A few months ago on Sakeriver there was a discussion about the best SF TV series. I submitted the following which I’m reproducing here because I’m lazy:
Talking about the best SF series is fun and all, but I personally much more enjoy talking about the worst of SF (we’ll limit ourselves to TV series for now). I’m sure that well-known turds like Voyager or Excalibur will be mentioned, but due to nostalgia I’m somewhat partial to 80’s TV shows. Here are some examples:
Manimal
Just the name of this show alone is distateful…
The Invisible Woman
I think it was a TV special and not a full series, so it may not technically qualify.
Misfits of Science
Notable for including Courtney Cox long before her Friends fame.
The Ghost Busters
Not what you’re thinking. This is long before the movie Ghostbusters. This was a children’s live-action show in 75-76. Columbia actually licensed the name from Filmation to make the movie. The movie was so popular that Filmation then came back and tried to cash in with the horrible cartoon Ghostbusters (some of you may remember this one). Columbia was none too happy about that since they had made the franchise a hit, so they hit back with The Real Ghostbusters, which is probably the one you think of when you think of a Ghostbusters cartoon. However this one sucked too, since the actors in the movie raised a lot of stink about their likenesses in the TV show, so they ended up being drawn differently, Lorenzo Music (who also did the voice of Garfield) got replaced with Dave Coulier for Peter Vankeman’s voice, etc. Slimer was changed from a gluttonous villian to an extremelly annoying slapstick sidekick, and then later usurped the actual main characters not unlike how Fonzie usurped Happy Days, Urkel would usurp Family Matters, and Elmo would usurp all of Sesame Street a decade later. But I digress.
Small Wonder
Ugh. I don’t think I need to say much about this show.
Not Quite Human (go to 3:20, this is all I could find)
Coasting off of his (relative) success from The Boy Who Could Fly, Jay Underwood starred in this made-for TV movie back in 1987. Co-starring a phoned-in performance by Alan Thicke as Chip’s father, he must have needed an extra paycheck in between seasons of Growing Pains or something. They actually made a couple of sequels for this, Not Quite Human II and Still Not Quite Human.
Out of This World
Not to be confused with the video game that had no relation, this was a crappy Saturday afternoon sitcom cut from the same mold as Small Wonder (and started around the same time, it ran from 87-91). The girl has a human mother and alien father, and her father grants her the ability to stop time at will. Instead of doing the logical thing anyone with this power would do (i.e. steal anything you want, take over the world, be a totall bad-*ss, etc.), she generally used it just to get out of stupid farcical situations that seemed straight out of Saved by the Bell.
No list of horrible Sci-Fi shows would be complete without some Super Sentai series and their derivatives. Instead of focusing on the well-known Power Rangers (which are certainly worthy of inclusion on this list), I’d like to introduce some of the less well-known copycats and spinoffs.
VR Troopers
This show, like Power Rangers, was produced by taking the action suit scenes from a Japanese Super Sentai show and re-shooting all the other scenes with new actors. What made this different though, is that they actually combined three different Japanese shows: Super Machine Man Metalder, Dimensional Warrior Spielban, and Space Sheriff Shaider. This of course produced a convoluted and unintentionally hilarious plot (Fans of Robotech and Voltron are knowingly nodding their heads here).
Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad
Yes, that really is the name of the show. Another Tokusatsu adaptation like Power Rangers and VR Troopers (and Big Bad Beetle Borgs, but I don’t even want to mention them…), this one actually had lower production values than the others, if you can believe it. Notable for the supporting cast role of Troy Slaten who would later go on to play Jerry Steiner in Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.
My favorite of all though, has to be…
Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills
Instead of licensing inexpensive footage from a post-run Japanese TV show, this show was actually 100% original, as far as it wasn’t a complete rip-off of Power Rangers and its derivatives. But as you might surmise by the name of the show alone, it was really, really bad. How it survived for 40 episodes I’ll never figure out, because my brother and I would laugh our way through Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad because it was so horrible, but TTAFFBH wasn’t even very watchable to make fun of. I do remember one episode where Zsa Zsa Gabor had a cameo, though (the heroes were sent to an alternate universe where Zsa Zsa had just been elected Governor of California or something to that effect). There was another humorous episode where they broke the monster-a-day format. In this episode, the big evil boss left for a while and left his lieutenant in charge. The lieutenant, wanting to prove himself by defeating the heroes, keeps on sending monster after monster after monster instead of just giving up for the day after the first one is defeated. The heroes get overwhelmed and are about to be defeated when the big evil boss comes back, recalls the monsters, and berates his lieutenant for not ‘doing it correctly’ by not following the monster-a-day formula. Years later it reminded me of Dr. Evil talking with his son Scott in Austin Powers about being defeated because of following standard bad-guy clichés.
Anyone else got some really bad SF TV shows, preferably with videos so that all can enjoy in the campy badness?
Oh, man. I’m embarassed how many of these I’ve seen. I used to watch Small Wonder every week. I can only say that I was young and foolish. I’ve seen VR Troopers before — that was particularly bad.
Here’s a random one, I think from the early 1990’s – Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars. I even had some of the action figures from this cartoon. It wasn’t really bad, but it was definitely weird and made very little sense.
Here’s the intro to Bucky O’Hare — I can still sing large portions of this song from memory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Mh7hhaqhk
I actually remember Out of this World. Even as a child I remember thinking how goofy her uses of this power were. Stopping time in order to complete a test before the “smart kid”. Unlike the rest of us she stops time and then laboriously works through the problem, instead of cheating. “I am only going to cheat by warping the space time continuum, not by looking at answers, that would be wrong.”