io9 
Enter your username and password.
-
posts about #phoenix5 more → 5 Favorite Star Trek Rip-Offs
San Francisco, 1:00 PM
Wed Dec 9
28 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors:
Editor-in-Chief:
Annalee Newitz |
News Editor:
Charlie Jane Anders |
Associate Editor:
Meredith Woerner |
Assistant Editor:
Lauren Davis |
Weekend Editor:
Graeme McMillan |
Contributors:
Joshua Glenn
Stephen Goldmeier |
Ed Grabianowski |
Austin Grossman
Paul Hogan |
Lauren Davis |
Chris Hsiang |
Lynn Peril |
Ann VanderMeer
Alasdair Wilkins |
Graphic Designer:
Stephanie Fox |
Interns:
Tim Barribeau |
Julia Carusillo |
Alex Eichler |
Cyriaque Lamar |
Caitlin Petrakovitz |
Mary Ratliff |
Josh Snyder |
| posts about #phoenix5 more → |
5 Favorite Star Trek Rip-Offs |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
05/03/09
The science in both seasons is garbage, but at least season 1 tried to be a bit cerebral here and there and was at least watchable.
Season 2 is CRAP. The scripts were so bad even Landau bitched up a storm. And, oh look! nifty space alien is our new deus ex machina! Let's let her conveniently shape shift and fix our woes! And flirt with the security guy that appeared out of thin air!
(The one who was using the alien chick as his cover - everyone knows Tony was really bopping Alan, the head pilot.)
05/04/09
05/03/09
As Mr. Carpenter stated above, the second season of Buck Rogers became Star Trek lite.
Galaxy Quest is a parody of the show Star Trek and of the actual actors themselves. It can't really be a rip-off.
B5 is not ST except that they both have aliens and happen in space.
Andromeda is GR ripping off himself.
Space 1999 is in a class by itself. Beyond the horrible science displayed by the show, you have to wonder what was being smoked in the writers' room with some of the plots. I still like the show and it's not anything like ST.
In conclusion, I have:
1. Andromeda,
2. 2nd season of Buck Rogers
3. SeaQuest
05/03/09
05/03/09
With an eerie, space based post apocalyptic plot and a starship the size of a small planet on a collision course with a star, a faulty AI, some bizarre technology, and numerous eco-systems with diverse societies completely oblivious to their own reality the show possessed enormous potential.
Sadly, it was produced in Canada and was a complete flop.
05/03/09
Not that there was much money put into it anyway.
05/03/09
Let's all remember that Battlestar Galactica was a cheap ripoff of Star Wars before it became what it was this decade, or at least for the first three seasons.
(Is it OK to admit that that in retrospect I didn't really like the last season of BSG, or is it still too early? Honestly, I think the story arcs I'm seeing in the last three seasons of DS9 as I'm watching them are better than anything BSG did.)
05/03/09
I never found VOYAGER compelling enough to watch at all. (Mrs. Overclock watched it, so if 7 of 9 was on the screen as I walked through the family room, I might have paused for a bit.) My viewership of ENTERPRISE was hit or miss. But I was an avid DS9 fan. The writing went from average to great, and interesting plots and story arcs.
05/03/09
05/03/09
And once DS9 got out on its own, away from the B5 influence, it became superb. The characters were much more like real people.
05/03/09
It's very weird to see it on the same page as Star Trek, which I always considered cheap, red sky/cardboard set, pink candy crap. And how many episodes did these guys do where they're in carton Ancient Rome or 1930s Al Capone word?
When you think about it, 1999 was a little edgy and bleak, like Stargate Universe is aiming to be.
Were other shows really 'ripping off' trek? I thought that in the 1970, trek was still considered a flop
05/03/09
Trek was big, big, big in syndication by the time Space:1999 came on. They wanted to be as popular both monetarily and with fans as ST was.
