wingsandsword

This show actually managed to make me cheer for Morgana Le Fae and spend most of my time watching it waiting for Arthur to die.

It turns Arthurian legend into some twisted version of it where Uther Pendragon is a genocidal tyrant who only recently went on a bloody, genocidal purge of all wizards and druids in the Kingdom, up to and including slaughtering infants because they possessed magical talent.

It turns Arthur Pendragon from the wise and heroic King of legend into a spoiled, arrogant brat.

It turns Morgana le Fay from an evil witch to an unloved and neglected young lady whose only reason to dislike Arthur and Camelot is that her parents were killed in their genocidal purge, and the only reason she wasn't killed is that nobody knows she's a sorceress (then, in the later seasons, has her suddenly be malevolent out of nowhere, as the writers probably realized she was becoming far sympathetic than the "heroes")

It similarly turns Mordred into a sympathetic figure as well, who like Morgana is only opposed to the Pendragon dynasty and Camelot on very justifiable grounds.

In this version of Arthurian legend, all the troubles of Camelot owe themselves to a bloody, genocidal purge that Uther Pendragon began twenty years before when he mis-blamed a witch for killing his wife, because his wife died in childbirth.

It turns Merlin from a wise and sage advisor into a put-upon servant who spends his time mucking out stables and doing other menial labor all while secretly saving Arthur and Camelot repeatedly.

It invents a new character of Gaius as a mentor to Merlin, who was a wizard who betrayed his own kind to survive the purge, and now lives as Uther's court physician. This traitor who was complicit in genocide is supposed to be a sympathetic mentor.

The more I reflect on the show years later, the more I can think that the show really did nothing but make me wait for when Arthur would die and Camelot would fall and wonder why would Merlin repeatedly place himself in danger for a Kingdom that wasn't worth saving and a royal house that deserved to fall.

The premise is that a time-travelling police officer goes into the past to hunt down a group of criminals.

It reminds me a lot of of the cheesy early 90's sci-fi show Time Trax, a lot of the same concepts, and this is basically a modern remake. Compared to its predecessor it plays the premise more for drama than pure action, and definitely shows the advances of 20 years of TV production.

It's a fun series, well written, great effects, and generally entertaining.

One nagging problem I have is that the protagonist is definitely not the "good guy". It's clearly established in the Pilot that the "North American Union" is a totalitarian corporatocracy, where the leaders of the 10 largest companies have unchallenged total control over North America after the "Corporate Rights Act" was passed in 2063, and freedoms like speech and assembly are abolished.

The "terrorists" that are the villains are trying to fight this dictatorship and start a revolution, but are arrested and sentenced to public mass execution for bombing the headquarters of the corporate government, but use some time travel device to go back in time to make their escape. Intending to only go back 6 years, far back enough to prevent their arrest and bring on their revolution, instead they go back 65 years and are stuck in modern-day Vancouver.

I kept watching the show thinking it's amazing we're supposed to be cheering for the police officer. I realized in later episodes they went to more lengths to make the fugitives less sympathetic, but we essentially have a fascist from the future trying to make sure her horrible, dystopian nightmare comes true fighting against a group of freedom fighters trying to prevent the death of democracy with the help of the younger self of the person who founds one of the megacorporations and invents much of the future technology.

This movie is just another WWII drama, one of the countless that Hollywood shoveled out in the 50's. Nothing particularly remarkable about the characters or plot, it's just the simple story of a demolitions group out to destroy a barely submerged bridge that Nazi tanks are using to cross a river. The characters are not particularly memorable, it just seems to blend in with the zillion other WWII movies made over the years.

It's not that it's bad, it's just bland and forgettable. It is very dry and procedural, it has almost a documentary feel to it in places (the heavy use of file footage of tanks and artillery contribute to this).

If I can make any compliment about it, it is that documentary feel to it, it doesn't relish the drama, it's about men on a mission and accomplishing that mission.

This movie was terrible.

I was more than a little tempted to just get up and walk out early in the movie, when it just wasn't funny. I thought maybe it would pick up and really get going soon, it didn't. It tries to be a romantic comedy, and what little chemistry exists between the couple is ruined by Robin Williams trying to be funny while doing unfunny things. Instead he comes off as a creepy, sadistic voyeur with a phony veneer of humor (and a minister having a prepubescent boy sidekick with him at apparently all times day and night is more than a little creepy in it's own right).

There isn't a single funny joke in the film that's not in the trailer, not one. There are a lot of gags that fall flat though.

The whole thing made me miss the time when Robin Williams in a movie was a sign it was going to be a great film.

In retrospect, I should have gone with my hunch and just walked out early, and saved myself the time.

MASH was one of the most popular TV shows of all time, and the members of the 4077th became well known and beloved characters to the entire country.

