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I really liked EXCALIBUR during a massive re-read of all X-MEN comics several years ago. EXCALIBUR stood out because the core X-MEN titles had gotten deeply muddled and confused. Writer Chris Claremont had sought to evolve the X-Men team by having Cyclops get married and retire, Professor Xavier leave the team and choose a redeemed Magneto as the new headmaster of the school. But due to editorial interference and crossovers and mandated resets, Claremont was unable to explore the ramifications of Magneto as the team leader. EXCALIBUR, set in England and featuring some X-Men characters (Nightcrawler, Psylocke, Shadowcat) allowed Chris Claremont to tell X-Men adventures without the obnoxious convolutions of the other titles.

Later, Alan Davis took over both writing and illustrating the title and added a new lightness to Claremont's 80s style superheroics. In a SLIDERS Season 6 fanfic type twist, Davis also took issue with the EXCALIBUR SPECIAL EDITION comic which had mis-drawn and mis-characterized various cast members and devoted #47 to explaining it away. https://www.cbr.com/the-abandoned-an-fo … excalibur/

Alas, it was too good last; with #68, EXCALIBUR saw a truly bizarre retool/reboot akin to "Genesis" and "The Unstuck Man" with cast and story changes so abrupt that the editors put in a note trying to assure readers that they hadn't missed an issue. However, I felt things improved with #83 when the brilliant Warren Ellis took over and introduced the character of Pete Wisdom, a hilariously cynical protagonist. Ellis left with #103 and the book would be cancelled with #125, but Ellis later took over X-FORCE with #102 and was able to continue some of his Pete Wisdom stories there until that too was cancelled with #115.

Warren Ellis also once remarked, "I don't know how a bunch of cultural rejects manage to get an abortion like SLIDERS renewed every fucking year." :-D

**

Another X-MEN comic that reflects SLIDERS is EXILES in which the characters visit alternate Marvel timelines. At one point, Wizard Comics Magazine said that the EXILES writer, Judd Winick, should write a SLIDERS comic and the SLIDERS fanbase protested on the grounds that Winick introduces gay characters to every property he writes and would likely make Wade bisexual.

Personally, I would love for Judd Winick to write a SLIDERS comic because he introduces gay characters to every property he writes, properties often devoid of LGBTQ individuals and people of colour until his arrival, and he would likely make Wade bisexual which I think would fit in well with Wade.

For reasons I can't remember relating to Razor Gillette from "The Young and the Relentless," the Gillette commercial about toxic masculinity, and the hilarious outcry against it, I wrote up a cost assessment of various shaving products I've tried, then forgot all about it until I was going through my scratchpad app today. The response to the Gillette commercial from various angry men feeling threatened by the idea that bullying and sexual harassment are bad led to the hashtag #getwokegobroke, a complaint that Gillette products are too expensive.

I think I wrote the below to sort out how much Gillette products cost each year, but I can't recall how it relates to the Razor character at all.

Rotary Electric Razor (Philips)
I've found that rotary razors with their rounded, rotating blades, provide at best a perfunctory shave. They leave the face with a low level of stubble and the results are that the user goes from unshaven to slightly less unshaven. The only point on which I can recommend them: they don't irritate sensitive skin and as their ineffectual nature makes them exceedingly gentle. I keep a cheap $10 in my desk at work, though, so that if I need to go from my office to an evening event and want to look morning-fresh, I quickly can go from unshaven to slightly less unshaven.

You'd spend about $40 a year on replacing the shaving head annually plus the $60 - $140 for a long lasting shaving unit itself.

Gillette Disposable Sensor Dual Blade Razors
These manual cartridge razors are an adequate single use product. Most of these lack modern razor technology: lubrication strips, pivoting razor heads to adjust to the contours of the face or microfins to press the skin down smooth for the blades. They provide one shave, but after that, the blades are dull and shouldn't be used again or they'll tug at facial hair and cut up the skin.

You'd spend about $365 a year on this as these single use blades amount to about $1 each.

Gillette Fusion5 ProShield Power Razor
This manual cartridge razor is the pinnacle of shaving technology: detachable razor heads for easy replacement. Dual lubrication strips. A pivoting shaving head that goes left/right and up/down for all contours of the face. A comb to catch hair and direct it into the blades. A motor in the handle that creates soft pulses in the razor head to increase cutting and sooth the face. And five blades, allowing an initial blade to catch the hair, the subsequent blade to cut it, and for the process to repeated three times where a dual blade razor does it once.

It's too big. I shave best by raking the razor against the grain of my facial hair, creating the smoothest results. But a five blade razor is so large that I can't use it to shave the skin between my mouth and nose; the head occupies the entire surface area of the space I'm trying to shave. I have no space to move it.

The Fusion5 includes a "precision trimmer," a single blade on the edge, but it keeps giving me shaving cuts because the trimmer has no lubricating strip or microfins. The micropulses ensure a gentle touch to the razor, but unless I want to grow a mustache (and I don't), the Fusion5 is too big.

You'd spend about $45 a year on replacement blades plus $15 for the handle (which comes with one blade).

Gillette Triple Blade Safety Razor
The company actually sells a wide range of disposable and cartridge-detachable triple bladed razors. The gentlest is the disposable Sensor 3 Sensitive. The sharpest is the cartridge-replaceable Mach 3. The Sensor 3 Sensitive has a stronger lubricration strip; the Mach 3 lasts longer and has sharper blades, and three blade razors work best for me in being small enough to maneuver in smaller spots on my face and offering a close shave.

However, in order to make the best use of these triple blades, it requires small, precise blade strokes to produce a stubble free face. The Sensor 3 stays sharp for about 10 shaves per blade and the Mach 3 for 15, so it's important to have a regular supply as continuing to use dulled razors leads to cuts. The sharpness of the blades and the lubricating strips allow shavers to use cheap shaving foam instead of pricier lubricating gels; the skin needs a protective layer of foam, but the blades don't need much extra layering to glide across the face.

You'd spend about $45 a year on the Sensor 3 Sensitive razors or about $40 a year on the Mach 3 refill cartridges plus $8 for the handle (which comes with three blades).

Gillette Shaving Foam
It works great with manual razors, it's super inexpensive at $3 -5 a can every three months (so, $20 a year) and it's very reliable.

Braun Series 3 Electric Foil Shaver
A foil shaver has motorized blades going left and right instead of in the circles of a rotary shaver. The Series 3 is one of the cheapest, and it's pleasingly effective, especially when combined with shaving gel. It provides a very close shave that's just as clean as triple blade manual shaving and the shaving head is advertised to last for a year and a half. It's much faster than manual shaving, but it's harsher on the skin than manual and rotary razors. To avoid skin irritation, it needs to be combined with high lubrication shaving gel; the light and inexpensive foam that works fine with manual blades don't provide enough protection. Definitely the most convenient option.

You'd spend $17 a year on a replacement head (really $25 - $26 over eighteen months) and $40 for the shaving unit.

Gillette Fusion5 Shaving Gel
This gel is thicker than Gillette's foam and it adds a high level of cushioning that Gillette's blades don't really need, but Braun's electric foil shavers definitely do. There's a great cooling effect to offset any irritation from an electric razor. It's $4 a can for about a two month supply, so that's $24 a year.

I prefer to use triple bladed razors and foam, but I generally can't. I'm always in a hurry on weekday mornings, so I use the electric foil (not Gillette) and depend on the gel (Gillette) to protect my skin from the foil blades. Spending two minutes on shaving instead of five gets me out the door sooner and helps me beat the traffic.

That was SPIDER-MAN: LIFE STORY and it might work for one mini-series, and it works well in film and TV. But Batman comics have been coming out for 80 years and the reason they've sold well enough to justify eight decades of continued publication: during the bulk of this time, Batman remained recognizable as Bruce Wayne and reflected the most commonly known version of the myth.

A version of Batman who retires and passes on his mantle eventually becomes so detached from the common perception of the character that it becomes false advertising to have BATMAN or DETECTIVE COMICS on the cover. This has been proven, not with Batman, but with efforts to turn Green Lantern, Green Arrow, the Flash and other cultural icons into generational heroes.

In the 80s and 90s, DC took the view that only the name and costume really mattered and attempted to replace lower-selling heroes. Green Lantern became Kyle Rayner, Green Arrow become Connor Hawke, the Flash became Wally West -- and it wasn't a sales disaster. However, DC soon found that every proposed film and TV adaptation of these properties inevitably used Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen and Barry Allen. Kyle, Connor and Wally had origin stories too complicated to present to a general audience.

As a result, hundreds of millions of viewers would see Hal, Oliver and Barry -- but go to comics and find Kyle, Connor and Wally. DC Comics found that it was at risk of publishing GREEN LANTERN, GREEN ARROW and FLASH comics that would be out of sync with the most commonly known, general audience version of these properties. They made a determined effort to repair the situation and made sure to get it done before any of these film and TV products were released.

BATMAN comics were spared a lot of this because that line of comics sold too well to justify replacing Batman long term. But if DC had, as Slider_Quinn21 suggests, allowed Bruce Wayne to age to retirement and become a mentor to Terry McGinnis as the new Batman, the best case scenario would have been what happened with Barry Allen. The books would likely sell well, the stories would be well-written, Terry would be well-liked -- but inevitably, a film adaptation would feature Bruce Wayne as Batman and DC would wonder why the hell they were presenting Terry as Batman to the world at large.

I think it's a funny revelation in ULTIMATES from Al Ewing that the Marvel Universe has been rebooted eight times, once every ten years, and no one noticed until SECRET WARS melted down and rebuilt the multiverse. But... I don't think it really tracks with the actual content of the stories (and it's not supposed to; it's just a joke).

It works to explain how Tony Stark, Frank Castle and the Fantastic Four have been detached from their real-world war histories, and shifted to subsequent conflicts before being moved to fictional countries. But it doesn't explain why Spider-Man and the X-Men have not been rebooted.

Under Paul Jenkins and Dan Slott's writing, Peter Parker thinks back to his childhood, he sees the 1960s and Peter makes a joke about how Aunt May dressed him in old fashioned clothes -- but when J. Michael Straczynski shows Peter's high school years, it's the 2000s. When the X-Men of 10 years ago were sent to the present (2013), Brian Michael Bendis wrote them as shocked by all the giant screen advertisements in Times Square -- except Times Square in 2013 didn't look that different in 2003.

The implication from these 2000 era X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN stories, intentional or not, is that the Marvel Universe in the 1990s had a 1960s level of technology and also a 1960s style of fashion and design -- and within ten years, the Marvel Universe Earth has experienced what took 60 years on our Earth. This actually makes sense if you consider that the Fantastic Four and Iron Man are making astonishing technological advancements and sharing them with the world.

However, when Tony Stark thinks back to his life before he became Iron Man, he remembers selling Stark branded cell phones which definitely didn't exist in the 60s. A tech driven character like this doesn't benefit from presenting his past as the 1960s; a reboot every 10 years (which only changes his origin story) works for him. In contrast, Captain America and Magneto absolutely need a WWII origin story, so it's best to maintain that and update the means by which they're still young today. Cap's time frozen in ice gets longer and longer; Magneto being turned into a baby and restored to youth must be retained with an added explanation that his powers somehow have him aging slowly but that he burnt them out during his initial battles with the X-Men.

There was a story with the Punisher where he was killed, revived as a Frankenstein type monster, then restored to a younger version of his human body -- which explained how he could be young in the 2000s and still be a Vietnam veteran. Subsequent stories elected to avoid any direct reference to Vietnam and then replaced Vietnam with the fictional Siancong.

Ultimately, my protest against set timelines in the DC Universe and my mild concern with Al Ewing's revelation: I think every character benefits from a different, tailored approach to comic book time and allowing the individual writer to make that judgement based on the story at hand. DC insists that every character be half-rebooted every ten years whether that works for them or not.

Anyway. When I was a kid, I was introduced to Spider-Man via the 90s animated series. I eagerly went to the comic store for more adventures of geeky scientist-superhero Peter Parker only to find that Spider-Man was a cool, sauve, blond coffee barista named Ben Reilly. ?!!?!

(I also got whiplash when a month later, Ben Reilly was speared through the heart and melted and Peter became Spider-Man again.)

https://www.comixology.com/Smallville-2 … FkY3J1bWJz

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=smallville+b … -desc-rank

I've rewatched a bunch of episodes of BIRDS OF PREY and... I really enjoy it, but there are a lot of problems here. The major problem is the budget. The original plan was to film in Toronto, but for some reason, production was relocated to Burbank but the budget wasn't increased. As a result, the show is trying to present superheroes with the same budget that the Sci-Fi Channel would assign to a season of SLIDERS. And the lack of money hits everything: the fight scenes depend on stunt doubles and sped-up footage because the money isn't there to choreograph with the actors. The same set dressings are reused constantly in different interiors. There is no location filming and every city street and rooftop is clearly an indoor set. The show reuses the same two shots of the Huntress running across rooftops and scaling a building throughout the entire 13 episode run.

