Automan.

I don't even know if I need to explain this one. It's another Glen Larson show, along the lines of the original Battlestar Galactica, except it's about a guy who's a holographic computer game image come to life. And he goes out and fights crime! — but only when the city's electricity usage is at low levels. If too many people plug in their electric blankets, he vanishes. He's like Tron, only in the real world. And he has a sidekick named Cursor.

Blake's 7

This one is an even bigger WTF, given what a cult following this show has in the U.S. Yes, there are U.K. DVDs, so if you're willing to pay import prices and have a region-free player, you're all set. There were rumors of American DVDs of this show, about a freedom fighter who teams up with criminals to fight an evil galactic federation, several years ago when a TV revival was first floated. But they never materialized, maybe due to rights issues. Also not on U.S. DVD: Blake's 7 creator Terry Nation's series The Survivors.

M.A.N.T.I.S.

Still no DVD, but ooh! Looks like it's available as a video on demand! Still, I am disgruntled. This was announced as coming out on DVD back in 2003. WTF? For those who missed it, this was an early Fox show about a paralyzed scientist (the awesome Carl Lumbly from Alias) who puts on a super exoskeleton/armor suit, and goes out to fight evil. It also boasted an early appearance by our ruler, Gina Torres (I shouldn't need to put anything in parentheses after her name.)

Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future

We posted a couple clips from this one a while back — it's an early show from Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. It's like a post-apocalyptic saga, with evil cyborgs and laser gun fights. It's pretty much the perfect TV show.

Journeyman

I'm actually kind of shocked about this one. I would have thought this show would do really well on DVD, since it's like a novel in episodes, about a guy who finds himself zIpping between the past and the present, while trying to save his marriage and job and stuff. It's like a metaphor for our modern dislocation. Also available as a video on demand though.

Alienated

Okay, I know almost nothing about this show, but I need to see it on DVD after reading the description: "The plot centers on the Blundells, a typical suburban family living in Victoria who undergo strange (often sexual) changes after being abducted by space aliens (who remain unseen throughout the series)." Plus it's Canadian,which means it's automatically really sophisticated.

Cosmic Slop

This was an African American Twilight Zone-esque anthology show that aired on HBO back in the 1990s. I have been seeking it on DVD for many years. It was co-produced by Reginald Hudlin, and took its name from the famous Funkadelic song. In the first segment, aliens turn up and promise to make America fantastically wealthy forever — if we'll let them take all of our black people away. Another segment is based on a Chester Himes story about a poor squabbling couple who have a rifle mysteriously delivered to their door.

Space Island One

I loved this show when my local PBS station showed it, and we included it on our list of great unsung TV shows. Here's what I said then: The crew of a corporate-funded space station mostly deals with scientifically plausible problems (with a couple of exceptions) and the stories focus on the ethical problems that come with profit-focused science. I should add that the characters get deeper and richer the more you watch this show, until you suddenly discover that the nicest guy on the show is deeply fucked up in a way you never expected. I would maim for DVDs of this show.

The Clangers

Okay, I have no clue if this show would hold up today; I've only seen a few tiny clips since I was a little kid and I watched it religiously. It's a stop-motion claymation show about little aliens living in peace and eating blue-string pudding. You know it's a great show because it's the favorite entertainment of The Master, the evil time traveler from Doctor Who. It's like acid induced proto-Teletubbies in space. I freely admit I may have rose-tinted glasses on when it comes to this show. Here's a clip.

Max Headroom

This one is really a no-brainer. This show influenced so much of today's television and was such a seminal cyberpunk masterpiece. Its brain-exploding superfast adverts, "blipverts," are like a warning of how ADD-focused advertising is becoming. We need a box set that includes his early appearances as a music video show host, his short-lived TV series as an investigative reporter, and his various TV commercial and music video appearances.

RoboCop

Okay, I mostly want to see this because it sounds incredibly cheesy and hilarious. I included it on my list of the worst TV shows based on movies, but it also sounds pretty amazing. RoboCop doesn't actually kill anyone because it's kid-friendly viewing, and villains include Dr. Cray Z. Mallardo and Boppo The Clown. Also not on DVD: the TV series of Logan's Run, Starman and Timecop.

