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An interesting situation in a reboot-revival: the MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS reunion special, ONCE AND ALWAYS, couldn't get all of the original actors back. Of the original six Rangers, four of the actors were absent and were presented via body doubles in the full body Ranger costumes and a mix of soundalikes and archived audio were used for their battle sounds; the grunts, shouts, cries of pain, etc.

While fans were mostly happy with archive audio of the Yellow and Green Rangers and the soundalike for the Pink Ranger, fans were apparently very unhappy with the vocal stand-in for the Red Ranger. They complained that the Red Ranger's voice sounded nothing like actor Austin St. John. I read that and found it a bit absurd; the Red Ranger didn't even have any lines in the reunion special, just non-verbal vocals ("Hunghhh! Hyahhh!"). What did it matter?

Then a fan editor proceeded to re-edit the audio of the fight scenes with the Red Ranger in ONCE AND ALWAYS. This editor lifted Austin St. John's battle vocals from old 90s episodes, removed background noise and music, and put them into ONCE AND ALWAYS to replace the stand-in's voice with the original actor's voice. I watched it and... I was astonished, because hearing Austin St. John yell and cry out in the Red Ranger fight scenes made it feel so much more like the original character.

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerrangers/c … actors_in/

This was a key identifier for fans... and the anniversary special missed it, probably because it didn't occur to them that it would matter to fans, probably because it was too labour-intensive to dig out the old episode audio files and clear away background noise and music. (This fan had already done that work for a separate fan edit project.)

It really speaks to how much certain things matter to fans and how it can be important to be aware of them.

I wonder in what world it is 'exactly right' to declare -- intentionally or not -- that SLIDERS will never be for anyone who isn't heterosexual, male and Caucasian.

Regardless of what the word "woke" means to you, NBCU cast an Asian man to lead QUANTUM LEAP; NBCU made a Latinx performer and a transgender girl the new stars of SAVED BY THE BELL. This studio is very interested in diversity for their revivals, and a showrunner who appears dismissive of diversity is probably going to have to work somewhere else.

The original SLIDERS made it clear that Torme is very interested in diversity. There was studio and network pressure to make Rembrandt speak in highly formal English which Torme resisted in favour of writing Rembrandt like the black musicians he knew, but Torme's vocabulary choices in recent years have unfortunately given the wrong impression to those who aren't intimately familiar with his work.

And again: Grizzlor has had to translate what Torme previously said. This means that Torme isn't conveying his opinions and ideas clearly enough on his own which does not speak well of his language skills. That's probably because writing screenplays in social satire and spoken communication are two somewhat different skillsets.

He said it in the podcast describing the reaction to his story ideas for a SLIDERS revival.

This is absolutely not true. Deborah Pratt is highly involved day to day, reading all scripts, directing an episode, providing story consultation, and maintaining continuity with the original series. She also directed an episode. Bellisario is involved but less present, providing feedback on scripts, not actively steering. Pratt has done plenty of interviews to share her involvement in the QL revival and how Bellisario is less involved.

I wonder in what world it is reasonable to declare that someone cannot possibly be contributing anything based on no information beyond the year they were born.

I could do a no-grain-added version of The Pneumatic Edition (but retain the colour increases) for RussianCabbie to review.

**

I should really be doing my taxes today, but instead, what I really want to figure out is: how come my blu-ray/TV can upscale the Turbine blu-ray of Season 1 to look pretty decent on my TV?

Examining the files on my computer, I can tell that the Season 1 episodes on the blu-ray are blurrier and severely desaturated in comparison to the Universal S1 files. The only merit of the Turbine files: they don't have the jagged edges, flickering, and flashing interlacing lines that make the Universal files so obnoxious.

The Turbine files are objectively bad, so what is my home theatre hardware doing with them that it can't do with Universal? I have to know.

On the recent POWER RANGERS: ONCE AND ALWAYS reunion special for the original Rangers on Netflix:

I'm not really a POWER RANGERS fan anymore, but I did watch the original MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS series until Jason, Trini and Zack left and I learned that the actors were being paid minimum wage with no residuals or likeness royalties. I loved the show, I left when half the cast did. POWER RANGERS seemed to switch out the cast every few years, I guess feeling that the costumes and colours mattered more than any characters; that's why I lost interest. I know Austin St. John (Jason) returned to the POWER RANGERS ZEO series to resolve his character, but I never saw it.

I did watch FOREVER RED when the original Red Ranger (Jason) joined up with most of the subsequent Red Rangers for a reunion mission, and I also watched when Jason showed up in GRID CONNECTION. I enjoyed them, but... I had arrived at the age where I think it's rather stupid for superheroes to shout out their combat maneuvers before they execute them.

I'm not entirely sure why the villains politely stand by for two minutes to let the superheroes morph into their costumes and shout out their catchphrases.

Jason seems to insist on handling every threat by standing still, pulling out his morpher, yelling, "It's morphin time!", thrusting his morpher forward, shouting, "Tyrannosaurus!" and then becoming the Red Ranger. I think a sensible villain would shoot Jason dead before he got through the first syllable of his catchphrase.

Also, for reasons I don't understand, any time the Power Rangers charge towards an enemy, there's an explosion behind them that doesn't seem to have any catalyst or cause any harm. I don't know why the Power Rangers, supposed superheroes, are randomly setting off explosive charges to the landscape behind them or why they aren't directing their firepower forward at their enemies.

I shouldn't ask such questions.

Anyway. There was a Netflix special recently called POWER RANGERS: ONCE AND ALWAYS which was supposed to be the 30 anniversary special for the MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS series and have all the original actors reunite as the original Power Ranger characters. This was a difficult prospect for many reasons. Amy Jo Johnson (the Pink Ranger) had mostly retired from acting (she's been directing for the CW lately). Austin St. John (Jason, the Red Ranger) is barred from travel except for convention appearances due to being accused of COVID relief fund fraud (hopefully not true) and couldn't travel to New Zealand for filming. Thuy Trang, the Yellow Ranger, died in a car accident in 2001.

Jason David Frank, the Green Ranger, refused to return. This was very strange as Frank had been a POWER RANGERS obsessive who seemed happy to return constantly as the White or Green Ranger. Turning down a Power Rangers project was highly uncharacteristic and Frank committed suicide last year in November 2022, a deeply disturbing incident that I don't think we'll ever understand.