And this undoubtedly affects the performances. Ashley Scott (Huntress) and Rachel Skarsten (Black Canary) are terrific with quips and wisecracks, but any time they're called upon to be emotional or pained or sad, they become strained and awkward. It looks like the episodes have been filmed with a very limited crew with extremely truncated opportunities for setups, meaning all the actors are filmed in extreme closeups (to avoid having to deal with extras or background action or any chance for retakes) and the directors are clearly working without much time or resources.

The lack of money becomes shocking later in the season when episodes start using what are obviously deleted scenes from previous episodes. Near the end of the season, a scene of Barbara and her boyfriend shows Barbara with the hairstyle that she had in the pilot episode; it's clearly an unused sequence being used to pad out an episode. Episode 3 has Barbara describing how her boyfriend's parents looked down upon her for her disability at a family dinner; near the end of the season, we see this family dinner and it's not a flashback but presented in the body of the episode, clearly another unused scene pressed into service.

Still, a number of the BIRDS OF PREY staffers went on to do ONCE UPON A TIME and I love ONCE UPON A TIME, so there's that.

Is Kate Bosworth going to be Lois to Routh's Superman... ?

**

It's hard for me to say whether BIRDS OF PREY is worth your time. I eagerly bought the DVD when it first came out and watched all of it happily with my niece, but...

IB: "Ooooh! I love watching Ashley Scott leap across rooftops! Amazing."

LAUREN: "That is not even Ashley Scott; that's some shitty computer generated animation and it looks like a PS2 graphic. Oh my God, they used that same computer generated shot in the LAST EPISODE!"

IB: "I wish you wouldn't overanalyze it so."

LAUREN: "Is that building supposed to be on fire? Those flames look like pixelated orange tissue paper!"

IB: "Lauren! Why can't you see the appeal of this?"

LAUREN: "WHAT appeal?"

IB: "We are watching 13 episodes featuring the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, the former Batgirl and the offspring of Black Canary fighting crime in hand to hand combat!"

LAUREN: "Oh, right -- that dark haired girl is Catwoman's spawn. I forgot, they only mention it EVERY OTHER SCENE and IN THE CREDITS."

IB: "I'm probably overexplaining this. The women are superheroes and the villains are the people they beat up! I'm still probably overexplaining this. Women! Punching! Evil!"

LAUREN: "The ENTIRE SHOW is overexplained and underbudgeted. They can't even afford to buy stock footage of generic cities!"

IB: "But don't Ashley Scott and Dina Meyer have amazing chemistry as Huntress and Batgirl?"

LAUREN: "Ashley Scott can't even act!"

IB: "But she... inhabits! She personifies! I just love low budget 90s shows with female leads battling supervillains. They're not for everyone."

LAUREN: "I can't take another episode of this. You're only watching this because you like watching cute girls; we might as well be watching BAYWATCH."

IB: "I've never seen BAYWATCH, but if it has Batman's hellraising offspring fighting crime, I'd check it out."

Hans Tobeason, one of BIRDS OF PREY producers, did a lengthy Q&A with the fans after the cancellation where he didn't seem very happy with the show. https://web.archive.org/web/20070902105 … eadid=4052

Another subsequent CLONE SAGA sequel story is THE CLONE CONSPIRACY (2016). In this tale, numerous Spider-Man allies and villains are recruited by the Jackal, the mad scientist who orginally cloned Peter. The Jackal offers them a price they can't refuse: the resurrection of loved ones they've lost.

Common Ground: Electro accidentally electrocuted his girlfriend; she is restored. J. Jonah Jameson is reunited with his dead wife Marla and his foster daughter Mattie. There's also the Lizard's dead son, Rhino's wife, just about everyone Spider-Man ever failed to save is returned. The Jackal then starts resurrecting dead Spider-Man foes and explains that no one is a clone; all these reanimated people have been restored from their original remains with their full memories, with a cloning process merely restoring their bodies.

And each reanimated individual must regularly take a pill or their body will degrade, allowing the Jackal to control them. Spider-Man confronts the Jackal, certain that this is another plot to end the world with another genetic bomb or cloning apocalypse or a virus.

The Other Slide of Darkness: But the Jackal unmasks to reveal that this isn't the Jackal at all -- it's Ben Reilly. Reilly reveals that the Jackal took his remains (back in 1997) and has been experimenting on reviving the dead. The Jackal killed and revived Reilly 24 times, making Reilly relive the trauma until Reilly broke out of his cell and overpowered the Jackal -- and Reilly has now taken control of the Jackal's technology and is seeking to conquer death.

Reilly offers Peter a price to for Peter's loyalty: Colin offers to resurrect Michael Mallory so that Quinn can apologize to his father for the terrible things he said before Mr. Mallory died in that car accident. I mean -- Reilly offers to resurrect Uncle Ben for Peter and absolve him of his guilt.

Dead Man Sliding: Reilly is obsessed with conquering death. He wants to save the world by redeeming every supervillain by bringing back all their victims, restoring hope by reuniting everyone with their loved ones, and to offer everyone a chance to be reborn (yes, he says "reborn"). But then it turns out that Reilly's plan is specifically to kill everyone and reanimate them, partially to heal them of all illnesses physical and mental, but also to control them through their dependency upon his pills.

The trauma of his 24 resurrections has left Reilly mentally scarred and Peter points out that Reilly has held off from resurrecting Uncle Ben specifically because Uncle Ben would tell Reilly that he's wrong.

My Brother's Keeper: In the ensuing fight, Spider-Man succeeds in stopping Reilly, most of Reilly's reanimated degrade and dissipate into dust, and Quinn is forced to deal with knowing that his clone -- his brother -- is now out there and his enemy. I mean. Spider-Man is forced to confront that his clone -- his brother -- is still out there and has been driven mad by his ordeals.

It makes me wonder -- if Colin came back and encountered a restored Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, what would his role be now? I suppose he'd be an inverted mirror of Quinn the way Ben Reilly has become a twisted reflection of Peter Parker.

Net Worth: Ben Reilly and Colin Mallory are two characters that SPIDER-MAN and SLIDERS fans seem inordinately fond of. Not sure why, but I accept that this is the case. In various test audience screenings, Colin consistently scored well with women to whom the character appealed whereas Quinn was considered bland, much as Reilly was well-liked despite the catastrophes of his stories.

Ben and Colin are literally clones of the lead character and, within the narrative, they're younger variants who (needlessly?) duplicate what the original already provides. That said, affection for characters goes well beyond utility.

It's interesting to see how comics mine bad stories for good ones and draw on a publishing history that isn't always a point of pride -- something that SLIDERS fanfic has always done as well. The fascinating thing is how modern Spider-Man comic books resemble SLIDERS fanfic because modern Spider-Man comics are fan fiction -- written decades after the original Spider-Man stories, produced by fans who grew up with this character and now want to imitate, update and expand his world.

Professional Fanfic: The goal isn't to offer an original vision but instead to subsume one's own style and interests into the framework of a Spider-Man story while making the old formula relevant to the present day. And because it's fan fiction, Spider-Man comics will inevitably draw on fan familiarity with the past even if there may be periods of avoiding it.

Colin Mallory is a strangely popular character in SLIDERS fandom. I don't get it, and I have the same polite confusion towards another inordinately popular character in Spider-Man stories -- the character of Ben Reilly.

The Exodus - Part I: SPIDER-MAN: THE CLONE SAGA (1994 - 1997) is one of the worst and most-reviled stories in Spider-Man's publishing history, the SLIDERS equivalent of having Earth Prime invaded by Kromaggs and turning Quinn into Kal-El of Kromagg Prime while Wade is sent to a rape camp.

Back in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #149 (1975), a mad scientist cloned Peter Parker. The story ended with the clone dead. 1994's CLONE SAGA revealed that the clone had actually survived, gone travelling across America and taken on the name Ben Reilly. In this 1994 story, Ben returns with a shocking discovery: he is the original and Peter was the clone. In addition, Mary Jane is pregnant.

Peter Parker decides to retire as Spider-Man, move to Portland, and he gives Ben Reilly his costume and asks him to continue as the real Spider-Man in New York City.

2002 era Marvel President Bill Jemas would look back at THE CLONE SAGA and describe as the story where Spider-Man's sales went from 400,000 copies a month to 48,000 a month.

The Exodus - Part II: Fans were furious that almost 20 years of stories were with a clone. That Peter was being presented as an imposter. That he was being replaced in his own book with all the ceremony of Kari Wuhrer taking John Rhys-Davies' spot and with an incredibly convoluted explanation to validate Ben akin to Robert Floyd playing Jerry O'Connell's role.

Marvel Publishing had been attempting to re-present a single, young, unmarried Spider-Man and thought Ben could serve while the married Peter was moved offstage, turning Spider-Man into a legacy hero like the Flash and Green Lantern.

However, Marvel soon found that star writers and artists they'd hired to write SPIDER-MAN titles were now seeking to leave, not wanting to write and draw Ben Reilly. Fans accepted Ben Reilly as a fun alternative to the increasingly serious and dour Peter Parker, but they didn't accept Reilly AS Peter Parker and certainly not as Spider-Man.

In addition, the storyline was severely overstretched with all the 'intrigue' over whether Peter or Ben was the clone going from 1994 - 1997 with at least one SPIDER-MAN comic a week. It was as if Bill Dial had written all of these comics with his trademark approach of padding out scripts with characters repeating information already established.

Revelations: Eventually, Marvel elected to undo the entire storyline in 1997. Peter and Mary Jane returned to New York City. Mary Jane miscarried the baby. Peter and Ben developed a close, brotherly bond. Norman Osborn revealed that he had tricked Ben into thinking himself the original so that Peter, thinking himself the clone, might go insane. Osborn was furious that Peter hadn't fallen apart and then killed Ben. Peter threw a bag of pumpkin bombs into Osborn and didn't hear from Osborn for a few months.

Peter resumed his role as Spider-Man. And since then, THE CLONE SAGA has been largely avoided: writers did their best not to mention Ben Reilly and tried not to refer to the storyline at all. Ben was referred to once in 2004 as one of Osborn's victims with no specifics. Aside from that, it was like he'd never existed.

Oh Brother: Which made a 2009 storyline quite a shock where Peter is attacked by a villain called Velociraptor. Peter changes to Spider-Man, demands to know why Velociraptor is hunting Peter. Velociraptor says that Peter Parker is an alias for the man named Ben Reilly. Spider-Man freezes in the middle of this fight, shocked, thinking on how he hasn't heard Ben's name in years. "You moron!" Spider-Man shouts at Velociraptor who is seeking to settle a score with Ben after encountering him during Ben's wanderings across America. "Ben Reilly's dead!"

Applied Physics: A full page of flashbacks unfolds, showing panels from the CLONE SAGA, stories that hadn't been spoken of in 12 years. There was a shocking sense of sentimentality as for the first time in over a decade, Spider-Man is permitted to remember Ben Reilly and how much his clone brother meant to him and how they were good friends and allies and how much Peter mourned Ben's loss (silently, I guess).

And it meant a lot to fans who missed Ben even if they hated the four year (!!!) CLONE SAGA arc. It acknowledged the positive memories of the CLONE SAGA, specifically Ben, and focused on his legacy while not delving into the who's the clone/who's the original conflict.

This is something you can only do in comic books where characters barely age despite the passage of decades. Stories that happened during the Ford US presidency can be treated like they happened a couple years ago. In contrast, I can't imagine the 2020 season of STAR TREK featuring Captain Kirk following up on the death of his brother back in 1967.

To Catch a Slider: It makes me wonder how a present day Quinn would think of Colin. Colin was a clone. A clone of Quinn. There was never a real Colin Mallory, just an altered Kromagg spy brainwashed into thinking himself Quinn Mallory's brother. Assuming that Quinn was recovered from quantum limbo after "The Seer" and learned the truth, what would he do? Would he attempt to recover the unstuck Colin? Or would he leave him unstuck, unable to be certain that the Kromagg sleeper programming wouldn't reassert itself once Colin were recovered?

Instead of talking about THE CLONE CONSPIRACY and how it relates to SLIDERS, I am instead talking about VARIETY which reports that Marvel TV is likely to be shut down with Marvel Studios (the film division) taking over all TV projects.

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/marvel … 203349869/

Signs of this have already appeared with Marvel Entertainment developing BLADE and GHOST RIDER only for Kevin Feige's division to step in and withdraw those characters from becoming Hulu shows. If TV is absorbed into Marvel Studios, the rest of Marvel Entertainment could carry on as the merchandising and publishing wing -- but I can't help but think it's time for Marvel Entertainment to come fully under the Disney banner. It was absurd to see them split off in the first place and it only happened because Feige refused to continue working for Marvel under his old boss who owned too much stock to be fired but could be reassigned to TV and the comics and trading cards and video games and whatnot.