Mann And Machine

I found out about this show when I was doing our round-up of human-A.I. buddy comedy chemistry. And now I can't believe there are no DVDs! It sounds so awesome. It's about a human cop who hates androids, but he has to team up with a hot gynoid partner. And then he sends her on dates with serial killers, and they end up living together. Come on? Why isn't this on your shelf right now?

The Middleman

It is definitely not too soon to start demanding our DVDs of this awesome show's first season. This could turn into one of those big-selling DVD items that converts tons of new fans and indoctrinates them in time for the inevitable second season. (Inevitable, I tell you!) Seriously, in case you're new to io9 and our obsession with this show, this Avengers-esque story of a young artist who goes for a temp gig and becomes the sidekick to a nameless man who fights alien monsters is one of our fave recent TV series, and the real reason DVDs exist is so we can proselytize about shows like this.

Life On Mars (British version)

This head-injury time-travel cop show was a hit on BBC America, and now there's an American remake with name actors in it like Harvey Keitel and Gretchen Moll. So why are there no DVDs on the horizon? After the American remake totally fails to recapture the British magic, we'll need to see the real thing. (I'm still watching the Brit episodes, thanks to the magic of TiVo.)

Space Cases

This Nickelodeon series featured a young Jewel Staite as Catalina, the super-cool space kid with the yelling powers. It was written by Peter David and Lost In Space's Bill Mumy, and featured weird plots and joyously silly acting from guest stars like George Takei (playing the stentorian Warlord Shank.) It was one of the few kids' shows that you'd want to watch with your kid the requisite 20 times. Your kids demand these DVDs!

Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends

For some reason I've been hearing about this show a lot lately. It's the seminal Spider-Man cartoon where he teams up with Ice-Man from the X-Men and Firestar, plus a super-dog. Graeme recently suggested Spider-Man 5 should be based on this awesome cartoon. So why can't we watch it and judge for ourselves?

Time Trax

Okay, you're going to start questioning my sanity now. But I loved this show when it was on the short-lived PTEN syndicated network back in the early 1990s, because it was so goofy. Dale Midkiff is a cop from a dystopian future (where white people are a persecuted minority) and he has to go back to our time to chase down time-traveling criminals. In every episode, a boxer from the future uses his future-boxing powers to win boxing matches. Or a future car mechanic uses future car mechanic powers or whatever. And the future cop has a holographic sexy librarian helping him! It's so awesome. Why is there no DVD?

Tripods

And finally, the BBC TV adaptation of this classic book series about teenagers fighting War Of The Worlds-esque alien invaders was brilliant and arresting. It featured then-cutting edge special effects and a cool alien-fighting coming-of-age storyline. I haven't seen it in 20 years, and I'm dying to see it again.

Runners up: Jake 2.0 never really won our hearts, because we were waiting for Jake Panther. Also: Animorphs; Charlie Jade; Century City; Century Falls; Dark Skies; Doctor Who: the TV movie; the Star Wars Holiday special (does someone really want that on DVD?), Exosquad; First Wave; The Man From Atlantis; Future Cop; Hard Time On Planet Earth; Manimal; Men Into Space; The Night Man; Now And Again; Out Of The Unknown; Probe — when you search for this on Amazon, you get lube!; and Project UFO.

Note: I mention kung fu above, but I'm also going to touch on other martial arts in this post. I hope that's OK.

Totally random factoid: as a young reporter, I wrote a story about Sir Run Run Shaw, the legendary Hong Kong movie producer responsible for Five Fingers Of Death, and actually met him and shook his hand. I am still excited.

1960s.

Bruce Lee co-stars in The Green Hornet, a scifi-ish Shadow ripoff about a newspaper publisher and his Asian valet, who team up to fight crime as the Green Hornet and Kato.

The Legion Of Superheroes introduces Karate Kid, whose superpower should be pretty obvious, in Adventure Comics #346, published in 1966. Karate Kid is the son of Black Dragon, a 30th century Japanese supervillain, who gets defeated by Japan's main superhero Sensei, who raises him to be a good guy and appreciate painting and sculpture. And he's been playing a major starring role in the recent Legion cartoon, as well as Brad Meltzer's revival of the Justice League comic. In his first appearance, Karate Kid was one of four teen heroes who applied to join the Legion — but one of them was secretly a villanous infiltrator. (Shockingly, it was the one named "Nemesis Kid.") (And check out this fantastic Legion cover gallery.)