So what we have here is a MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS special reunion anniversary movie called ONCE AND ALWAYS on Netflix -- where the only real reunion of the originals is between original Blue Ranger (David Yost as Billy) and the original Black Ranger (Walter Jones as Zack).

I watched it and, given the casting issues and low budget, the team did a very good job. The original POWER RANGERS series had the team break up due to cast attrition over time. Rangers lost their powers, went overseas to join a diplomatic mission for world peace, moved to alien planets to be with girlfriends, etc.. By the time the last original Ranger left, everyone had been depowered. (However, one continuity oddity: despite losing his Power Rangers powers twice onscreen, Jason returned in FOREVER RED and had his Red Ranger powers, no explanation provided; the screenwriter took the view that fans would want Jason to have his powers and explaining it wasn't worth the screentime).

ONCE AND ALWAYS opens with the original Power Rangers in 2022 at their current ages engaged in battle. Jason, Billy, Trini, Zack, Kimberly and Tommy: they are the Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, Pink and Green Rangers. Due to the absence of one-third of the actors, the Red, Yellow, Pink and Green Rangers stay in their full-body Power Rangers costumes.

However, the show seems to have successfully lifted archive dialogue from the old episodes: the Yellow and Green Rangers give their distinctive combat noises and yell out a few lines; the Pink Ranger has a soundalike who mimics Amy Jo Johnson well. The Red Ranger sounds more generic than I'd like, but it's functional.

These are the original Power Rangers. They are together. Somehow, they regained their powers, reunited the original team, and resumed the eternal battle against evil. Despite all the unfortunate casting changes and losses in the original series, our heroes found their way back to themselves and each other.

The story has to do some twisty contortions to justify only ever showing the Blue and Black Rangers in civilian wear; the story also has to regrettably provide a final end for the original Yellow Ranger that can't use the original actress' face but does manage to use her voice. There is a slight awkwardness because it's like the full fledged reunion story of the Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, Pink and Green Rangers is happening offscreen and we're only getting the scenes with the Black and Blue Rangers.

But the story manages to reorient itself to being about how Zack, the goofy charmer of the original series, has to grow up after the Yellow Ranger's exit story while Billy, the detached scientist, has to deal with actual human emotions of grief and loss and mourning that he'd previously been able to avoid in his superhero life.

It's quite good, but I really, really, really hope we never get a SLIDERS 'reunion' of this nature where only Jerry and Cleavant return and Professor Arturo and Wade are only seen at a distance in full body obscuring spandex suits.

It's not necessarily that Terry Matalas didn't believe in Season 2's storylines. My personal opinion on Season 2: completing Michael Chabon's unfinished stories is an impossible task and no one should ever have to try. Even a resurrected Ernest Hemingway wouldn't have been able to handle this nightmare assignment.

Chabon's sudden departure from PICARD was not expected, and it happened too late into Season 2 to start over with storylines. And Chabon has a difficult style for another writer to adopt.

My take on Chabon: he introduces a ton of story elements, but he is not entirely aware of how it all ties together when he starts. He lets the story's meaning reveal itself to him.

With Season 1: he knew that it was about artificial intelligence and Data, but it may not have been clear to him until scripting that it was all about Picard getting to see Data one last time, to tell Data how much he loved him, and to say goodbye to him fully, wholly and meaningfully -- in all the ways Picard didn't get to in NEMESIS.

I think in Season 2, Chabon again came up with story elements: Picard's mother, Q being sick, the Borg wanting peace, a fascist alternate Starfleet, time travel -- but when the time came to start writing the scripts, Chabon wasn't around to weave his story elements together. All the beats were handed over to Terry Matalas. Matalas tried and... it just didn't work.

Season 2 was like one of those Netflix Marvel TV show where there is a lot of random material to stretch out the episode count. What did the Borg have to do with Picard's mother or Project Khan or Wesley Crusher or Q dying? Matalas didn't know, Chabon wasn't there to find out.

Chabon has a rather abstract approach to story conception that's hard to replicate.

It's true that lots of shows have a head writer leave material for other writers to expand upon in the house style. But Chabon's style is very difficult to adopt in his absence. Chabon's writing is low key subtlety that is severely underplayed. It is very difficult for another writer to identify what defines Chabon style in order to extrapolate and continue what Chabon might have done. He's more M. Night Shyamalan than, say, Tracy Torme.

Maintaining a house style is all about knowing the specific identifiers of that style, maintaining them while bringing in your original ideas and perspectives. Tracy Torme's SLIDERS is about the American Dream; Jon Povill's SLIDERS questions that Dream, but both versions have Torme's style for the jokes.

In terms of Chabon's PICARD, Chabon's stylistic identifiers are so low key and chameleonic, with Season 1 slowly exploring the artificiality of life whether it's sex or machines or borders. Chabon finally offers the contemplation (as opposed to a conclusion) that artificiality is about defining beginnings and endings, and so, artificial intelligence like Data can't technically be life unless it's capable of experiencing death, a thought that Data offers in his final moments with Picard.

It is a moment that seems to have come intuitively and emotionally rather than through carefully plotted calculation. And since pastiche and maintaining a house style are fundamentally exercises in calculation, trying to predict what Chabon would have improvised is futile.

With Season 3, I think Matalas was out of Chabon beat sheets and ready to turn to do TERRY MATALAS' PICARD rather than TERRY MATALAS' MICHAEL CHABON'S PICARD.

For better or for worse. (Not sure which one, eager to find out.)

When this thread first started, it was sharing news from Tracy Torme: he was going into NBCUniversal meetings to discuss a SLIDERS reboot. A fan posted a response saying he didn't want a reboot, he'd prefer some original property about parallel universes, that he himself had something he thought better than SLIDERS, and that SLIDERS should not come back.

I wish I had not said what I said in response which was vitriolic and mocking, basically telling him that no one had forced him to spend a decade writing legally dissimilar SLIDERS fanfic to sell as original work.

What would Marc Scott Zicree, Mr. Sci-Fi, have said in response? What his reboot be? It would be measured, thoughtful, productive and positive. Something like:

Well. If you're a TV producer seeking studio support and network funding, it's important to present yourself and your product to be broadcastable and  marketable. To offer something that NBCUniversal would be enthused to fund, advertise, and see potential profit.