Didn't happen. They claimed they were going to overthrow the networks (literally! read some of the PR of the time) and audiences watched it and went "yawn". Basically, only really desperate SF fans who literally would watch anything tuned in after the first blush wore off.
It was better than "Starlost".
05/03/09
GQ: parody all around. Perhaps as one of these young snarky internet kids, you are confused by a loving parody as opposed to a snide one?
Phoenix: uniforms are definitely ST, but overall it looks much more influenced by Doctor Who of that era, with a smidge of Lost in Space -- small crew, robot (which I guess makes it ST once or twice removed). But seriously. It's 60's Doctor Who all the way.
05/03/09
05/03/09
05/03/09
For some reason barely understood complex philosophical ideas mixed in with really awful "Skienze" and lousy dialogue didn't work.
05/03/09
The effects and models could not make up for the writing and acting. Not even when they sexed it up.
05/03/09
I'm not going to "flame" (verb?) because that's tedious, but Joe Straczynski has written, on many occasions about how he wanted to expand away from Star Trek. Tackle ideas that Trek would never touch like religion, money and simple human corruption, without heavy allegory (I'm half-black! He's half white!) and reset buttons.
And it's more than a little established that DS9 was a grab of Babylon 5, at least in terms of general premise and starting point. Paramount even tried to quash Babylon 5 in the cradle.
So rip-off? No and it's insulting to write that.
05/03/09
05/03/09
None of you mofo could even recall the big Mack Daddy of ST ripoff, QUARK?
Dick Benjamin, a multigendered co-pilot, an unfeeling plant of a science officer, blonde twins, and a mission to clean up the galaxy's garbage?
Created by GET SMART's Buck Henry? Does that ring a bell?
Have you no respect for history?
And as for the B5/DS9 beef, I've only got two words about that: Undisclosed. Settlement.
It went down to the lawyers, and came back up with silence, so obviously somebody got happy. And now JMS can afford to write comic books, with the occasional screenplay for Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie.
Your Honor, I think we're done here....
05/03/09
My mom, an old-skool Trekkie like myself, and I watched that faithfully every week.
Gene/Jean the co-pilot. The blondes, who each insisted the other was the clone. The boss. The model work.
And word on the undisclosed settlement. It would take a serious shitload of money and groveling to shut up JMS about it... and lo he has. Nobody's ever won a Trek-related lawsuit before or since.
05/04/09
While I can't say with certainty that DS9 was or was not in the development stages when JMS showed up at Paramount's door, I can say that the two shows were different enough that there's no way that Paramount took JMS' treatment and built their own show around it. At worst, Person A briefly overheard Persons B and C discussing the B5 pitch, and picked up on the idea of setting a series on a space station.
And for damn sure B5 was not a ripoff of DS9, as JMS spent five years pitching the idea to every studio in Hollywood, and there's no way that Paramount let him take a peek at their idea until they were ready to announce the start of production.
The kinda sad thing, though, is how B5 failed to influence Trek. JMS cowrote a treatment for a reboot of Star Trek, but Paramount turned it down. I don't know where to find it anymore, but he did post the treatment on the internet, and I suspect it would have been a huge hit.
05/03/09
05/03/09
05/03/09
And don't get me started on "Carl" the computeroid.
05/03/09
Here's a non-contentious response to including Babylon 5: by that reasoning, isn't Star Trek itself a "rip-off" (or "influenced by") of Lost In Space?
Maybe you should have defined the terms of rip-off first. The original Battlestar Galactica is often called a rip-off on Star Wars, having been created in response to it. But it centers on a flagship and its commanding officer on the bridge, and many episodes were planet-of-the-week reflecting some theme or issue. So it would have been a fair candidate.
05/03/09
"Galaxy Quest was the best Star Trek movie ever made."
Quoted for mother-fucking truth.
05/03/09
05/03/09
05/03/09
But I've always seen "Star Trek: Deep-Sleep Nine" as "Star Trek: TNG" with the lights turned down.
Turning down the lights doesn't make a show bolder, more exciting or even edgy.