After more than a decade, people did want to know what happened to all of them after the war. Did Klinger find Soon-Lee's family? How did Radar fare back on the farm? Did Mulcahy get his hearing back? It would have made a fine TV movie, or maybe even a miniseries to have a big reunion of the 4077th stateside after the war (like they talked about doing a few times during the series). See that Klinger found his wife's family and they moved back to the US, only to face racism and discrimination, and is down on his luck as a petty crook trying to make ends meet. Show that Radar's farm had failed and and moved away to join the police in St. Louis. Show that Col. Potter now runs a Veteran's Hospital, and that Hawkeye went home to Maine and a small-town practice. Show that Mulcahy's hearing has been largely restored through surgery. It could have been a huge hit just to see them all later, as a epilogue to the whole story of MASH.

Instead, we got AfterMASH, which took the basic idea of "what happened next" and ran it into the ground. We got three familiar characters: Potter, Klinger and Mulcahy, a brief introduction on how they got there, and then try to replicate MASH stateside. Create a whole new set of young mischievous doctors for Potter to keep an eye on, a whole new bossy administrator to yell at Klinger, and then find thin reasons for constant guest appearances by former MASH cast. It kept trying to be essentially a stateside remake of MASH, with some of the same characters, but the chemistry wasn't there. If not for the MASH name I doubt it would have even lasted as long as it did.

I saw this show when it was on, for it's very short run, when I was a little kid, and even then I could see the huge plot holes.

A "typical American family" touring Egypt finds a local boy who offers to show them an unauthorized tour of the Great Pyramid, on the day of an eclipse, and the boy suddenly stops in the middle of the pyramid and demands more money. When the family refuses, he extinguishes the light and leaves them alone in the Pyramid, where the eclipse happens and they are mysteriously sucked through into another dimension/world.

Now, at this point it seems vaguely akin to Sliders or Stargate SG-1, which treated the concept of other worlds and ancient Egyptian space/dimensional travelers much better, however here comes the big problem.

They are barely arrived in this new dimension, where they land in a huge desert with a single road going through it. A futuristic car drives up and out of it comes some strange official-type person, who tries to arrest the family and is quickly beat up, looted of some strange crystal, and the family flees.

Apparently this official was a very, very high ranking leader of the "Zone Troopers" this world, and that crystal was a huge, powerful command permit that gives its wielder nigh-unlimited authority over the computer and governmental systems of this world, which turns out to be huge set of vastly different "zones" with different cultures and peoples, all policed by the "Zone Troopers". Also throw in some bit about how they are trying to go home by following a series of obelisks that have the "eye in the pyramid" sign found on US Dollar bills on them that leads to a mysterious capital city they hope can send them home.

This is all in the first 10 minutes of the pilot. This leader will be a recurring nemesis as he follows them trying to get his crystal back, but like Colonel Decker of A-Team fame, he's always 3 steps behind.

Now, in one of the episodes the son does poorly on a test at school and is promptly drafted into the Zone Troopers. Bad, but it's worse when he finds out that conscription is for life, unless he can excel at the training program so well he's made an Officer and is allowed to resign immediately.

Suddenly, that crystal goes from being able to shut down massive power grids, rewrite any computer file, open any lock, override any command, and being nigh-godlike in the system to being ignored. The dad just says something about "I can't use that to get you out of every little problem you get yourself into, you have to take care of these things yourself." The dad just arbitrarily decides to let his son be drafted, probably for life, on an alien world just because he failed a test at school, and decides not to use the plot-device uber-permit (mainly because it would completely shortcut the episode) but it makes the dad look like a real jerk.

So the show sets up that the main characters don't have to worry about the bureaucracy of the new world they find, which they decide to arbitrarily ignore early on, and make the main characters look either incompetent or uncaring. They couldn't make it 8 episodes without completely backpedaling on one of the main concepts of the show?

As a child of the 80's, I grew up with all the toy/TV fads. GI Joe and Transformers were kings, but there were many claimants to the throne.

Captain Power was one. It had the whole package deal, action figures and vehicles, a TV show, video tapes, and even a tie-in magazine.

The show itself was kinda neat, the only live action children's sci-fi show I think there was in the 80's. Now, the effects were hokey, but I recall that the writing and story lines were actually halfway decent (the excellent J. Michael Stracynzki was responsible for the writing). The show ended up on what was presumably to be a cliffhanger, and I remember thinking that the entire episode was very, very dark for a children's show. Unfortunately they never got to resolve that cliffhanger.

The show broke new ground in it's use of CGI, back in the late 80's before it became ubiquitous in movies about 5 or 6 years later. The villain's two major henchmen were entirely CGI creatures.

There were 3 tie-in videotapes which were just a short intro sequence with the main characters at their base before moving along into an animated battle sequence that was interactive with the gun/ships. There wasn't animation for the battles in the show, but presumably they just used cartoons to save money for the tie-in tapes.

