Yeah I was blown away by the fact that this was made in 1996. The special effects are 60s Thunderbirds and the live action bits have an extreme 80s look.

The guy who created this actually worked on 60s Thunderbirds!

I watched the whole first season a long time ago and it gets much stupider. I highly recommend it.

Yeah, ol' Gerry Anderson. I was but a kid when it came out and my whole family gathered to watch the first episode aired.

After it was done everyone just sort of peeled off slowly and it was never spoken of again.

You forgot to add the "ironic" tag to your post!!

I only vaguely recall this show, though I remember watching maybe 1 or 2 episodes before my brain started to revolt.

As for the best time-travel plot on TV, that would be the episodes "Babylon Squared" and "War Without End, Pts 1 & 2" from Babylon-5.

Zathrus love B5 time-travel episodes.

So whom would you rather use the bathroom after: Zathrus or Neelix?

About that Babylon 5 time travel plot: almost certainly, the original intention was for that to happen at the end of the series, after five seasons of Commander Sinclair in charge (and no Commander Sheridan). So it was going to be a more straightforward "I guess I was Valen all along" thing, and credit to JMS for managing to rework the concept so that Sheridan and Delenn could be inserted to allow for past / present / future "The Ones".

The best time-travel plot was anything on Dr Who.

I'd rather convince Neelix that an airlock was the bathroom and "flush" for him.

Seriously, where did all that money go? I demand to see accounting ledgers, invoices and receipts!

My parents paid their licensing fee, we have a right to know for fuck's sake.

At a guess? Models are expensive, especially when you blow up half of them, do complicated filming with them, and then enhance the footage with special effects.

Not to mention all the prosthetic and animatronic makeup that went into this thing.

For a real waste of money, go look up the old TV show "Space Rangers." Hol-ee fuck it was awful.

Yeah, the amount of labor and materials that go into even run of the mill practical special effects absolutely dwarf contemporary CGI.

Most of the budget of big ticket special effects blockbusters these days is going to actors and marketing (about half of the total budge usually goes to marketing). Effects are relatively cheap, especially since they started getting farmed out to China.

And that's sad on a lot of levels, one of which is I find the best effects are often a combination of practical and CGI.

A weird example is The Phantom Menace. Jar-Jar, even without his personality, is 100% CG and looks crappy. The Nemoidians (the aliens that were Japanese stereotypes) are dudes in suits with animatronic masks, and they also look crappy. I don't think anything would've fixed Jar-Jar, but using CG to make the Nemoidian eyes blink or making the mouths not so stiff would've been an improvement.

It's not the main focus of this post, but it's part of it:

http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/scab_cinema

.5 million per episode, which made it the most expensive programme to be made in Britain up until that point.

http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/Guide/SpacePrecinct.htm

Fuck, really? 1.5 million for THIS? This is like something made in college for their demo reel.

Very rarely does Brit sci-fi ever have the emphasis on "sci," and it's often about a hair away from a puppet show, and I say that as a fan of Doctor Who. The trouble is, that's very hit-or-miss, and I think trying to make it an American-ish cop show worked against it having much appeal.

Sadly, the best "serious" UK sci-fi show I can think of at the moment was "Star Cops." The plots were often grounded in real(ish) concepts, but it was hampered by the FX of the time. They had a lot of what were supposed to be zero-G scenes, and the fishing line holding everyone and everything up was often obvious. Still, it had a decent plot and I liked the lead character, Detective Nathan Spring.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StarCops

It also had a theme song by The Moody Blues' Justin Hayward.

Star Cops was good, but holy shit was it boring.

It was trying to be hard sci-fi set in a universe where law enforcement in space was basically as powerful as being a U.N. peacekeeping force. Politics don't get a lot of zap-kapow-foom, so there you go.

That's a good episode.

Kabbage, you're in Allston? All these PoE people from the Boston area I learn about AFTER I move away.

Yeah man... I asked you through replys a few times in the past about it, but no response.

PoE really needs its forums back.

Anyways I've since moved to Somerville for my new job, but my little brother lives there now, so I visit pretty regularly. Bagel Rising is still incredible. The Silhouette is exactly like it was four years ago. Herrell's/Allston Cafe is now a completely different coffee place.

While I was in school, I used to work at that thrift shop on Harvard ave, Cheap Chìc. It is also identical to how it used to be.

Sweet new BBQ place, though.

When stuff falls of the front page I don't usually keep up with it, unfortunately.

I found some pretty sweet records at Cheap Chic one time around 2004 or 2005.

Also http://www.54evil.com/ even though only like half a dozen people regularly post.

Get on it, make a PoETV only forum. It may be half-way to ghost town but at least half the cans o' cock-shit from news and such wont be there.