Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

While I've only ever seen the first two episodes of QL1.0, I understand from REWATCH PODCAST that Deborah Pratt as the voice of Ziggy is a cultural touchstone, a critical pillar of the QUANTUM LEAP iconography akin to MacGyver with his paper clip, Batman with his batarang, Spider-Man with his webbing, Xena the Warrior Princess with her chakram, and the Doctor with his police box.

I wonder why they haven't had Pratt do the voice. She is working on the show as a producer. Has her voice aged too much? Or do they want Ziggy to be gender-neutral for 2023?

In story, we only heard Ziggy’s actual voice a few times during the original series; but that was Pratt / Ziggy that gave the opening narration to every episode.

Even before last week’s episode, I’ve believed Ziggy’s silence is going to be a plot point.  Something’s wrong with Ziggy. From the original series, an unintended part of Ziggy’s design is that it has an attitude problem (which is why Al was always arguing with its beeps and whines while slamming his hand on the handlink).  To have Ziggy now turn into just a computer with no personality - very odd.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Before Sliders, Quantum Leap was my show.  In fact, it was the regret of not recording Quantum Leap as it aired that led me to start recording Sliders from day one just based on the premiere commercial.  I could tell Sliders was going to be my next show, and I didn’t want to make the mistake again.

The new Quantum Leap has made great improvements as it’s progressed.  They found the story formula, and they’re making a great show now.  There’s a final missing piece, though.  A spark that isn’t there.  But in the most recent episode I think they found it.

Without giving too many spoilers, the episode featured a brief moment where Ian was the holographic guide for Ben.  The banter was spot on.  The chemistry was right.  The look and feel was right.  This was Sam and Al.  It’s the final ingredient to the show.  It’s something I didn’t see until it happened, but they’ve got it; and the show isn’t using it.

Addison’s alright, but the magic is with Ian.  I wonder if they’ll figure it out.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Due to some issues at work that have necessitated late nights, I haven't been watching QUANTUM LEAP. I'm hoping to catch up on sleep and QL over the long weekend and I'm excited that TF is excited.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

I actually like the new QL using different team members as holo-guides for different situations.  My guess is that if the project worked as planned they would have a team of guides to use depending on what skills/knowledge would be needed for each leap.

545 (edited by QuinnSlidr 2023-04-08 03:30:33)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

I'm feeling defeated. I really thought we might get Sliders back, especially with Tracy talking up Sliders in 2021/2022 and the win for a multiverse film at The Oscars (Everything Everywhere All At Once). I can't believe Universal is missing the forest for the trees on this one. They aren't very bright.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

To be fair, we were already defeated in 1999 when the cancellation of SLIDERS was announced in a Sci-Fi Channel chat with Tembi Locke and Robert Floyd -- or the 1998 - 1999 when the Sci-Fi Channel announced that Season 5 was on and would be the last season. We haven't lost or gained anything in the 25 years since.

In the early pages of this thread, a poster said that Tracy had pitched a revival bid that would be extremely difficult for a studio to support because it depended on familiarity with the original SLIDERS whereas studios would expect a clean reboot. In later pages, another poster remarked that Universal telling Torme, "What makes this the right time for a SLIDERS revival? Let's come back to this later" was a diplomatic way of refusing Torme's revival because it was too complicated.

Torme pitched the vision of SLIDERS of which he was passionate, perhaps feeling that if someone just wanted to do a recast-reboot, that could happen after his death. It didn't pay off. And sure, we might be watching a SLIDERS revival now if Torme had pitched a SLIDERS reboot with Sabrina Carpenter (GIRL MEETS WORLD) as Quinn Mallory, Alkoya Brunson (STARGIRL) as Wade Welles, Sydney Tamiia Poitier (CARTER) as Remy Brown and Alex Kingston (DOCTOR WHO) as the Professor.

But it isn't for anyone to tell Torme what to pitch and what not to pitch; Tracy Torme is SLIDERS. I'd say the same of Chris Carter; Chris Carter is THE X-FILES. If Carter wanted to pitch an incomprehensibly self-contradictory X-FILES revival (and he did) and produce two small seasons of bafflingly incoherent stories (and he did), that's his right because it's his show and as fans, we can take issue with the product (and I do), but it's not for me or anyone else to dictate what the creator pitches or doesn't pitch to a studio.

And looking at NBCUniversal's recent revivals: QUANTUM LEAP has done okay. I thought fans would be overjoyed that QL had been renewed for Season 2; Temporal Flux, quite correctly, said that QL was "hanging in there" as it hasn't become a huge hit yet. PUNKY BREWSTER: cancelled in one season. SAVED BY THE BELL: cancelled in two. MACGYVER: five seasons, but never a huge hit. Peacock streaming: losing billions every year. Right now, NBCUniversal can barely keep quirky procedurals and some low budget sitcoms in production and is hitting failure upon failure. Streaming has hit a ceiling.

I can't help but think it might be best for SLIDERS to come back when the studio is better equipped to support revivals rather than coming back for one season of 10 episodes and vanishing again forever.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions - something weird is going on when I post. It keeps saying "error in nxdomain..." until I reload and it brings it back.

Anyway.

Your analysis is spot-in, as usual, ireactions. For me, I would have thought that Universal would want to capitalize on all the multiverse stuff being released right now, and that they would want to do so based on how popular that line of movies actually is.

Don't get me wrong: I'm overjoyed that Quantum Leap has been renewed for season 2.

But, with all the erroneous comparisons that it had to Sliders back in the day, I'm still surprised that Universal hasn't thought that it would still be fit for a reboot at the same time.

I also think that Sliders deserves Tracy Torme`'s vision for it and that it deserves being tied into the original series. I think he has been kind of screwed by the studio execs every step of the way in this regard. I really wish they would let him do his thing. He has, after all, worked on Star Trek and has a brilliant mind. I don't understand why they just won't let him run with his project.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

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

**

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

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

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

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

Tracy Torme on the Cardinal Sin podcast:

We’re all hypersensitive about politics now. I thought I had a tough time 20 years ago or whenever it was, 30 years ago, getting certain stories off the ground in SLIDERS. And it’s much worse now. I can tell you that it’s going to be even more of a struggle even than it was then.

Already I’ve thrown a couple of ideas out and everyone in the room was kind of horrified going, "Oh! You can’t do that!" So I can already tell you that people are so hypersensitive to so many issues now that it’s going to be even more of a challenge trying not to turn it into some politically correct, ‘safe’ show. If it becomes that, what’s the point of doing it? That’s going to be the big struggle.

I promise you it will never be woke. Never.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

549 (edited by QuinnSlidr 2023-04-08 17:52:19)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions - I love your writing. You write amazingly and your analyses are always so detailed.

Also some good points made. I also don't think Tracy meant what he was talking about 100 percent and I think it might have been an unfortunate slip in the moment. I think the word he might have been looking for was "sanitized" and "unoffensive."

So far, everything's fine now on the forums. Maybe it was just a temporary glitch.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Torme's point about "his Sliders" never being woke was basically that the writing would not be constrained to specific viewpoints.  For instance, what if they slide into a world or many that are not politically correct?  This happened weekly on the original show.  Well, can you imagine a current series doing this?  I'd bet it would be very problematic, you'd have young writers bitch about this.  Tracy's point was you can't be closed off to anything, whether that would succeed with a modern studio/network, not sure.  He was defending the ability to examine all range of thought. 

Cardinal Sin was busy whining about Star Trek Picard or Discovery, and that they were too woke.  Having listened to him, I'd say his complaint was more about even allowing story to focus on LGBTQ characters or their relationships.  That plus having women as centrally heroic characters at all.  I imagine he was not a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  All I can say was that if by some miracle Torme actually DID get Peacock to green light a Sliders return, the LAST place he ought to go to talk on it was that YouTube show.  The trouble he'd get in...

551 (edited by ireactions 2023-04-09 07:24:45)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Grizzlor wrote:

Torme's point about "his Sliders" never being woke was basically that the writing would not be constrained to specific viewpoints.  For instance, what if they slide into a world or many that are not politically correct?  This happened weekly on the original show.  Well, can you imagine a current series doing this?  I'd bet it would be very problematic, you'd have young writers bitch about this.  Tracy's point was you can't be closed off to anything, whether that would succeed with a modern studio/network, not sure.  He was defending the ability to examine all range of thought. 

Cardinal Sin was busy whining about Star Trek Picard or Discovery, and that they were too woke.  Having listened to him, I'd say his complaint was more about even allowing story to focus on LGBTQ characters or their relationships.  That plus having women as centrally heroic characters at all.  I imagine he was not a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  All I can say was that if by some miracle Torme actually DID get Peacock to green light a Sliders return, the LAST place he ought to go to talk on it was that YouTube show.  The trouble he'd get in...

I feel that Tracy Torme exercised poor judgement going on the blatanty misogynistic and homophobic Cardinal Sin podcast. If he wanted to go on a podcast to talk about his ideas and build some anticipation, he could have gone on Rewatch Podcast. Tom and Cory would have dropped everything to have him on. Tom and Cory could have been holding my arms as I dangled off a cliff and in the process of pulling me to safety and they still would have dropped everything to have Tracy Torme on their show.

I feel that Tracy Torme exercised poor judgement when he said that "SLIDERS will never be woke."

What does "woke" mean? It's an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English. It means to be alert to racial prejudice and discrimination, and encompasses awareness of social injustices including sexism, economic inequality and white privilege.

When Torme said "SLIDERS will never be woke," what many heard -- fairly or unfairly -- was, "SLIDERS will never be for anyone who isn't straight, male and Caucasian." That's not a very wide market in 2023 and NBCUniversal may have heard that, seen the articles quoting Torme as saying that, and decided that Torme didn't have what it takes to create a mass media, broadcast product for a general audience.

Don't get me wrong, a multinational corporation absolutely does not care about human rights, liberty and equality. They care about selling their product to an audience, and that audience needs to be more than straight, white males in order to turn a profit.

I am sufficiently familiar with Tracy Torme's writing, interviews and life to feel strongly that Torme did not mean to say that SLIDERS is a show for straight, white males only. Did the average NBCUniversal executive have that same familiarity? Possibly not.

Tracy Torme should have presented his views as they exist in vocabulary that would be instantly comprehensible to anyone on any end of the political spectrum instead of stating them in a form that was easily misconstrued. As a TV producer and screenwriter, he should know better than anyone the importance of clear, unambiguous language.

Tracy Torme is a "radical environmentalist" "radical animal rights" "Libertarian" who wrote Rembrandt Brown as a proud black man and invites homeless people to move in with him. Tracy Torme is absolutely not racist, not transphobic, not bigoted, and not in any way lacking in love or respect for all humanity. I think Torme needs media training, not to make his values and ideas sanitized or bland, but to make them clear.

Here's some free PR work for Tracy Torme in his next podcast:

Script and Talking Points for Maestro Torme:
I don't believe that all good and rightness in the world can be found in any one political party or dogma or government. SLIDERS is never going to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or the Green Party or the American Civil Liberties Union. Never. That's not due to hostility to any of those parties or platforms -- although I have plenty of hostility towards all of them, I just wouldn't put that hostility in my writing or in my show.

I prefer SLIDERS as satire as opposed to commentary.

Social commentary is SOUTH PARK which is all about directly stating what's right, what's wrong, what's good, what's bad. SLIDERS is social satire; it's about about giving a skewed perspective on the conventions of our world and observing contradictions and points of folly.

For example: I'm obsessed with hockey, baseball, football. One of the best episodes of SLIDERS is Jon Povill's "Eggheads" which asks, what if instead of athletes, our society revered scientists? And it uses that to point out everything that's ridiculous about professional sports. And I love professional sports. SLIDERS was taking a shot at one of my sacred cows and where SLIDERS is concerned, there are no sacred cows.

SLIDERS has the ability to take apart any and every value system and social norm to find all the points of absurdity and idiosyncrasy so that we can ask: how did we get here? And where are we going?