I even had a subscription to the tie-in magazine, which was a disaster. It had it's glossy, shiny opening issue which of course talked all about the show and it's world, with a few side-articles about sci-fi type things going on in the real world (the Biosphere II project and the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation). By the second (bimonthly) issue Captain Power magazine merged with He Man magazine (a very dying franchise at the time) and production quality of the magazine dropped sharply from it's glossy premier. Then with the third issue it was only He Man magazine (with a short note that Captain Power magazine had been discontinued and the remainder of subscriptions would be serviced by He Man). Then for the 4th issue on the subscription He Man magazine folded and gave way to Muppet Magazine, and so on, as it fell between dying and fading children's entertainment franchises.

Unfortunately, the toys were the real let-down. I remember when Captain Power came out, at the same time as the Nintendo Entertainment System was in the US. Among all my friends, the two products were in direct competition. You could have fun being interactive with your TV by shooting it with light guns built as toy planes, or you could have video game cartridges. The toys themselves weren't exceptional either. I might have been spoiled by GI Joe, which had great figures with good sculpting, flexibility and variety. There were only 3 good guys and 3 bad guy figures (nevermind the variety of heroes and villains on TV), and 2 good-guy vehicles and 2 bad-guy vehicles. The interaction with the TV was glitchy at best (often taking hits when nothing on TV was shooting at you), and almost never scoring hits even when you get right up on the TV and hit it directly.

So, it was a decent show that might have had a shot of being successful, but the poor execution of it's tie-in lines doomed the brand.

This movie gives "fiction" a new meaning, a skewed, misinformed and alarmist painting of a harmless hobby. I've met people who actually were banned from playing D&D by well meaning mothers who saw this movie in reruns on Lifetime (of course, Movies of the Week are always reliable stories that help tell us what is good and bad in the world, and just because it's fiction doesn't mean that it's not all real, or so too many people think).

If done as animation and voiced with Phil Hartmann, you would think it was one of the lame propaganda films done by "Troy McClure" on the Simpsons. If you can overlook the utter over-seriousness and "it could happen to you" moralizing zealotry of the Reagan era and it's it's "Very Special" episodes of sitcoms and "Afterschool Specials" it could be enjoyable for pure camp, akin to looking at lame propaganda movies on the History Channel and laughing at the obvious deceptions.

I remember watching this show as a kid, I watched it regularly, and even then realizing how silly it was.

The basic concepts of the show changed over time. At first, it was the tale of a former astronaut who wears a suit of super-armor and fights crime. That really didn't change. However, his patron, the powerful Mr. Hungerford, was a computer with the mind of the founder of a big megacorp. It was explained in the beginning of the series that his personal records, psychological profile and company files were all blended together to create an AI that had the mind of Mr. Hungerford, a main character of the show even did it in that episode. The AI didn't exist at the very beginning of the show. Of course, later in the show when it became all about psychics and strange pseudo-science we find out that all along what "really" happened was a psychic helped him upload his mind into the computer (never mind that he was dead and buried in the first episode, when he supposedly hired this psychic).

The show sank to self parody pretty easily. In one episode about a billion-dollar lottery giveaway (which was just an excuse for a clip show as characters stood around in a bar reminiscing about former adventures and what they would do if they won the lottery), they even have a little girl come up and thank the hero for saving her mommy from a cult a while back. It was a painfully overdone cliche of the show that some charismatic man with questionable powers was leading some ominous cult that ol' Super Force rides in on with his motorcycle and power-armor and saves the day.

In the second season, the show became all about psychics, as our hero has a near death experience and comes back with psychic superpowers that make him impossible to hit and lets him see through walls, and throw in a psychic regular character. The second season ended on a cliffhanger where Super Force had his mind destroyed by a gadget and presumably they were going to fix that in the third season, that never came, so it ended as mindlessly as it lived.

Presumably it's future politics were meant as satire. When one of the characters wins said Billion Dollar Lottery, we find that in 2020 there is a 101% income tax on incomes of One Billion Dollars or more, so the winner gets no winnings, and owes the government 10 Million Dollars too. Oh, and in 2020 there is free welfare for all that lets people live without working if they choose, but nobody wants it because everybody has a good work ethic and doesn't want something-for-nothing. I'll presume these were the creators attempts at social commentary.

It had huge, epic battles that were just a guy in a suit and some buff bodybuilder doing wrestling moves out in a field or next to what seemed like a city reservoir or something. All the aliens looked exactly like humans, the more outrageous ones might have white hair or bright blue eyes! Oh, and alien bounty hunters have anti-matter storage canisters the size of coke-cans that can supposedly destroy the Earth in one blast, but when they try and use it, it's defective so it doesn't work and the Earth is saved. I don't even want to think about how a defective anti-matter storage device prevents it from exploding.

It was fun to watch as a little kid, but I do wonder what kind of tiny budget the show was made on to have such cheesy effects and makeup, lame plots and lack of continuity between episodes. The suit and bike were cool, and that was probably most of the budget for the show right there.