AGENTS OF SHIELD has done well. DAREDEVIL's first and third seasons were great. LUKE CAGE was very strong. JESSICA JONES was terrific. IRON FIST had a good second year. THE PUNISHER series was professional and watchable. DEFENDERS had a very good episode set in a restaurant. But it's clear that the TV shows exist at a remove from the films and it's silly, counter-productive and self-sabotaging for Marvel to compete with Marvel. Marvel already has Sony for that. Okay, this was a good use of a lunch break. Back to my workstation!

This is some goofball geekery that may be a better fit for the RANDOM THOUGHTS thread. But I've been re-reading Spider-Man comics on my tablet on the treadmill and I was typing all this up Saturday night as part of my reading journal. The Spider-Man comic books once found themselves in a state of being unsure of how to refer to the past and how much of it had happened (or not happened).

New Avengers: In 2006, Peter was on top of the world. His marriage had Mary Jane working with him as an equal in his Spider-Man career. Spidey had joined the Avengers and was being mentored by Tony Stark. His job as a high school science teacher was fulfilling. He'd let Aunt May in on the secret and she had been a source of strength and support. And he joined the Pro-Registration side in CIVIL WAR, unmasking on live TV to support the new law and gaining the respect he'd always lacked from law enforcement and the government. In addition, due to a mystical event where Peter embraced his inner spider, he now had organic webshooters, acidic stingers he could use to stab enemies, the ability to communicate with spiders and night vision. Peter was happy. And he barely ever thought about Harry Osborn, his old college friend who had died of a drug overdose.

Back in Black: In 2007, Peter was in a dark time. In the aftermath of CIVIL WAR, Peter was a fugitive as an unlicensed superhero who chose Captain America's (losing) side. Also, Peter had unmasked and was now a target on all sides. When Peter joined Captain America, his wife Mary Jane and Aunt May escaped Avengers Tower with him and then Aunt May got shot and was dying in a hospital.

All of this also made it hard for Peter to handle his day job as a high school science teacher.

This led into BACK IN BLACK, a half-a-year branding title across all the SPIDER-MAN titles. In AMAZING SPIDER-MAN by J. Michael Straczynski (BABYLON 5), Peter identifies Aunt May's would-be assassin as a Kingpin thug and puts on the black costume to take revenge. He beats the Kingpin to an inch of his life and vows to execute him if Aunt May dies.

In FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD SPIDER-MAN by comics veteran Peter David, Peter impersonates his own cousin, Ben Reilly (a clone of Peter who dyed his hair blonde and then died), and resumes his teaching job as his own substitute. And in SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (RIVERDALE), Peter attempts to continue fighting crime while being hunted by the police and the official Avengers and while Aunt May is dying.

The AMAZING issues end with Aunt May's identity about to be exposed which will summon the police as she is an accomplice to Peter's crimes against the Superhero Registration Act. Peter and Mary Jane fake paperwork, impersonate paramedics, steal an ambulance and transfer Aunt May to another hospital. Afterwards, Peter realizes that he has committed fraud, grand theft auto, stolen paperwork, resisted arrest, and become the very thing he became Spider-Man to fight. He has become a criminal.

One More Day: BACK IN BLACK leads into ONE MORE DAY (by Straczynski) where Aunt May is deemed terminal. Desperate to save her, Spider-Man asks for Dr. Strange's help and Strange casts a spell allowing Peter to manifest at multiple points in the Marvel Universe to ask everyone he can for help -- Dr. Doom, Beast, every magician and scientist -- and they all tell him that Aunt May is too far gone to help.

The Source: Leaving Dr. Strange's house in distress, Peter is approached by Mephisto, the Marvel version of the devil. Mephisto tells Peter that he can save Aunt May at a price. The price is the source of Peter's strength and joy, the core of not only his power, but his will, the very thing that gives him light in the darkest moments, the force that sustains him against all odds. Mephisto tells Peter that he wants his marriage. After much deliberation between Peter and Mary Jane, Mary Jane stipulates that in addition to saving Aunt May, Mephisto must also erase all public knowledge of Spider-Man's true identity. Mephisto agrees and Peter and Mary Jane embrace for the final hours before their reality is rewritten.

Time Jump: Peter wakes up to find himself in Aunt May's house, in his bedroom as she wakes him up (which is weird because the house was burned down in a previous storyline). It seems to be several months after the previous scene and Peter doesn't seem concerned; the abrupt time jump is experienced by the reader but not Peter. It's established: Spider-Man is an unregistered fugitive from the law and Peter is unmarried, jobless and borderline homeless. Aunt May once again doesn't know that Peter is Spider-Man.

Peter gets on his bike, saying he has an event. He visits a massive penthouse apartment for a reunion party -- welcoming back Harry Osborn (who is somehow alive again). Everyone applauds Harry who says he has been in rehab facilities in Europe for a long time and is now celebrating his sobriety with a glass of water. Peter spots Mary Jane at the party who abruptly leaves.

Confusion: The next storyline, BRAND NEW DAY (2008), had Peter fighting crime. He was using mechanical web shooters. He made no reference to the stingers or the night vision or talking to spiders. When he ran out of web fluid, he didn't switch to organics. It was unclear what had happened: how much had removing Peter and Mary Jane's marriage altered their history? Why had they broken up? Why was Harry alive again? How long had he been alive? How was Aunt May's house restored after the second Molten Man had burned it down? It also wasn't clear: how far did the erasure of Peter's unmasking extend? How much of Spider-Man's continuity had been altered?

Gradual Answers: These questions remained until 2009. Harry and Peter go on a roadtrip and Peter notes that since SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #200 (published in 1993), Harry was thought dead. Harry explains that his father faked his death to get him into rehab in Europe and a flashback shows Harry returning to New York City, surprising Peter and Aunt May with a return gift: he paid for Aunt May's home to be rebuilt.

Later, Spider-Man has a battle with the Green Goblin (Norman Osborn, who knew Peter's identity). Osborn is furious: he somehow cannot remember who Spider-Man used to be and Spider-Man taunts him, saying that things are different now: Osborn has no idea who Spider-Man is and Spider-Man knows everything about him.

Then, in an adventure with the Fantastic Four, the Human Torch (one of Spider-Man's very good friends) realizes that he remembers Spider-Man unmasking to him and befriending him -- but he can no longer remember who the face was beneath the mask. That memory has been wiped away. In fact, all written and digital record of Spider-Man's unmasking has been strangely altered to obscure Spider-Man's real name and face. Spider-Man explains that with help from a "friend," a psychic blindspot has been created around the Peter Parker identity.

Details: In 2010, we get a detailed flashback finally to explain the memory situation. ONE MOMENT IN TIME flashes back to the wedding day for Peter and Mary Jane: in this altered version of events, a criminal that Spidey captured is released by a magical red bird (Mephisto). This criminal later knocks Spider-Man unconscious with a lucky shot on Peter's wedding day. Mary Jane waits at the altar and Peter, lying in an alley, never arrives. Later, Mary Jane forgives Peter but tells him she doesn't want to marry Spider-Man and asks him not to ask for her hand again or to have children with her unless he is ready to give up the mask.

All subsequent stories seem to take place as originally published -- except Peter and Mary Jane were dating/living together but unmarried. (This does raise an issue: during the CLONE SAGA of 1994, Mary Jane got pregnant and was overjoyed and was devastated when she lost the baby in 1996. But ONE MOMENT declares she wouldn't have wanted to have a child. In an interview, writer Joe Quesada said that in his mind, Mary Jane's pregnancy was removed from continuity, but everything else remains, although this is not explicit in the comics themselves.)

Let's Do This One More Time: We then get an alternate version of ONE MORE DAY in flashback. This time, a dying Aunt May's heart stops beating, but then she miraculously revives. It seems to be a miracle (or the intervention of Mephisto). Peter once again leaves the hospital to visit Dr. Strange, but this time, instead of asking for Dr. Strange to save Aunt May, he asks Strange to erase all knowledge of his secret identity. Strange consults with Reed Richards and Tony Stark who agree that Peter deserves a second chance; they also describe how they have in the past unrevealed secret identities with repurposed mind control machines and magic.

Reed and Tony create a biotechnological virus augmented by Dr. Strange's magic that erases all records and memories of Peter as Spider-Man while keeping Peter in a magic bubble so only he will retain his memory of Spider-Man's true name and face. Peter grabs Mary Jane and yanks her into the bubble as well. Afterwards, Peter tells Mary Jane they're now safe, but Mary Jane is furious with him -- after the traumatizing events of BACK IN BLACK, Mary Jane wishes that Peter had allowed her to forget Spider-Man's identity along with the rest of the world or at least asked her what she wanted. She breaks up with him and leaves New York. Continuity was indeed altered only in small, isolated ways. All is explained...

Except for why the organic web shooters disappeared and why Peter doesn't have the additional spider-powers. During this storyline, however, the lettercolumn has an editor's response asking about this and the editor replied: "Those other powers really only exhibited themselves under certain circumstances. They weren't extra powers Peter could call up whenever he wanted, so whether or not they've disappeared for good is a story waiting to be told."

Throwaway: That's a strange response because in the 2011 SPIDER-ISLAND story, the entire population of Manhattan gets spider-powers and they all get organic web shooters. At one point, Peter tells a friend who has run out of organic webbing to fire that she needs to eat starchy foods to replenish -- but he doesn't have the organics himself. That said, nobody during SPIDER-ISLAND manifests stingers or talking to spiders or night vision or whatnot. In 2013, there's finally a throwaway explanation in SCARLET SPIDER #14, a title focused on a clone of Peter Parker named Kaine. Kaine was a serial killer in a decaying clone body, but the SPIDER-ISLAND storyline restored his body and sanity and took away his homicidal behaviour.

Kaine encounters a mystical spider entity, the same one that gave Peter those extra powers. The entity tells Kaine that it originally chose Peter Parker as its avatar, hence all those extra powers, but that Peter rejected 'the spider' in time and embraced 'the man,' thus losing those powers -- powers which Kaine could now claim if he wanted. It's two lines of dialogue to resolve an outstanding question from five years ago and Peter Parker doesn't even appear in this issue. At last, in 2013, we finally have all the answers to questions raised in 2008.

I guess we don't have to worry about it now, but I wondered if a Sony, de-Marvelized Tom Holland could have ended up in a similar situation of excellent stories and artistry being marred by confusion over what did or didn't happen in the past.

Comic books are an illustrated and therefore impressionistic medium. TF's page scan is from 1994 and shows three versions of Batman drawn to be reminiscent of Bob Kane and Frank Miller. The 90s Batman is following the Neal Adams style as originated in 1970. When three artists' versions of Batman show up on a single page, the art explains itself even if the dialogue doesn't acknowledge it.

Bob Kane's Batman comes not only from an alternate timeline, but from an alternate reality as envisioned by a different artist, as does Neal Adams' Batman. And that works in an illustrative medium. 'God' used different pencils, brushes and printing techniques to build each world.

It's really interesting to look back at Batman's design over the years. I notice that Neal Adams' streamlined superhero look remained until 1995 when artist Kelley Jones stripped out the trunks, made the head horns more like blades and the colourists turned gloves and mask from blue to black and the rest of the body to a darker gray while the cape expanded widely. Jones made Batman look supernatural and demonic, but it was hard to see this as something a human being could wear and one imagined Batman having to crawl through doorways or crouch under low ceilings because of the ears.

In 2000, the costume was reworked again by Dave Johnson with the same colours but shortened horns, a pouch belt instead of Adams' capsules, a wide bat-emblem with no yellow. Batman looked like Neal Adams' superhero again but with a darker palette, wearing Miller's costume with Jones' colours.

In 2011, the costume was redesigned by Jim Lee to suggest the outfit was assembled from molded plates of body fitted armour with a belt of larger capsules that created a very technological texture that really fit the non-lethal, street level sci-fi version of Batman. And if you saw all these Batmans in the same frame of a comic book or an animated film, I think it would be perfectly self-explanatory as pastiches of different artists. But live action's elements are neither impressionistic nor illustrative.

To make this attitude work in live action -- I'd want to see Tyler Hoechlin's Superman visit the SMALLVILLE Earth and notice that 2000s-era pop music seems to play constantly in the background and that at 8:50 PM, there is always a slow, hearfelt conversation between two romantic partners. When Hoechlin tries to fly, he discovers that the gravity on SMALLVILLE's Earth is stronger and it's harder for him to get off the ground and also causes tights to chafe more severely than on Earth-38. He also notes that the fashion styles of this world prize street clothes over costumes.

And then I'd want Tom Welling's Clark to visit Brandon Routh's Earth and see that despite modern technology, the primary design style is that of metropolitan 1940s art deco in all the buildings and that the culture prizes silent, sustained, longing gazes over actual conversations and for Routh's Superman to discover that time runs at a slower tempo on his Earth and he doesn't have the red-blue-blurring speed of Tom Welling. And I'd want Bitsie Tulloch and Erica Durance's Loises to meet and observe that they aren't twins but might be sisters. But what happens when Ray Palmer and Brandon Routh's Superman meet?

Why does a Kryptonian-born refugee look like he's the identical twin brother of a human man?