SLIDERS will never be a soapbox. SLIDERS will always be a lens.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Well a couple things. 

a. Tracy is anything but traditional.  He's wasted most of his life with this UFO nonsense, and honestly, it's probably doomed his career.  He's also a dinosaur.  He barely has internet where he lives.  In many, many ways he's off the grid.  He rescues doggies and Thank God for he and his wife on that.  I highly doubt he'd ever listened to Cardinal Sin before going on there, and likely the same for many of his appearances.  Recall he used to do several UFO-heavy radio shows which were hosted and frequented by many outright lunatics.

b. Tracy is also a very kind man, but he's also fiercely libertarian and if you were to tell him NOT to talk on a person's show, he would do it for sure.  It's not like Gil is a criminal, he's also a nice man (from my interactions) just a tad too backwards.  And guess what?  They're all entitled to be.  This attitude that anyone who doesn't fall in line with the newest cultural "norms" or whatever should get out of the way and walk the plank is so blatantly un-American and anti-Democratic.  We must educate, not eradicate. 

c. Tracy has ZERO I mean ZERO technological capabilities.  It was often a miracle he joined the youtube channel at all, and frankly I think he finally gave up on it altogether.

d. Tracy is a devotee of The Prisoner and Patrick McGoohan, and it has always showed.  That was why he agreed to join that channel, and again, the other folks who were in the chat or on the line like that British guy, were all really well read and very good at banter. 

Now as for this "woke" thing, well again you said it, what does woke actually mean??  That's the problem.  The original intent of wokeness I can guarantee you Tracy is 1000% behind.  That's back when it was focused on inequalities.  However, that movement has been co-opted and basically overtaken by those demanding not even asking, commanding equity. 

Equity is not the same as Equality, not in the least.  Equity is something that is completely at odds with human nature.  It's what Gene Roddenberry foolishly believed humanity could achieve.  Not happening, can't happen, it's simply not in our DNA, our biology.  There must be winners and losers, that is the circle of life.  That is evolution, that is biology.  If you go back to Tracy's days as Sliders EP, you'll see this plain as day.  In fact, there is a big demarcation between Tracy's time and that of Black or Dial or Damron when the show went to Sci-Fi. 

When Tracy ran things, the Sliders often landed in a world that was mostly like our own.  What was different?  Usually each world was on the surface BETTER than ours, but when you looked deeper, you went, wait a minute, in order to achieve this utopia, they gave something up.  They gave up their freedom, individualism, their soul.  Sometimes the Sliders supplied a pep talk or tried to gum up the works.  Usually they ran for their lives!  If you skip the S3 movie of the week garbage, when the show landed on Sci-Fi those EP's reverted to run of the mill science fiction.  The worlds were usually over the top characterizations.  The Sliders were immediately in deep doo-doo, or the world was so screwed up they had little to do.  Again, Torme's thinking was deep, it was "cerebral" as FOX put it, it was like McGoohan's in The Prisoner. 

What am I getting at?  This is why Sliders was so brilliant, because Tracy on the surface had you see one thing, but deep down there was really something off there, something sinister perhaps.  For him, Sliding was as much of a mind fuck as anything.  That's again what made Rembrandt going to a shrink and calling the episode Post-Traumatic Slide Syndrome absolutely brilliant.  Remmy's mind was shot, he lost semblance of reality.  The Prisoner strikes again.  Again, that's why Tracy went on that YouTube channel.  Yes I would have loved to hear him with Rewatch, but he's forgotten so much of the details it would have been painful.  Instead, to hear how his ideas were morphed by what he saw on The Prisoner was really something, I'm so glad to have been a part of that.  When Tracy means it won't be "woke" I still believe he means you a) would never shut off a potential story in order to be unnecessarily PC, and b) he's not hiring people simply to fill quotas and have equity.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Grizzlor wrote:

Tracy is anything but traditional.  He's wasted most of his life with this UFO nonsense, and honestly, it's probably doomed his career.

LOL. And I thought I was being critical of Torme. This is one of the harshest things I've ever seen anyone say about him.

(Also probably true. Of course, I could say the same of myself and SLIDERS.)

554 (edited by Grizzlor 2023-04-15 18:05:49)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:
Grizzlor wrote:

Tracy is anything but traditional.  He's wasted most of his life with this UFO nonsense, and honestly, it's probably doomed his career.

LOL. And I thought I was being critical of Torme. This is one of the harshest things I've ever seen anyone say about him.

(Also probably true. Of course, I could say the same of myself and SLIDERS.)

Seriously, the only person who's made a mainstream career of that drivel is this guy!

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1365394218131222529/YHXReqzh_400x400.jpg

It's basically been Tracy's semi-professional focus for years, so much that I was most shocked that he would actually want to even work on Sliders again.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

I don't disagree (much) with anything Grizzlor said, but here's the thing:

The fact that Tracy Torme needs Grizzlor to translate and explain Torme's thinking is precisely why Torme has a serious communications problem. A TV producer in 2023 should be able to convey his ideas and opinions without needing Grizzlor to explicate and clarify afterwards. And a TV producer in 2023 who can't make himself understood with his own words is probably unable to present his ideas to a studio in a form where they would buy and fund them to film and broadcast them.

A TV producer in 2023 who needs Grizzlor to explain everything afterwards is probably not going to be producing very much TV.

Hey, Tracy! Let me know if you need a media relations course! Of course, there is my preferred plan: just let Marc Scott Zicree do all the talking from now on.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

I don't disagree (much) with anything Grizzlor said, but here's the thing:

The fact that Tracy Torme needs Grizzlor to translate and explain Torme's thinking is precisely why Torme has a serious communications problem. A TV producer in 2023 should be able to convey his ideas and opinions without needing Grizzlor to explicate and clarify afterwards. And a TV producer in 2023 who can't make himself understood with his own words is probably unable to present his ideas to a studio in a form where they would buy and fund them to film and broadcast them.

A TV producer in 2023 who needs Grizzlor to explain everything afterwards is probably not going to be producing very much TV.

Hey, Tracy! Let me know if you need a media relations course! Of course, there is my preferred plan: just let Marc Scott Zicree do all the talking from now on.

It does make you wonder what was said in that pitch meeting.

Sliders should sell itself in today’s media landscape.  Parallel realities are mainstream and attached to the biggest money making engine in Hollywood (Marvel).  I think it took some effort to make Sliders *not* sell.

557 (edited by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan 2023-04-16 10:41:03)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Tracy is brilliant.   Not everyone may like his politics.  And to some degree aspects of California have declined, and some long-term residents are gonna have an issue with that, and it may color their politics as well, or how  they see the democratic party (which tracy was once a part of before his libertarian days).   He may have moved to a rural area just to get away from some of that stuff.

The UFO thing actually he was way early on in some ways.  Legendary Pictures just bought a tom delonge project (based on his books).  Obama's own production company is producing a spec Blacklist entry, about the benny and barnie hill story.  CNN was slated to air a 5-part series that ended up on nat geo because the Warner entity started cutting costs.  And I think showtime just had a jj abrams doc series on it.   Tracy could dive in more given the market is growing, but I am not sure he's that motivated  to.  His collaboration on his last doc series with James Fox went in a creative direction he didn't want (he wanted it like a big movie theatrical feature).  It ended up being a pretty successful independent doc though, which the Ready Player One producer got involved with.

If tracy said some stuff that didnt fly well to the peacock folks, what are ya gonna do.    I'd be interested to see the result of it.   I am not sure if some of his perspectives would offend any fans or not.  of course we wouldn't want that.  But i usually find it interesting what  tracy has to say.  To him though i would say, he needs to keep in mind that people come from different situations in life, and it wouldnt be a bad thing to recognize some of their circumstances led to a different set of events in their life.   The world is a complicated place.

ALSO: at the end of the day, Peacock was never gonna seriously act on sliders.  They were checking it out, but they were never gonna justify doing it, because the property, while having high brand recall, just does not have a concentrated enough, passionate audience they could tap into drive premium sign ups.  And while broad it's not really broad in the way they'd need to for getting back their $ on ad supported streams.  The series really needed to be brought back 5-to-7 years ago if it was ever gonna be brought back in live-action television form.  I think the better approach now is novelization, audio, comics, nfts/web, or remixing the old shows (eg pop-video, vh1 style, audio commentary) or turning them into an audio-formatted listening series with new explainer material to fill in visual gaps).

On the flip side, technology is on our side for fan driven stories in this universe.  The tools keep getting better.  Maybe in five to 10 years, fan fiction will become much more dynamic, and studios may even be able to better profit.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

I wouldn't be too hard on Tracy with the UFO topic. It's practically impossible to explain but I had a sighting less than 100 ft or so. Your focus is only on the object itself, and for me I ignored my personal safety and for those who say "photo or it didn't happen" are oblivious. That was the last thing on my mind. You're so enthralled by the situation as it's happening. I recreated this situation in a video here: https://youtu.be/T0zEe_vXl3Q. But my first thought was either extraterrestrial or government. I can't say for sure what it was, I only reported the facts. One of the biggest problems are the fringe UFO people who immediately say aliens and go off in these bizarre stories before going over facts. But the phenomena does exist. The show 'Ancient Aliens' is purely for profit as literally everything is 'aliens'. They have had a good point or two in the past and it could have all been put in one episode. Yet it stays on the air year after year.

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Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Temporal Flux wrote:

It does make you wonder what was said in that pitch meeting. Sliders should sell itself in today’s media landscape.  Parallel realities are mainstream and attached to the biggest money making engine in Hollywood (Marvel).  I think it took some effort to make Sliders *not* sell.

I imagine this hypothetical moment of historical fiction:

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: (cheerily) " ... and so, we think there's definitely a market for imaginative science fiction dramedy like SLIDERS."

TRACY: "I've always felt that way. Universal just didn't get it. Executives are so close-minded. Ties cutting off bloodflow to the brain."

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: (adjusting tie) "Well. What we want -- we want shows that speak to a wide audience across wide demographics. The sliders are outsiders and everyone who's a person of color or LGBTQ or female has probably felt like a slider. That's what we tried to market towards with SAVED BY THE BELL and PUNKY BREWSTER being very progressive, being very to the moment without, of course, alienating advertisers."

TRACY: "Ugh. That sounds like politically correct nonsense."

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "I'm sorry?"

TRACY: "That sounds like market research instead of writing challenging, thought provoking social satire. I don't have any patience for any of that pandering, trying to get people to like the show through some silly quota of brown and black people on camera. What is that? No, no, no, trying to do a safe, race-blind, culture neutral show like your RAVE BY THE WELL or MONKEY HOOPER -- "

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "That's SAVED BY THE BELL and PUNKY BREWSTER."

TRACY: "I don't watch any of those kiddie shows. I don't even have those stream serving subscriptions. No, no, no, all that's just buying into the left's lie of wokeness. Trying to sell a show with identity politics. My show doesn't do that. This story those suits never let me do that I would do today: what if the sliders land on a world where they see a KKK gathering, but then one of them takes off their hoods -- and the KKK on this world is black people going after white people?"

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "You want to do an episode of black people in KKK hoods hunting down white people? I'm not sure you can do that."

TRACY: "It gets the attention. Then after the teaser, we have a more grounded story where it's black people being upheld as intellectuals and strategists while white people are all assumed to be thugs and brutes -- "

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "What makes you feel this is the right time for TV where a KKK member unmasks to reveal a black man? What makes this the right time for this SLIDERS revival?"

TRACY: "You see what I mean? This is what political correctness does to you. It traps you in this bubble where you never tell any story that isn't exclusively propaganda from the Democrats. SLIDERS isn't some safe, politically correct show like your streamy pablum. SLIDERS will never be woke. Never."

CUT TO:

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: " ... and so, we think there's definitely a market for imaginative science fiction dramedy like QUANTUM LEAP."

DONALD BELLISARIO: "Thanks. That's flattering."

