favorite sci-fi/fantasy shows

Just curios to see what everbody's favorite sci-fi shows/movies are Mine are Ultraman(the original)Johnny Socko&his flying robot (oh how I wanted that robot)Gammera&Godzilla except the U.S.version that one sucked Ultraman/Ultraman/Here he comes from the sky/Ultraman/Ultraman/Watch our hero fly/In a superjet he comes from a billion miles away from a distant planet land/Comes our hero Ultaman

my favorite sci fi tv show is farscape. i like the star trek movies. and the old godzilla movies...the godzilla movie that had matthew brodrick in it was horrible though. kind of like ferris beular saves new york...i like the lexx on sci fi channel too..its odd but quirky.

STAR TREK

Damn it Zod I'm a tickler, not a poll taker!
As eluded to in earlier posts Scotty never seemed to have enough time, even though it was a 5 year mission.
The classic bickering between bones and Spock.
I'll post more on Star Trek later, but first we drink the trania.
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Some of you may think that Star Trek is an easy answer as well as a commercial one. There were shows that were more hard core science fiction, like Dr Who, but there were so many different guys playing the character over the years I could never embrace it. The show was jumping the fucking shark every new season.
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How could we have this thread without covering the original Twilight Zone.
The episode where the kid from Lost In Space (Billy Mumy) was in the small town and he had the evil powers. The guy at the party gets drunk and starts singing and "Anthony" tells him to stop. The guy tries to smash Anthony but he gets caught--"You're a bad man! You're a VERY bad man"--Instant Jack In The Box. "That was good that you turned him into a Jack in the Box Anthony. That was REAL good."
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After this thread we need to have a "Best Detective Show" thread.

In order of decreasing annoyance at missing an episode:

1. Babylon 5 is just the best show I've ever seen, with depth of character and epic scope that runs rings around anything else. Watching the relationship between Londo & G'Kar change over the years is some of the finest writing and acting on TV. I've found more wisdom and spirituality from its five year run than from all my days in Catholic school as a youth.

2. FarScape is currently the only thing I make a point to watch regularly. Its strongest points are eminently appealling characters, who you genuinely come to care about; and an unpredictable plot arc that takes nothing for granted and never presses the "Reset to Status Quo" button at the end of the episode. Even when they get wacky and experimental, it somehow works (as opposed to The X-Files suddenly having no clue where it's going in recent seasons.)

3. Doctor Who, mainly the Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker/Peter Davison eras, were deeply influential in my youth. The Doctor has always been one of my heroes, because he faces down evil with irreverence, and wins the day by using his wits over his fists or the biggest guns. Indeed, I sometimes ask myself "What Would The Doctor Do?" in ethical dilemmas. Admittedly, the sets are cardboard, the monsters are rubber, and the budgets are lower than your average grade-school Christmas Pageant; but you can tell that the actors are having a blast making it and that enthusiasm outshines all other drawbacks.

4. Star Trek in all its sundry incarnations can't be avoided. Deep Space Nine was my favorite, as during the end of the Dominion War saga it came close to B5's level of drama. The Next Generation really set the standard that all current series have followed with varying degrees of success, so they get props for reinventing TV SF after a long dry spell. Voyager had its problems, but you could always expect a good performance from Robert Picardo & Jeri Ryan. Enterprise may be too early to judge now, but I like the fact that the characters are allowed to be flawed humans instead of some of the bland ciphers of "Gene Roddenberry's Vision of the Perfect Future " like Voyager. Classic Trek has its merits, but I tend to find too much to nitpick in comparison to the recent versions.

5. The X-Files used to rate much higher back when it was unique and still genuinely scary, but it's really lost something lately. The addition of Robert Patrick's Agent Doggett as The Skeptic forcing Scully to reluctantly accept her role as The Believer is a nice bit of growth and development for a character that got caught in a rut as the technobabble-exposition source, but it hasn't compensated for what it's missing. I don't know if it went wrong when Morgan & Wong left, or when the comedy episodes outnumbered the scary ones that one year, or when Chris Carter was forced to expose the Conspiracy only to reveal that he was making it all up as he went along and had no secret plan, or when the studio caved in to every infantile demand David Duchovny made, but it hasn't been as good as it used to be for a couple seasons now. Still, the older ones are delightfully spooky.