SLIDERS had potential as a 2023 prestige science fiction mindbender like EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. There's a market for inventive science fiction with lovable characters.

I hardly think NBCUniversal was "never" going to go for SLIDERS; NBCU executives are busy people. They're not going to take meetings unless there's at least a faint flicker of possibility.

"What are ya gonna do?" is probably not the right question. What will NBCUniversal NOT do?

They will not work with a TV producer on projects that don't seem marketable. To the average person, when the series creator says, "SLIDERS will never be woke," what most NBCU executives will hear is: "SLIDERS will never be a product you can market to women and people of colour and LGBTQ+ viewers."

The average NBCUniversal executive is busy and hasn't obsessively studied Tracy Torme to know that Torme loves black people and their music and their voices and their lives. The average NBCU executive may have taken "SLIDERS will never be woke" to mean that the show is unsellable.

Do we seriously think SLIDERS is above marketing? Beer is a near-universally popular product and yet, Bud Lite still needs to be advertised to the transgender demographic. I don't even drink and I know that SLIDERS has to work harder than beer to sell itself.

I think some media training would be a very good idea so that SLIDERS isn't misrepresented by its own creator. "SLIDERS will never be woke" strikes me as painful moment of self-sabotage, and Torme's disdainful description of NBCU representatives in public was quite the unforced error. Perhaps Marc Scott Zicree should have taken the lead.

From what I've heard and read, a meeting with Zicree is a splendid, life-affirming experience. Temporal Flux once described Zicree as "a master of tact."

Compare Torme and Zicree's respective attitudes towards Kari Wuhrer. Torme would not even bring himself to speak Wuhrer's name, describing her as "A girl from MTV who can't act" and remarking, "I don't think Meryl Streep will be looking over her shoulder."

Zicree's attitude: he took a day to watch all of Kari's direct-to-video movies to learn how to write for her. He said Wuhrer could be incredibly funny and warm and indicate a lot of complexity under the surface. In that moment, Zicree established himself as the Mr. Rogers of science fiction TV. I suspect that Zicree could find one nice thing to say about even Jack the Ripper.

And if your studio is meeting with Zicree, Zicree will take the time to watch some of your past work and find SOMETHING to like about everything your studio has ever done. Zicree expresses joyful enthusiasm for what your studio could do with Zicree's ideas. Zicree would be a pleasure to work with.

I have this terrible sense that a professional studio meeting with Tracy Torme is the polar opposite of meeting with Zicree.

Torme once described Arturo as insecure with an ego that was out of control, vastly mismatched to actual achievements. Torme described Rembrandt as an outdated showbiz icon, out of touch and delusional about his audience. I suspect that there are times when Torme may embody some of his characters' lesser traits and it's possible that the meetings with NBCU were one of those times.

None of that makes Torme any less a genius as a writer; it just makes it harder for his writing to be sold, produced, filmed and aired. Some coaching from Marc Scott Zicree would be very helpful.

I'm sure Zicree would do it in exchange for some extra SPACE COMMAND money. Or you could just bring in Zicree as a partner and let him do all the talking.

Zicree is not as good a SLIDERS writer as Torme. Let's get that out of the way now. Temporal Flux once remarked that Zicree is deeply interested in the sliding technology: the Slidewave, the Slidecage. We may have gotten the Slidesled, the Slideblender and the Slidesocks if Zicree had stayed for Season 5.

Zicree is less capable and less interested with the social satire of SLIDERS. And given that the social satire is inherently the true voice of SLIDERS, that's a pretty serious shortcoming.

However, Zicree has some truly impressive human resource skills. Temporal Flux reported that Zicree got himself hired on Season 4 of SLIDERS by going into the job interview with David Peckinpah and simply repeating everything Peckinpah said in paraphrased sentences. Peckinpah wanted to hire him on the spot. This combined with Zicree's very-positive attitude to Kari Wuhrer tells me that Zicree is easy to work with.

Zicree may not have Torme's genius, inventiveness, ingenuity and imagination (besides Temporal Flux, who does?), but Zicree could probably have sold a show that, as Temporal Flux says, should really have been able to sell itself.

The hypothetical perspectives within this post are the personal views of ireactions. I cannot stress enough in the name of Amanda Mallory's Riceroni and lamb: the views of ireactions are not the consensus of Sliders.TV.

I imagine this hypothetical moment of historical fiction:

CUT TO:

This has been an exercise in historical fiction. I cannot stress enough in the name of the Professor's fish that I wasn't in the room and all of the above is speculative dramatization (except Torme actually did want to do that KKK teaser in the 90s).

The Pneumatic Edition with added grain (AddGrainC(var=60)) looks good on my TV under very specific and peculiar circumstances. I just skimmed through "Summer of Love", "Prince of Wails" and "Fever" (which have finished encoding). At the 'normal' TV setting, the high grain level caused really intense flickering across the image. This is because the sharpness of the TV is set to 50 percent. The grain was also highly present and distracting with the backlight set to 50 percent.

At the 'Energy Saver' TV setting that I use for watching standard definition video, the grain blended into the image and the faults were less glaring.  This setting has the sharpness set to 0 percent and the backlight set to 10 percent.

I don't think most people in this world do this with their TV... do they? I assume most people want the backlight to be bright and the sharpness to be high.

The episodes look alright. I think for so long, I hoped that Topaz AI or Lanczos or QTGMC or TDecimate or Doc Brown would find some way to elevate 1.02 - 1.09 to near-HD brilliance. I feel pneumatic has offered a more modest path. The Pneumatic Edition isn't great; it isn't even exactly good. Instead, pneumatic in clearing away the inadequacies of low-resolution analog tape and primitive DVD transfer has brought these Season 1 episodes to the dizzying heights of good enough.

We shouldn't allow perfect to become the enemy of good enough.

Anyway. If I'm going to show SLIDERS to a friend at their house (a fate most of my friends have avoided), I would probably bring them the non-grain augmented Pneumatic Edition that I'll encode next.

Well, I had some time this evening to check out The Pneumatic Edition of 1.02 - 1.09 on a 55 inch TV while adjusting pneumatic's Avisynth+ script. And... I think I'm going to use LanczosResize without the extra taps. I get that four taps or nnedi3 offer better sharpening, but I think that's for quality standard definition material. These episodes of SLIDERS are not in good quality.