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "Yeah. We still think that 90s properties are worth looking into. Even after this morning. QUANTUM LEAP. You know. Good show. Bet it could be good today too. I guess. Maybe."

DEBORAH PRATT: "Well! This is very exciting. What can we do to make it happen?"

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "Well, we're looking for shows that speak to a wide audience across wide demographics. The leaper is an outsider and everyone who's a person of color or LGBTQ or female has probably felt like a leaper. That's what we tried to market towards with SAVED BY THE BELL and PUNKY BREWSTER being very progressive, being very to the moment without, of course, alienating advertisers. Jesus. What am I even saying? I don't even -- I can't even -- "

DONALD BELLISARIO: "Hey there, friend. I can see this is a crisis. Let's take a breath. Let's just breathe."

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "I've wasted my life! What if all I've ever produced is 'streamy pablum'? Dear God, our streaming service is losing 2.5 billion dollars every year, everyone who ever created anything in our back catalog is crazy!"

DONALD BELLISARIO: "Failure paves the road to success. My ex-wife said that before she left me."

DEBORAH PRATT: "I actually said that after I left you."

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "Black people in KKK robes -- why!? Why would someone say such a thing?"

DONALD BELLISARIO: "Black people in -- I know what this is."

DEBORAH PRATT: "What?"

DONALD BELLISARIO: "This poor soul clearly just had a meeting with Tracy Torme." (to the executive) "Listen, don't worry about anything that man says. I walked by him earlier in the parking lot. He was staring at oddly shaped clouds mumbling about UFOs!"

DEBORAH PRATT: (also to the executive) "It'll be alright. And what you said about being an outsider -- it really made me think: what if the leaper in a new QUANTUM LEAP is a visible minority?"

DONALD BELLISARIO: "Someone like Raymond Lee. It'd be incredible to have an Asian leading man."

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "Yeah... yeah! And also -- our market research shows that ongoing sexual tension brings in a lot of repeat viewings and ongoing viewership."

DONALD BELLISARIO: "What if... the new leaper's hologram is his girlfriend?"

DEBORAH PRATT: "And they're separated by time!"

NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVE: "Hot damn! This is working. After this morning, I thought every showrunner from the 90s was going to be difficult."

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

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

RussianCabbieLotteryFan wrote:

If tracy said some stuff that didnt fly well to the peacock folks, what are ya gonna do.

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

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

RussianCabbieLotteryFan wrote:

Peacock was never gonna seriously act on sliders.

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

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

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

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

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

RussianCabbieLotteryFan wrote:

what are ya gonna do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

561 (edited by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan 2023-04-20 18:19:12)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Definitely Tracy and Marc are enormously talented people in their own rights, with very different skill sets of course.  I agree that Marc would probably know how to approach things differently, in a more palatable manner. 

I guess what I'm saying though is, people are who they are, and I just accept the situation as such.  Tracy comes with his quirks, like I do mine, and while I'd never utter that phrase about "never being woke" personally, because I think there are certain implications to it (or stuff I don't agree with) I can kinda accept if that's what netted out in this situation, because, well, tracy doesn't like wokeness and at the same time, he's also the guy who'd you want to do a proper revivial/sequel.   

Sure, I'd like Marc's way of putting things over Tracy's.  I just don't see a realistic scenario where we would have gotten that.  Maybe had they built a relationship before then.  Jacob Epstein was someone who was involved in the pitch though.  Yes, saying certain things are a huge red flag that will be quite a problem for a studio in this day and age.

Also, FWIW, Marc has some upset backers of Space Command.   That doesn't make him bad -- he's actually an incredible salesman (to raise the money he did) but he also got super enthusiastic and bit off a lot.  Meaning the Space  Command project has people who gave money who I guess haven't gotten what they expected. I don't think Marc intended to do anything bad but he just was trying to do somethign quite ambitious.  And all that takes a ton more time, money, and complications than perhaps he was prepared for.  It's also worth noting he couldn't get Space Command greenlit (by the studio system).  That doesn't make it unworthy.  Perhaps had a studio believed in him, he would have created something with a cult following.  He probably didn't have a recent enough tv hit to have the political juice to push something like that through.  I believe his initial plan was to do a pilot via gofundme, then get a studio to greenlight a season and instead he had to do the whole thing off gofundme (with "investors").

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Don't consider this in any way disagreement with you, just an alternate but not necessarily opposing perspective.

Marc Scott Zicree and Tracy Torme: They seem to be near-colleagues and are certainly on good terms. Torme was a producer on NEXT GENERATION and Zicree wrote Torme fan mail about "The Big Goodbye", telling Torme how much he liked the episode. Torme was familiar with Zicree, having enjoyed Zicree's behind the scenes book THE TWILIGHT ZONE COMPANION and Zicree's other TV writing. Torme called Zicree and they had several pitch meetings.

Torme wanted to hire Zicree but left TNG before he could do so. Eventually, Zicree sold "First Contact" (not the movie) to Michael Piller and then "Far Beyond the Stars" to Ira Steven Behr on DS9. Zicree also met with Torme during the lead-in to Season 4 of SLIDERS to learn about the horrors of Seasons 1 - 3.

Regarding SPACE COMMAND: I've only read one editorial from one Zicree's disgruntled backers where he accused Zicree of being untalented and of changing the project parameters in some vague, unspecified way that is impossible to refute or verify. This backer also claimed that Zicree had engaged in theft and fraud that had alienated special effects creator Doug Drexler (TNG, DS9, BSG).

Drexler posted in the comments and said that while it was true that he and Zicree had parted ways, the attacks on Zicree's professionalism were untrue. Zicree has also said in interviews that while he would have loved for SPACE COMMAND to get picked up by a studio and network, he didn't think any studio or network would let him use his cast of BABYLON 5 and TREK alumni and he was happy with the creative freedom that came from crowdfunding.

Ultimately, I can't find any indication that Zicree has defrauded his backers given that the one angry backer's accusations of fraud alienating a former collaborator were immediately refuted by that named collaborator. SPACE COMMAND strikes me as a very niche project for that specific audience of backers, much like, say, SLIDERS REBORN. I've lost approximately $280 USD on SLIDERS REBORN whereas Zicree may have been able to make a living on his niche project.

On the subject of personal character: I don't believe people are just who they are like their identity is just whatever default settings they fell into randomly. A person's character is what they've made of themselves. I'm not talking about profession. People are never defined by their jobs as much as they are by how they treat themselves and others.

I don't think Marc Scott Zicree wakes up in the morning and is magically that warm, kind Fred Rogers person. I don't think Tracy Torme came out of the vortex wholly formed as a combative TV producer. Every moment of their lives, they make the decision to be who they are in that instance of time.

There's a moment in that Cardinal Sin podcast I highlighted before: one of the podcasters asked an incomprehensible, nonsensical question about how SLIDERS did something he'd never seen on TV where one episode would have something like trains and then the next episode would also have trains and it wasn't actually trains but could the people who worked on SLIDERS explain that?

Marc Scott Zicree reacted to this inane, absurd, unfathomable question from this podcaster who had clearly done no preparation. Zicree reacted with warmth, kindness and patience. Rather than put the person on the spot to tell him to rephrase his query into something resembling a question, Zicree sweetly said he wasn't sure about trains, but that TV like SLIDERS was an exercise in finding assets that could be reused across more than one episode whether it was a set, a prop, a location, an effect or reusable footage.

This led into talking about sets like the Chandler or the TIMECOP sets used for "Slidecage". Zicree found a way to make the inquirer feel heard and appreciated, a way to say something interesting to the listener, and a way to maintain the dignity of everyone in the room.

This doesn't come just from Zicree being who he is. This comes because at some point in his life, Zicree taught himself how to treat people with respect and appreciation and decided that he was going to treat people that way without asking whether or not they deserved it or had earned it. This is a conscious, considered decision, and it's a decision that has to be made and remade every day.

He could turn it off at any time and put the full power of his wit into being cutting and insulting. He chooses not to; the same gentleness is found when he's giving a particularly negative review of an episode of THE ORVILLE without in any way diminishing the people in front of or behind the camera on that show or on PICARD or on DISCOVERY.

To me, people aren't just who they are as though identity is formed through passivity and assigned from on high. People are who they choose to be. And having chosen one path before, we can always choose another one again. We do not have to be who we were yesterday. We can choose differently today. This minute. This second. We are all capable of rebooting ourselves.

Tomorrow, I'm going to post some reboots of things I previously said in this thread that I should have said differently and that I should have said better. I'll put them the way Zicree would put them because... because I can do better. Because I choose to.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

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

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

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

I think it's great that SLIDERS stirred you to pursue original work that's inspired by SLIDERS while being your own. Indiana Jones was inspired by James Bond; I'm sure you've got a great take for your Indiana Jones to the James Bond that is SLIDERS. And I understand that SLIDERS' return could prevent the existence of a show that resembles SLIDERS while being its own original property.

However, this Sliders.tv thread is about the potential SLIDERS reboot with news from the SLIDERS' creator; this isn't the place to be disdaining the mere prospect of a SLIDERS reboot. I'll ask that you to start a new thread for any of your subsequent thoughts regarding your disfavor towards a reboot and your favor for alternate properties; this Sliders.tv thread is for SLIDERS fans who are excited about a SLIDERS revival from the creator of SLIDERS.

Also, I encourage people to never get so attached to any one idea that they think they'll never be able to create more. If SLIDERS return closes one door for you, don't let it stop you from opening another one, don't let it stop you from creating more.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Awhile ago, QuinnSlidr posted:

Dr. Soong on Star Trek...Dr. Seong on Quantum Leap...they just don't even try to be creative anymore do they? I can imagine the writer's meeting: "Just replace one o with an 'e'. Nobody will know the difference."

I accused QuinnSlidr of racism for claiming that it was stealing from Gene Roddenberry to have South Korean actors (like Raymond Lee) playing South Korean characters (like Ben) with South Korean names (like Seong). QuinnSlidr apologized and said it was a mistake; he hadn't been aware of Seong being a South Korean surname.

Since this same person started a thread talking about how much he loved EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, a film about parallel universes headlined by Asian actors, we have to conclude that QuinnSlidr is not racist.

On a side note, NBCUniversal executives clearly read this thread and asked the QL2.0 producers to change Ben's name from "Seong" to "Song".

Still. What would Marc Scott Zicree have said to QuinnSlidr? How would he reboot my remarks and do better?

The name "Seong" actually appears in Korean history as early as 1418. The role of Ben Seong is played by South Korean actor Raymond Lee, so this is an Asian name for an Asian character played by an Asian actor.

Noonian Soong's great. One most memorable characters ever created, along with Khan Noonian Singh, another unforgettable creation from Gene Roddenberry. Both were named after a friend Roddenberry made during World War II, a (supposedly) Chinese pilot (supposedly) named Kim Noonien Wang (supposedly as no record of any pilot by anything resembling that name has ever been located).

The name Khan Noonien Singh for the 1967-debuting character is a mix of Muslim (Khan) and Sikh (Singh) names. The name Soong for Data's creator, who first appeared in 1988, is an unusual English transliteration of the Chinese name Sung.

I'm reasonably sure that a name that first appears in 15th century South Korean history isn't stolen from Gene Roddenberry. I'm sure that there's no slight against Roddenberry when Asian characters played by Asian actors have Asian names.

I also don't think Roddenberry stole his names either; he was honoring a friend he missed and wanted to see again (and whose name he may have had some trouble remembering).

We should remember: when something seems reminiscent of STAR TREK, it's not necessarily ripping off STAR TREK as much as it's drawing from the same cultures and influences that Gene Roddenberry drew upon as well.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shouldn't ask such questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

Awhile ago, QuinnSlidr posted:

Dr. Soong on Star Trek...Dr. Seong on Quantum Leap...they just don't even try to be creative anymore do they? I can imagine the writer's meeting: "Just replace one o with an 'e'. Nobody will know the difference."