However... I have always liked TF's explanation for why SLIDERS went from alternate histories into the supernatural and paranormal. Paradoxically, I also hate it because I don't really approve of monsters, magic and other paranormal elements in SLIDERS -- at least not as Seasons 3 - 5 presented them.

I do not dispute Temporal Flux's validity in noting that what we perceive as universal constants of reality may not be consistent across the multiverse. However, from a perspective of storytelling technique and style, I feel that this route is a mistake for SLIDERS.

The first two seasons established that SLIDERS operates on rules based in the variability of decisions. Each parallel Earth is the result of individuals making choices. Each chosen path and each potential outcome creates a world. There is no course of decision that leads to rock star vampires. Or amusement parks that feed on negative emotions. Or dragons. Or Dream Masters. Or radioactive worms that excrete immortality-granting serums. Or magic walls of fog.

While TF's system allows for these elements, they undermine the moral and functional foundation of SLIDERS stories: that people matter, that their choices have impact, that the sliders -- four homeless people with troubled pasts and fractured psyches and deep-set insecurities -- can make a difference. Magic and paranormal elements in SLIDERS, at least as they were presented in the show, create a multiverse where humans are helpless beings against forces outside their comprehension and grasped only by a select few who deal in Dream Mastering and voodoo curses and shapeshifting with brain fluid.

In addition, the solutions to these threats is never in terms of understanding the rules by which these concepts function and devising a solution via Quinn and Arturo's cleverness. Furthermore, the magic and monsters are never representative of human nature or society or any social or psychological force; it's not even symbolism, merely imagery defeated by wielding alternate imagery -- a magic sword slays the dragon, a big bomb blows up the dinosaur.

Force and violence should not be the sole means of resolving SLIDERS stories; the power that the sliders employ should be the power of imagination and decision. To me, a SLIDERS story is an adventure emerging from and being about the choices that people make.

Rosenbaum has to be exaggerating slightly. There is absolutely no way a production company could offer "no money"; the actor's union requires a base level salary no matter what. The pay probably wasn't specified which pissed Rosenbaum off. It makes a degree of sense, however, that the production would not divulge story details until the actor was locked in with an NDA.

It could be that production didn't know if they could come up with a role for Rosenbaum when they're already juggling a lot, but then they found one at the last minute. In addition, they weren't able to speak to him directly; they went through his agent as Rosenbaum was unavailable for a direct meeting and communication can often get garbled. People are only human and there's no need to assume malice or even incompetence as much as people being rushed, distracted and busy. That's how the very talented, very gifted Season 10 SMALLVILLE writers forgot whether or not Clark was wearing glasses.

When SMALLVILLE's final season was airing, I kept saying that Michael Rosenbaum wasn't essential to the finale; they could use Lucas Grabeel who played the young Lex in flashbacks and as a clone. Slider_Quinn21 said that it would never be satisfying for the Pilot to have started with Jerry O'Connell versus Jerry O'Connell and for the finale to feature Zoe McLellan versus Robert Floyd -- I mean, for the Pilot to have started with Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum and for "Finale" to end with Tom Welling and Lucas Grabeel.

Then the finale came and it had Michael Rosenbaum for two scenes and some footage of him as President and no Lucas Grabeel at all. I grumbled that Grabeel should have played Lex throughout the episode but then aged/morphed into Rosenbaum for those two scenes and Slider_Quinn21 asked if I were Grabeel's agent. I later found out: the plan had been to use Grabeel for every Lex scene and then pull a Season 7 shot of Rosenbaum's face and graft it onto Grabeel to show the young Lex growing into the adult version.

If Rosenbaum came back, they would have Grabeel age into the adult Lex earlier. But the finale lost Grabeel when he got a regular role on SWITCHED AT BIRTH and then got Rosenbaum but only for two scenes. Anyway. Perhaps it's time to revive the campaign and have Lucas Grabeel play Lex in CRISIS.

But honestly -- I cannot even wrap my head around Superman being played by Tyler Hoechlin AND Brandon Routh AND Tom Welling while having Lois played by Bitsie Tulloch AND Erica Durance and to have Routh playing Ray Palmer AND Superman. There was a certain TV logic to John Wesley Shipp playing Grant Gustin's father and also playing the older Barry Allen of Earth 90; Barry will look like Gustin when young and like Shipp when middle aged. But why the hell would a double of Clark Kent have Hoechlin's face while another has Routh's and another has Welling's?

Why does Erica Durance's Lois Lane share a face with Clark Kent's aunt, Alura? Ray Palmer noted in "Invasion!" that Kara Zor-El (Melissa Benoist) looked like his cousin, but I suspect this may be one of those things best not thought about such as why no one ever seems to hand over money for coffee at Jitters and Central City's citizens never panic over seeing Sherloque wandering the streets with the face of self-confessed murderer Harrison Well or how Oliver is paying rent when he lost his company.

Maybe I'll just have to dismiss the strangeness here or ask Temporal Flux to explain it to me.

I really like it too. TF transplanted the essence of who these characters were in the Pilot into older alternates. He has a beautiful vision for SLIDERS because he has both the sci-fi skills and a love and understanding of the characters. And Transmodiar was clever to find a way to change them from doubles to the originals.

Every 2 - 3 years, I update the outline. I think next year, Wade will have gone from a tech reviewer to a climate change activist and Rembrandt will be running an AI cafe where all the food and drink are made by robots that play jazz. Meanwhile, Quinn will be a tech support manager at Doppler Computers and the Professor teaches all his classes online via video link as he is banned from the Berkeley campus after an unfortunate incident involving a mayoral campaign, Pavarotti, bungee jumping, a barfight, and a woman named Ambrosia.

I have written exactly this story in a six part series of screenplays called SLIDERS REBORN at www.earthprime.com/reborn

• "Reprise" (1): Picking up from the end of "The Seer," we follow Rembrandt into the unstable vortex and find out what happened to him on the other side. A 4 page screenplay.

• "Reunion" (2): Twenty years after the Pilot and 15 years after "The Seer," we find Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo alive and well and home in 2015. The Kromagg invasion seems to have never happened. Quinn Mallory is missing. But when reality starts breaking down around one of Wade's students, Quinn reappears, regroups the original quartet and leads them on another adventure through the interdimension. 95 pages.

• "Revelation" (3): Across three parallel Earths, the original sliders search for answers as to why reality is beginning to collapse. The clues will lead them to a confrontation with the sliders' oldest enemy. 151 pages.

• "Reminiscence" (4): Set in 2001, this short novella is a transcript of Quinn in a mental institution being questioned by a psychiatrist. As Quinn explains his situation and tells the story of sliding, he explains how he, Wade and Arturo are alive, how the Kromagg invasion has been reversed, why the new sliders of Seasons 1 - 2 vanished, why Season 1 episodes aired in the wrong order, why monsters and magic appeared in Season 3, why Seasons 4 - 5 seemed stuck in the same sets, and why it was 1994 in the Pilot but suddenly 1995 in "Summer of Love."

• "Revolution" (5): Trapped in a burning building, Quinn Mallory finds that his only chance for survival is to ask for help from Quinn Mallory (as played by Robert Floyd). 46 pages.

• "Regenesis" (6): It all ends here in this 144 page script featuring Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, Maggie, Diana, Mallory, the breeder parasites, the super-intelligent snakes, the robots, the dinosaur, the animal-human hybrids, the giant scarab, the rock star vampires, the fat craving zombies, the remote controlled cars with laser cannons, the dragon and Hurley.

I had a lot of fun writing this series. I spent two years of my life writing it on evenings and weekends. And I really love it, but it is not a viable route for a general audience revival. SLIDERS REBORN is not a general audience story. When starting out, I really tried to make it entry level: a new audience viewpoint character, indirect resolutions to the Season 3 - 5 plots presented in the form of jokes much like the way FAMILY GUY makes reference to nonsensical, insane events depicted in short cutaways. But it didn't work; the jokes were too obscure and the plot resolutions demanded elaboration, so I embraced that and accepted that SLIDERS REBORN would not be suited to people unfamiliar with SLIDERS.

Even when trying to resolve the old material with humour and distance, the result is like the IDW X-FILES comic books. It's made for a very, very small number of people precisely because it addresses all these plots that only old fans want resolved. A new SLIDERS should be an entry level product like the STAR TREK rebootquel or DOCTOR WHO in 2005.

To be fair, Rosenbaum wore the bald cap pretty effectively and the director did a good job of keeping Lex's oversized head slightly out of frame at the top and slightly narrowing the image so that Lex didn't seem inflated in the forehead.

I was highly inappropriate in the Reviving SLIDERS thread. The only things I should have said:

A revival of SLIDERS needs to make sense to a general audience who has never seen or heard of the show. It's called BROADcasting for a reason. These story ideas would be better suited to SLIDERS novels, comic books and audioplays than they would to general audience television. I'm going to start a new thread, Rebooting SLIDERS. Thank you.

I like pilight's idea of gender-swapping all the sliders, however. As with Starbuck on BATTLESTAR, it immediately makes it clear that Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Remi Brown and Maxine Arturo are reinterpretations rather than trying to pastiche previous performers.

It allows a rebooted, gender-flipped SLIDERS to have some continuity with the old show as the variation here is, as the Professor would put it, "the difference of an X chromosome and a Y chromosome." It allows for a neat reversal of the male-dominant original cast by altering it to three women and one man.

Just speaking on the subject of my view on the Revival thread ideas -- it's interesting to look at THE X-FILES which had two revivals. There was the Season 10 - 11 revival of 17 episodes. And there were the IDW comic books: THE X-FILES: SEASON 10 (25 issues), THE X-FILES: SEASON 11 (eight issues), THE X-FILES: CONSPIRACY (a Lone Gunmen series that ran six issues), THE X-FILES: YEAR ZERO (a five issue miniseries featuring the first X-Files investigation in 1946), and also MILLENNIUM (a five issue conclusion to the TV show with a guest-appearance from Fox Mulder).

The IDW comic books were, to be blunt, geeky stuff. They were professional fan fiction, very much like the ideas in the Reviving SLIDERS thread. I loved it all, loved how writer Joe Harris was stitching the mythology into something coherent and whole, resurrecting the deceased villains and restoring the paranoia and sense of forward motion that THE X-FILES once possessed. He revealed that the Lone Gunmen had faked their deaths, showed that the 2012 invasion had been stalled by a new faction, brought modern political forces into the old conspiracy -- but he also told stories that could not be understood by the average viewer. They were for fans.

In contrast, the TV revival of THE X-FILES was for a general audience. The mythology of Seasons 1 - 9 was summarized in a very vague, undetailed form that didn't require remembering it. Viewers who had never seen an episode of THE X-FILES could watch the Revival. That said, the Revival became convoluted and confusing due to poor script editing: Mulder and Scully were depicted as separated/living together, out of touch with FBI work/carrying out their duties like no time had passed, searching for William/never discussing him, facing a global contagion/never thinking about it.

However, the goal of the TV revival -- whether it was achieved or not -- was to create television that could be enjoyed whether you were watching your 201st episode or your first one -- which was not the goal of the comic books.

Any TV revival of SLIDERS will have to aim for the same goal as THE X-FILES revival. Comic books, novels and audioplays can aim for a more specific audience of 50,000; a TV show with such a scant audience won't survive.

We don't know if there's going to be a reboot. There has been an icy silence on the subject. Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davies were investigating it. So far, the problem seems to be ownership: NBCUniversal should, in theory, own the rights to SLIDERS.

But SLIDERS expert Temporal Flux, the de facto authority on the show, has observed: SLIDERS was also produced by St. Clare Entertainment. St. Clare Entertainment is now defunct, but it would have owned 33 per cent of SLIDERS which is now split across Robert K. Weiss (the co-creator), John Landis and Leslie Belzberg. NBCUniversal may need to come to an agreement with all three parties separately, a series of legal challenges that may be too troublesome to explore.

The other issue I would take with a reboot on a strictly personal level that is in no way representative of SLIDERS fans: after 19 years of fully obsessing over SLIDERS (as opposed to half-obsessing) -- I have come to the conclusion that SLIDERS is about THE sliders -- Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown and Professor Arturo as portrayed by Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies.

If you read the scripts, the characters are defined in very general terms and it's the synthesis of scripted dialogue and actors' interpretations that make them whole. Quinn, on paper, was a socially awkward nerd who lived in his head; Jerry O'Connell transformed him into a traumatized, self-isolating athlete. Wade was a girl with a crush; Lloyd made her a social crusader. Rembrandt was an inept coward; Cleavant built Rembrandt into comedic picture of trauma that made Remmy's torment funny instead of cruel. Arturo was an insecure wreck; Rhys-Davies played Arturo as the father figure of the group. Certainly, the writers eventually capitalized on what the actors brought in.

But if your reboot has other actors as Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, you're creating new characters at which point, a studio is likely to wonder -- why reboot SLIDERS at all?

Why not come up with a new title and a new set of characters exploring parallel universes? Why not create an original work about alternate histories that doesn't rely on paying royalties to the original creators and including them in the creative process? Why not produce a new series that doesn't require facing all these legal challenges? Especially when a reboot, even if it uses the old titles and names, is effectively a new series with new characters?