Others that deserve a mention:
The Invisible Man. I love the chemistry and banter between the characters. Paul Ben Victor as "Bobby" Hobbes is an unmitigated hoot.
Batman: The Animated Series. Best Super-Hero cartoon, ever. Best on-screen treatment of what Batman's truly about, ever. It's even better then the actual comics have been lately. None of that Knightfall/Cataclysm/No Man's Land sales-gimmmick nonsense here.
Star Blazers/Space Cruiser Yamato My first exposure to real anime, and probably set me down the path of Gear-head Otaku-dom with all those lovingly detailed starships. The rousing Yamato fanfare and the ominous Comet Empire dirge still give me goosebumps.

I'll deal with movies in a follow-up post when I have more time.

MadK-- the best Doctor Who was the guy with the Mike Brady hair. I think that was Tom Baker, or perhaps the first guy you named. He was the only one who seemed to have a long run in the role.

best sci-fi/fantasy shows

Top 5 sci-fi shows of all time:

1. QUANTUM LEAP -- I loved everything about this show; the characters, writers, stories, effects; this was sci-fi at it's best, in my humble opionion. (It helps that I'm a huge fan for anything involving time travel!) Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell had great chemistry and I was always glued to the set when it was on. I thikn the series' final episode is one of the best hours on television. (Anywant care to ge a discussion going about this show?)

2. STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION -- Took a while for me to catch on but I eventually really liked this show. I'm one of the ones who thinks Picard is way better than Kirk; Kirk was good but I always liked Picard. (People say Picard talked his way out of jams, where as Kirk shot his way out; maybe so, but defeating an enemy with just your mind is a skill few people have these days ("Use the Force, Luke.")...personally, I thought it was cool.)

3. STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE -- I think the caracters on this show were all greatly written. The stories always had a twist to them at the end that I usually liked.


4. KNIGHT RIDER -- Come on, who didn't love that car?! Loved the episodes involving KARR, the 'evil twin.' And 'Goliath' was cool, too.

5. LOIS and CLARK -- Any show with Superman, I like. Wasn't always well-acted, but there were certain episodes I thought were reall true to the legend of Superman.

Just want to apoligize for my poor spelling and lack of grammar, occasionally. (To think, I was an English major.)

Deffinately, Star Trek: DS9. In my opinion, Cisko is the best captian in the whole series. He's as introspective as Picard, yet can kick ass like Kirk. And I'm in love with Terry Farrel (Jadzia Dax). I was so pissed when they killed her off.

You can't for get the classic though, Lost in Space. The b&w ones were the best.

StrokeOfG-- Quantam Leap was definitely a great show. Especially the last episode. One of my favorite episodes is when Sam leaps back to the 70's and he's in a cheasy KISS wannabe band. One of their songs was called "Rock the Redhead". Definitely some funny shit. When he leaps into Dr. Ruth is also classic.

Well, let's see, sci-fi/fantasy, I love a lot of them: Babylon 5, Star Trek and TNG, Quantum Leap, a short lived show called Voyagers with Meeno Peluce and Jon-Erik Hexum, some of the Doctor Who, and Batman. LOL. I'm such a nerd, but a fun one.


Smiley

The Prisoner

While the British cult hit, "The Prisoner", was heavy on the social and political content, it qualifies in my mind as an SF program. The time of the show was never clear, allowing for the possibility that it was set in the future. And even though in ran thirty years ago, it featured technological and scientific weapons, tools and processes that still do not exist today.

The strength of the show was that it never did "jump the shark." It was conceived as a limited run series, so the story arc was predetermined and they didn't have to haul out script #27 and rehash it. It was also driven by one central creator, Patrick McGoohan, who also starred, so there was some clarity of vision, although that vision was cracked. People think of the "Twin Peaks" series as one of the strangest on TV, but the final episode of "The Prisoner" would have even weirded out David Lynch.

(RELATED ASIDE: Twilight Zone had similar a strength, in that Rod Serling's vision fueled the program. But he wore out near the end and had to recycle to many of his own ideas. I was lucky enough to meet Mr. Serling the year before his untimely death. He gave a college lecture and invited any of us were interested to spend time with him in a coffee shop afterwards. A handful did, and he alternately entertained and depressed us with stories of his successes and failures on the Twilight Zone. One of the most amazing things about meeting him was learning just how short the man was--just a bit over 5'. He was careful in the show to almost always have himself filmed alone, so there was no context that viewers could use to judge his height. He was a just a bit sensitive about it, and since he controlled the show, he was able to avoid the issue. One sad thing about the meeting with him was that he chain-smoked constantly, so it was hardly a surprise when lung cancer claimed him not long after he kindly spent an evening with a bunch of nobody college kids.)