I accused QuinnSlidr of racism for claiming that it was stealing from Gene Roddenberry to have South Korean actors (like Raymond Lee) playing South Korean characters (like Ben) with South Korean names (like Seong). QuinnSlidr apologized and said it was a mistake; he hadn't been aware of Seong being a South Korean surname.

Since this same person started a thread talking about how much he loved EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, a film about parallel universes headlined by Asian actors, we have to conclude that QuinnSlidr is not racist.

On a side note, NBCUniversal executives clearly read this thread and asked the QL2.0 producers to change Ben's name from "Seong" to "Song".

Still. What would Marc Scott Zicree have said to QuinnSlidr? How would he reboot my remarks and do better?

The name "Seong" actually appears in Korean history as early as 1418. The role of Ben Seong is played by South Korean actor Raymond Lee, so this is an Asian name for an Asian character played by an Asian actor.

Noonian Soong's great. One most memorable characters ever created, along with Khan Noonian Singh, another unforgettable creation from Gene Roddenberry. Both were named after a friend Roddenberry made during World War II, a (supposedly) Chinese pilot (supposedly) named Kim Noonien Wang (supposedly as no record of any pilot by anything resembling that name has ever been located).

The name Khan Noonien Singh for the 1967-debuting character is a mix of Muslim (Khan) and Sikh (Singh) names. The name Soong for Data's creator, who first appeared in 1988, is an unusual English transliteration of the Chinese name Sung.

I'm reasonably sure that a name that first appears in 15th century South Korean history isn't stolen from Gene Roddenberry. I'm sure that there's no slight against Roddenberry when Asian characters played by Asian actors have Asian names.

I also don't think Roddenberry stole his names either; he was honoring a friend he missed and wanted to see again (and whose name he may have had some trouble remembering).

We should remember: when something seems reminiscent of STAR TREK, it's not necessarily ripping off STAR TREK as much as it's drawing from the same cultures and influences that Gene Roddenberry drew upon as well.


You really do have one heck of a talent for analysis, ireactions. As far as I'm concerned, it's all water under the bridge.

You also present a good argument for how Tracy's response to Universal executives could have been taken, vs. something from Marc Scott Zicree and how it may be more palatable to such executives when shopping around a potential reboot.

If only we had a better publicist and/or PR person acting on Tracy's behalf. I have to hope that a Sliders reboot is not entirely out of the question and it will eventually happen.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

TemporalFlux wrote:

It does make you wonder what was said in that pitch meeting.

Sliders should sell itself in today’s media landscape.  Parallel realities are mainstream and attached to the biggest money making engine in Hollywood (Marvel).  I think it took some effort to make Sliders *not* sell.

LOL!  Well, I think you had two thinks at work there.  First, you're an NBC exec, and in comes a group of basically, old geezers, pitching a TV show they did, on other network, 2 and 1/2 decades ago.  None of them really command that kind of confidence.  I don't think an network would ever, sadly, sign off on them.  They'd need to have an Alex Kurtzman type, younger, successful with today's landscape, as the QB.

The other part is, and I reference Tracy being asked, "but why Sliders NOW?"  Indeed why now?  It's because Hollywood still cannot grasp Sliders.  They don't get it.  That plus similar parallel universe shows never do particularly well.  Sliders at it's heart is very cerebral as Tracy used to joke, it's never going to be an easy pitch.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Grizzlor wrote:

It's because Hollywood still cannot grasp Sliders.  They don't get it.  That plus similar parallel universe shows never do particularly well.  Sliders at it's heart is very cerebral as Tracy used to joke, it's never going to be an easy pitch.

I understand the desire to blame a vague, amorphous "Hollywood" for all the failings of the world and for any and all issues with Tracy Torme. However, given that shared universes and multiverses are now billion dollar businesses, I don't think Hollywood "still cannot grasp SLIDERS".

Torme described NBCU executives as "hypersensitive to politics" and "horrified" by his ideas. This tells me: it's more likely (and specific) that a certain TV producer doesn't get how to present his ideas as something resembling a producable and marketable product. A certain TV creator still doesn't get that he needs to present himself as someone resembling a congenial colleague and amiable business partner if he wants a studio to cut him a multimillion dollar cheque and fly him and Jerry O'Connell to Vancouver.

I don't think NBCU felt it was the wrong time for a SLIDERS revival as much as they felt it was the wrong time for anything from Mr. "SLIDERS will never be woke".

Fairly or unfairly, in 2023, a TV show needs to speak to the woke and unwoke much in the same way Bud Lite needs to sell itself across all political spectrums. As Grizzlor said, we must educate, not eradicate. TV is broadcasting. The problem is not necessarily what Torme says, it's how he says it. Torme needs media training.

I take no pleasure in saying that. And Tracy Torme is SLIDERS, and he had the right to pitch however he liked with whatever he liked.

But my sense is that while Tracy Torme is SLIDERS' creator and its best creative voice, Marc Scott Zicree is SLIDERS' nicest creator and its best public voice and the best former SLIDERS staffer to pitch a revival. A partnership would work well, and of course, Grizzlor is right that any SLIDERS revival would likely see Torme and Zicree back in their old co-executive producer/story editor consultancy roles while more recent showrunners (Seth MacFarlane?) would take the lead much in the same way Donald Bellisario and Deborah Pratt consult on QUANTUM LEAP but it's Martin Gero who runs it.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

I understand the desire to blame a vague, amorphous "Hollywood" for all the failings of the world and for any and all issues with Tracy Torme. However, given that shared universes and multiverses are now billion dollar businesses, I don't think Hollywood "still cannot grasp SLIDERS".

Torme described NBCU executives as "hypersensitive to politics" and "horrified" by his ideas. This tells me: it's more likely (and specific) that a certain TV producer doesn't get how to present his ideas as something resembling a producable and marketable product. A certain TV creator still doesn't get that he needs to present himself as someone resembling a congenial colleague and amiable business partner if he wants a studio to cut him a multimillion dollar cheque and fly him and Jerry O'Connell to Vancouver.

I don't think NBCU felt it was the wrong time for a SLIDERS revival as much as they felt it was the wrong time for anything from Mr. "SLIDERS will never be woke".

Fairly or unfairly, in 2023, a TV show needs to speak to the woke and unwoke much in the same way Bud Lite needs to sell itself across all political spectrums. As Grizzlor said, we must educate, not eradicate. TV is broadcasting. The problem is not necessarily what Torme says, it's how he says it. Torme needs media training.

I take no pleasure in saying that. And Tracy Torme is SLIDERS, and he had the right to pitch however he liked with whatever he liked.

Torme heard the word "woke" mentioned by Cardinal Sin when complaining about Picard, and said Sliders wouldn't be woke.  Which by the way, is EXACTLY the right response.  Sorry, you cannot do a "woke" Sliders.  May well leave it dead.  Sliders is precisely the style of show where you get to have characters/worlds that are frightening politically incorrect, because you can show why they are wrong for being so ignorant. 

ireactions wrote:

But my sense is that while Tracy Torme is SLIDERS' creator and its best creative voice, Marc Scott Zicree is SLIDERS' nicest creator and its best public voice and the best former SLIDERS staffer to pitch a revival. A partnership would work well, and of course, Grizzlor is right that any SLIDERS revival would likely see Torme and Zicree back in their old co-executive producer/story editor consultancy roles while more recent showrunners (Seth MacFarlane?) would take the lead much in the same way Donald Bellisario and Deborah Pratt consult on QUANTUM LEAP but it's Martin Gero who runs it.

They're both too old.  Bellisario and Pratt consult?  LOL, more like they take a paycheck, and pat themselves on the back.  I do not recall Torme whining about Peacock execs and their sensitivities.  He seemed to feel like they were interested, but there wasn't likely a financial opening to do the show.  Now with Peacock itself stalling out, and NBCU's old cable infrastructure ground up, where would a Sliders even go?  In any event, I doubt Tracy and co. got into details with regard to their Sliders pitch.  He felt it went well, and began to lament about Peacock, because I got the sense that again, there's not a large budget they have available to them.  Hence the "why is this the right time?" is a classic, we like it, but there's no money right now.  Or whoever is in control has his or her portfolio and Sliders isn't on it.  Which again, has been my gripe for years, the execs cannot see the possibilities.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Grizzlor wrote:

Torme heard the word "woke" mentioned by Cardinal Sin when complaining about Picard, and said Sliders wouldn't be woke.  Which by the way, is EXACTLY the right response.  Sorry, you cannot do a "woke" Sliders.  May well leave it dead. Sliders is precisely the style of show where you get to have characters/worlds that are frightening politically incorrect, because you can show why they are wrong for being so ignorant.

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

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

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

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

Grizzlor wrote:

I do not recall Torme whining about Peacock execs and their sensitivities.

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

Grizzlor wrote:

They're both too old.  Bellisario and Pratt consult?  LOL, more like they take a paycheck, and pat themselves on the back.

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

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

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Interesting.  I watched the special and assumed they'd used archival footage of Kimberly, Jason, and Tommy.  But I guess watching them back to back was a little disorienting.

I was sad that they couldn't get all the original actors back, but I was happy with the special.  My friend was sad to find out that it wasn't a 10-episode series.  I think it would've been a good show if they had gone that route.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

Interesting.  I watched the special and assumed they'd used archival footage of Kimberly, Jason, and Tommy.  But I guess watching them back to back was a little disorienting.

I was sad that they couldn't get all the original actors back, but I was happy with the special.  My friend was sad to find out that it wasn't a 10-episode series.  I think it would've been a good show if they had gone that route.

I personally would be very keen on a season of MIGHTY MIDDLE-AGED POWER RANGERS, but I think the short length of the reunion special was a blessing in disguise due to all the practical issues.

If you can't get Austin St. John to play Jason because he's barred from leaving the US, can't get Amy Jo Johnson to play Kimberly because she feels she's well-past wearing skintight suits, can't get Thuy Trang to play Trini because she's slightly deceased, can't get Jason David Frank to play Tommy because he's somewhat dead... then options are limited.

ONCE AND ALWAYS has to kill off Trini without having the actress' face visible for a death scene. Then it has to find ways to keep Jason, Kimberly and Tommy offscreen  The limitations would become even more glaring in a 10 episode season if you only have two of the six main Power Rangers (and yes, I know Tommy wasn't among the original five, but history associates him with the originals).

I suspect you'd have to recast, and then... is it really a reunion?

But I wish they could do MIGHTY MIDDLE-AGED POWER RANGERS. You know how fascinated I am with what it's like for people to have drifted from a life defining experience (like sliding or being a Power Ranger or investigating X-Files) only to return to that experience decades later.

FOREVER RED, GRID CONNECTION and ONCE AND ALWAYS raise (but don't necessarily answer) the question: what does it mean to be an adult doing the same job you were doing as a teenager?

MIGHTY MIDDLE-AGED POWER RANGERS could be a metaphor for never losing your youthful passion and optimism, but also a metaphor for arrested adolescence.

FOREVER RED indicates that Jason got his powers back after his ZEO-depowering. There was always a slight disconnect between Jason and the Red Ranger; the unmorphed Jason was a low-key, quiet guy while the Red Ranger was hyperactively melodramatic. FOREVER RED and GRID CONNECTION show that Jason's Red Ranger personality has become his morphed and unmorphed personality, and no matter what random crap happened to him in ZEO or TURBO, the status quo would inevitably reassert. Jason would always return to being the Red Ranger; ONCE AND ALWAYS indicates that Jason would inevitably be back with the original Rangers.

ONCE AND ALWAYS shows that Zack could never get away from being a Power Ranger. He was a Power Ranger from 1993 - 1994. It was an after-class high school job that he left to get into politics. He gave up his powers; he campaigned for world peace; he worked in Congress -- but despite all this, by 2022, Zack was once again back in the suit fighting Rita Repulsa alongside the other five Rangers and despite his best efforts, he raised the next Yellow Ranger.