1970s.

Sonny Chiba starred in a number of classic science fiction films, including Message From Space, a Star Wars-inspired film about the peaceful planet Jillucia under threat from the evil space Emperor. Sonny Chiba has to rescue a set of "holy seeds" that can save the planet somehow.

A volcano opens up and the evil Princess Dragon Mom emerges, in Hong Kong's Infra Man (1976). A scientist named Rayma volunteers to be implanted with electronics so he can become the unstoppable martial arts fighting machine Infra Man. Besides super strength and amazing martial arts skill, he also gains X-ray vision, plus ray beams and rockets coming out of his body. We have the original trailer above.

Doctor Who suddenly starts featuring a lot of martial arts, with Jon Pertwee's version of the Doctor claiming to be an expert in "Venusian Aikido" and "Venusian Karate." (Supposedly the producers preferred aikido because it's mostly a defensive art, and fit in with their vision of the Doctor as a pacifist.) Here's someone's compilation of the Doctor's greatest smackdowns:

1980s.

In 1983, director Kirk Wong puts out Flash-Future Kung Fu, a mash-up of Blade Runner and old-school martial arts melodrama. In a grungy neon-lit future, Eddy Ko, the star pupil of a martial arts school, secretly takes part in underground "black boxing" bouts. And a group of Neo-Nazi punks wants to take care of Ko and his friends using an army of mind-controlled zombies.

Just a year after Robocop hits in the U.S., Hong Kong puts out Roboforce, a comedy version featuring a robot dominatrix who shoots missiles out of her arm.

Japan creates the Super Sentai Series, about a team of super-soldiers in color-coded outfits who use martial arts and super-advanced weapons to fight monsters. They also join their robotic vehicles together to form a giant robot to fight giant monsters. In the 1990s, the Super Sentai Series got redubbed in English and mixed in with new footage of American actors, to create the Power Rangers series. The most awesome version of Power Rangers is Power Rangers In Space, in which they have to fight a villainess with the amazing name of Divatox.

1990s.

Hong Kong puts out a few awesome science fiction films, chief among them Tsui Hark's Wicked City, which features Yuen Wo-Ping in a supporting role. It's been a while since I've seen this film, but I don't remember it having much martial arts, despite Yuen's involvement. Hark also produced Black Mask, starring Jet Li as a super-soldier engineered not to feel any pain, who goes AWOL and tries to lead a quiet life as a librarian — until his old squad starts killing innocent people. And then he dons the eponymous black mask to bring down his former comrades. Hark also directed a sequel, Black Mask II. Here's the masked Jet Li kicking a guy about 20 times, and then dealing with rollerskating machine-gun thugs, using only a couple of compact disks (Kenny G is deadly!) And meanwhile, some crazy dominatrix turns out to have a razor blade in her mouth, which might make this scene not entirely work safe. And then there's Robotrix.

Plus, director Nam Lai Choi put out one of the strangest martial arts movies of all time — The Cat (Lao Mao), about an alien entity that goes around possessing people and creatures. The movie's setpiece, a giant martial arts smackdown between a dog and an alien-possessed cat, uses all of the cliches of martial arts movies, including the slow-mo wire work and the instant replay. (But no naming of the moves as you're doing them, sadly.) Here's a clip:

Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Van Damme puts out two of the greatest science fiction movies of all time: Universal Soldier and Timecop. He's an unstoppable cyber-zombie, or he's a windmill-kicking law-enforcement master from the distant year 2004. He kicks you so hard, your arm shatters. There's also 1995's Virtual Combat, in which a virtual character from a fighting video game somehow gets into the real world and kicks people in the head. A lot. Oh, and Milla Jovovich first starts smacking weird creatures around in 1997's The Fifth Element.

1999-today:

Yuen Wo-Ping arranges the fight sequences for The Matrix, the movie which proves virtual worlds feature more awesome flying head-kicks than real ones. The wire work is gorgeous, plus it's put together with a new "bullet time" special effect that makes all of the soaring and kicking look even more impressive.

The Matrix trilogy gives rise to a ton of kicking, smacking, chopping imitators, including Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium and Ultraviolet, which introduce the new and amazing martial art of gun-kata. Now at last people can use guns to create a graceful battle tableau, instead of having to fight with fists or feet. Plus the Resident Evil movies and a host of other video-gamey films.