Those scalers may make the closeups look good, but then by comparison, the medium and wide shots look worse. It seems better to aim lower and achieve more consistency where nothing looks 'great' but everything is consistently 'okay'.

I'm also adding a really high level of grain, AddGrainC(var=60). I've also really dialed down the saturation and contrast increases because any more seems to make the lack of detail in these old analog tape files look more glaring. This is a version of The Pneumatic Edition that is meant for me on my TV to be watched on a really low backlight setting (about 10 percent of the full brightness) with the TV's sharp setting reduced to zero.

I don't know if these will look good for anyone but me. I'm still going to do a grainless version, though, just to have the true Pneumatic Edition on file.

As a positive person, I would like to share an example of a slow-burn romance that, unlike Allegra and Chester, is mostly effective. CASTLE features arrogant loudmouth crime novelist Richard Castle nonsensically partnered with a homicide detective, Kate Beckett, a straightlaced, systematic crimesolver. For four seasons, Castle and Beckett were constantly avoiding any discussion of romance even though they were obviously in love by the first third or so of Season 1. They were like Allegra and Chester except with Allegra and Chester, the question is: why won't they talk about their feelings? With CASTLE, the question is more appropriately, why would they ever talk about their feelings?

Castle may be in love with Beckett, but his juvenile nature makes it impossible for him to approach a woman he truly respects and admires with anything but frivolous quests and hapless attempts at crimesolving, and Castle is on some level horrified that the woman of his dreams isn't a fun loving goofball but a rigid, regimented law enforcement officer.

Beckett may be in love with Castle, but Beckett is appalled by the chaos that Castle brings into her life and perpetually aghast at Castle's recklessness, pranks, and inability to take anyone or anything seriously. Beckett is horrified that she is in love with this lunatic and never wants to admit it to anybody ever.

I will concede that in the middle of Season 4, however, this really did get tiresome and I was relieved when Castle and Beckett finally started dating at the end of Season 4.

There are ways to do a strong slow burn romance and THE FLASH seems to readily avoid all the ways to do it with Allegra and Chester.

As for story ideas for the final season of THE FLASH... I would have just made every episode a cheery revisiting of a different part of the Arrowverse. Star City. Gotham. The Wave Rider. Freeland. Port Oswego. Resolve the GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES storyline, save the Legends, find Bruce Wayne, get Kate Kane and Ryan Wilder sharing the Batwoman mantle, revisit Black Lightning, settle the NAOMI storyline. That's 8 - 10 episodes there and the three part finale could be the final battle of the Flash and the Reverse Flash.

It's not like Eric Wallace has anything much to say about the Flash and Iris anyway. And with a wider range of Arrowverse settings, well, it's like what Slider_Quinn21 says with SLIDERS: it writes itself.

I just can't get past how Allegra and Chester's emotional dilemma is perpetually: they like each other and avoid talking about it for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

It brings to mind the antithesis of this: an episode of AP BIO where a high school student, Sarika, tries to blackmail her arrogant biology teacher, Jack Griffin, with photos. The photos show Jack having warm, flirty moments with Lynette, the payroll officer at the school. Sarika believes Jack will be horrified if the pictures are distributed.

Instead, Jack is delighted by the photos. "I'm a grown-ass man," Jack informs Sarika. "I don't get embarrassed when I like somebody."

Well, I've reloaded all the jobs with nnedi3 as per pneumatic's advice. Strangely, last night, AVIDemux (which I use to queue video encodes to run while I sleep or am at work) crashed and the log said it crashed halfway into "Summer of Love" (although the script runs when playing the file 'live' on my computer). I installed a newer version of AVIDemux and it's just finished "Summer of Love".

The results for "Summer of Love" are... mixed. The episode is a leap forward from the DVD, but watching it on my computer screen, the video still looks 'soft' and I can't tell if the grain is making it look aged and dirty or filling in some of the blanks. As pneumatic remarked, it's best to review these at living room distance when time permits. That's a lesson I had to learn too many times myself, thinking an AI upscale excellent on my laptop screen only to realize in the living room that it looked ghastly on the TV or worse, not really that much better.

That said, "Summer of Love" has a magic that transcends the visual problems. The moment where Skid miserably informs Rembrandt that the President of the United States is Oliver North is beautifully sad for both Rembrandt and Skid for two entirely separate reasons. Rembrandt's family lifting him to their shoulders and banging his head into a ceiling beam is hilarious.

I notice that "Summer of Love" has Quinn struggling to acquire clothes for himself and the Professor and "Prince of Wails" will maintain the issue of clothing (and the sliders trick the hotel into providing them with new garments) -- but after that, it ceases to be an issue: the Professor is perpetually in a perfectly tailored suit, Rembrandt always has perfectly pressed clothes, and Wade and Quinn somehow manage to maintain a rotation of regularly worn outfits. (Hahahahahahahaha.)

Anyway. I think I'm going to do a few versions of The Pneumatic Edition: one 1080p set with added grain, one 1080p without added grain, and one that's just 720x540 with the colour boosts but no grain or increase in scaling. At this rate, all the files should be done by the weekend. Then I'll watch them on an HDTV and decide which ones to keep.

A wide range of former prosecutors think Alvin Bragg's case is pretty strong, just difficult for the average non-lawyer to understand.
https://www.salon.com/2023/04/10/eviden … st-donald/

Trumpist and former attorney general William Barr thinks Alvin Bragg's case is pretty weak but that there are plenty other cases against Trump that aren't weak at all.
https://www.salon.com/2023/04/10/very-s … ents-case/

**

I feel like our current political discourse has become overcomplicated, concerned with partisan loyalties and various esoteric identifiers and turns of phrase to the point where Tracy Torme saying "SLIDERS will never be woke" could have conceivably killed his revival efforts (damn it).

I would like to offer a simpler framework to evaluate the morality of any viewpoint. Instead of deciding whether or not SUPERNATURAL is sufficiently in-tune with our personal religious beliefs, instead of debating whether or not SLIDERS needs to be "woke" -- why don't we just turn to "Prince of Wails" and say:

Under this framework... there are certain things that I find I would have to let slide despite my finding them distasteful. On masks and vaccines: I suppose, if you are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you have the liberty to not wear a mask and not get vaccinated in order to pursue your happiness.