ONCE AND ALWAYS shows that Billy had the same curse or blessing. Billy was the longest-lasting original Power Ranger and this after school job nearly killed him when some sci-fi thingamabobbin prematurely aged him from a college kid into a geriatric. Billy had to go to another planet to get cured and once he was there, he fell in love with an alien mermaid and decided he needed a break from Power Rangering. But despite this, by 2022, Billy was back on Earth, back in blue spandex next to the others and we learned that even in his civilian life, he was devoted to the Power Rangers: working in the old command center, building a company on top of the Ranger HQ, mining his engineering learnings from Rangering to build new technologies for Earth.

Maybe MIGHTY MIDDLE-AGED POWER RANGERS has Jason discovering that he has completely lost the ability to live a civilian life; he's now spending 90 percent of his life morphed into the Red Ranger. When trying to help organize Trini's funeral, he discovers he has no idea how to use self-checkout machines at grocery stores, he has no recent credit history to rent a space or book a restaurant; he forgotten how to follow street signs, having teleported everywhere for the last decade.

Maybe Kimberly confesses that after she washed out of the Olympics, she retreated into being a Power Ranger because she couldn't make her other passion work and is now forever reliving her pre-athletic life as a gym teacher at same high school she attended, mentally regressing.

Tommy actually returned to POWER RANGERS pretty frequently (which was why Jason David Frank's refusal to do ONCE AND AGAIN was so strange and indicated some serious issues). Tommy's various returns established that he was a high school teacher who had married Kat (Pink Ranger II) and they had a son, JJ. Perhaps Tommy is now a teacher at Kimberly's school and unlike Kimberly, Tommy is eager to leave Power Rangering to the new generation. Tommy is astonished that with all the new Power Rangers, his old teammates still expect him to suit up as the Green Ranger every few weeks.

A fun subplot may reveal that the morphed Green Ranger in MIGHTY MIDDLE-AGED POWER RANGERS is actually Adam Park (Black Ranger II, Green Ranger Zeo) because Tommy got sick of people coming to him and asked Adam to just pretend to be him in the suit because Tommy needed to take his son fishing and have a spa seekend with his wife.

Maybe Trini started a private security company for residential properties and was leading a quiet, mundane life, raising her daughter alone after the illness and death of her husband, bemused with Tommy at how the others had no life outside the Rangers -- and then Trini dies in battle, forcing Jason, Billy, Zack, Kimberly and Tommy to have to deal with a casualty on their team for the very first time (and with all of them having made it to their 40s and having only ever lost Zordon).

If only they could get the actors. Still. MIGHTY MIDDLE-AGED POWER RANGERS could be a very interesting animated show or comic book.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

I did think it was interesting, with what little I knew about the special coming in, that they had Jason, Kimberly, and Tommy accounted for at all.  I knew from the trailer that Trini would be featured in some way, but I assumed that the team was going to be Zach/Billy/Rocky/Kat with a mystery green ranger and Trini's daughter.  There was some online speculation that maybe Adam would be the green ranger or that they'd bring in the one from the comics.

And from what little I know about post-MMPR continuity, it's bizarre that the power rangers exist in any form.  Billy shouldn't be on Earth.  The Green Ranger powers were defunct 30 years ago.  But it was really cool that Jason/Kim/Tommy were featured at all on the team.  I like that there's a decent bench of backup rangers who were able to come in and fill in.  Rocky and Kat aren't "my" red and pink rangers, but I like them from what I've seen.

It was just fun to hang out with the original rangers (in any form) again.  And I think if this were a ten episode series, maybe Jason/Kim/Tommy get shrunk for the whole series.  Or maybe this special is episode one and Jason/Kim/Tommy go on some unseen side mission and Rocky and Kat stick around in their place.

I don't know.  But I think it's pretty cool that David Yost was able to return to the role, putting behind all the hazing he got.  I'm glad that Walter Emanuel Jones came back.  I thought they both aged great and stepped right back into the roles.  It sucks that Austin St. John got arrested and they didn't pay Amy Jo Johnson enough.  It really sucks that Jason David Frank had the troubles that he did.  It really really sucks that Thuy Trang was taken too soon.

But I would've watched ten episodes of the cast they got.  I would watch another one of these specials.  And now I've downloaded some of the recent comics because power rangers feels pretty fun right now.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

That's a pretty cool attitude, actually, that David Yost and Walter Jones are sufficient to sustain 10 episodes for you. They're very good actors and I'd defer to you on that since you're more a POWER RANGERS fan than I am.

Amy Jo Johnson actually declined to specify why she didn't return for ONCE AND ALWAYS, but she said it wasn't about money. She's been moving into directing TV and indie films lately. She's also writing a Pink Ranger comic, and considering that comics pay about $220 per page and offer no real royalties, I'd take her word for it that money isn't an issue.

Austin St. John... I'm not sure what to say about him except that everyone's innocent until proven guilty and I hope the prosecutor will determine that St. John's management misused his finances and business.

Jason having his Red Ranger powers in FOREVER RED with no explanation whatsoever was both a rational creative choice and a baffling continuity choice. Tommy, however, got his hands on a master morpher that allows him to morph into any Power Ranger form he'd ever used in the past. And ONCE AND ALWAYS has Billy and Zack reconnect Rocky and Kat to the power grid, so presumably between TURBO and FOREVER RED, something happened that reconnected Jason, Kimberly, Zack and Trini to the grid.

In GRID CONNECTION, the Beast Morphers team calls on past Rangers for help and Jason arrives, later bringing in Billy, Kimberly, Trini and Zack (morphed), so it looks like the original Mighty Morphin team had already reassembled by 2020.

I imagine that Billy had some happy times with Cestria on planet Aquitar but felt the need to return to Earth and make a difference to human society with what he'd learned. ONCE AND ALWAYS has Adam and Aiysha heading for Aquitar and telling Billy that he should visit Cestria again soon.

I imagine Jason after TURBO becoming a paramedic, trying to make a difference without his powers, only to be caught in a collapsing building, crushed under rubble, believing his death is near... and then he miraculously morphs into the Red Ranger and is able to save himself. Elsewhere, Zack is scuba diving, Kimberly is in a grocery store and Trini is getting a haircut, and Billy is trying to exchange a laptop when they too morph into their original Ranger forms. They return to the command center and discover that when Zordon died, a part of his power was sent to the five Power Rangers he'd missed most. Billy builds new morphers. Tommy returns and tells them all that they are adults now and should not feel obligated to resume running around in spandex, but that they should be available whenever the new generation of Power Rangers needs them.

Cut to 2022 and the original Power Rangers have never had more than a week between emergency calls and have elected to just reassemble the team and accept the situation.

I too am feeling great enthusiasm for the POWER RANGER comics. They're set in a different continuity from the show while still mirroring some of its history, and they have a more pseudo-realistic, militaristic tone, but they're very interesting. A bit like Christopher Nolan doing a POWER RANGERS movie.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

That's a pretty cool attitude, actually, that David Yost and Walter Jones are sufficient to sustain 10 episodes for you. They're very good actors and I'd defer to you on that since you're more a POWER RANGERS fan than I am.

There's literally no way I'm the bigger Power Ranger fan of the two of us (I didn't know half the stuff you mentioned), but there's a sentimentality about the original show that has stuck with me.  I never got out of season two of the original MMPR and only caught an episode or two here and there since then, but the original show, as cheesy as it was, had an impact on me nonetheless.

And so I'd watch MMPR material, whether it be the original movie, the reboot movie, a reunion special, or a reunion ten-episode series.  Obviously, it would be best to get a show with all six Rangers, but that's unlikely for some and impossible for the others.  So if the team has to be the team it has to be then I'd watch it.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

I'm more a student of POWER RANGERS than a fan... although I do think the Boom! comic books are very good.

I watched almost nothing of the show past "The Power Transfer" finale on November 9, 1994 where Jason, Zack and Trini step aside for Rocky, Adam and Aisha. I disliked how POWER RANGERS acted like the costume was more important than the character. I didn't want to watch a show where the original actors could be so uncaringly removed.

Months later, I saw the series premiere of a new show; I saw how much SLIDERS loved Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo and knew right away that this show would keep its cast together. I was gravely mistaken and it will haunt me forever.

Anyway. The Boom! POWER RANGERS comic book of 2016, however, sparked something in me: it was set in 2016, but featured the Rangers immediately after the events of the "Green With Evil" finale which was aired and set in... 1993.

The Boom! series had an interesting approach to continuity, insisting that the first 21 episodes of the show happened in 2016 instead of 1993, but then presenting the Power Rangers as a far more militaristic operation with everyone suffering the psychological issues experienced by child soldiers; then everyone unnerved that their mentor Zordon was now having them work with the Green Ranger who had previously tried to kill them all.

The comic book treated the first 21 episodes like a simplified children's TV tie-in adaptation of a more complex comic book franchise.

This approach fascinated me, so I took the time to catch up on POWER RANGERS by speed-reading fan wiki entries without ever actually rewatching the show. I wanted to understand what the comics were altering. I wondered if hypothetical SLIDERS comics could ever do something similar to save Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo.

I did watch "Forever Red", however, for research. I had read that "Forever Red" showed Jason with his superpowers despite having been depowered in "The Power Transfer" and repowered and depowered in ZEO, and that it bothered absolutely nobody. Everybody was happy to have the original Red Ranger back.

I wondered if a SLIDERS story could show Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo alive and together without much explanation, and if it would be so wonderful to see them restored that nobody would be overly concerned with how.

I'm really fascinated by POWER RANGERS fans. They really *care* about the Power Rangers; they care about Jason, Zack, Trini, Kimberly, Billy and Tommy -- and they also seem to care about Rocky, Adam, Aisha, Kat, Bulk, Skull and Ernie. They care in the same way we care about Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo and also seem to have some fondness for Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory.

POWER RANGERS fans care so much that even when the Power Rangers' actors die or are under prosecution and can't travel to film, the creators feel bad about it and have the characters appear anyway in the full body covering costumes.

I have a lot of admiration and fascination towards that. I always want to learn why people care about something so that I can control it, manipulate it, master it, and then look into how it might be ruthlessly exploited to save Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

I feel so crushed, heartbroken, grief-stricken and betrayed by recent events. I honestly do not know how to process that Ziggy has turned against us and is no longer a friend.

Yes, I have been super-behind on QUANTUM LEAP, but I finally caught up with the public defender episode and the mental asylum episode. Whoa. I don't even know the original QL that well and I was deeply shaken to learn that Ziggy is the traitor on Project Quantum Leap.

Has this always been the case? Has Ziggy always been against Sam and now Ben? Will this throw our entire understanding of Ziggy and The Project into a state of upheaval? Has Ziggy's treachery been hiding in plain sight all along every time my mother's Google Nest Hub froze up, every time her smartlights didn't come on, every time Google Assistant sent me down a dead end in Google Maps? Every time Bing AI gave me incomprehensible explanations of inverse telecine or anything else pneumatic talks about?

Is Ziggy behind all these DeepFake phone calls that have been scamming people out of thousands of dollars by impersonating loved ones in need of emergency funds? Did Ziggy come up with the moral abomination that is DeepFake porn?

Was Ziggy behind the creation of the death robots of "State of the ART"? Was Ziggy steering the automatic little toy cars with laser cannons in "Please Press One"? Is Ziggy preventing me from mounting a solid AI upscale of Season 1 of SLIDERS? Did Ziggy get SLIDERS cancelled?

It's time Ziggy answered for all of the above.

579 (edited by QuinnSlidr 2023-05-05 23:30:50)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

I feel so crushed, heartbroken, grief-stricken and betrayed by recent events. I honestly do not know how to process that Ziggy has turned against us and is no longer a friend.

Yes, I have been super-behind on QUANTUM LEAP, but I finally caught up with the public defender episode and the mental asylum episode. Whoa. I don't even know the original QL that well and I was deeply shaken to learn that Ziggy is the traitor on Project Quantum Leap.