And yet -- the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot might as well have had different character names and a different title. MACGYVER was rebooted with Lucas Till and MACGYVER's original show is very much like SLIDERS: the original intent for the character is very distant from the onscreen results. Originally, MACGYVER was supposed to be a Richard Dean Anderson adventure show featuring a cocky hotshot named MacGyver in action stories depicted in real-time.

The pilot episode was set in a single location to facilitate that, necessitating MacGyver using whatever objects were available to fashion solutions to his problems for this opening story as a plotting necessity. The real-time element was dropped from the series; the use of everyday objects remained in the pilot and was then heightened as the defining aspect of the show while Anderson changed the characterization in his performance from arrogant to humble. All that was an accident -- and the reboot has sought to deliberately and precisely recreate what the actor and writers stumbled into unwittingly.

However, MACGYVER was a cultural force to be reckoned with. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA had a certain brand value that I'm not sure SLIDERS does for the general audience. And yet -- these things can be built and rebuilt.

THE X-FILES is synonymous with paranormal investigations. MACGYVER is a brand for do-it-yourself cleverness and espionage. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is a brand for space opera. THE MATRIX is a brand for virtual reality. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE is a brand for crazy espionage stunts. BOND is a brand for men's fashion and lifestyle.

Could NBCUniversal and whatever wreckage of St. Clare Entertainment exists make SLIDERS a brand name for parallel worlds?

It's not impossible, but it currently looks difficult to the point where studios and networks might decline to bother.

Selfishly, I would like SLIDERS to be left alone as it is now. But I must not be selfish and instead hope that SLIDERS will somehow return and delight and inspire a new generation of fans and preferably make it through five seasons without losing three-quarters of its cast and being disavowed by its creators.

JJ Abrams directing a new JUSTICE LEAGUE?
https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/jj- … 20%251%24s

Anticipation!

I love Supergirl's new costume and I am relieved that the Flash is getting his chinstrap back. That alone would have elevated every episode of the previous season of THE FLASH from an average of 6 out of 10 to a 6.125 out of 10.

Day Ten of Informant: Last Man Standing
Well, Informant was one of the last men standing. He has left the SLIDERS community.

This, however, doesn't change the fact that Informant also stayed.

Tolerance: Slider_Quinn21 once remarked that we SLIDERS fans had astonishing staying power. We stayed when the show moved from the indie film look of Vancouver to the sun-drenched Los Angeles backlots and the dimly lit studio interiors.

We stayed when the wise father figure of the sliders was shot and blown up after getting his brain sucked out. We stayed when the star of the show descended into hackwork performances and forced his talentless brother into a leading role. We stayed when the same star then abandoned the show. We stayed when Wade Welles was turned into the fortune telling machine from the movie BIG.

Post-Show: Informant stayed in the SLIDERS community even when the show ended on a cliffhanger that would never be resolved. He stayed when the Sci-Fi Channel shut down the forum and when discussion moved to EarthPrime.com and Sliders.tv. He stayed despite Sliders.tv experiencing service outage after service outage.

Accomplished: And I ultimately don't take issue with how Informant left because what matters more is that time for which he chose to stay. During that time, much like Mulder and Scully by Season 7 of THE X-FILES, he'd accomplished everything he wanted and the only 'failures' he had were in areas that had nothing to do with SLIDERS.

The One Who Stayed: My SLIDERS REBORN scripts have a running joke from Quinn: he frequently reminds Wade and Arturo that Rembrandt's the only one of the original four who didn't come back to life because Rembrandt was the only one who wasn't so incompetent as to die. By this simple metric, Quinn notes that Rembrandt's survival makes him the most reliable, competent and capable member of the team. Rembrandt isn't always right; Rembrandt doesn't know everything, but he stayed (alive) and that counts for something.

Touchstone: Informant stuck around and kept posting long after most people had moved on because SLIDERS was a cultural touchstone. Many people, some of whom still post here, call any continued regard for SLIDERS immature and silly. Informant didn't do that; he always reinforced that SLIDERS was important and influential -- not necessarily in a positive way, but it was a critical and meaningful part of our experiences and of TV history. Informant always felt that to give SLIDERS its due regard was in fact self-aware and honest.

See Things As They Are: He didn't overidentify or fixate on his emotions with the series. He didn't pretend he wasn't a fan of SLIDERS. But he was never obsessed with the show. He noted and conceded its flaws. He was also never in denial of its merits.

Informant didn't mock himself for his love for SLIDERS, he didn't self-flagellate himself for fixating on it, he didn't dismiss its value or overinflate its worth. He didn't make SLIDERS a life-defining event; he also didn't bury SLIDERS in a hole and try to forget about it. He gave it a place of regard and carried on.

Appropriate: Informant let himself like SLIDERS to an appropriate and healthy degree. Not less. Not more. He always gave SLIDERS its due and made it feel safe for everyone else to do the same. He chose to stay when it mattered most and that counts for more than why he left. It always did. It always will.

That's another thing that confuses me. Sony announced that they would be bringing SPIDER-VERSE style productions to television. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE, HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER) would be showrunners. But Marvel holds the TV rights to Spider-Man. Was Sony's announcement based on anticipating that the Marvel consultancy would continue? Is the announcement now null and void?

The conversation and tangents continue here: http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=8910#p8910

Day Eight of Informant: Smallville - "Alternate"

Informant wrote another screenplay, not for SLIDERS, but for SMALLVILLE. SMALLVILLE often pastiched other TV shows and movies (THE MATRIX, RESIDENT EVIL), and Informant scripted a SMALLVILLE pastiche of SLIDERS called "Alternate," set in Season 6 of SMALLVILLE. http://someplacethatiselse.net/shared/g … rnateB.HTM

Season 6 of SMALLVILLE is when Clark and Lex are no longer friends; Clark alienated Lex with his obvious deceits and avoidance and distance, Lex's isolation and loneliness has driven him to extremes like having the Kents attacked to try to force Clark to use his powers (except Clark had lost his powers that week and got them back later). Meanwhile, Chloe is in on Clark's secret.

In "Alternate," Clark discovers that Lex is attempting to replicate teleportation powers from one of the Kryptonite mutants. Clark interferes in the experiment and is shunted into a parallel universe.

There, Clark discovers a Lex-double living on the Kent farm. In this universe, Clark left Smallville at the end of Season 2 and never returned. Lex-B, saddened by Clark's disappearance, had a nervous breakdown, lost his fortune and is now running the Kent farm. This alternate Lex is a friend. But on this world, Chloe is the one who became warped and twisted by Lionel Luthor is now using her journalism powers to serve Lionel's empire. Clark is forced to confront that in his life, his friends will always turn against him; it was always going to be either Lex or Chloe.

With "Alternate," Informant taps into an interesting and underexplored aspect of SLIDERS: the idea of branching points in parallel universe as the result not of choices, but of chance. Chance is the only variable on display; the SMALLVILLE narrative is defined by inevitabilities. Clark was always going to become a superhero whose childhood friend would become his sworn enemy. "Alternate" says that the only difference across two parallel realities was who that enemy might turn out to be.

Informant, arguably a more cynical and defeatist writer than most SLIDERS writers, has "Alternate" present the multiverse as an inexorable march to a preordained outcome even if the roles might be redistributed in different realities. If Lex doesn't meet his fate to be the villain, Chloe will assume that path.

On some level, that's entirely fair. No matter where SMALLVILLE went, its ending was ironclad.

But Informant has Clark ultimately win the alternate Chloe back and convinces her to help the alternate Lex topple Lionel Luthor. Informant, in the same story, offers a very small, very minute flicker of hope: that perhaps reality isn't immutable. Perhaps the problem is Clark's behaviour: his withdrawal, distance, deceit and lies alienated Lex Luthor on his world and alienated Chloe Sullivan on another. It's possible, Informant hints, that the inevitability is in the outcome of Clark's patterns rather than in the multiverse.

It is a very small spark of solace and not one that Informant sustains. We may have choices available to us. We may be able to look at ourselves and see our flaws and choose to change. But "Alternate" notes that the SMALLVILLE universe is clearly not designed to accommodate any openness or free will.

SMALLVILLE demands that Lex end the series as a villain even if the actor and the individual episodes diverge from that destination; SMALLVILLE insists that Clark Kent wear a skintight costume even when the character clearly prefers different garments.

SMALLVILLE and SLIDERS are closely linked, but not obviously so. SLIDERS was sabotaged by FOX network executive Peter Roth firing John Rhys-Davies; Roth later shepherded SMALLVILLE to the WB. Clark Kent and Quinn Mallory are both geekboys played by athletes. They even dress the same in flannel and jeans and have the same hair. Both shows are about an isolated young man reaching out into the world and tapping into his boundless potential. SLIDERS offered its characters infinite possibilities (and subjected them to all the worst ones).

"Alternate" shows that SMALLVILLE does not have infinite possibilities. "Alternate" highlights how SMALLVILLE is a show where all the characters have outcomes that are set. Even in a parallel world, fate is merely reassigned, never changed. SMALLVILLE is in many ways a prison for its cast, a jail cell from which even sliding offers no escape.

As with "29.7," Informant's story offers implications that are troubling and unwelcome, but his conclusions are difficult to dispute and deeply disturbing in how they reflect a simple assessment of circumstances as they are instead of how we would wish for them to be.

Next: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I like women. I like reading stories about strong, stalwart women. One of my favourite writers for such characters was Brian Wood, a comic book author accused of sexual harassment in 2013 at which point I banned myself from buying his work. The accusations from female artists in 2013 didn't seem to affect his career as Wood was hired by Marvel to write an all-women X-MEN comic. Recently again in 2019, there was a new accuser, a comic book journalist, who detailed Wood preying on her and affirmed the previous accusers. As a result, Wood's current publisher, Dark Horse, severed all ties with him and Wood is unlikely to work again in comics. It's about time.

It confuses me that a man whose writing had such regard and respect for women engaged in such predatory behaviour towards them.

TRANSMODIAR: "Death of the author, good sir!"

My friend Kara once said to me, "You have a type, Ib! You like women who are strong. Confident. And kind of weird." Wood's comics were filled with such women, women who would have punched Wood in the throat had he:

(a) Invited them into hotel bedrooms despite him being married with a child
(b) Continued to press them for sex even after they'd refused to have an affair with somebody's husband
(c) Accosted them the next day and screamed at them for declining sex.
(d) Responded by falsely telling their employers that they had sex with him in a stockroom at their workplace and getting them fired
(e) Forced them to kiss him
(f) Deluged them in texts soliciting them for sex

I was disgusted and ashamed at the accusations and of Wood's tepid response where he chose one accuser, confirmed that he'd "made a pass" and then forgotten it, while carefully avoiding any acknowledgement that there were multiple women who'd come out against him. It was clear from Wood's non-response that he had done all of these things and rather than confess, apologize and commit to penance and reparations, he largely ignored his victims and carried on.

I can't bring myself to throw out his comics, although I haven't put a penny in his pocket since 2013.

I wonder if the comics he wrote are a lie and he didn't actually believe in his characters.

I don't know, but it continues to trouble me because Wood's writing was a huge part of making me realize my own appalling behaviour towards women. I discovered his writing after grad school, and putting myself in his female leads' heads made me realize that my condescending, intrusive, grossly disrespectful communication would have had Wood's female characters put a boot through my testicles. I never engaged in Wood's specific behaviour, but I made inappropriate remarks because I didn't understand how to flirt, I would entangle myself in class projects with women I was interested in whether they wanted me to be there or not, I would follow women around campus and stare at them blankly and tongue-tied and I thought myself inept and harmless.

Then I read Brian Wood's comics. They featured women battling unwanted overtures, seeing through shallow come-ons, defying harassment and standing up to men who saw them as possessions. His writing showed how behaviour like mine could be threatening, disturbing, unnerving, distracting and harmful. His work made me realize what I'd been doing and would never do again. Also around this era, I joined a bunch of book clubs with women describing harassing, predatory behaviour which I recognized in myself and stopped, but Wood was the initial catalyst. Most of my friends these days are women. That wouldn't have happened without Wood's writing.

I've often thought that autobiographies can lie but fiction reveals authors whole. Wood's fiction lies, suggesting a compassion, empathy and respect for women that he plainly didn't live by even as he wrote it. Transmodiar once described me as writing in "a fugue state," making me wonder if as a writer, Wood adopted a better persona that he couldn't maintain in real life.

Informant would say that Brian Wood's self-aware wokeness was an act because all self-aware wokeness is an act. But that can't be totally true, can it?

I'm not going to pretend that I didn't 'act' when I stopped being a harasser. It was not natural for me to befriend women strictly as platonic associates. It was not natural for me to decide that I would no longer fantasize about my female friends, not even in the privacy of my own head. It was not natural for me to encourage them to treat me as one of the girls. I acted against my natural/worst impulses because I knew that if I kept behaving the way I used to, I would always be alone and never have the friends I wanted to have.