However, this framework doesn't give you the liberty to falsely claim that masks cause you to poison yourself with carbon dioxide or that electrostatic material doesn't catch viral particles, nor do you have the liberty to falsely claim vaccines cause heart failure or mount an immune response; such false information is attacking the health and well-being of others and therefore harming their liberty and happiness.

Under this framework, we need to ask ourselves: are we informed by awareness that the achievements and humanity of people of colour have often been appropriated by Caucasian men of privilege and power?

Are we aware that Elvis Presley popularized a musical style created by black musicians like James Brown simply through Presley performing their styles while being white? Are we informed by the awareness that people who are visible minorities or women or gender-nonconforming are stigmatized and dismissed by societal prejudice? Are we acting to either rebalance that injustice or not make it worse in order to uphold their inalienable human rights?

I'm not saying "Prince of Wails" is the pinnacle of political analysis. It suggests that democracy is an American invention, somehow dismissing the French Revolution, Britain's own Bill of Rights and transference of power from monarchy to a parliament. However, it has the benefit of being straightforward and relatively easy to remember.

Do we believe that human beings are created as equals? Do we acknowledge James Brown as the godfather of soul?

I cannot stress enough in the name of Tracy Torme's typewriter, Robert K. Weiss' robots, David Peckinpah's cowboy hats, Marc Scott Zicree's SPACE COMMAND costumes, Keith Damron's lunch receipts and Bill Dial's Solitaire scores that the opinions of ireactions are not the consensus of Sliders.tv.

So, for the most recent two episodes, the critical, urgent stories that Eric Wallace had to tell instead of resolving LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, the stories Wallace felt were absolutely vital within the limited span of the final 13 episodes of THE FLASH:

Chilblaine learns the obvious and straightforward lesson Khione can't be a replacement for Frost, a realization that could have happened as a C-plot but for some reason, this gets stretched out for the entire episode. Meanwhile, Iris has a crisis of confidence over some arbitrary issue and needs a sappy motivational speech from Dreamer to get her to do the obvious and straightforward.

Barry and Iris deal with a building inspection; meanwhile, Allegra and Chester have a minor emotional issue and avoid talking about it for no apparent reason beyond stretching out the story.

Character arcs so trite and simplistic they could be covered exhaustively in a teaser -- and a building safety check. These are the essential stories for two episodes of THE FLASH that Eric Wallace could not do without in the final season of THE FLASH.

Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!? Why!?

Your original code QTGMC script works for me:

This, one, however:

Gives me this error:

Also, after the script is running, how do you save the rendered video as an MP4 file? I ran it through AVIDemux to save it as an MP4, but I'm wondering how that's handled by someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm not sure what the NXdomain issue is. Take a screenshot and send it to me? I'll ran it past Dreamhost tech support.

**

One has to wonder: was Torme's revival idea something that NBCU found accessible and marketable? Judging from Torme's hints, that Torme's pitch was SLIDERS: THE NEXT GENERATION which is an odd proposition for a broadcast audience (as opposed to a fan audience). SLIDERS: THE ORIGINAL SERIES was hardly STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES.

There's another area where Torme perhaps did himself no favours: he declared on a podcast that a SLIDERS revival wouldn't be "woke". Some heard that and felt that Torme was effectively aligning himself and his SLIDERS revival with the opposite of what is considered "woke", and allying himself with misogyny, racism, transphobia, bigotry and fascism.

The aggrieved white male demographic of SLIDERS cheered; transgender SLIDERS commentator Annie Fish (formerly known as Ian McDuffie) was deeply offended and I doubt Annie was the only one. I would not be surprised if NBCU heard Torme's remarks and decided to focus on QUANTUM LEAP instead.

But let's look at Torme's remarks which I personally feel were misunderstood by both sides:

I feel I should note here: Torme has voted Libertarian in every election since at least the 90s.

I don't believe that Torme meant his remarks in the way that they have been heard by people who self-identify as "woke", but I can see it being a dealbreaker for studio executives. I don't mean that in a political sense; I mean that in a marketing sense.

Recently, there was some hilarious outrage over the Anheuser Busch beer company marketing their Bud Light beer with a transgender social media influencer. A former Hollywood leading man whose name I don't wish to type declared he'd buy Busch Light beer instead (peculiar as I know for a fact that he barely drinks and Busch Light and Bud Light are made by the same company). A country music star bought some cases of Bud Light and proceeded to fire a gun at them. These men felt threatened that a mass market product was being marketed by a transgender individual.

Here's the thing: a beer company doesn't actually care if its product is 'woke' or 'conservative'. A beer company wants to sell its beer to the widest range of people possible: men, women, non-binaries, transgendered individuals, Christians, atheists, liberals, libertarians, conservatives – their money is as good as anyone else's.

Any mass market product in 2023 whether it's beer or a SLIDERS revival has to be sellable to a broadcast audience that includes people of colour, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, college students, high school dropouts – and exclusionary attitudes like transphobia and other bigotries, in addition to being hateful, limit the spectrum on which a product can be sold. In contrast, a product that rejects bigotry still has a lot of potential customers. SLIDERS is a TV show and it's called broadcasting for a reason.

In that podcast, Torme inadvertently declared that he was not interested in broadcasting.

I don't even think that's what Torme meant at all. I think Torme misused the term "woke" which I think he associates with "political correctness" which I think he's also misused historically. Torme has called "political correctness" to be "the great lie of the left".

"Woke" and "political correctness", if examined carefully, are terms that simply mean that in our speech and conduct, we live by certain truths: that all human beings are created equally and endowed by their existence with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and James Brown is acknowledged as the godfather of soul. To be "woke" and "politically correct" means that we hold those truths to be self-evident whether for ourselves or for people who are women or black or Asian or transgender or non-binary or gay.

It also means that we recognize that there are some people who have failed to live up to those truths. And we don't pretend otherwise -- regardless of how much they helped me with SLIDERS fanfic or how much Lego they photograph and share. And since my previous paragraph quotes dialogue that Tracy Torme adjusted and approved for "Prince of Wails", it is my conclusion that Tracy Torme is in fact "woke" and "politically correct"; he just doesn't use those terms for himself or use them as they are generally used in common parlance.