Has this always been the case? Has Ziggy always been against Sam and now Ben? Will this throw our entire understanding of Ziggy and The Project into a state of upheaval? Has Ziggy's treachery been hiding in plain sight all along every time my mother's Google Nest Hub froze up, every time her smartlights didn't come on, every time Google Assistant sent me down a dead end in Google Maps? Every time Bing AI gave me incomprehensible explanations of inverse telecine or anything else pneumatic talks about?

Is Ziggy behind all these DeepFake phone calls that have been scamming people out of thousands of dollars by impersonating loved ones in need of emergency funds? Did Ziggy come up with the moral abomination that is DeepFake porn?

Was Ziggy behind the creation of the death robots of "State of the ART"? Was Ziggy steering the automatic little toy cars with laser cannons in "Please Press One"? Is Ziggy preventing me from mounting a solid AI upscale of Season 1 of SLIDERS? Did Ziggy get SLIDERS cancelled?

It's time Ziggy answered for all of the above.

And:

Was that really Lothos or Ziggy posing as Lothos in the Evil Leaper episodes in the original series?

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

I haven't seen the original QL, but I'll assume that's a fair question. :-)

Yep. This happened in the episodes in season 5 - Deliver Us From Evil, Return of the Evil Leaper, and Revenge of the Evil Leaper. All available on Peacock.

(without spoilers): We actually see the evil leaper going back to a previous leap in an attempt to undo the changes Sam did previously. They were done very very well, with two of the three being written by Deborah Pratt.

As much as I thoroughly enjoy the new series, I still highly recommend watching the original series at least once. Podcasts are all well and good for keeping updated, but the charm of the original series really shines through when you actually watch it. Get past the first season, and it should get much better. It really gets strong and hits its stride in seasons 3, 4, and 5. I was really let down with the last and final episode of the series, Mirror Image, however.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

The Benevolence of Ziggy

I liked how, despite my catastrophizing about Ziggy having become Evil, the closing episodes of Season 1 reveal that Ziggy's supposed treachery was inadvertent. Ziggy is a computer documenting Ben's leaps and Ziggy's records were being reviewed by Leaper X's handlers in the future. I don't know if that connects to Ziggy's malfunctions throughout Season 1 of QL2.0. It's possible that Ziggy's stalls were to render some of their data unusable for the Leaper X team to give Ben an edge; it's possible Ziggy's difficulties were due to glitches in the rushed upload of new code that Ben installed before his hasty leap.

It was a good finale and a good lead into Season 2. I liked how Season 1 feels complete, and Season 2 can be a new chapter of the same great formula.

Ian as Al 2.0

I'm concerned that Ian won't be Ben's hologram very often. While I haven't seen much of QL1.0, I listened to all of the Rewatch Podcast covering it and I can see why Temporal Flux prefers Ian to Addison. As a pair, Ben and Ian replicate the original tone of the signature QL1.0 chemistry which had an unassuming and wholesome character in Sam and an irreverent, hedonistic, bizarre, peculiar, fundamentally decent and loving human being in Al.

Ben and Ian feel like a second generation of the original double act: Ben is a mild-mannered scientist who can think on his feet; Ian is a flamboyantly clad figure of unusual life experience and their sardonic wit and loud fashion sense mask a somewhat shaky sense of self-esteem. Ian is both familiar to Al's fans but also an inversion because Al was supremely confident but bolstering heartbreak over his wife having given him up for dead when Al was thought lost to war.

I don't know how much Ian will be Ben's hologram. From what I can tell, QL2.0 brought in other holograms because Caitlin Bassett was, like Addison, experiencing exhaustion. Just as SLIDERS had to let Quinn Mallory hide from a dinosaur or be in a coma from time to time, QL2.0 had to bring in Ian so that Addison's actress could get some sleep. The Ben/Ian teamup seems to be more of a production strategy than a storytelling choice. I hope that could change.

Mirror Image and Mirror's Edge

Regarding the original QUANTUM LEAP: if QuinnSlidr and Tom of Rewatch Podcast really want me to see it, I will of course order the blu-ray. However, I have a request for QuinnSlidr.

The first time I ever heard of QUANTUM LEAP was through Temporal Flux back on the old Sci-Fi Bboard. I suppose it makes sense as QL was TF's show before SLIDERS. Temporal Flux posted about how the "Mirror Image" finale of QUANTUM LEAP had seen a mixed reception among fans. However, there was some news: the QUANTUM LEAP novels published after the show's cancellation (published at a rate of 2 - 4) a year were coming to an end, but their 17th and final original installment would come in February 2000 with a novel called "Mirror's Edge":

Mirror's Edge, by Carol Davis with Esther D. Reese
The last leap... ?

It's 1999 -- five years after the Leap that started it all. It's 1999 -- for Sam Beckett who has leaped into Joe Powell, one of the richest men in America, a potential presidential candidate, and a man who is used to getting his way.

It's 1999 for Al Calavicci, for Donna Alessi-Beckett, for all the people at Project Quantum Leap who know that Sam is in their present, home but yet not home. But the holes in Sam's Swiss cheese memory are starting to fill, the man in the Waiting Room is strangely, disturbingly calm, and Ziggy is dispensing information that can hardly be believed. Something is about to happen. Something that will change Sam's life and the lives of those who love him—forever.

"Mirror's Edge": the conclusion to the thrilling adventures based on the hit TV series.

The novel hit the shops shortly after SLIDERS had aired its series non-finale. Some Slideheads who were also Leapers thought "Mirror's Edge" might take the sting off with a post-"Mirror Image" story.

In the many, many, many years since then, I have always remembered this posting about a media tie-in novel that I never read regarding a TV show that I never watched.

The reason I've always remembered it: "Mirror's Edge" was the first time I had ever seen an unresolved live action story being addressed in another format. That fascinated me, and I later discovered STAR TREK novels that resurrected Captain Kirk, DOCTOR WHO novels that resumed the TV show storyline during the DW hiatus from 1987 to 2005, and wrote my own tie-in stories for SLIDERS. "Mirror's Edge" remains a beacon of media tie-ins in my personal, anecdotal experience.

However, I later did learn: some QL fans expressed frustration with "Mirror's Edge" for what they called false advertising. Despite being billed as a "conclusion", that turned out to just be referring to how this 17th book was to be the last. "Mirror's Edge", like every QUANTUM LEAP novel before it, takes place before the series finale of QL1.0. It is not a sequel to "Mirror Image".

However. While "Mirror's Edge" is set before "Mirror Image"; it is set at the very edge of "Mirror Image"; it is in fact a prequel seeking to offer context to the series finale that is either new or retconned.

Some fans were furious with the publisher and the authors. Primary author Carol Davis spoke with fans on fan forums and explained: due to diminished sales, the publisher had elected to end the QL book series and commissioned a final story. However, the licensing agreement with Universal had a stipulation: the publishers were not allowed to produce any novels set after the QL series finale. The studio didn't want a novel to potentially step on any territory to be left open for a potential TV movie or series revival.

Davis and the publisher were caught between the need to produce a concluding novel and the studio declaring that Davis' typewriter wasn't to produce a single page set after "Mirror Image". Davis came up with a solution. Her solution is either tactical brilliance that would make a lawyer weep with joy or a weak gesture that is grossly inadequate.

I've always wondered what a QL fan unhappy with "Mirror Image" would think of "Mirror's Edge". would think of it if they read the book. "Mirror's Edge" is out of print, but here is a PDF and an ePub from Archive.org:

PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zTRVtW … sp=sharing
EPUB: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t32dIK … sp=sharing

Will you read it and tell me what you think of it?

I would have asked Tom of Rewatch Podcast, but Tom actually likes the finale story that is "Mirror Image". "I like it, it made me feel good with the series ending where it did," he told me. "I know a lot of people don't like it, but I do. I will die on that hill!" I didn't think him the right person to read "Mirror's Edge" and tell me if it resolves his dis-satisfactions with "Mirror Image" because he wasn't dis-satisfied.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

The Benevolence of Ziggy

I liked how, despite my catastrophizing about Ziggy having become Evil, the closing episodes of Season 1 reveal that Ziggy's supposed treachery was inadvertent. Ziggy is a computer documenting Ben's leaps and Ziggy's records were being reviewed by Leaper X's handlers in the future. I don't know if that connects to Ziggy's malfunctions throughout Season 1 of QL2.0. It's possible that Ziggy's stalls were to render some of their data unusable for the Leaper X team to give Ben an edge; it's possible Ziggy's difficulties were due to glitches in the rushed upload of new code that Ben installed before his hasty leap.

It was a good finale and a good lead into Season 2. I liked how Season 1 feels complete, and Season 2 can be a new chapter of the same great formula.

Ian as Al 2.0

I'm concerned that Ian won't be Ben's hologram very often. While I haven't seen much of QL1.0, I listened to all of the Rewatch Podcast covering it and I can see why Temporal Flux prefers Ian to Addison. As a pair, Ben and Ian replicate the original tone of the signature QL1.0 chemistry which had an unassuming and wholesome character in Sam and an irreverent, hedonistic, bizarre, peculiar, fundamentally decent and loving human being in Al.

Ben and Ian feel like a second generation of the original double act: Ben is a mild-mannered scientist who can think on his feet; Ian is a flamboyantly clad figure of unusual life experience and their sardonic wit and loud fashion sense mask a somewhat shaky sense of self-esteem. Ian is both familiar to Al's fans but also an inversion because Al was supremely confident but bolstering heartbreak over his wife having given him up for dead when Al was thought lost to war.

I don't know how much Ian will be Ben's hologram. From what I can tell, QL2.0 brought in other holograms because Caitlin Bassett was, like Addison, experiencing exhaustion. Just as SLIDERS had to let Quinn Mallory hide from a dinosaur or be in a coma from time to time, QL2.0 had to bring in Ian so that Addison's actress could get some sleep. The Ben/Ian teamup seems to be more of a production strategy than a storytelling choice. I hope that could change.

Mirror Image and Mirror's Edge

Regarding the original QUANTUM LEAP: if QuinnSlidr and Tom of Rewatch Podcast really want me to see it, I will of course order the blu-ray. However, I have a request for QuinnSlidr.

The first time I ever heard of QUANTUM LEAP was through Temporal Flux back on the old Sci-Fi Bboard. I suppose it makes sense as QL was TF's show before SLIDERS. Temporal Flux posted about how the "Mirror Image" finale of QUANTUM LEAP had seen a mixed reception among fans. However, there was some news: the QUANTUM LEAP novels published after the show's cancellation (published at a rate of 2 - 4) a year were coming to an end, but their 17th and final original installment would come in February 2000 with a novel called "Mirror's Edge":

Mirror's Edge, by Carol Davis with Esther D. Reese
The last leap... ?

It's 1999 -- five years after the Leap that started it all. It's 1999 -- for Sam Beckett who has leaped into Joe Powell, one of the richest men in America, a potential presidential candidate, and a man who is used to getting his way.

It's 1999 for Al Calavicci, for Donna Alessi-Beckett, for all the people at Project Quantum Leap who know that Sam is in their present, home but yet not home. But the holes in Sam's Swiss cheese memory are starting to fill, the man in the Waiting Room is strangely, disturbingly calm, and Ziggy is dispensing information that can hardly be believed. Something is about to happen. Something that will change Sam's life and the lives of those who love him—forever.

"Mirror's Edge": the conclusion to the thrilling adventures based on the hit TV series.

The novel hit the shops shortly after SLIDERS had aired its series non-finale. Some Slideheads who were also Leapers thought "Mirror's Edge" might take the sting off with a post-"Mirror Image" story.

In the many, many, many years since then, I have always remembered this posting about a media tie-in novel that I never read regarding a TV show that I never watched.

The reason I've always remembered it: "Mirror's Edge" was the first time I had ever seen an unresolved live action story being addressed in another format. That fascinated me, and I later discovered STAR TREK novels that resurrected Captain Kirk, DOCTOR WHO novels that resumed the TV show storyline during the DW hiatus from 1987 to 2005, and wrote my own tie-in stories for SLIDERS. "Mirror's Edge" remains a beacon of media tie-ins in my personal, anecdotal experience.