The act became second-nature. I recently said to an actress friend, "You're a beautiful woman. It means nothing. Beauty is just skill and maintenance, but you shouldn't feel insecure about your appearance in auditions." I recently had a coldly technical discussion with a platonic friend about her sex toys and recommended a specific oil to maintain the motor. I took a friend bra shopping and remarked only on the markup.

I used to have to rehearse for such situations, but what was second nature is now my nature. If I'm on a date, I might not maintain that vacancy of sexuality, but all my friends are women and I know that sexual coldness matched with social warmth will put them at ease. It comes naturally, it isn't an act, but I don't deny it started that way. You fake who you want to be until that's who you really are. I remade myself into someone who would be accepted by Brian Wood's fictional women; those fictional women would be ashamed of their author.

But what if Informant's right about Brian Wood? Did the comics somehow filter out his abusive, harassing traits because (a) that would be unpublishable and (b) he was concealing his predatory behaviour from a general audience by stripping it out of his fiction? Before 2013, I felt relief from thinking about Brian Wood's writing because he'd saved me from continuing or expanding on my misdeeds. I could have easily become a serial harasser or worse, entitled and cruel and prone to reprisals. I felt gratitude towards him. Now I feel sickened by him.

I was reflecting on Tracy Torme's "Slide Effects" notes and decided to write up my thoughts. And, because I love pastiching my favourite writers, I wrote them up as though they were a review written by Darren Mooney of www.them0vieblog.com.

_____________________________________________________________________

Earth 213: On a world where Darren Mooney obsessed over Sliders instead of The X-Files, Darren reviews "Slide Effects":

The Sliders screenplay, "Slide Effects," is a relatively lean beast.

Quinn wakes up to find himself home. It's 1994; sliding doesn't exist; Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are alive and well. Only Quinn remembers sliding and the last five seasons and he thinks that he's losing his mind. The scenario is revealed as a Kromagg simulation, the Sliders escape and slide off to new adventures.

It is a direct and focused story, tightly plotted in a way Sliders so singularly wasn't throughout its run, and that focus is both to its credit and a major flaw.

Scattered Attention
Sliders always seemed to struggle to map out a clear direction or identity for itself. Threads like the FBI searching for the Sliders or the Professor's son never amounted to anything. This problem was most obvious in Season 4 as Marc Scott Zicree, Bill Dial and David Peckinpah rewrote the mythology from one story to the next.

All the elements introduced in "Genesis" with the Kromaggs setting a trap for Quinn were dismissed with a line of dialogue in "Mother and Child." Freeing Earth Prime was reduced to a footnote in "Revelations" and "Strangers and Comrades." Even "Requiem," a story presumably about the fate of Wade Welles, didn't commit to killing her off.

Six Hundred and Seventy Two
In contrast, "Slide Effects" has a very clear idea of where it is going and no room for distractions in its 46 pages of script. This is even more apparent when looking at the original version of "Slide Effects" which is a general yet defined set of 1996-era notes from series co-creator Tracy Torme and a total of 672 words sent to EarthPrime.com as part of the 2009 interview.

From these generalities, Sliders fan writer Ibrahim Ng wrote a 46 page script that reflects the taut, trim plot of the series co-creator. There is no time for exploration or improvisation. Everything in the "Slide Effects" script serves a single purpose: resurrecting Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo and restoring the original premise of the show. This affords "Slide Effects" a purity and energy that was severely lacking in Seasons 3 - 5 as cast members and writers left or lost interest.

Tribute
Notably, "Slide Effects" is specifically a tribute to Tracy Torme. As a follow-up to the Season 5 cliffhanger, "Slide Effects" noticeably doesn't in any way address the events of "The Seer." And yet, "Slide Effects" resolves everything — and nothing — by offering a bridge from the fifth season back to the second season, and back to the version of Sliders that Tracy Torme built and would want restored.

Every page of the script basks in this thrill of apparent canonicity, in the validation that comes from being a script that originated from the co-creator of the series. The title page of Ng's document declares that "Slide Effects" is "a story by Tracy Torme" and Ng buries his own writing credit in the summary. It's an overture urging fans to accept the subsequent pages as a step above fan fiction or media tie-in novels (not that Sliders has any novels).

"Slide Effects" declares itself canon to Sliders and counts on fans to accept it as such because the plot comes from the series creator and executes his wishes and intentions.

Legitimacy
The 46 page script was written in 2011, a time of increasing appetite for legitimacy within fan communities, particularly as it related to licensed products. Perhaps owing to the ever-increasing importance of "the canon" in popular culture, fans expected significance and importance to their media tie-ins.

These expectations of canon come in all shapes and sizes, but they mostly tend to place an emphasis on the "worthiness" of the content for an adult audience. There had to be a sense of weight and heft to Doctor Who audioplays and Star Trek novels in order to justify the audience’s interest and expense, either through being decreed canonical or in being canon in lieu of any other options.

Real Stories versus Fake Stories
It seems likely that the increased attention paid to perceived legitimacy is an extension of this philosophy, insisting that media tie-in producers prove that their content is are worthy of attention and time by making them matter. That legitimacy is reflected in the way "Slide Effects" claims significance through its (passingly) direct involvement by a key figure from the franchise’s history. It is a way to delineate between what is perceived as "real" and what is "fake."

It is a stamp of approval, marking "Slide Effects" as vital to Sliders fans and tangibly essential regardless of its quality or artistic value, although in this case, it was the fan writer and not the creator who labelled "Slide Effects" so.

By Association or Authencity
To be fair, Ng may seek to declare canonicity through a paltry association, but he also makes tremendous effort to assert "Slide Effects" as important through the voices of the characters. The attention given to recreating a print approximation of performances from Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies is astonishing, detailing the specific intonations and line deliveries of each actor with the script providing not just the words that the actors would speak, but the deliveries and the body language and the acting.

At points, Ng inserts double-hyphens and spaces into Quinn Mallory's dialogue to capture O'Connell's precise pausing and takes the time to describe a scar on the actor's face. The lyricism of Cleavant Derricks' voice is present in Rembrandt with a slight exaggeration that was never in the teleplays but certainly in the performance and it works well in the digital ink of a PDF document. John Rhys-Davies' booming voice can be heard in every line for Arturo. Interestingly, Ng expressed difficulty with writing dialogue for Wade Welles.

Altered Purpose
That is wise, because despite "Slide Effects" being a supposedly faithful adaptation of Tracy Torme's story idea, the "Slide Effects" screenplay makes a noticeable divergence from the creator's intentions. "Slide Effects" as a 46 page script is a story featuring the return of the original cast and clearing away the events of Seasons 3, 4 and 5. It does not seek to resolve the Kromagg/human war or liberate Earth Prime or split the Quinns, but those events are clearly central to "Slide Effects" devoting its pages to stepping back from these developments and declaring them to be "possible futures" that are not the actual future of the original Sliders.

It is a gratifying, earnest, emotional story that offers relief and comfort to the fans, but it is also clearly not what Tracy Torme conceived for this story.

Original Purpose
Ng has given his own separate account of receiving the "Slide Effects" plot. Torme shared it with him in an informal online conversation via instant messaging in 2000, shortly after the cancellation of the series.

"Slide Effects" doesn't actually wrap up the Season 3 - 5 plots and the reason why is clear: Tracy Torme had no idea what those plots were nor was he interested in finding out, nor could he have had advance knowledge of episodes from 1997 - 2000 when conceiving this outline in 1996. Torme's story was in no way designed to resurrect the Sliders from their deaths or reverse the Kromagg invasion of Earth or the merging of the Quinns.

Repurposed
Instead, Torme's plot was focused on creating a pitch for a second Kromagg episode that would not explicitly mention the Kromaggs when pitching it to the Kromagg-averse FOX Network. FOX would have refused to approve any Kromagg story. But they might have approved a pitch that asked: what if the Sliders find that time has been rewound to the Pilot? And what if only Quinn remembers sliding? Their approval would have allowed Torme to push the story into production with the Kromaggs revealed only at the end at which point FOX would have been obligated to air it.

Torme had no familiarity with the latter seasons, had no interest in watching them, and no version of "Slide Effects" scripted by Torme would have hinged upon confronting those latter seasons in any fashion.

Framework
As such, there is something quite endearing watching Ng struggle within a pre-existing plot to achieve aims for which it was never intended. In spite of its adulterated origins, there is a clarity to "Slide Effects" that resounds. There is no parallel Earth explored in this script: it's set on Earth Prime and the only parallel universe that features, a world where verbal communication was stigmatized against, is referred two only in a few lines of dialogue. Everything else is very consciously building towards the Kromagg explanation for Seasons 3 - 5 and how those episodes fit within the larger tapestry of Sliders continuity while ensuring that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are front and center.

At times, the story can feel truly overstuffed with the sheer quantity of plot content in "Slide Effects." It addresses the Kromagg invasion, the dead characters, the Kromagg Prime backstory and even throws in addressing the question of which Professor slid, none of which was ever intended by Torme's plot.

Three Visions, One Story
Compounding the issue, there is the simple fact that Sliders was effectively three radically different television shows during its five season run. The first two seasons were an anthology series akin to The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, albeit with a regular cast. The third season was a horror-action series. The fourth and fifth were a studio-bound cable action series. Any follow-up has to address these discontinuities and this is the biggest challenge that Ng faces with "Slide Effects."

Is the script to reconcile the different aspects of the show? Or will it put one above the others? When it comes to scripting a follow-up or sequel, how does one decide constitutes the "real" version of the show? It seems a fool’s errand to try to fashion them into a cohesive arc. As such, "Slide Effects" faces a considerable handicap.

37 Lives
In order to fit all of these details together, Ng offers an explanation with careful setup, so much so that it feels like his 46 pages exist to rewrite the series rather than expanding or continuing its story. The explanation is that Seasons 3 - 5 were the amalgamated experiences of 37 Quinn doubles, each with disparate and contradictory experiences in sliding, and with the the most traumatic experiences brought to the forefront. This is why Seasons 3 - 5 showed the Sliders dying one by one with any discrepancies declared to be the result of merging 37 lives into a single Quinn's story.

It is a very dismissive approach to a complicated mythology, separating Seasons 1 - 2 from 3 - 5 and declaring last three seasons to be other Sliders' problem and no business of the 'real' Sliders.

Simplified Shorthand
The emphasis on recategorizing the history of Sliders finds "Slide Effects" employing a sort of shorthand in its invocations towards the past. There are references to the Kromaggs and allusions to their shapeshifting, but no acknowledgement of how their appearances were revised for Season 4.

The script is careful to describe an "Invasion" era Kromagg with no further comment on the matter. There is no concern raised that the Rembrandt of the possible futures, the Rembrandt of "The Seer," remains without resolution in his arc. There is no direct acknowledgement of the Professor's terminal illness in "The Guardian" which this Professor could still develop.

In fact, the script for "Slide Effects" sharply diverges from the notes and Torme's wishes in two areas: the point at which the Kromagg simulation began is altered from "The Guardian" as intended to "As Time Goes By" in the script. The script also omits Logan St. Clair, a clear effort to avoid her and the Professor’s illness without even referring to either.

Self-Serving
This simplification is not necessarily a bad thing. Ng draws from the most iconic and recognisable elements of Sliders that haunt the show’s five season run. All the Season 3 - 5 regulars appear in "Slide Effects," but as imagery created by a Kromagg's telepathic powers creating illusions instead of in-character and in-person, which really helps to keep the story tight. Perhaps anything more would weigh the story down. This efficiency also helps to declutter the mythology somewhat. Seasons 3 - 5 were dominated by unresolved plots. "Slide Effects" is centered on the original cast, but it can seem somewhat self-serving.

Even as a potential Season 4 premiere, the plot alone is a way to for Torme to assert that only his tenure on the show is the 'real' version of Sliders and that any episodes aired during his departure are doubles and alternates. Ng's script pages magnify this with dialogue specifically to indicate those futures that aired on FOX and the Sci-Fi Channel could never happen to these versions of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, the one, true Sliders. 

As self-flattering as that might be, there is still something endearingly open-minded in the grudging notion that Seasons 3 - 5 still remain valid with infinite versions of the Sliders out there, some of whom resemble or are the versions we saw in the last three years of the show.

A Tangled Web We Weave
As "Slide Effects" weaves through three years of Sliders continuity, it feels almost like continuity porn. At the halfway mark, Ng stops using Torme's "Slide Effects" plot to tell a story, but as a means to retroactively “tidy up” storylines that everyone (from broadcaster to viewer) would rather forget.

I’m a bit wishy-washy on the issue continuity – I don’t believe that basic continuity excludes an audience, but I don’t believe that it makes for a good story crutch. It’s nice to build on what came before, but exposition and elaboration over events that happened in the past are unnecessary at the best of times.

Minutia
Including a throwaway line which explains that Arturo likes Jeopardy adds personality and doesn’t detract from the story at hand. On the other hand, devoting 23 pages of a 46 page script to explaining how every crazy event in the Sliders history was the result of a Kromagg plan kills momentum and would have likely confused viewers if this script as Ibrahim Ng writes it had ever been filmed.