Why does Tracy Torme say that he isn't "woke" or "politically correct"? I mean, he describes himself as a Libertarian, a "radical environmentalist" and "radical animal rights" person. My personal theory: this stems from how Tracy Torme writes black characters.

"Summer of Love" presents Rembrandt's family speaking in lyrical and poetic, non-standard American English and has them all highly egotistical and overaggressive and utterly hilarious and wonderful. This was considered highly inappropriate in 1994 screenwriting; there was a school of thought that all black characters in film and TV should be scripted as though they were white and merely played by a black actor.

All the black characters on BABYLON 5, for example, were scripted as 'race neutral' which, when the writer is white, just means writing them as white. And while there is nothing specifically disrespectful in that, it does deny that there are life experiences that are unique to black people that are not lived or known by white people or white writers.

Torme was a white writer who wrote black characters like Rembrandt with a specific eye to how Rembrandt has had life experiences that white people do not have. Torme wrote Rembrandt and his family with an awareness that black people have to work twice as hard as white people to be considered half as good, hence the hypercompetitiveness and pettiness at Rembrandt's funeral.

Torme wrote the Brown family as having to be their own law enforcement, hence Rembrandt's wife coming after him with a gun. Torme wrote Rembrandt's brother as talking crap about Rembrandt when dead but being warmly supportive to his face.

It is very obvious to me that these are all based on black people whom Torme met, knew and loved in his childhood.

Torme would have undoubtedly seen intense resistance from studio and network executives who would want him to just write his black characters as white people played by black actors.

To me, Torme saying that his SLIDERS revival wouldn't be woke means that Torme's writing would never simply present the Democratic Party's talking points and platforms as SLIDERS' values any more than he'd have the sliders perform Hitler's MEIN KAMPF. Instead, Torme would have eagerly satirized and poked fun at and inverted every system of political dogma whether libertarian or conservative or liberal or socialist.

What's the transgender episode of SLIDERS in Torme's hands? It's probably not the QUANTUM LEAP episode providing a lecture on transgender rights. Instead, it's probably a bizarre inversion of conflict over transgender rights instead: the sliders land on a world where gender-specificity is considered taboo and rude, but Arturo makes an angry rant about how a man is entitled to gender-segregated restrooms and suddenly emboldens a terrorist group that he is not equipped to stop. SLIDERS' take on this issue isn't going to be a seminar and a speech; it's going to be a bizarre parody.

Let's note that Torme also had no issue with his own values and worldviews being mocked and pilloried. Torme loves sports. He is obsessed with baseball, football and hockey. He allowed "Eggheads" to mock professional sports from both a competitive perspective and a fan perspective. Torme is obsessed with Westerns; he personally rewrote "The Good, The Bad and the Wealthy" to criticize the violence of Westerns.

I don't feel Torme conveyed his worldview with the nuance and care needed for something so delicate and it could have become a problem. Note that the key person to whom he was pitching a SLIDERS revival was Danielle Claman Gelber.

Claman Gelber is a veteran TV executive who is a powerful woman in the male-dominated entertainment industry, who in addition to spearheading development on X-FILES and ALLY MCBEAL and DAWSON'S CREEK, also developed lesbian TV programming like THE L WORD, shows that made psychotherapy mainstream (WEB THERAPY), shows that destigmatized marijuana (WEEDS) and cancer (THE BIG C) on broadcast TV.

Claman Gelber's career seems to have a highly progressive bent, if only for marketing. Her output suggests that she is someone who may well have been put off by Torme, a potential business partner, declaring, "SLIDERS will never be woke."

I have to wonder if maybe, in the future, Torme should just be quiet and let Marc Scott Zicree do all the talking from now on.

I cannot stress enough in the name of Slidology: the views of ireactions are not the views of Sliders.TV.

Do Rep0=13 and EZKeepGrain require additional DLLs?

I put your DLL pack into the Avisynth folder, but it still didn't run until I added more DLLs (avsresize, BWDIF, LSMASHSource, nnedi3, TDeint, TIVTC). I can't seem to get Rep0=13 and EZKeepGrain running after adding them to your script.

I'm hoping to spend some of the Easter holiday reading up on Avisynth+ and how to use it so that I'm not dependent on the only person in this thread who knows what he's doing to type out the code.

I'm current experimenting with different Hybrid scaling solutions and grain settings until I'm happy.

Hybrid is doing a good job with most episodes except "Last Days" which remains very jagged and ugly in the opening scenes, so that's probably an Avisynth+ job.

One of the weird things about Michael Reaves: he seemed cursed to write scripts called "Requiem" and would suffer horribly for writing them. He wrote the SLIDERS episode "Requiem" for which he nearly died of shame, stupefied by how Keith Damron and Bill Dial had reduced it to people standing around reiterating already-known information with as few sets as possible. "Requiem" had been an assigned storyline, really; Reaves had pitched the story of Rembrandt developing a psychic link with a woman and Damron and Dial and Reaves make that woman a disembodied Wade.

He also wrote a DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS script called "Requiem" -- a teleplay for the 80s cartoon where some kids are transported into a fantasy world of dungeons and dragons. It was a peculiar assignment. For reasons beyond sense or reason, DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS had finished producing its third season, production didn't know if there'd be a fourth -- yet Reaves was asked to write a series finale script to end the show to use as a fourth season premiere (then why was it a finale?).

Accepting this nonsensical assignment, Reaves wrote an ambiguous series finale script that was never produced because the DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS cartoon wasn't renewed for a fourth season. And, for some weird reason, after the show went off the air, Reaves was constantly harassed by people asking him if there had been a series finale episode that they had missed and that there were rumours that his series finale had revealed that DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS had been set in hell and the Dungeon Master was actually Satan and that Reaves' work on the show had been a covert operation to introduce child viewers to Satanism.

In response, Reaves put his "Requiem" script online.
https://soulofacarp.com/ReavesSite/requiem_preface.htm

Fans made an animated version of the script.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1_6SeRRflo

It was eventually recorded as an audio drama that was included on the DVD box set of the series.

As with SLIDERS, Reaves noted that the title "Requiem" (a musical composition honouring the dead) didn't make sense because as mandated on D&D and SLIDERS, he wasn't allowed to kill off the character(s) whom the requiem (if any) would supposedly honour.