B5 was for the most part better than all of the Treks, IMHO. Better in fact than most any Sci-Fi TV, with the possible exception of Battlestar Galactica (reboot). Since I don't really consider "The Twilight Zone" or "LOST" Sci-Fi, I won't include them in the comparison.
Interesting side-note; I did mention to JMS on the usenet forum that he had (at the time) passed-up my hero Rod Serling on writing the most scripts for the same television show. I for one was amazed that he hadn't noticed.
05/03/09
Yeah, he was the first person to ever solo-script an entire full-length season of primetime TV, and even aside from that there's still only 18 eps that other people wrote for the main series compared to his whopping 92. Or rather, 18 that others _mostly_ wrote, since he still had a lot of input in terms of how main characters behaved and tidbits that tied into the main storyline.
05/03/09
JMS' achievement is impressive and notable, but does get overstated a fair bit.
05/04/09
13 eps is a short season in the US, and it's not a season at all in the UK. Blake's 7 doesn't count (neither does The Prisoner). I guess I have to give you Dixon, since that was one person writing the entire first nine seasons, six of which were over 20 eps long (and it was actually 201 eps straight).
However, I'd still say that JMS had to work harder each season on the basis that he was also the executive producer, and he had to keep track of continuity with every script, even if someone else wrote it.
@Pinkhamster:
It was only semi-syndicated. Some markets had a regular PTEN station. Where I was living, however, it did get syndicated as a solo show.
05/04/09
Some of them are brilliant, and overall the series is a great, great SF story. Some of the best episodes he did though have long stretches of wretched dialogue. He'll make up for it a scene or two later with some great speakin', but it does stand out.
05/04/09
While Cuse and Lindelof have proven that it's entirely possible to manage a long-form storyline with a stable of script-writers doing a lot of the grunt work, I'm not sure that JMS is really capable of handing over that level of control to a bunch of not-hims, and certainly it would have been an even more monumental sacrifice in his mind to do so with the first show that was truly _his_.
That's not saying that it wouldn't have worked out better in the long run, especially given stuff like the one episode that he doesn't even remember writing (I think he had the flu, and with the busy production schedule he just woke up one day to find that he'd written an entire episode and couldn't recall anything of the writing process. I don't remember which ep it was, but it was one of the less popular JMS-penned eps, and even he has said that he should have never gone ahead with that script.
The thing is, though, that B5 has an aspect of traditional stagecraft mixed in, which isn't very common in TV or movies, except those that are adapting stage plays and musicals. While a TV show can just have the character give a specific look in a close-up shot that lets you see what they're feeling, an actor in a play will have a monologue to describe it. This makes B5 feel more familiar to some people (especially those who work in the stage theatre business), but more foreign to those who aren't used to it.
05/03/09
No. No we can't.
05/03/09
B5 had more influence on Star Trek than the other way around, especially in terms of the storytelling method. Before B5, Trek was purely episodic, with the "trusty" status quo (well, other than that bit with Yar getting killed). Afterwards, they started dabbling in long-form storytelling, with permanent changes, and season-long storylines. B5 was also shopped around before DS9, it's closest Trek equivalent, had even been mentioned publicly. And while there were a lot of surface similarities early on (ZOMG they're both on a space station! ...nevermind the fact that the only other options were to set it on a planetary body or a spaceship), such similarities were pretty quickly revealed to be very minor when compared to the very different directions that the shows were headed in. So yes, no we can't agree on that. I'd actually say the setting is a bit closer in feel to Star Wars, and the makeup design certainly was by a long shot (hence why B5 won an Emmy for makeup).
05/03/09
05/04/09
Oh, we were a major player in B5 as well. We were just a little late to the game, but note that JMS confirmed that both the Minbari and Humans would become neo-First Ones, while the Centauri and Narn would not.
05/03/09
05/03/09
05/03/09
05/03/09
05/03/09
05/03/09
Have you ever been in a cockpit Billy?
05/03/09