Thoughts on Sliders in Random (Page 2 of 2)

I don’t know why it occurred to me today, but I was thinking back to something Torme said.  Why did we keep watching and fighting for more Sliders after it became bad television?

The explanation is that we as an audience were almost role playing as Sliders.  No matter how strange or awful the slide was, we kept jumping into the vortex each week hoping that the next slide would bring us back home to the show we used to love.

We sometimes ask why the Sliders kept sliding and didn’t just choose a world to settle down on.  We should know.  We kept sliding ourselves.

I think this is great analysis, and also why I've made the argument that the show held strong ratings (relatively) for Sci-Fi channel even in S5.   The thing is, because SLIDERS is a new world every week in procedural format, there's ALWAYS the possibility that the show could tap into the potential of its premise and deliver an intriguing, thought-provoking episode.  A serial drama, you can know to "stop" watching at a certain point.  But SLIDERS always had the possibility to deliver.

I do admit though back in the 90s/2000 I was not able to keep up.  When it moved to science channel, I didn't really tune in live to see it (and I am not sure the re-run schedule but not much of that either).  So I myself was not loyal and hardcore but always wanted it to keep going.

I did feel a lot of the magic was lost by season 3.

Sci-Fi channel dropped it because Jerry and Charlie were gone and they felt they had to find new originals that the network could stand on rather than toil in a non-breakout hit that was veering toward descending.

However, for the most part, the extra budget they got by cutting SLIDERS didn't produce a better ROI for  them.  They got a lot of new shows that didn't work.   I understand why they felt they had to move away from it.  They couldn't afford to try to re-invent the show and it was gonna be hard to make the show good when you do a world-of-the-week on the same universal backlot.   And they were not going to be able to bring in some new star actor to the cast, given the tight budget.

I understand why they canceled it -- they needed to focus on bets with upside.  At the same time, I'll also say in the end, the decision didn't pay off.  Sliders -- with its great premise -- was drawing them at least some core of a sci-fi fan base (this is why they acquired it for two seasons originally -- so they could launch new shows off of the audience it would  bring).

when is it going to be available?

I love how you described each character of sliders.  You really should write the definitive SLIDERS book about the series...

And understand and respect your POV on this.   However, I would argue that technology could provide a great sandbox for finding the right creative approach for fan-fic sliders  work.  You iterate.   It isn't capital intensive (theoretically).  And you correct mistakes and have a real working model  (prototype) to "see" what your last draft is, so you can improve it each time.

It goes without saying that if that working  with the actors again was  a possibility, by anyone, well that  is overwhelmingly the preferred option.  But short of that --  let's face it, it's not really a possibility anymore -- we are left with either the status quo or  new ways to "imagine" it actually happening.

But I understand it might be sacrilege to some.  I prefer to think of it as the creative universe that keeps giving.

I'm not advocating for AI writing, as I agree with your position.

I will say that it's interesting technology that a "dumb" computer can summarize all of the human writing it has collected and provide something comprehensive and decent.

I'll also say chatGDP allows you to say, "Play a text-based game around the tv show SLIDERS (1995)" and it's a decent little thing that we don't otherwise have through official software releases.

My points though largely revolve around bringing characters to life, based on the scripts humans provide it.  That's what I think is potentially exciting about the future.  To be able to play in the SLIDERS playground in a more visual way, via our own scripting.

ireactions is right... everything is built from, and on top of everything else. Kinda like legos.

On EarthPrime.com, the EARTH 211 episode guide fanfic posited a parallel Earth where FOX supported SLIDERS, the ratings were huge, Tracy Torme stayed with the show for all six seasons, there were no cast changes, and Season 4 had an episode called "AntiGrav":

AntiGrav: This lighthearted episode shows the results of Quinn's experimentation had it actually gone as planned – a world where antivgravity has created a society in the clouds, with flying cars and buildings. Quinn's double shunned his celebrity and went into hiding, prompting him to re-emerge when his double starts taking a lot of the credit.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030719094 … eason4.asp

When they did encounter a world with anti-grav technology, in Season's Greedings, Quinn displayed no interest in it

It's funny. Earth 211 triggers this hungry, gnawing, painful longing in me, this desire for all of these beautiful synopses to be made into whole scripts. Earth 211 is the true SLIDERS. The SLIDERS we have on our world is a collapsed, broken version of the real SLIDERS.