I’ve argued before and I’ll argue again that this focus on specific minutia is damaging to science fiction television, playing to diehard fans and locking out a general audience.

Not Recommended
If a kid asked me to recommend a Sliders episode and I had them read "Slide Effects," I can assure you that they’d probably never go near the show again again in their life. "Slide Effects" isn’t intended as an episode for new viewers. It’s for fans who know their episodes inside out and that is in stark contradiction to Tracy Torme's plot which made this story a season premiere, an introduction for new viewers by taking them back to the beginning of the show.

Television shows make mistakes. Frequently. Unlike with movie series featuring James Bond or Batman, TV writers generally can't just reboot after a mistake. They have to work around the mistake that they’ve made in order to steer the story in a worthwhile direction. Even in comic books, Batman's abrasive personality is revealed as a nervous breakdown and Green Lantern becoming a mass murderer is explained as his being possessed by a primordial fear demon.

Don't Dwell
However, I don’t see the benefit to anyone in dwelling on those mistakes or seeking to waste valuable time addressing gaps that nobody cares about. I’ll bet Sliders fans would have been glad to see the end of those particular storylines, and certainly didn’t want to see them again – and would have been just as happy if "Slide Effects" were the more character-oriented, introductory, general audience script that Tracy Torme would have wanted.

Move On
Killing Arturo was a mistake. Making Quinn a mythical chosen one in an interdimensional war was a poor choice. Dispatching Wade was a wrong turn. Feeling that Sliders was out-of-touch with an 18 - 25 audience, FOX tried to clean out the cast. They turned Quinn Mallory into a sociopathic action star, introduced Maggie Beckett and had the Sliders' frame of reference with the audience -- Earth Prime -- turned into a Kromagg outpost.

All of this could have been forgotten even and especially with a more faithful version of the "Slide Effects" plot, filmed and aired as a season premiere. It could have been implied that Seasons 3 - 5 were part of the Kromagg scenario without being overt. Those seasons were in the past, best forgotten about. After all, we don’t spend a few hours everyday remarking on how stupid parachute pants were – we just don’t wear them anymore. Life moves on.

A Wizard Did It
"Slide Effects" makes a valiant attempt to retroactively “fix” bad decisions. And, in fairness, the detailed replays of Season 3 - 5 episodes are the right maneuver to attempt something like that. "Slide Effects" writes off those seasons as not “really” being the Sliders adventures but the adventures of their doubles. If you’ve watched The Simpsons, you’ll recognise that he’s pretty much saying “a wizard did it” – which is just lazy writing.

However, that’s not the problem. The problem is that "Slide Effects" spends half its length explaining to us exactly which wizard did what. Quinn's out of character behaviour towards a captured Wade in "Mother and Child"? Quinn subconsciously didn't believe in the situation; any subsequent jerkiness was the result of his detaching from the Kromagg simulation. "I stopped believing in the life you gave me." Rembrandt suddenly having a Navy background? It came from the false Arturo's memories and was folded into Quinn's amalgamated timeline. "You got sloppy," says Quinn. "You combined my life in ways that didn't make sense."

Insular
Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but it does bother me. It’s exactly the kind of insular continuity obsession that the alienates mainstream viewers from science fiction and fantasy television. Anyone reading my reviews of say, The X-Files, will know that I have enough problems with storylines dependent on contradictory references to past episodes to make sense. Here the storyline is dependent on fragments from three seasons of Sliders. I’m not interested in the the scheme of a master villain which exists in the form of a convoluted set of plots for a troubled TV show.

Storytelling Sacrifices
As much as "Slide Effects" feels tighter and focused than the three seasons that preceded it, it also feels like it sacrifices a lot of storytelling opportunities. In order to condense Torme's plot and addressing all the unresolved arcs down to 46 pages, Ng has to make a number of storytelling sacrifices and cut off a number of promising ideas at their root. There are any number of clever premises at work in "Slide Effects" that the script rushes past in order to get to that final confrontation between the Sliders and the Kromagg agent.

Arcs Untouched
The most obvious of these forsaken premises is the very idea of Quinn remembering sliding where no one else does. The possibility of building a whole character arc around Quinn finding himself home and trying to rebuild sliding is intriguing. There is something dramatic and compelling about Quinn having to decide whether or not he might want to slide again and whether or not he should bring his friends with him on this second effort or leave them home and safe.

In addition, even within the first two seasons of Sliders, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo had changed significantly. By resetting the clock back to the Pilot, "Slide Effects" invites them to contemplate whether or not their character development has been worth their nomadic and homeless situation in the multiverse. The script fails to delve into these questions, leaving the premise of the Sliders finding themselves home somewhat underexplored.

Rush to Reset
The abbreviated length of "Slide Effects" undercuts its own premise significantly. There is no sense of Quinn struggling with finding himself home only to lose it again. Earth Prime is established in a single page of script that exists primarily to have Quinn quote Mallory's final line from "The Seer" and realize that he is home. The confrontation between the Sliders and the Kromagg pays no mind to the characters' development between the Pilot and "As Time Goes By" and is strictly concerned with the traumas of Seasons 3, 4 and 5. "Slide Effects" never fully capitalises on the potential of its plot, rushing towards a reset instead of exploring the characters' mindsets.

Passengers
There are other issues with this compressed pace. Most obviously, every Slider who isn't Quinn Mallory feels like something of a passenger across the arc. Wade's role is to send Quinn to a therapist; Rembrandt contributes nothing to the story beyond being part of the quartet and making numerous funny remarks. Both are granted little time to develop their own agendas or motivations. The Professor leads the charge in exposition, but aside from that, only Quinn Mallory seems to have any real agency.

No Soft Sell
In fact, there are a whole host of ideas that are broached and ignored. The Kromagg declares the Earth Prime illusion to be a gift of what the Sliders want most, their heart's desire — and the emotional cost of rejecting it is never discussed except in a joke from Rembrandt. In fact, the idea of a softer sell with the Kromagg tempting the Sliders with the choice to stay in the illusion in exchange for helping the Kromaggs invade the real Earth Prime never comes up at all, an odd lapse for these master manipulators.

No Reason
The rationale behind the Kromagg deliberately forcing Quinn to endure the most traumatic experiences of 37 Quinn doubles is also strangely non-existent. The desired outcome is clear: "Slide Effects" seeks to acknowledge Seasons 3 - 5 but then write them away. But the Kromagg telepathically inflicting Seasons 3 - 5 on Quinn is in direct contradiction to the Kromagg's stated mission: to give Quinn and friends happy memories of Earth Prime to spur them to stop sliding randomly and find a way to locate their home coordinates so that their homecoming would be followed by a Kromagg invasion fleet.

It's at this point that Ibrahim Ng's effort to rework Tracy Torme's 672 word story idea into a resurrection for the original Sliders shows its greatest strain. The plot from Torme only highlighted the Earth Prime in 1994 scenario as part of the Kromagg simulation. Ng attempts to extend that to every Sliders episode after Season 2 and Torme's framework stretches at the seams with the effort to contain far more than it was ever meant to hold.

This is where Ng's attention to the post-Torme episodes begins to work against Torme's intentions. Likely, had Torme's "Slide Effects" aired as a Season 4 premiere, any dismissal of previous episodes would have been done without specific references to the past, a level of vagary that Ng's script cannot countenance in its wish for closure.

Bait and Switch
But despite seemingly offering closure, "Slide Effects"' final pages work against any sense of an ending, instead leaving off with an extension of the original status quo: Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are still lost, still exploring the multiverse, still searching for a way back home — albeit without the threat of the Kromaggs or the Earth Prime invasion or Logan St. Clair pursuing them or the Professor dying from a fatal disease.

Readers could be forgiven for being surprised when "Slide Effects" declares itself to be a new beginning for a new run of Sliders episodes that will never be written. Sliders was not good at endings and even "Slide Effects" offers an amusing nod to this tendency.

Non-Ending Ending
In a very real way, "Slide Effects" might just be the most satisfying non-ending ending to Sliders ever written. There is a quick glimpse of episodes from Seasons 3 - 5 as as the Sliders peer across the myriad realities, but the story effectively ends with the original Sliders resurrected (having never been dead or separated). The trauma of Seasons 3 - 5 is vivid and compelling and the resolution to the emotions if not the plot points is cathartic and comforting. Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are heralded as the true, core, original Sliders and presented with heartrending sincerity.

And three years of TV episodes are effectively erased, treated as more of the alternate realities that were so central to the larger mythology of Sliders, serving to offer a glimpse of a framework into which multiple versions of the canon might possibly be integrated.

One Step Forward, One Step Back
Meanwhile, the Sliders end the story with resuming their nomadic search for home, precisely where they were at the end of Season 2. No lasting harm has been done, but no progress has been made. It is certainly a kinder fate than what later seasons offered and, in contrast to those seasons, a stirring and joyful coda while in no way a conclusion.

To be fair, this seems to be the point. Ng seems to argue that the Sliders traveling endlessly on amazing adventures is the happiest way to leave them while ruefully observing that compared to death and body horror, interdimensional homelessness is merciful.

It is a wry and self-aware non-ending ending, one that acknowledges Sliders as a truncated and abbreviated TV series in its first two seasons that has been overshadowed by where the last three seasons chose to venture.

The Officially Hypothetical Series Finale
All of this makes "Slide Effects" rather unique in the context of Sliders. This is a fan fiction screenplay that is also a story from the original co-creator of the series. It exists exclusively for the purpose of wrapping up arcs that were left unfinished yet the only wrap-up it presumes to offer is sentiment, distance and reversal.

Ultimately, it serves as a version of Sliders that is what Tracy Torme would want. It presents a restoration that Torme may have contemplated but may not have settled upon. And even if Torme had chosen this route, no Torme script would have been as continuity-oriented as this screenplay.

Modern Day
"Slide Effects" is short and rushed and is less authentic than it presents itself in its conception and creation. These are serious issues.

However, the story is genuine and heartfelt and provides a convincing depiction of all four Sliders and presents their friendship as overcoming all odds. The narrative also feels a lot tighter and more constrained than the stories it seeks to resolve. These storytelling sacrifices allow "Slide Effects" to build both plotting and emotional momentum as it rushes towards the finish line and it leaves the reader's fondness for Sliders as redeemed and restored along with the Sliders themselves.

From this perspective, it feels like "Slide Effects" is the kind of story that many fans and critics would expect from an entry-level season premiere as it lays the previous season(s) to rest, reaffirms the concept of the show, and clears the slate for a new run of adventures.

In that respect, this 2011 screenplay adaptation of a 1996 story idea is a very modern type of Sliders story.

According to Temporal Flux, the de facto authority figure on the series, Sabrina Lloyd left because Kari Wuhrer was harassing her on set. Wuhrer made multiple remarks about how Sabrina, engaged at the time to a crew member, was dating the help. She verbally abused Sabrina to the point where Sabrina would flee the set and lock herself in her trailer and cry.

Cleavant Derricks said in an interview with EarthPrime.com webmaster Transmodiar: Lloyd loved John Rhys-Davies dearly and considered him the father figure of the set. When John was fired off the show, an invitation that TF recovered shows that Sabrina hosted John's farewell party at her own apartment. Cleavant said that Sabrina was miserable after John left and Wuhrer's harassment didn't help.

In an interview, Sabrina said that she felt SLIDERS was no longer challenging her acting abilities which is certainly true given that the production no longer required actors to learn their lines or deliver them correctly.

TF's account: when SLIDERS was renewed for a fourth season, Sabrina said that she didn't want to return to the show if Wuhrer remained aboard. Showrunner David Peckinpah informed Sabrina that he would prefer to retain Wuhrer and Sabrina asked to be released from her contract.

She promptly found another role on an Aaron Sorkin show, SPORTS NIGHT, a major network series with a devoted creator and clearly what Sabrina preferred to be working on instead.

Asked about SLIDERS, Sabrina said that she had seen the episode that wrote her out and that she would never return to the series and was happy on SPORTS NIGHT. She did a voiceover for one episode in Season 5, "Requiem," and Cleavant Derricks revealed that he had to ask her to do that as a personal favour. Otherwise, an impersonator would have recorded the lines.

Actually, if you're going to follow Transmodiar's list, make sure to watch "Requiem" before "Eye of the Storm" or a line in the series finale, "The Seer," will throw you off. This is the first time I have ever encouraged ANYBODY to watch "Requiem." God help us all.

Just... make sure to read "Slide Effects" after you watch the series finale. So many people went on with "The Seer" as the last word on SLIDERS for so long and no one should have to live like that. Not when the creator of the show himself has offered a coda to the show. (Admittedly, a coda that wasn't much more than a post-it in its original form, but a coda nonetheless.) https://earthprime.com/etcetera/slide-effects-2

I am going to try to answer this question Seriously when I haven't in the past and instead posted a list of fanfics.

Assumes serious face.