In no order at all:

Lexx: The characters are such oddballs that you can't help but wonder what will happen to them every episode, and same thing applies to the storyline. People tend to write it off as sexy fluff, but in my opinion it's one of the most creative shows that has ever been made. And won't mention my feelings towards Zev.

The Outer Limits (60's version): I've never seen an episode I didn't like, and one of them gave me a serious case of the creeps when I was a kid (A military base out in the desert was being attacked by these HUGE hairy ants with vaguely human faces, the concept was so disturbing to me that I thought they were under the couch.). Wonderful stories, the best opening sequence of all time, and the weirdest mood music ever made. I wish they showed reruns of it.

The Twilight Zone (60's version): Rod Serling is, and forever will be one of the coolest people ever to walk upon this godforsaken rock. I've walked away from viewing that show feeling liked I got hit in the head with a clawhammer, and I've stayed up at night staring at the walls pondering the lessons that were given to me. Any show that makes you truly think is a blessing, and I've learned a lot from that one.

Battlestar Galactica: Cheesy as hell, but those Cylons (sp?) rocked. So did their ships. They had two really great episodes that I remember. One was when the Cylons went on a suicide run and just crashed into the fleet, wrecking everything. The Galactica was on fire, people running around in a panic, man that was fun. The other one (A two parter I think) was when they found the other Battlestar. I forget the name of it exactly, but those guys didn't fuck around. They wanted the Cylons on a plate and they were pretty bloodthirsty compared to the Galactica. In the end the two battlestars take on one of the big Cylon bases, and the other battlestar is seemingly destroyed... or maybe not. It was all up in the air and I was praying to see that other battlestar again. But it never happened.

The Night Stalker: NOBODY remembers this show. Then again I had to see it in reruns, since the whole thing started in 72 and I was around four at the time. Before there was Scully and Mulder, there was Carl Kolchak. He didn't have the federal government on his side, he was a goddamn reporter for fuck's sake. And he had to deal with monsters by himself. It ran for only a season, but it was a hell of a show.

I could mention others (Star Trek, Dark Shadows, Farscape, Space 1999)But the ones I wrote about are the top 5 I think. Oddly enough I when I think Sci-fi, I tend to go retro. LOL

"We want information"

"You wont get it!"

"I am number two"

"you are number six"

"Why did you resign number six?"

"be seeing you"

Fav sci/fi fantasy

"George Bush conquers planet syntax"

My all-time favortie show is Quantum Leap. The thought of time traveling has always fasinated me. I also like watching Highlander:The Series, and Forever Knight.

GODZILLA!!!

This bad boy is the best Godzilla all the way!!!!

I also I Guyver he is kick-Ass!!

Sci-Fi/Fantasy

So many fond memories...Ovda, I was glad to see someone mention Forever Knight...kept me company many late weekend nights while studying

Any of the Star Trek series deserve mention...some more than others. I'll hold off further debate until Enterprise settles in (it's great to see Scott Bakula in action - he was fantastic in Quantum Leap).

Of course, being a child of the seventies, I have to tip my hat to the bionic duo...Steve Austin and Jaimie Somers. Now that was a pair of shows.

And another late seventies/early eighties classic...Mork and Mindy. For the child in all of us.

From the macabre, to the intellectual explorer, to the juvenile delinquent...something for everyone

Notes and queries

Does any one know what "quantum leap" actually means?

quantum leap n (1956) : an abrupt change, sudden increase, or dramatic advance

It's derived from the scientific term "quantum jump," which refers to an abrupt change of a particle (electron, atom, or molecule) from one energy state to another.

Dictionaries: your friends.

And yes, I was a QL fan when it was on as well. I'm also a Doctor Who fan -- though I enjoy the Tom Baker and Davison eras, my favorite Doctor is Sylvester McCoy (yes, I'm one of those weirdos who has "Ghost Light" as his favorite episode).

Babylon 5 was terrific up until the disaster of the fifth season and the abandonment of Crusade. Maybe someday....

As for the inevitable Trek, I liked TNG and DS9 when they were on, but they seem a little stale and dated today. Voyager I gave up on after two seasons. Enterprise is hard to judge just yet ... I WANT to like it, but they're not making it easy for me. TOS I only knew from James Blish's novelizations as a kid, but I'm finally getting to see some of the episodes themselves on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Oh yeah, and I loved Batman. The original one, with Adam West and Burt Ward. I was five, so I have an excuse.

Particles and waves

So its actually a very small amount of movement then? discrete you might say?

Lexx

I would have to say the only sci fi series i kinda followed has Lexx on the sci fi channel. It's really weird but cool anyways.