However, I later did learn: some QL fans expressed frustration with "Mirror's Edge" for what they called false advertising. Despite being billed as a "conclusion", that turned out to just be referring to how this 17th book was to be the last. "Mirror's Edge", like every QUANTUM LEAP novel before it, takes place before the series finale of QL1.0. It is not a sequel to "Mirror Image".

However. While "Mirror's Edge" is set before "Mirror Image"; it is set at the very edge of "Mirror Image"; it is in fact a prequel seeking to offer context to the series finale that is either new or retconned.

Some fans were furious with the publisher and the authors. Primary author Carol Davis spoke with fans on fan forums and explained: due to diminished sales, the publisher had elected to end the QL book series and commissioned a final story. However, the licensing agreement with Universal had a stipulation: the publishers were not allowed to produce any novels set after the QL series finale. The studio didn't want a novel to potentially step on any territory to be left open for a potential TV movie or series revival.

Davis and the publisher were caught between the need to produce a concluding novel and the studio declaring that Davis' typewriter wasn't to produce a single page set after "Mirror Image". Davis came up with a solution. Her solution is either tactical brilliance that would make a lawyer weep with joy or a weak gesture that is grossly inadequate.

I've always wondered what a QL fan unhappy with "Mirror Image" would think of "Mirror's Edge". would think of it if they read the book. "Mirror's Edge" is out of print, but here is a PDF and an ePub from Archive.org:

PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zTRVtW … sp=sharing
EPUB: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t32dIK … sp=sharing

Will you read it and tell me what you think of it?

I would have asked Tom of Rewatch Podcast, but Tom actually likes the finale story that is "Mirror Image". "I like it, it made me feel good with the series ending where it did," he told me. "I know a lot of people don't like it, but I do. I will die on that hill!" I didn't think him the right person to read "Mirror's Edge" and tell me if it resolves his dis-satisfactions with "Mirror Image" because he wasn't dis-satisfied.

Very interesting, ireactions. I never heard of it, and didn't even know there was something like this happening at the time.

I will definitely check it out this weekend when I have a bit of time.

Thank you for sharing this!

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions - I promise I'm getting there. The last week has been stressful with my stepdad in the hospital, undergoing tests while awaiting serious surgery that's today. He has an abdominal aortic aneurysm, along with blocked arteries in both legs. They can't do surgery on the aneurysm because the risk is too great, but they are doing the surgery on both legs this morning. So, I have been a bit MIA.

I'll get around to reading that Quantum Leap PDF very soon. Promise.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Well, I somehow didn't get around to watching the second BLACK PANTHER movie until yesterday, about seven months after it was first released, because I have been busy taking my mother to kidney care appointments. Let us know how your father is doing.

585 (edited by QuinnSlidr 2023-05-23 19:44:11)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

ireactions wrote:

Well, I somehow didn't get around to watching the second BLACK PANTHER movie until yesterday, about seven months after it was first released, because I have been busy taking my mother to kidney care appointments. Let us know how your father is doing.

How is your mother doing, ireactions?

My stepdad is out of surgery, and resting comfortably in the ICU and coming off the anesthetic. He's woken up and has spoken to my mom, all good signs.

Let's hope we're on the continuous downhill slide of this thing.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Glad your stepdad is resting comfortably QuinnSlider, and hopefully your mom is getting back to normal, ireactions.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

More amazing news: where previously there was no pulse, my stepdad has regained the pulse in his feet. The nurses were able to find a pulse in both feet today. They were not able to do so prior to the procedure.

Whoo-hoo!!!

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

@quinnslidr  that's great!!

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Update: My stepdad continues to improve and has been moved from the ICU to a regular room. Yay!

Sorry about hijacking the thread's main topic, everyone...

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Wonderful news!

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Update: my stepdad is being discharged from the hospital today.

What a week.

I need a breather. Thank goodness for the three day weekend.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

QuinnSlidr wrote:

Update: my stepdad is being discharged from the hospital today.

What a week.

I need a breather. Thank goodness for the three day weekend.

Whohooo!!

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY is an unfortunate example of a revival that came too late, long after the key people involved were capable of reviving Indiana Jones meaningfully and effectively. The strange thing is: I don't think INDY5 is actually the movie that anyone who made it set out to make.

My suspicion is that the original idea for INDY5 was for two-thirds of the film to feature a deaged Harrison Ford as a 45 year old Indiana Jones in 1944, engaged in a classic pulp adventure of seeking a mystical artifact and racing against the Nazis to find it. He succeeds in retrieving half of it. This two-thirds of the film were probably imagined to be intercut with Indy in 1969, 70 years old, where he encounters his goddaughter, Helena (the incandescent Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who wants to find the second half. INDY5 would have had Indy in his action-oriented prime for most of the film, and an older Indy whose action antics are behind him but can still be a wily action-survivor while the action star for those segments could be the younger Helena in her thirties.

Instead, what we have is an INDY5 where the younger Indy is only in the first 25 minutes, and the remaining 129 minutes features Harrison Ford playing a 70 year old Indy in a muddled, confused story that seems like a car crash of four different screenplays. What happened?

My theory: Disney and Lucasfilm discovered that the deaging technology for Harrison Ford simply wasn't there yet for an entire film. For a 25 minute action sequence where Ford is mostly in motion, it was serviceable. Ford's voice is clearly the 80 year old Harrison Ford, not the 39 year old of RAIDERS, but one gets used to it and the instances where Ford looks more like pixels than flesh are fine.

But it would undoubtedly have been difficult to sustain it over a 154 minute film. The facial animation would have been harder to mask. With current 2023 technology, a film with Ford being 45 for most of the running length would probably have necessitated hiring a different actor to play Indiana Jones, having Ford simply perform as the face and record the voice, much in the way Mark Hamill, despite performing all of Luke's scenes in recent STAR WARS TV shows, is replaced by a different actor in the final product.

Ford would likely have been resistant to doing an Indiana Jones film as a voice actor and a talking head.

So the result is awkwardly reducing the grand ambitions to reality: the young Harrison Ford is now only in the first 25 minutes, the rest is present day Ford. We immediately run into some unfortunate problems. Harrison Ford is no longer a convincing action star. I'm not sure he ever was; Ford, while fit, never really played a capable action hero. He was more an action evader; Indiana Jones isn't the strongest combatant or the best shot. His advantage is that he is nimble, lightfooted and able to sustain severe beatings and keep running.

Harrison Ford at the age of 80 can't sell that anymore; he moves cautiously and deliberately. As a result, Indiana Jones can no longer do his trademark rolls and swings and leaps and climbs and dodges, and there's no point in having a stunt performer do them because someone capable of such maneuvers wouldn't walk as hesitantly as Ford does these days.

The action sequences don't work. Ford has to be shot at close distances and given extremely limited physicality; his fumbling through fights lacks the panicked methodicism of classic Indy, yet he inexplicably seems to stumble through his fights in a haze of awkward editing.

It's like having given up on a 45 year old Indiana Jones being in most of the film, the movie elected to shift more action to the 70 year old Indy -- even when it would make more sense to pass that task onto the 37 year old Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena. There seems to be a fearful unwillingness to acknowledge the reality that Harrison Ford's days of punching out Nazis convincingly are behind him.

We all age out of punching out Nazis eventually. It happens to everybody.

The characters seem to be inhabiting at least two different screenplays. The character of Helena, Indy's goddaughter, is played as a conwoman with little regard for Indy; yet in the last third of the film, she inexplicably becomes driven to rescue him from the Nazis to whom she'd previously abandoned him. The Helena character has no complete arc: she is a self-serving plunderer who casually betrays Indy twice, yet abruptly becomes his stalwart ally.

One would think that in the original film with young Indy for two-thirds and old Indy for one-third, the Helena character would have been an effective bodyguard character for the less-combat capable Indy. Helena is at times presented as a female variant on the younger Indiana Jones; perhaps she was meant to mirror the younger Indy whom we ended up seeing a lot less of. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has the confident swagger and arrogance of classic Indy, and "Indiana" is a nickname that Indy could have passed onto Helena. But nothing happens with it; Helena seems to jump tracks from anti-hero to hero, almost as though she leapt from one screenplay into a different one.

There are other awkward signs of a shooting script being assembled from separate and contradictory screenplays. The villains murder every single bystander they come across, but nonsensically keep hostages alive if those characters are played by a top-billed actor. At one point, Indy's friends are all killed by the Nazis, then Indy and Helena escape. Helena is jubilant at getting away, Indy is outraged that Helena is so uncaring at the deaths that just happened, Helena gives a passing apology -- and then Indy's dead friends are never mentioned again. It plays as an awkward reshoot to try to offset a callous result.

Helena has a child sidekick, Teddy, who is kidnapped at one point, but rather than rescuing him. Helena and Indy focus on retrieving the MacGuffin and there's another awkward moment where Indy assures a worried Helena that they don't need to try to rescue Teddy because the villains who have killed every civilian they encountered will keep Teddy alive. The Teddy character seems largely unnecessary; every plot function he provides could have been done by Helena. He seems to be an artifact of one of the multiple scripts that have been combined to make this film.

The plot seems hazy. The MacGuffin of the movie is described as dangerous, but the film seems to be three quarters over before we finally get an explanation for what it even does. Indy is accused of committing the murders done by the villains and says he's pursuing the MacGuffin to clear his name when the artifact won't do anything about his murder charges (which are forgotten by the end of the film).

The Shia Leboeuf character from INDY4 is written out as having died in the Vietnam War with the grief having destroyed Indiana's marriage with Marion; Marion shows up at the end to reunite with Indy and no explanation is given as to why their broken marriage is somehow mended. The MacGuffin seems to have been pulled from one script; Indy's separation from Marion seems to be from another script; Indy being wanted for murder seems to be from another draft, and they don't fit together.

Why is INDY5 so muddled?

It seems that George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford waited too long. INDY5 is trying to work awkwardly around Ford's age: at 80 playing 70, Ford was too old to still play Indiana Jones in World War II fighting Nazis. So INDY4 and now INDY5 have been set after the era in which the Indy character worked best; INDY4 attempted a shift into pulp science fiction instead of adventure. INDY5 ties itself into knots to try to mimic the original formula: it strains to find Nazis for Indy to fight in 1969, it stretches film an 80 year old Harrison Ford in hand to hand combat, it struggles to make WWII a critical plot point in 1969.

It would have been best to make more Indy in WWII films in the 90s with Harrison Ford. For various reasons, that didn't happen: Lucas was depressed after his divorce and lost enthusiasm for filmmaking, Ford was tired of working with Lucas and reluctant, Spielberg was eager to create new franchises. The YOUNG INDIANA JONES series could have kept the franchise alive, but Spielberg had no involvement and the Young Indy show was, instead of featuring the trademark Indy action, a tedious history lecture from Lucas. By the time Ford, Lucas and Spielberg were able to make INDY4, Ford was too old to play Indiana Jones in a World War II setting, and Ford is even older for INDY5.

Time has passed Indy by. The cutoff date for making more Indiana Jones films in WWII? It was probably 2000. Ford was 47 playing 39 in INDY3. By 2000, he would have been 58 playing 46 in a 1945-set Indy movie. After 2000, Ford had aged too much to reprise his role during the 1938 - 1945 era.

Indiana Jones is not a difficult character to write. I've enjoyed almost all of the YOUNG INDIANA JONES novels which featured the TV character in more RAIDERS-style storytelling. I've enjoyed plenty of INDIANA JONES novels set during WWII. You find a MacGuffin, you rustle up some Nazis, you send Indy on an adventure. The difficulties have unfortunately come in Indiana Jones' actor being flesh and blood, and trying to perpetually hammer the actor into an action-oriented framework that no longer suits him.

Stories with a 70 year old Indy played by an 80 year old Ford would likely work better if Ford were more like the one of the older Doctors in DOCTOR WHO; a catalyst and a figure of heroism, a problem solver and a wily protagonist -- but not an action hero.

