Posted on 01/13/2005 1:41:37 PM PST by pabianice
I just noticed the comment about Gene Barry. I thought he was pretty good.
I think that the Sci Fi Channel should buy up Niven's entire catalog. Think of the wealth of stories available by creating a whole series based on "Tales of The Known Universe".
Think of all the characters and races and planets in Known Space...Louis Wu, Pril, The Kzin, The Puppeteers, the Jinxians...heck, you could do a nifty two hour movie out of "A Gift From Earth". I'd love to see a one hour episode done from the story "Relic of The Empire".
Any one of the stories from "Neutron Star" would be a great one hour episode of an anthology series like the one that was done with Ray Bradbury's stories. Some of those were great.
They would have material and guaranteed high ratings for a decade.
I don't know if it qualifies as sci-fi but the movie version of J.H. Rosny's "Quest for Fire" was much better than the book. The book was a skinny little thing that could have been much better.
Check this one out. It is HUGE.
Just about everything under the sun that is in the public domain.
Remember it? Heck, I've got it on DVD and can recite dialogue from it verbatim. And I often do...to the eternal dismay of my cohorts and associates!
I would love to see "Lucifer's Hammer" done justice on the big screen. I was surprised that it didn't get a look with the relative success of "Apocalypse" and "Deep Impact".
"Footfall" would be another great book to see on screen from the Niven/Pournelle alliance.
On the other hand, political correctness and modernism was on display as well. In the 1953 WOTW, the Martians are defeated as they are in the HG Wells story, by viruses "which God, in His wisdom, had created" (quote from the novel and the movie). In ID, the aliens are defeated by a human created computer virus - no need for God when you have a hacker, don't you see. Moreover, in the book and the 1953 WOTW, Martians were looking to conquer Earth to live on it (Mars was dying) and to use Human Beings as food. In ID, the alienes simply moved from planet to planet stripping them of their resources - their real crime was that they were the ultimate environmentalist nightmare, sort of like interstellar strip miners and polluters.
I took a different perspective on ID. I viewed the Rand Quaid character as the hero, and his courageous self-sacrifice as the decisive factor. The hacking would have been to no avail without a human to fly the plane and deliver the death blow.
DR. LIZARDO: Black Lectroids are on this planet! HERE! In-a New Jersey! Coming to destroy us! We must act! ESCAPE, or die! We must-a work _faster_, to-a finish the Great Vehicle Itself, so that we can-a enter the 8th dimension, and FREE our trapped comrades, so we can return home, and seize power once again! WHAT IS THE GREATEST JOY?
RED LECTROIDS: The joy of duty.
DR. LIZARDO: LOUDER!
RED LECTROIDS: THE JOY OF DUTY!
DR. LIZARDO: History is-a made at night! Character is what you are in the dark! We must WORK, while the clock, she's-a ticking!
RED LECTROID: Death to the Black Lectroids!
DR. LIZARDO: WHERE ARE WE GOING?
RED LECTROIDS: Planet Ten!
DR. LIZARDO: WHEN?
RED LECTROIDS: Real Soon!
I still use the 'real soon' line a lot in everyday conversation. Nobody ever gets the reference. I have often wondered if I was the only person to ever see this movie. Thanks to FR, I now know there is at least 5 of us. Laugh.
Mission Control: Buckaroo, The White House wants to know is everything ok with the alien space craft from Planet 10 or should we just go ahead and destroy Russia?
Buckaroo Banzai: Tell him yes on one and no on two.
Mission Control: Which one was yes, go ahead and destroy Russia... or number 2?
ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION: REMEMBERING THE FIRST ADVENTURE OF BUCKAROO BANZAI
What is the status of the proposed BB TV show?
Earl Mac Rauch and W.D. Richter, in collaboration with Reno Nevada, have written a pilot script for Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets and New Mysteries, a proposed TV series for Fox TV. A short promotional trailer (with a computer-generated Jet Car) was even made for the project by the visual effects wizards at Foundation Imaging. Unfortunately, the pilot was shelved by a network management change, although another outlet has reportedly expressed some preliminary interest. In the meantime, you can see the amazing Jet Car trailer on the DVD edition of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. ...
When is Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League going to be made?
Real soon.
BB FAQ
Huntsville, was your post intended for me? I made a comment about The Planet of the Apes and you answered with Harriet Beecher Stowe. I don't get the connection.
Timmy Robbins...does he play one of the Martians? AS for Cruise...he is so over.
The short story had a space ship finding a capsule and reading the about humans crash landing on the earth and finding Apes in control and mute humans.
The kicker at the end was the people in the spacecraft that found the capsule laughing about this funny and impossible scene as they swung around the spacecraft using their tails.
Was the book close to this?
Creative and intellectual bankruptcy.
*sigh* I love the book. I'd kill for this to be made as a period piece set in 1890's Woking and surrounding area.
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