Fair Warning: For new fans, I don't recommend watching anything outside of Season 1, Season 2 and from Season 3: "Double Cross," "The Guardian," "Dead Man Sliding" and that's pretty much it. According to SLIDERS expert Temporal Flux, co-creator Tracy Torme gave up on the show in Season 3 and stopped going to the set after "Dead Man Sliding." The other co-creator, Robert K. Weiss, had left after Season 1.

I'd suggest reading Wikipedia entries to finish out Seasons 3 - 5.

Gems Throughout: Season 4 has some great episodes. "Prophets and Loss" is a throwback to 80s style television formula but done with incredible craft and passion: there's one scene where the sliders are interrogated and it seems to happen in real-time. "Virtual Slide" has some neat perceptual tricks and deft twists of plot. "World Killer" is a minor masterpiece of SLIDERS.

"The Alternateville Horror" has some brilliant touches of humour and cinematography and staging. "Slidecage" has some spectacular hard sci-fi concepts and one of the finest visual realizations of the series. "Slide By Wire" is an impressive, well-paced tech thriller. "Way Out West" is a very amusing Western spoof.

Seven standouts in a season of 22 isn't great.

Diminishing Returns: In Season 5, "The Unstuck Man" is a clumsy, witless, joyless hour, but there's something impressive in writing Jerry O'Connell out of the show with a note-perfect impersonator. "Applied Physics" is a brilliant exploration of the new situation and a moral crucible for the new slider, Dr. Diana Davis, but the threads it sets up are unfortunately discarded in the rest of the season.

"New Gods For Old" is a magnificent exploration of free will, individuality, collectivism and community but sadly destroys what "Applied Physics" set up. "A Current Affair" is really lighthearted and funny. "The Return of Maggie Beckett" is one of the best scripts ever written for the show. And that's it. Four standouts and one interesting failure is pretty sad for a season of 18 episodes.

Setbound and Bottled: The show changes in ways that aren't to its benefit. Season 3 moved production to Los Angeles and proceeded to set the show there and make no effort to use night filming, stock footage, lighting and colour processing to maintain the San Francisco setting, declaring that the sliders would now slide to LA from now on (aside from two episodes in Season 3 and one in Season 4 that insisted on San Francisco). The show's use of backlots and outdoor studio sets eviscerated the indie film look achieved in Seasons 1 - 2 with location filming.

Should've Travelled Light: According to Temporal Flux, the Season 1 - 2 team had very bare, empty soundstages that could be reconfigured into any interior. If they needed Quinn's basement, they wheeled in the blackboard, the sliding coils, the worktable and the furniture into any soundstage and that would be the basement. If they needed a courtroom, they rented a judge's bench, a jury box, the tables and some chairs. For a hotel room, they'd put up false walls and windows, bring in some beds and put a TV on a dresser. Then they'd pack all that away and bring out what they needed for the next set.

Police Stations: In contrast, the Season 3 team built an expensive cave set that ate up their money with rental costs and maintenance and forced them to include it in episode after episode whether the story called for a cave or not. In Season 4, the production built a vast hotel set, the Chandler, with its lavishly decorated halls and bedrooms consuming the money in rental fees and upkeep and forcing nearly every episode to be set in the hotel whether the plot needed the hotel or not. And they kept it for Season 5. The Season 3 - 5 producers were veterans of cop shows which maintain a police station set; they were indifferent to how SLIDERS needed a different approach.

Beige Curtains: Visually, the show takes a nosedive. Season 3's standing sets are livened up by high contrast and high saturation and a good amount of location filming in LA despite the cave set. Season 4, however, is largely studio-bound and it's a bleak, dim, gray, dull looking show. Season 5 maintains the same look and starts filming in the Hill Valley Square from BACK TO THE FUTURE and it looks ridiculous.

No Review: There's also the sense that the script editors and producers are not performing quality control. Starting in Season 3, characters are often not introduced by names and reviewers have had to check credits and scripts to know how to refer to the guest-characters. Exposition is given in the most artless fashion through a guest-character, Diggs, dumping the information onto the sliders through inane dialogue. Actors misdeliver lines and see those takes aired. Characters also behave in shockingly sociopathic ways and the writers and at times actors are totally indifferent to how bad it makes them look.

Sociopaths: We have Quinn falling in love with an unconscious woman in "Dragonslide," Quinn flirting with Wade's sister when Wade is despondent in "Season's Greedings," Quinn flirting with a married woman in "The Exodus Part I," Quinn refusing to let his friends go back to their home Earth for no clear reason in "The Exodus Part II," Quinn tricking his terrified friends into thinking he's being electrocuted in "Sole Survivors," Quinn abandoning the sliders in "Slither," Quinn having no interest in saving Wade from a rape camp in "Mother and Child," Quinn having no interest in saving his mother in "Revelations" -- some of which is poor writing and some of which is the actor mis-performing the scripted dialogue or adding his own subtext to scenes -- and these incorrect takes being aired anyway.

Disavowed: We have a series-ending cliffhanger despite the show's producers knowing full well that there wouldn't be a sixth season.

SLIDERS was, after Season 2, abandoned by its original creators, denigrated by its gradually departing cast and disavowed by those involved. Seasons 3 - 5 are, on the whole, not an enjoyable, professional product. Whatever fanbase the show has is entirely due to the first 22 episodes and a few scattered throughout the last three seasons. In the years to come, the lead producer for Seasons 3 - 5, David Peckinpah, died and there was much rejoicing in this community. His family posted on the now defunct Sci-Fi Channel forum and defended their family patriarch, protesting the way SLIDERS fans reveled in their loss.

Binge: On the IMDB boards (also defunct), one of Peckinpah's sons explained: Peckinpah had been a good father, a devoted family man and a recovered drug addict who had been sober for 20 years in order to focus on his wife and children. In 1994, Peckinpah's 16 year old son, Garrett, died suddenly from bacterial meningitis. Peckinpah fell apart and fell back into heroin and cocaine.

Peckinpah had a development deal with Universal and was assigned to SLIDERS in Season 3. Peckinpah's grief and addiction made it impossible for him to properly oversee commissioning stories and reviewing scripts or ensure actors performed their lines. "The Exodus" two parter of Season 3 was commissioned not because it was a good story, but because it allowed Peckinpah to hire musician Roger Daltrey for a guest-role and devote two weeks to an on-set rock concert with Roger Daltrey's band. Filming the episode was something to do between performances and binge drinking sessions.

Addict: Peckinpah was bitter and angry towards anyone who questioned or protested his attitude, firing John Rhys-Davies off the show and driving Sabrina Lloyd to quit as well. He had no concern for the content he was producing and it showed. After SLIDERS, he moved from LA to Vancouver, presumably to develop new projects but really to indulge his addiction. Without his family and friends to watch him, Peckinpah overdosed and died, so Seasons 3 - 5 are simply a symptom of a deeply troubled human being and his gradual self-destruction. Season 3 is cocaine, a superficially thrilling but emotionally dead experience. Season 4 - 5 are heroin, a sedating, lifeless endeavour.

Fans view Peckinpah as a demonic monstrosity. He was just a man. Broken and lost. Peckinpah killed himself and in the long process to do so, he took SLIDERS down with him. He died longing for his son, he died in infamy, and he died alone.

Restoration: Anyway. If you do watch the show past Season 2 and somehow get to the end of Season 5, consider reading the "Slide Effects" screenplay which was what Tracy Torme would have liked to happen next in SLIDERS. https://earthprime.com/etcetera/slide-effects-2

I bought a copy of this.

I like to blame everything that's ever gone wrong on DARK PHOENIX. My coffeemaker got clogged with grounds this morning; I blame DARK PHOENIX. ;-)

It could be true, but it's corporate nature to blame any problems on a previous regime.

Thinking about this -- creatively, if Marvel Film agreed to avoid telling any stories that had major impact on New York City, then Sony's SPIDER-MAN films could carry on as though it's in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's New York City. Sony has the rights to Spider-Man and his cast of friends and enemies.

Most of Spider-Man's villains are situated in New York City. Sony could do whatever they wanted so long as their movies never ventured outside the five boroughs and Marvel could politely agree not to destroy planet Earth.

However, Marvel Film (Marvel Studios) is currently refusing to even acknowledge the existence of Marvel TV (Marvel Entertainment) with the writing staff of the Netflix and ABC and Hulu shows only knowing what happens in the movies when they attend the premieres, so I can't see Marvel Film showing any grace to a rival studio when they're coldly indifferent to their office mates in the next cubicle.

When VENOM came out, it was part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or at least Sony producer Amy Pascal said it was in a joint interview with Kevin Feige and Kevin Feige reacted with astonishment. In a follow-up, Feige said that only Sony's Spider-Man films were in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and that VENOM was a Sony project and had nothing to do with Marvel.

Pascal in turn said that she'd meant that VENOM was drawn from the Marvel comic book universe, but that all the Sony films featuring Spider-Man adjacent characters were set in the same world as the Marvel films even if they'd never be seen in a Marvel movie. Feige said that Pascal's explanation was "perfect" and it seems to be Feige's attitude to the Netflix, Hulu and ABC shows (although AGENT CARTER seems to get a special exemption from being exempted).

The key point of interest, however, is that whatever arrangement between Marvel Film and Sony existed, it allowed Marvel to bar Sony from featuring Tom Holland or Spider-Man in VENOM. Sony would have absolutely featured Spidey in their VENOM movie unless they couldn't; my guess would be that Holland's contract was specifically for CIVIL WAR, HOMECOMING, ENDGAME, INFINITY WAR, FAR FROM HOME and two more sequels -- and Marvel could prevent that from being expanded to Sony's spin-offs in which they had neither ownership nor profit. Marvel, fairly or not, was able to restrict Sony from fully making use of its Marvel characters (Venom, Morbius, Silver Sable, Black Cat) by withholding Holland and making them seem illegitimate.

It doesn't seem like Marvel and Sony will coordinate. I think we may have to see future Spider-Man films as being set in a parallel universe and featuring, in SLIDERS parlance, a double of Tom Holland's Spider-Man in a Sony variant of the Marvel Cinematic Universe where, for whatever reason, the AVENGERS characters and story elements do not appear again even if their impact on Holland's character remains intact.

It reminds me of how DAREDEVIL refers to the Chitauri invasion in AVENGERS, but only in the vaguest of terms, calling it "The Incident." Meanwhile, the Avengers Tower is inexplicably absent from the New York City skyline. And in LUKE CAGE, street vendors are selling videos of the Hulk/Abomination fight from INCREDIBLE HULK, but we have to assume that those videos would show Mark Ruffalo instead of Edward Norton and that the fight would be set on the same streets we saw in LUKE CAGE instead of the generic Canadian city that passed for Harlem in the movie. Except in this case, DAREDEVIL and LUKE CAGE were set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Sony's SPIDER-MAN films won't be on account of branding.

Wow. Even DAREDEVIL and LUKE CAGE can't seem to make clear connections to AVENGERS and INCREDIBLE HULK despite explicit references and DD and LC are part of the Marvel family. What chance does Sony have as the competition?

Tom Rothman's handling of the X-MEN franchise and superheroes with FOX is indefensible. The era in which he made a lot of these moves, however, was when superheroes were viewed with derision after BATMAN AND ROBIN. The technology wasn't available to render the spandex costumes of comics with 3D printed texture that matched the contours of the actors. The filming methods of the era made hypersaturated colours like the yellow of the X-Men's costumes or the blue of Superman's tights look flickeringly overbright.

Spider-Man's face, a vivid, elastic surface of human emotion in the comics, was an inflexible statue in live action. I think of this as the SMALLVILLE and UNBREAKABLE era where the film and TV avoided overtly depicting superheroics because they could not be rendered well onscreen. Rothman was working on the X-MEN in this time period when fantasy fiction seemed distant from the semi-plausibility of live action. He had in his hands the film rights to X-MEN and FANTASTIC FOUR and he used them the way studios use video game properties: he produced some shabby product before expecting he'd sell them back to the original copyright holders.

That's not the era Rothman's working in now. Rothman now exists in a world where on his watch, INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE offered a diverse and vivid canvas for Spider-Man characters as well as incredible profit. Where the two live-action SPIDER-MAN films he worked on have been massive earners. Superheroes have proven themselves at box office without diluting them or apologizing for their absurdities or refusing to show them in their costumes or using their powers.

The tech is there and there's money to be earned and Rothman wants that money. The same way he wanted some money for producing some films to make a quick return on a small investment before selling back the rights for a little more money. He might now see the value of Spider-Man as a massive franchise to be fostered and nurtured for what will be massive amounts of money as opposed to the smaller earnings he chased down before. We all have the capacity for the most incredible change. We can evolve into people who now adore superheroes while still staying true to our natures as people who are mostly driven by money. I'm not saying Rothman has changed, but the box office of HOMECOMING and FAR FROM HOME could have done something.

Or we'll get SPIDER-MAN: THE LAST STAND and ARACHNID ORIGINS: PARKER and DARK SPIDER followed by a NEW WEBSPINNERS movie that's so bad that the studio decides not to release it and dumps it on iTunes. But I prefer to be an optimist.