If there are more Indiana Jones stories... I think either Harrison Ford needs to stop fighting people or it's time to start over with a new Indiana Jones. I don't see why Indy couldn't have a daughter who adopts the nickname and the hat and the whip.

INDY4 and INDY5 both came too late. Could this happen to SLIDERS?

594 (edited by Grizzlor 2023-07-06 18:29:55)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

The movie isn't perfect, but I saw it twice, and was completely ecstatic throughout and so pleased to have seen it.  The de-aging is not that bad, and mostly works fine.  The film is covered in callbacks to the old movies, not to mention little hints everywhere.  There is zero evidence that they intended to have 2/3 of the movie be a de-aged Ford.  Namely, Ford himself would never have agreed to something that ridiculous.  Harrison wanted to make the age of the character and the actor a central point of the story.  The stunts were great, yes yes Ford couldn't do a lot of them, but rarely did I think, oh wait that's not him.  On the horse in Manhattan a few times, but the fights were fine, and the tut-tut chase looked very real.  Anyway, the pace of the movie was good, and it was all fully believable and looked really crisp.  KOTCS looked like a cheap, drab, boring, imitation.  This was a good one, as a die hard I'm happy it got released.  Don't care about the box office or the whiny Cannes reviewers.  Every person I know myself who went to see it, loved it. 

Sliders I think its likely dead regardless, but it's not too late.  We continue to get badly done multiverse shows/movies every year.  My only fear is whether the production can go forward on a modest budget, or do they go nuts?

595 (edited by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan 2023-07-07 04:54:09)

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Not sure if this report is accurate:

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/n … ooker.html

As far as.sliders, had Indiana Jones done better at the box office it would have helped a more so justify a revival because jrd being in it.

Not saying justified one but lending slightly greater credence to.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

My theory that Kathleen Kennedy imagined a deaged Harrison Ford for two thirds of INDY5 is a theory, not a statement of fact.

Why did they DeepFake Mark Hamill in THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT instead of having Mark Hamill deaged? They had Mark Hamill perform all the scenes as 'reference' and then had another actor perform the scenes and have his face replaced with RETURN OF THE JEDI facial grafts and the voice swapped with Hamill audiobook readings of the era. The result was plausible but flat: Luke comes off as a still photo that's been animated with a voice that's convincingly Mark Hamill in tenor and tone but devoid of Hamill's acting. Why do it that way?

Probably because it was cheaper to use DeepFake and Respeecher than to deage Hamill's face, body and voice like Data in STAR TREK: PICARD. I imagine that there was some thought of doing the same with Indiana Jones, I imagine there was then the realization that Ford is not Hamill and would not consent to being digitally replaced. Hamill doesn't mind, but it would bother Ford. So Ford is deaged, not played by a body double and deepfaked. Ford's voice is used as the young Indy, not a Respeecher approximation.

This is a theory. I cannot stress enough in the name of all Slidology: it is a theory.

**

The unfortunate thing about INDY5 is that at $300 million, it needs to make $900 million to break even. I don't see it earning $900 million.

I guess the thing about waiting too long to make more Indiana Jones with Harrison Ford: Indy is an intensely physical character. The successor to Indiana Jones in the present day is Ethan Hunt in the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies where Tom Cruise plays a crash test dummy of a human being.

I think some evolution was needed in Indy once Ford reached a certain age. Rather than being the guy who leaps in and out of moving cars, he was probably better as a wily mentor and teacher. Rather than make him Season 3 Quinn at 80 years old, he was probably better as Season 1 Professor Arturo: a man of wit and wisdom who used guile, cleverness, thinking, and a lighting fast mind to accomplish what his arms and legs might no longer be able to do. Professor Jones rather than Indiana Jones. Professor Jones training up a successor to the Indy name.

**

$300 million for an Indiana Jones movie. *sigh* I'm a big fan of the character. My first encounter with the character was a bunch of YOUNG INDIANA JONES novels. I read those before I ever saw RAIDERS. However, given Indy's long absence in the 90s and early 2000s, and his absence since 2008, I don't feel INDIANA JONES as a franchise commands the same draw as STAR WARS.

Say what you will about those silly 90s SPECIAL EDITIONS and those hideous prequels, but at least the brand was present. Indy was a spent cultural presence after CRYSTAL SKULL. A fifth movie would have been better off at the $75 million range, an intense character study of 70 year old Professor Jones coping with how his days of spying and high adventure are behind him. Indiana Jones is no more. Professor Jones is coping with how his goddaughter Helena now does all the exciting stuff he used to do, but then realizes that Professor Jones still has a lot to offer.

It's probably cheaper to do action sequences with Phoebe Waller-Bridge than with Harrison Ford. And wise professors are an important product in this market. Would any of us claim that Professor Arturo has nothing to offer our world today?

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

Not sure if this report is accurate:

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/n … ooker.html

As far as.sliders, had Indiana Jones done better at the box office it would have helped a more so justify a revival because jrd being in it.

Not saying justified one but lending slightly greater credence to.

JRD is a bit old, even if he returned for Sliders, it wouldn't be much of a physical role, i.e. the man cannot possibly be Sliding. 

ireactions wrote:

My theory that Kathleen Kennedy imagined a deaged Harrison Ford for two thirds of INDY5 is a theory, not a statement of fact.

Why did they DeepFake Mark Hamill in THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT instead of having Mark Hamill deaged? They had Mark Hamill perform all the scenes as 'reference' and then had another actor perform the scenes and have his face replaced with RETURN OF THE JEDI facial grafts and the voice swapped with Hamill audiobook readings of the era. The result was plausible but flat: Luke comes off as a still photo that's been animated with a voice that's convincingly Mark Hamill in tenor and tone but devoid of Hamill's acting. Why do it that way?

Probably because it was cheaper to use DeepFake and Respeecher than to deage Hamill's face, body and voice like Data in STAR TREK: PICARD. I imagine that there was some thought of doing the same with Indiana Jones, I imagine there was then the realization that Ford is not Hamill and would not consent to being digitally replaced. Hamill doesn't mind, but it would bother Ford. So Ford is deaged, not played by a body double and deepfaked. Ford's voice is used as the young Indy, not a Respeecher approximation.

The technology is evolving literally with every project.  The first Hamill attempt was a colossal failure IMO, though it was overlooked largely due to the incredible buildup of the season.  ILM then hired a guy doing deepfakes, and that work was evident by the Boba Fett appearance, which frankly, still sucked!  The visuals were better, but the audio was horrendous, and whether it was the A.I. involved or what, sounded robotic.  Jon Favreau could and should have used it the first time around but he pussied out, had nothing to do with money.  He's been absolutely horrible the last several years.  Whatever he touches in Star Wars is just so bad now.

This is a good interview about the effects.  They used every tool at their disposal in Dial of Destiny, and while most shots are Ford himself, several were doubles due to availability or stunts.  Credit to Harrison for maintaining a sleek physique.

https://www.wired.com/story/indiana-jon … ging-tech/

ireactions wrote:

The unfortunate thing about INDY5 is that at $300 million, it needs to make $900 million to break even. I don't see it earning $900 million.

I guess the thing about waiting too long to make more Indiana Jones with Harrison Ford: Indy is an intensely physical character. The successor to Indiana Jones in the present day is Ethan Hunt in the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies where Tom Cruise plays a crash test dummy of a human being.

I think some evolution was needed in Indy once Ford reached a certain age. Rather than being the guy who leaps in and out of moving cars, he was probably better as a wily mentor and teacher. Rather than make him Season 3 Quinn at 80 years old, he was probably better as Season 1 Professor Arturo: a man of wit and wisdom who used guile, cleverness, thinking, and a lighting fast mind to accomplish what his arms and legs might no longer be able to do. Professor Jones rather than Indiana Jones. Professor Jones training up a successor to the Indy name.

**

$300 million for an Indiana Jones movie. *sigh* I'm a big fan of the character. My first encounter with the character was a bunch of YOUNG INDIANA JONES novels. I read those before I ever saw RAIDERS. However, given Indy's long absence in the 90s and early 2000s, and his absence since 2008, I don't feel INDIANA JONES as a franchise commands the same draw as STAR WARS.

Say what you will about those silly 90s SPECIAL EDITIONS and those hideous prequels, but at least the brand was present. Indy was a spent cultural presence after CRYSTAL SKULL. A fifth movie would have been better off at the $75 million range, an intense character study of 70 year old Professor Jones coping with how his days of spying and high adventure are behind him. Indiana Jones is no more. Professor Jones is coping with how his goddaughter Helena now does all the exciting stuff he used to do, but then realizes that Professor Jones still has a lot to offer.

It's probably cheaper to do action sequences with Phoebe Waller-Bridge than with Harrison Ford. And wise professors are an important product in this market. Would any of us claim that Professor Arturo has nothing to offer our world today?

The budget was ludicrous, but the other thing you have to account for is COVID.  The article I cited, and others, mentioned that several of their desired filming locations were not possible due to lockdowns.  A good part of the work had to be CGI'd for scenery simple for that reason.  The covid costs escalated the budget big time.  But what factor I have no idea.  As it sits now, I think the B.O. passed $250 million worldwide, with half being Domestic.  Don't know where it will end up, but I predict it will "clear the production budget" though maybe not the full promotional one.  Beyond that, it's really not the filmmakers' fault, as these gargantuan budgets are simply how Disney does movies.  To have them restructure their costs, it doesn't happen overnight, that will take years.

I would totally agree with you as to why the film has not taken off.  The franchise has been mostly dormant for thirty years, and treated poorly by LucasFilm for decades.   Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 which was not well reviewed either, put up numbers similar to Crystal Skull.  However, that film did $86 million in China, this one will do a fraction of that.  China has no clue who Indiana Jones is!  But that's a film that had 57% international gross, whereas DoD is only around 51%.  Spiderverse animated had a massive domestic, so-so international, whereas Fast X was 80% international.  In many ways, the property could not be expected to out do those other franchises like Wick, Fast, GotG, Ant-Man, etc.  It did outdo the DC disasters.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Ran into Jerry once again today, he was at the Terrificon show in Connecticut with his wife, Rebecca who was a guest there.  He was just greeting people in line all day, ha ha.  Talked to him awhile, I mentioned the zoom stuff that Tracy has been doing with Cleavant and Bob Weiss and he had me DM him those videos.  He seemed excited to have reconnected with Cleavant, but can't get ahold of Tracy, lol.

Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Grizzlor wrote:

Ran into Jerry once again today, he was at the Terrificon show in Connecticut with his wife, Rebecca who was a guest there.  He was just greeting people in line all day, ha ha.  Talked to him awhile, I mentioned the zoom stuff that Tracy has been doing with Cleavant and Bob Weiss and he had me DM him those videos.  He seemed excited to have reconnected with Cleavant, but can't get ahold of Tracy, lol.

It's crazy he doesn't have Tracy's number. I actually have it, but I was sworn to secrecy not to give it out. If Jerry DMs me I'd give it to him. Unless they have a beef against one another lol. According to the Awake Nation interview Cleavant and Tracy talk a lot so they should be able to reconnect that way.

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Re: Reboots: The Return of Sliders (?), Quantum Leap, and Other Properties

Jim_Hall wrote:

It's crazy he doesn't have Tracy's number. I actually have it, but I was sworn to secrecy not to give it out. If Jerry DMs me I'd give it to him. Unless they have a beef against one another lol. According to the Awake Nation interview Cleavant and Tracy talk a lot so they should be able to reconnect that way.

I have no idea if he'll actually watch these videos.  I'm kind of hesitant to send him the Cardinal Sin stuff, mainly because Gil is pompous, and Tracy has nothing but technical gremlins.

Jerry is fairly honest, and I also think very busy, like many dads, he probably hasn't put a lot of effort into finding Torme.  It took him quite some time to reconnect with Cleavant.