Jet Li also stars in the mega-awesome The One, in which alternate universes are real, and you can gain awesome superpowers by killing all of your alternate selves. There are only two Jet Lis left, and only one of them has cool hair. Which one will smack the other one into oblivion and become a dimension spanning god? And then of course there's Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo, where a super-suit gives him amazing martial arts skills... and the ability to channel James Brown.

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• The Guardian from Star Trek: In "City on the Edge of Forever," Kirk and Spock had to hop through a giant talking stone donut in order to follow a crazy Bones back into the Great Depression. Bones had a fever and a bad skin rash, Spock had to work in a soup kitchen and build a device in what little spare time he had, while Kirk spent all his time wooing Joan Collins. Later, they were able to hop safely back through. If that's not easy time travel, then I don't know what is.
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• The Omni from Voyagers!: Voyagers! ran on NBC from 1982 to 1983, and featured the awesome pocket-watch sized Omni as one of the coolest time travel devices ever. It had a miniature scale model of the earth inside, and red and green lights that would tell you if time was "flowing normally" or if it had been disturbed. You would spin the dials and set it (and forget it) and travel back to any time you wanted, which usually just happened to involve temporal anomalies involving famous people.
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• The Flash's Cosmic Treadmill: Barry Allen decided he wanted to check out time travel, so he invented a treadmill that ran (zing!) on cosmic rays. A speedster could set it to a specific time, either forwards or backwards, and then run on the treadmill until it sent him back to that time. Get this, they stayed in that time by "maintaining his internal vibration" that was specific to that time travel. Talk about working overtime. Later Wally West discovered he could time travel without the treadmill, but nothing really beats putting the word "cosmic" in front of something. If only he'd invented the cosmic ab-cruncher and cosmic stairmaster.
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• Dr. Evil's Time Warp Machine from Austin Powers 2: This is from the category of time machine where they never even attempt to explain to you why or how it works, it just does. Which is how all evil genius machines should work. Who needs all that explanation about tachyons and the space-time continuum and all that? Plus it had a psychedelic look and feel to it as well. You just run up to it and throw yourself on it like a velcro wall, and you pop out in the appropriate time... as long as they have another time machine on the other end, apparently. Granted, Austin's own new Volkswagen bug time machine might have looked cool, but that was just a Delorean ripoff.
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• Doctor Doom's Time Platform: Not to be outdone by all the time travel going on in the DC universe, where it seemed like if Superman sneezed he'd end up in the 1800s, Marvel had their own action happening with Doom and his time machine. Doom never really got enough credit, building working Doombots, devices that gave people superpowers, creating massive weapons and all that jazz. Maybe because he was too whiny and bitchy when it came to the Fantastic Four. Anyhow, his time machine was a platform that you'd stand on, wank with some controls, and then you'd be sent back in time, no problem! Why he never conquered the damn world with this thing I'll never know.
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• The Time Traveling Roller Coaster Ride from Timecop: In this Jean Claude Van Damme flick, you hopped into what looked like an amusement park ride, and got blasted towards a wall that you hoped would open up into a time-portal before you got smushed into jelly. It uses the whole "acceleration as time travel" idea, but really does it in style. We just wish there would have a been a "You Must Be This HIgh To Ride This Ride" sign next to Van Damme. Or at least someone asking for his e-ticket.
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• The Timespheres from Terminator: They weren't the most practical devices, because when you were sent back through them they burned off all your clothes. Meaning you couldn't be sent backwards or forwards into a heavily populated area unless you didn't mind everyone seeing your junk. Now, don't ask us how they can send machines back in time as long as they're covered with skin. It boggles our mind too.
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• The penny from Somewhere in Time: Christopher Reeve learned how to travel back in time from 1980 to 1912 in order to be with Jane Seymour, who he's fallen in love with from staring at old photographs of her. Yes, it's corny, we know it. But when he finds a Lincoln penny from 1979 in his pocket and zaps back to the future, even you might admit you have feelings, you robots. It was based on the novel Bid Time Return by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, and is Reeve's best-known film outside of the Superman series.
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• Uncle Rico's Time Machine from Napoleon Dynamite: Sure, it didn't work and it appeared to only make your testicles hurt (no idea what it did to women), but you had to give the ripoff artist who invented it credit for including things like "time crystals." We'd still want one, just to screw with people.
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The Good:

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• The Twilight Zone: Time travel has long been a staple of Twilight Zone stories, and numerous episodes have featured things like soldiers traveling through time to Custer's Last Stand, people revisiting their pasts, and trying to alter the future. One of the best shows was "A Stop in Willoughby," which featured an overworked businessman who would dream that his train was stopping at a utopian city in the 19th century called Willoughby.
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• Doctor Who: Following hard on the heels of The Twilight Zone was Doctor Who, a series about a time-traveling alien that first appeared in 1963. It's the longest running science fiction series in history, and its recent seasons have been hailed by fans and critics alike, even if the special effects are still a bit craptastic. In a great episode called "The Face of Evil," the Doctor (played by the excellent Tom Baker) revisits a planet he'd been to in the past, only to find that they now fear a giant stone effigy of his face. Meddling in the past sometimes leads to poor results.
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• Voyagers!: This time tripping series featured a traveler from the future, Phineas Bogg, teaming up with teenaged Jeffrey Jones and "fixing" history. They'd do stuff like make sure the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. They traveled around with a device called The Omni, which looked like a big pocket watch. It had two lights on top: the red one meant there was a problem with the timestream, and the green one meant all was well. Yes, it sounds cheesy, but it was great fun.
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• Quantum Leap: Yet another show about fixing mistakes in history, but this series made the episodes a bit more personal, as Dr. Sam Beckett could only travel through time within his own lifespan. With his holographic pal Al from the future, he had to figure out what was wrong and fix it so Sam could "leap" out into his next adventure. One of the more emotional moments had Sam leaping into Vietnam to try to stop his brother from dying.

• The Bad:
  

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  • Time Tunnel: This campy series from the 1960s featured a government project (called "Tic-Toc," ouch) which was basically a giant tunnel that could take people back through time. When an irritated Senator threatens to shut the project down because of ballooning costs, Dr. Tony Newman enters the tunnel and is shortly followed by Dr. Doug Phillips, who is trying to save him. They become "stuck in time" and somehow transported to the scenes of major events, like the Titanic sinking, Pearl Harbor being bombed, this show being canceled after one season.
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  • Back To The Future — The Animated Series: This cartoon version of Marty and Doc Brown could have been whimsical fun, but it only manages to capitalize on very early 90s cheese. You can check out the opening for the series, but be aware that you won't be able to travel back in time to unwatch it.
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  • Time Trax: this series features Dale Midkiff as a cop from the future who was sent back to capture over one hundred criminals who had escaped into the past. Armed with his sentient and holographic computer SELMA, which looked like an AT&T MasterCard, he'd zap the baddies with a shot from his car alarm alarm remote and send them back to the future. Okay, so it was really a futuristic device disguised as an alarm remote, but still. Ouch.
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  • Timecop: Yes, they made a TV show after the semi-cheesy Jean Claude Van Damme movie of the same name. In it, Jack Logan tracks down criminals who try to go back and alter time. If only they could go back and cancel this show before it began. Mercifully, only nine episodes were produced.
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  • Do Over: 34-year-old Joel Larsen accidentally gets zapped with a defibrillator, and wakes up in his 14-year-old body, back in the past. Armed with the knowledge of a thirty-something, he tries to change his life for the better, and promptly fades into television obscurity. 80s nostalgia just couldn't keep this one alive.

  • The Fringe:

    These are the shows that haven't quite proven themselves yet, but are very promising so far.

  • Life On Mars: This much-lauded BBC series features a cop who gets struck by a car in the present day, and suddenly wakes up in 1973. He's able to keep working as a policeman in the past, but it isn't made clear if he's imagining everything via a coma in the present, or if he's just a bit mentally deranged back in 1973. It's getting an American makeover, in the grand tradition of taking great BBC shows and turning them into sludge, so try and track down episodes of the original.
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  • Journeyman: This show is pretty much 'Quantum Leap Redux,' except the storylines and acting keep us coming back for more. San Francisco reporter Dan Vasser finds himself traveling through time and changing the destinies of people he meets along the way, which is somehow related to his time-tripping. We'll see if it can travel through time and avoid the writer's strike and the new show chopping block.