It is my hope that Reaves rests in peace and that nobody will ever force him to write any more scripts called "Requiem" that use that title for no good reason whatsoever.

Ryan Gosling in YOUNG HERCULES is due to a peculiar situation.

During the fourth season of HERCULES: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS, series-star Kevin Sorbo suffered a series of strokes. This led to partial vision loss and paralysis, anxiety attacks, trouble walking, fatigue, dizziness, and being unable to stand for more than 5 - 10 minutes.

While waiting for Sorbo to recover, Season 4 began episodes of HERCULES with minimal Hercules. There were episodes where Hercules went missing or had an offscreen mission and his friends Iolaus and Salmoneus and Autolycus had to take over. Writers pitched an episode where Hercules became a monkey, but due to the difficulty of securing trained monkeys, Hercules instead became a pig.

There were several episodes that focused on Hercules when he was a teenager and actor Ian Bohen took over the role.

For reasons I don't understand, the studio, Renaissance Pictures, decided to do a YOUNG HERCULES pilot with Ian Bohen and had Kevin Sorbo write Universal a letter saying that a YOUNG HERCULES spinoff series would be great for the franchise.

This is nonsensical to me. Teen and adult Hercules characters were the same character. What would be the point of having the same HERCULES show twice over?

Maybe the idea was that YOUNG HERCULES would have a 13 episode order to air between seasons of the adult HERCULES show.

The YOUNG HERCULES pilot was a successful TV movie, but Universal passed on doing a full YOUNG HERCULES hour-long syndicated show. Later, Renaissance and Universal pitched it to FOX Kids as a half-hour children's show.

FOX Kids picked it up for one season of 50 of 30 minute episodes at 50 million for the entire season... but then actor Ian Bohen declined to do the series, saying he didn't want to move from Los Angeles to New Zealand full time to do the show.

This is confusing: how could Renaissance Pictures have hired an actor to do a pilot but not secured him for the series?

I have to wonder if maybe, when Universal decided not to have two HERCULES shows with basically the same character, the cast contracts expired. Then came the opportunity to sell YOUNG HERCULES to the half-hour Saturday morning market, but all the actors needed new contracts and Ian Bohen decided not to sign a new agreement.

The YOUNG HERCULES TV movie aired in February 1998 and then in September 1999, I eagerly tuned into FOX Kids expecting to see Ian Bohen. But instead, it was Ryan Gosling in the costume.

It really threw me off. Gosling's presence alienated me from the show and I ended up not watching it. But I have become more relaxed about the recasting now.

I'm not familiar with Ryan Gosling's work, but watching HERCULES and XENA today: it's obvious that continuity is just whatever the writers can vaguely remember on a good day. Roles are frequently recast; guest-actors often play multiple characters across the shows (Lucy Lawless played two other roles in addition to Xena). The Bohen-Gosling change doesn't feel like a big deal anymore.

I don't think I saw more than 3 - 4 episodes, but looking at the Wikipedia entries: the show 'only' lasted one season of 50 episodes (!!) and is often described as a "failure" for this.

To me, 50 half hours strikes me as pretty solid and FOX Kids was, after all, a kids programming block that wouldn't have wanted to see the cast age into their 20s.

(Yes, POWER RANGERS had 145 episodes after three years, but POWER RANGERS was cannibalizing action and special effects footage from Japanese TV shows.)

YOUNG HERCULES was done very cheaply with one director shooting four episodes in one block using the same locations, guest-actors and sets across the four installments.

Due to the filming schedule, episodes were completed and aired out of order: characters would be part of the regular cast but then be introduced for the 'first' time, characters would leave the show in a departure story, but then be present for more episodes. Characters would be aware of certain secrets, but then learn them in a shocking reveal. Even on DVD with the episodes in production order, some misordering remains.

I wonder if it's any good. Some fans have provided a continuity-based episode order, so I'm looking forward to watching the series without those glitches.

When running upscale jobs, they generally had to happen while I slept. I have 32GB of RAM on my gaming laptop, so that allowed me to do my other work even while Topaz monopolized the GPU.

Currently, I have Hybrid running a transcode job on Episodes 1.02 - 1.09 with pneumatic's advised settings, nnedi3 scaling to 1080 and grain to fill in some of the fuzziness. It's taking about 3 - 4 hours per episode. I just had a look at "Prince of Wails" and "Fever" which finished, putting them on a very mediocre 55 inch LED TV.

It occurs to me that in two episodes in a row, Wade has to nearly get hit by a car to get the plot going.

They look okay to me, and as I've considered the Universal files to be awful, okay is quite an accomplishment. Most of the distortions from viewing these episodes on a modern TV (lines, jagged edges) are gone. The soft focus look is a little more deblurred now. Mediums and closeups look good. Really wide shots still betray that this is more a videotape than a digital file, but it's still okay.

The odd distortions of Topaz AI upscaling are absent. Yes, Topaz AI's closeups looked better, but the mediums and wides looked so bad that it was distractingly inconsistent. The Pneumatic Edition is consistent. The grain and the nnedi3 scaling are making the lack of detail tolerable, and pneumatic's instructions have reduced the jaggies and comb lines to the point where their occasional appearances seem acceptable. I've upped the colour a bit just to make it look a less faded.

I could live with these.

Thanks. MPC-HC was the only part I got right. The Kazaa Codec Pack has always been my go-to. VLC is just too odd in how it positions itself at bizarre sizes every time I open a video file with it. MPC-HC has the sense to put itself in the center of the screen and the decency to use hardware acceleration.

Warning for those with weak stomachs: I recently applied something I learned from a Republican.

I'm not entirely sure why Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Republican, actually. In 2004, he said chose Republicans in 1968 after listening to Richard Nixon speak about free enterprise, an unintrusive government, low taxes and a strong military. As political heroes go, Nixon is a peculiar choice.

Also odd: Schwarzenegger in 2015 wrote a short essay about the importance of electric vehicles by asking: if you had to be a locked room with a running car, would you want to be locked behind Door Number 1 with a gas powered car or locked behind Door Number 2 with an electric car? He said he'd choose Door Number 2 and he hoped you'd join him there too. https://www.facebook.com/notes/10158687852561760/

Why is this man in the party of Trump?

