is "ruined" because they get sickbay's deck number wrong need to remind themselves that it's just a TV show. There are obviously large retcons or mistakes that damage characters, or lead to a feeling of the viewer being insulted, but that kind of lazy writing can happen on any show, on any channel, from any decade.

Yes, I remember the wrestling, too! Probably for slightly different reasons, but hey. That kinda thing was far more suited to the tone T4 consistently aimed for, I think.

Shame about Powerless. That's why I won't start watching US shows until they're finished nowadays, or until they reach a certain level of success to ensure a proper ending. Too many things I enjoyed got abrupt endings or unresolved cliffhangers, thanks to the brutal nature of the American networks. There's always hope for a streaming revival, I guess, but that's scattershot.

@ralphdibny @RogerRoger i still have my TOS none remastered season sets and they had this real strange clamshell design that was awkward to open and close

one thing that still irks me with TOS releases though is that they REFUSE to put the episodes in the proper order, when the show was originally aired they were aired out of order for various reasons (for example The Man Trap was shown first because the networks wanted a scary episode) and the pilot episode is about episode 3 but they NEVER fix it for DVD and blu-ray, even Netflix is out of order and it's dumb, why they can't at least put Where no man has gone before first i can never understand

@FullbringIchigo It is lazy of them. I think all fans, or newcomers prepared to give the show a fair shake and therefore armed with a viewing order, would make the effort to watch "Where No Man..." first anyway. Just a shame that it'd otherwise confuse more casual passers-by.

@RogerRoger it is odd, lets just say you had no idea about it and was coming in fresh, then for one random episode all of a sudden the uniforms change, no one is wearing Red, the Phasers and communicators are different and Spock even shouts in anger

it's completely jarring