Tuesday, June 03, 2008

The Classic Science Fiction Channel

I assume all this is legal. The guy who put together the side says he believes that it is.

5 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Oh, this is all legal. All the links I've seen are to the NBC/Fox project Hulu.com, which has these series up. Howver, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is only barely to be preferred to GHOST HUNTERS or whatever they call their Skiffy Channel bilge...however funny the puppet invasion episode did manage to be (I think that might've been the closest to successful surreal camp Irwin Allen ever got).

Todd Mason said...

Hulu, btw, also has various MTM Productions up (alas, the music-replaced versions of WKRP), and other Universal (NBC's corporate other half, these days) and Fox properties...I SPY, for example. Also, lots of films. All with "limited" adverts. Rather similar to the network sites, only with less gingerbread to wade through to get to the episode/film archives.

Unknown said...

The things I've seen on Hulu have all been very good quality, too.

Doc Quatermass said...

I think my local cable company (which eventually got gobbled up by TCI, sold to AT&T and then Bombast) finally got the Sci Fi Channel in it's fifth year just before it started morphing away from classic old black and white horror and sci fi films and '50s and '60s TV.

Classic bait and switch strategy new cable stations used - often changing as the originators would sell the channel off to someone else. I'd always miss the really good years of new cable channels like Nick @ Nite and TV Land, both of which weren't too bad when I moved back to town from the country in '87 and got cable until about the mid-'90s) by the time they'd make the line up on our small cable company - the draw back to living in a small town.

Eventually the cable channels would largely copy each other in the mid- to late-90s with '70s, '80s, & '90s line ups. AMC went down the crapper when it started interrupting movies with commercials and then went for the same audience demographic Spike TV sought, same with N@N, TV Land and most every other cable channel thats become homogenized for the 40s and under crowds.

Comcast (which has the worst customer service of any company I've encountered) moved The Sci Fi Channel to it's bronze line up from it's line up in it's above the basic tier.

We recently dropped the Bronze level when our cable bill went from 70-some dollars a month to 90-some, I miss Encore Westerns and Fox Movie Channel. I plan to at some point make good on my decade-plus old threat to switch to Dish or even just focus on watching movies and TV shows in my video library on DVD. Watching TCM and RTN and paying almost $80 just doesn't seem worth it. I watch a couple of shows on CBS but have little interest in the major networks and would not be very upset if the NBC, CBS, and ABC disappeared as well as the studio-owned networks that gobbled up the independent channels to offer canned pap in the place of markets for older classic shows that many people I know hunger for.

Heck as a kid, a teen and a young adult I got the three major networks and two independent stations and TV was better than when I got 100-plus stations. I don't begrudge anyone the right to watch most of the stuff on TV now but there has to be more room for older movies and TV shows that a lot of people I know would rather watch.


And no offense, but I can't agree that VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is only barely to be preferred to GHOST HUNTERS.


http://www.gocomics.com/pickles/2008/06/01/?campid=0&ssns=9&

Fred Blosser said...

My sister and I goofed on VTTBOTS in our high school years when it ran on ABC. I haven't seen any of the episodes in many years, but I did catch the original Irwin Allen movie on Fox Movie Channel recently. Although the "science" was insane (the Van Allen radiation belt had caught fire?!), there were some bits about temperatures soaring to dangerous levels, the icecaps melting, religious nuts acting up, that made me wonder if Irwin knew something in 1961 that we didn't. As I recall, the TV series made heavy use of stock footage from the movie and Allen's cheesy 1960 remake of THE LOST WORLD.