The Future Just Isn’t What It Used To Be
We’re all on a science fiction kick around here. We’ve just discovered the new version of Battlestar Galactica and we’re hooked. Well, it’s new to us. Apparently this was another hot trend we missed out on five or six years ago while we were still trying to figure out why televisions no longer had tubes and were being described with a confusing array of terms like “plasma,” “LCD” and “HDMI.” For the Woodstock boomers among us, televisions are made with an LCD, not LSD, and the flying duck that scrubs toilet bowls is just an advertisement and is not real.
Many of us were into science fiction all the way back to the 1950’s and 1960’s when all we had to model ourselves after was Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. By the way, science fiction is now referred to just as sci-fi to distinguish it from sci-fi-fantasy where they have interstellar warp drives but still use swords and fight dragons. Even as naïve kids we knew that the dopey looking spaceships in Flash Gordon couldn’t really fly with sparkles and cigarette smoke coming out the butt end, but we wanted to believe and we played spaceship games anyway. It was all about suspending disbelief and accepting the fantastic images as real.
We’re doing the same thing today as we watch BSG (as it’s called by cool people). It’s
perfectly obvious that despite the huge budget for special effects, the whole thing is like a WWII movie about an aircraft carrier fleet after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Why would a real spaceship need fighter planes that shoot bullets if they had the technology to “jump” into hyperspace and travel millions of miles in a few minutes? It doesn’t matter. We want to believe and, frankly, it’s just plain cool.
Just for the record, this show is a quantum leap (no pun intended) away from the original Battlestar Galactica show of the 1970’s. You might remember that show was like a “cowboys meet the aliens” mashup with Lorne Greene (Ben Cartwright) reprising his role as the patient father figure (commander) trying to run a serious spaceship (ranch) and save the colonists (cattle) from robots (rustlers).
In the new version, Edward James Olmos is the father figure headed directly for sainthood for putting up with a ragtag crew of well-intended miscreants. He was an excellent choice for the role of commander since he went to the Marlon Brando School of Mumbling, and most scenes tend to call for him looking and acting disgusted when the youngsters under him do something stupid. Although, like Star Trek, doing stupid and rash things tends to save the day in every episode.
While watching the entire first season of BSG, I remembered my father’s reaction to the original Star Trek series. He’d watch in disgust and say something like, “If I couldn’t run my business any better than Kirk runs that spaceship I’d resign.” Fortunately my dad never had to steer his corporation through a gaseous cloud at the far edge of the universe while evil aliens were firing proton torpedoes at him. Or maybe he did, corporations are often involved in mysterious activities. Which brings up something we find disturbing – apparently corporations are going to be taking over our space program since NASA has been effectively grounded.
Director Stanley Kubrick foresaw corporate takeover of the space program in his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you recall, everything in the film, except the apes, had a logo and was sponsored by a major corporation. The space shuttle was run by Pan Am, Hilton had a hotel on the space station and even the evil computer HAL (IBM) was an obvious corporate entity. How this all works out as NASA gives it up to the likes of Microsoft, Intel and Google remains to be seen, but we’re still hopeful that our hero Richard Branson will keep the true spirit of space exploration alive and well.
One last word on all this sci-fi stuff. We are able to watch BSG thanks to the magic of Netflix which, along with a few thousand dollars worth of computer and networking
equipment, six software programs and two technical engineers, lets us watch “streaming”
movies via the internet on a big screen television. Without this modern marvel of science we’d have to resort to ordering a DVD through the mail and wait two or three days between episodes. So how did we figure out how to set up all the technical bits? We watched my young granddaughter hook up her computer to an LCD TV in order to see her Disney movies. I really wish she’d been around when I was trying to figure out how to program a VCR.
Note: “Battlestar Galactica” ran as a series on the Syfy channel from 2004 through 2009 and is one of many spinoffs and follow-ups to the original show from the late 1970’s. Syfy has just given a go ahead for a new pilot, to be called “Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome,” which started production in February 2011 but has no release date yet. The creator of the original show, Glen Larson, is in talks with Universal for a big-screen movie that is rumored to be based on the first series.
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It was a challenge for me to get the HDMI cable hooked up to my TV….the physical hooking up part was easy, the part that entailed using the remote I was not a natural at. It took a call to Time Warner Cable, who were not helpful at all, and one to Sharp where a very patient person walked me through the process in order for me to actually watch TV in HD. I over heard the Sharp man comment that I really wasn’t a natural with kind of stuff and though “No duh!” It still makes no sense to me that I bought a TV that was advertized at HD, only you still have to buy an expensive cable (unless you order it on line) in order to actually get HD.
I do love that my Wii now streams Netflix though! However, I did need a gadget geek to help me get that to happen too.
What’s good about HDMI is that it carries both a video and an audio signal so you only need one wire instead of three. I get most of my info on that sort of thing by befriending people in the tv section of Best Buy. They seem a lonely lot, always will to chat with you and they don’t push because they don’t work on commission.
I never understood the newer series BSG. It’s SO much more different than the 70’s series. It’s more political. Wasn’t “Caprica” a spin off? I think BBC America is showing the series over again.
I think some corporations could probably learn a thing or two from these shows. Or at least the people that write them. Gene Roddenberry was way ahead of his time. Imagine what he could do now if he owned a couple banks?
Yes, Caprica was a spinoff but I’ve not seen it. I prefer catching the shows on Netflix because I can watch at my own pace and don’t have to wait a week for a new episode. Corporations can’t learn anything, they are generally just blackholes of greed that will suck the life out of everything. The real issue that I didn’t address directly is that our current administration doesn’t see the value of space exploration and is, instead, more focused on funding car companies and big banks.