In 2018, in a bodybuilding subreddit that Schwarzenegger frequents, a man lamented that he'd been deeply depressed  and had put on weight and been unable to get himself to work out and he had become a "lazy ass" and he wished Schwarzenegger would tell him off. Schwarzenegger replied:

I am mystified as to why Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the party of Trump. He is apparently mystified as well, having repudiated Trump and called him the worst president in history and a failed leader.

In response to the 2021 Capitol riots, Schwarzenegger filmed and posted a ridiculously melodramatic video complete with bombastic soundtrack about how democracy is like a sword: it must be heated and struck and plunged into freezing water to become tempered and strong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A18Ext23_dI

I thought about that last one today. You see, the TPU case I keep on tablet was slipping off a bit. I had weakened the corners significantly because of all the times I'd taken the case off the tablet to put on tempered glass. The case had gotten a little stretched. It wasn't tightly gripping the tablet anymore. Sometimes, when holding the tablet at its sides, the case would come loose from the tablet.

I thought about buying a new case, but one thing I really need to stop doing is wasting money on phone and tablet accessories that don't last.

I put the TPU case in a canvas bag and put the bag in my dryer and let the dryer run on high heat for 20 minutes. Then I put the canvas bag in the freezer for an hour. Then I took the case out of the bag and it fit onto the tablet tightly and securely, having shrunken and cooled and rehardened.

I cannot emphasize enough in the name of the Dual Dimension box set foam, the Mill Creek envelopes, the double-sided Season 3 discs and the Turbine hard case that opinions of ireactions do not reflect the consensus views of Sliders.tv. Were a consensus to exist, ireactions would not be the one to determine it blahblahblahblahblahblahblah.

Whether or not the customers noticed Waymond bounding through the laundromat really has no bearing whether or not Evelyn is imagining the events of the film.

The customers aren't interested in Waymond and aren't watching him; Waymond's burst of agility is outside their line of sight, and more pertinently, it is outside Evelyn's line of sight.

This means that it cannot be in her imagination because she is not aware of it and Waymond's sudden physical abilities are outside her perspective, independent of her imagination, and genuinely taking place in the reality of the film.

If the fantastic events of the film were entirely in Evelyn's mind, there would be no extranormal events outside Evelyn's personal experience.

I'm confused. I turned PP back on, so wouldn't I be getting fewer combed frames?

I can confirm that with PP enabled and MI set to 200, most frames that were previously combed are now clear:

It's interesting: there is an action-adventure war series of books called ANIMORPHS, about high school kids who can transform into animals and discover that their planet is slowly being invaded by aliens. They become child soldiers in the war against invasion. The 64 book series was shepherded by Katherine Alice Applegate and a legion of ghostwriters working off her outlines. The series finale ended with a beloved character killed off, one fan favourite mutilated and transformed into an enemy soldier, every survivor traumatized, the villains defeated but surviving, and the end of the war only leading into another war and a cliffhanger ending.

The teenaged readership rioted, furious that Applegate had turned all the characters into psychologically shattered wrecks and ended with the villains not wholly defeated and the beginning of another war. Applegate responded in an open letter, saying:

I think STAR WARS is doing something similar, except that STAR WARS is different from ANIMORPHS in a key area: STAR WARS is completely unaware of how it has effectively become an anti-war parable about the futility and endlessness of war.

ANAMORPHS was deliberately showing war is a relentlessly consuming force of savagery and horror without end by deliberately having no ending; STAR WARS's endless wars are because JJ Abrams was mimicking the formula original STAR WARS war movie and offering a new iteration of the original film and the original war with the repetition being inadvertently depressing. The anti-war implications of the sequel trilogy are completely accidental.

I think it's very important that we enjoy art on our specific terms. Our interpretations aren't necessarily right or wrong; they're simply our interpretations. We're all going to respond differently to a work of fiction especially one addressing perceptual understandings of reality.

That said, when Evelyn isn't looking, we see Waymond on the security cameras where his bearing and physicality suddenly change as the Alpha Waymond personality takes over his body and he performs some fancy acrobatics of which 'prime' Waymond is not capable. This occurs outside Evelyn's perspective and awareness from an objective third person perspective, so while Evelyn may be having a mental breakdown, these events appear to be happening in Evelyn's reality.

I think Slider_Quinn21 has seized on one of the primary peculiarities of STAR WARS: it almost never thinks about how depressing it is. Lucas conceived STAR WARS as a fun rollercoaster ride of space opera adventure, a movie that didn't require too much thought, just the excitement he felt when dragracing as a young man.

Naturally, he set his joyride movie in a fascist-ruled dystopian empire with his heroes being the perpetually-losing revolutionaries rebelling against a system that would keep coming back.

And of course, Lucas reduced Luke's aunt and uncle to skeletons, nuked a planet, killed pretty much everyone in Rogue Squadron, and then had Luke triumphant and happy at the end of a movie where his family had been incinerated and most of his new friends had either been blown up or suffocated in the icy vacuum of space.

Who is more traumatized? Luke Skywalker or Rembrandt Brown? Certainly, they'd have a lot to discuss in a support group.

I don't know if JJ Abrams, Rian Johnson and the people making all these other shows and animated serieses have thought about how depressing STAR WARS is, but if they're following Lucas' formula -- high adventure and excitement in battling against fascism -- then they're re-enacting and deepening an element (a flaw?) in the original source material that they won't overturn. The Empire/First Order/alt-right/whatever keeps winning so that these shows and movies can justify more action sequences against the villains.

It's possible that STAR WARS needs to be done with the Empire and find a new villain if it wants to break what Slider_Quinn21 notes is a deeply saddening cycle of the Empire winning and the Rebels scoring points and winning battles but always surviving on the losing end of this eternal war.

Thanks. I'll stick with the moire patterns. It's fine. I'm redoing all the encodes again with Lanczos at four taps.

I don't know why, but I don't like the results with the Nvidia encoder. GPU acceleration is fast (7 - 10 minutes per episode), but image just looks dull and fuzzy to me, even though when I take screenshots, I can't see any difference. I'm sticking to CPU encodes (an hour per episode) for this.

I may need to design some artwork for SLIDERS: SEASON 1: THE PNEUMATIC EDITION.