There are stories in E211 from Transmodiar, Recall317, Nigel Mitchell, Jules Reynolds and others. It all makes me want so badly to find Quinn's timer and slide to this beautiful world where SLIDERS thrived and flourished and FOX polished it like a gem and made it the crowning jewel of their network and Universal stood by Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo for six wonderful seasons of wonder, terror, action, humour, inventiveness, imagination, creativity and SLIDERS truly was that series that never, ever ran out of ideas.

As much as I love what I came up with in SLIDERS REBORN and all the splendid contributions that Transmodiar, Nigel, Slider_Quinn21, Jim Ford of SLIDERSCAST and Informant made to turn the real world version of SLIDERS into a story with a restoration of the original sliders and a closing (but not final) adventure and a happy ending, and as much as I love Tracy Torme's "Slide Effects" story, these fanfics were salves and bandages.

A full-fledged version of Earth 211 is what I would really, really, really want.

I wonder if Steven Moffat (DOCTOR WHO) would ever be inclined to pitch a SLIDERS reboot.

Well, Earth 211 is a quick read. It's just the synopses of the episodes, not full scripts.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030711182 … efault.asp

I think only an insane person would try to write full scripts for even a mini-season of SLIDERS.

What about 1.5 full seasons?

Thank you for linking me.

The Sliders fan community really is a historically great one.  As Tracy said maybe the first significant online community for tv.

Was the online community significant? 

Certainly ours was the first to save a show.

SLIDERS has a place in history, but I don't think it has anything to do with being the first online community (it wasn't) or the first fan community to save a show.

THE X-FILES' debut in 1993 led to a high level of Usenet newsgroup activity and they created what I think is the first online fanfic archive (Gossamer). The first X-FILES Usenet group was formed in December 1993 and the fanfic newsgroup was created in May 1994, leading to mailing lists for story sharing, editing and distribution. SLIDERS wouldn't debut until March 22, 1995.

I guess SLIDERS fans were the first 'online' group to save a show, but I'm not sure the online factor is actually that significant. SLIDERS may have organized online, but their battle to get SLIDERS to a third year was successful via letters by post, faxes and phone calls. Emails, while meaningful, are easily dismissed. STAR TREK was also renewed for a third season due to fan communities mobilizing through mail and phone calls.

I think SLIDERS' place in history is not based in SLIDERS fans being the first to save a show (they weren't) or being the first to gather online (they weren't). I think instead, SLIDERS fans are significant because SLIDERS fans took over roles that would usually be tasked to people who actually worked on the show.

SLIDERS has a truly peculiar situation: fans with no official status are regarded are the authorities of the show. In contrast, the official creators who worked on the show for the bulk of its episodes are regarded with mistrust, suspicion and derision.

When we want behind the scenes information on SLIDERS, we barely look to the show's creator much (because he left before all the crazy stuff happened) and we don't look to interviews with producers David Peckinpah and Bill Dial. We are skeptical and suspicious of the official accounts published by story editor Keith Damron. Instead, we turn to some guy who was buying SLIDERS trading cards and props off eBay from crew members, a guy who would converse with these sellers and then corroborate the anecdotes from multiple sources and then share his findings online (Temporal Flux).

When we want SLIDERS merchandise, we don't waste our time looking to the studio or its licensors: we've had to make our own DVD upscales and cases and replica props.

When we want SLIDERS episode guides, we don't look to the officially published guide, a book so thin and inaccurate that it still has interviews with former cast members talking about how they never want to leave the show that they'd left by the time the book saw print. We go online to the fan guides.

When we look at SLIDERS fan pages describing the properties of interdimensional travel and the pseudoscience of the series, we note that the official creators of the show were so lazy that for their series bible, they simply copied the fan pages rather than do their own work on their own series.

When we want tie-in storytelling, we don't waste our time on the poor to middling Acclaim comic books. Instead, we turn to the novellas written by Nigel Mitchell, Mike Truman, Jules Reynolds, YA novelist Maureen Johnson.

When we look to who is maintaining the legacy and memory of SLIDERS, we look to fan fiction: Tracy Torme's unused reset story, "Slide Effects", is screenplay, and there's also the SLIDERS REBORN twentieth anniversary fan fiction. We look to podcasters who reviewed every episode of the show and ended their time on SLIDERS with reviewing "Slide Effects" and the twentieth anniversary special.

SLIDERS is the show where the creators put so little effort into the show and the studio had so little interest in monetizing the fans that the fans had to do everything short of filming the episodes themselves. That is SLIDERS' place in history.

Well, this is certainly a way for anyone who wants images accompanying their sliders writing to get such images..

https://twitter.com/svpino/status/1635611742008147968

Same