Here is a few examples of the theme music from various sci – fi shows.
1.Battlestar Galactica – The main theme from the 1970s series.
2.Doctor Who – The updated version of the main theme.
3.Red Dwarf – A great theme from one of the funniest shows on TV.
The following crafts have appeared in some of the most well-known science fiction television shows and films. The list is my own personal choice from the last 40 years. I have limited the list to 10 examples otherwise the list could have gone on and on. I have included a fact in each of the examples.
The U.S.S. Enterprise as depicted in the film “Star Trek-The Motion Picture” (1979). The appearance of the ship differs slightly from the classic television series of the 1960s.
The colonial baseship “Battlestar Galactica” from the 1977 television series of the same name. The ship led a fleet of survivors after a war with the Cylons searching for the lost 13th colony called Earth.
An Eagle transport from the 1976 television series “Space 1999”. Only the second series made by Gerry Anderson that was live action instead of using puppets.
The mining ship “Nostromo” from the 1979 film “Alien”. The scene in the film where the alien bursts from the chest of actor John Hurt was filmed without telling the rest of the cast what was about to happen, showing real reactions on their faces when it did.
The NSEA Protector from the film “Galaxy Quest” (1999). The film was comedy take-off of the television series “Star Trek”, the story being that the actors in the show were mistaken for real thing by aliens who having monitored the show and believing that it was a historical record. They kidnapped the cast to help them in a war with other aliens.
Starbug from the television science fiction comedy series “Red Dwarf”. It was a shuttle that was used for planetary exploration based on the Jupiter Mining Corporation ship Red Dwarf. Set 3,000,000 years in the future, the cast consisted of Dave Lister the last human in the universe, a mechanoid called Kryten, a hologram of Lister’s dead crewmate Arnold Judas Rimmer, and a humanoid descended from Lister’s pet cat.
The image above is showing one of the alien base ships from the 1996 film “Independence Day”. In this movie, aliens attempt to take over the Earth using city sized base ships and stripping the Earth of its resources – you can see how huge the ship is on the image above. The aliens are eventually defeated by uploading a computer programme into their system, disregarding the fact that alien technology will be totally different to that of Earths.
All images in this post are under the UK law Fair Dealings or under Creative Commons Licence rules.
Although in my opinion the golden age of science fiction films was the 1950s, there were high concept movies as well as grade Z trash produced in the last 40 years. The following are examples of the best and worst. The majority of the output of bad movies is usually direct to DVD productions, having mediocre acting and shoddy CGI effects.
BEST——–“Dark City” (1998)
A neo noir sci-fi film directed by Alex Proyas and starring Rufus Sewell, William Hurt and Keifer Sutherland. It was shot at the Fox Studios in Australia. It asks the question on what it means to be human and the relationship between memory and personal identity.
PLOT
John Murdoch (Sewell) wakes up in a hotel bath, suffering from what seems to be amnesia. He receives a telephone call from Dr. Daniel Schreber (Sutherland), who urges him to flee from a group of men who are after him. During the call, John discovers the body of a brutalized, ritualistically murdered woman, along with a bloody knife. Murdoch flees the scene, just as the group of men (known as the Strangers) arrive at the room. Eventually he learns his real name, and finds his wife Emma . He is also sought by police inspector Frank Bumstead (Hurt) for a series of murders allegedly committed by Murdoch, who cannot remember killing anybody. While being chased by the Strangers, Murdoch discovers that he haspsychokinetic powers like them, and he uses these powers to escape from them. Murdoch moves about the city, which experiences everlasting night. He sees people become temporarily asleep at midnight, when the Strangers stop time and alter the cityscape, as well as people’s identities and memories. Murdoch questions the dark urban environment, and discovers—through clues and interviews with his family—that he was originally from a coastal town called Shell Beach. Attempts at finding a way out of the city to Shell Beach are hindered by lack of reliable information from everyone he meets. Meanwhile, the Strangers, disturbed by the presence of this human who also possesses psychokinetic powers, inject one of their men, Mr. Hand (O’Brien) with Murdoch’s memories, in an attempt to find him.
Murdoch eventually finds Bumstead, who recognizes Murdoch’s innocence and has his own questions about the nature of the dark city. They find and confront Dr. Schreber, who explains that the Strangers are endangered alien parasites who use corpses as their hosts. Having a hive consciousness the Strangers have been experimenting with humans to analyze their individuality in the hopes that some insight might be revealed that would help their kind survive. Schreber reveals Murdoch as an anomaly who inadvertently awoke during one midnight process, when Schreber was in the middle of fashioning his identity as a murderer. The three men embark to find Shell Beach, which ultimately exists only as a billboard at the edge of the city. Frustrated, Murdoch tears through the wall, revealing a hole into outer space. The men are confronted by the Strangers, including Mr. Hand, who holds Emma hostage. In the ensuing fight, Bumstead, along with one of the Strangers, falls through the hole into space, revealing the city as an enormous space habitat surrounded by a force field.
The Strangers bring Murdoch to their home under the city and force Dr. Schreber to imprint Murdoch with their collective memory, believing Murdoch to be the final answer to their experiments. Schreber betrays them by inserting false memories in Murdoch which artificially reestablish his childhood as years spent training and honing his psychokinetic abilities and learning about the Strangers and their machines. Murdoch awakens, fully realizing his abilities, frees himself and battles with the Strangers, defeating their leader Mr. Book (Richardson) in a battle high above the city. After learning from Dr. Schreber that Emma’s personality is gone and cannot be restored within her body, Murdoch utilizes his new-found powers through the Strangers‘ machine to create an actual Shell Beach by flooding the area within the force field with liquid and forming mountains and beaches. On his way to Shell Beach, Murdoch encounters Mr. Hand and informs him that the Strangers have been searching in the wrong place—the head—to understand humanity. Murdoch opens the door leading out of the city, and steps out to view a sunrise that he created. Beyond him is a dock, where he finds the woman he knew as Emma, now with new memories and a new identity as Anna. Murdoch reintroduces himself as they walk to Shell Beach, beginning their relationship anew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)
WORST——–“Galaxy of Terror”(1981)
A sci-fi horror mess of a film produced by Roger Corman and directed by Bruce D Clark, starring Edward Albert,Erin Moran,Robert England,Ray Walston and Sid Haig. It has become something of a cult classic is recent years.
PLOT
On a desolate, storm-lashed planet called Morganthus, the survivor of a crashed spaceship is attacked and killed by an unseen force.
On another planet a very long distance away, two figures are seen playing a strange game. One, an old woman, is identified as the controller of the game while the other, whose head is obscured by a glowing ball of red light, turns out to be an all-powerful mystic called the Planet Master. The two speak cryptically of things being put into motion, and the Master instructs one of his military commanders to send a ship to Morganthus.
Without delay, the spaceship Quest blasts off to Morganthus. Piloting the ship is Captain Trantor, a survivor from a famous space disaster that has left her psychologically scarred and unstable.
As the Quest approaches the planet’s atmosphere, it suddenly goes out of control and falls toward the surface, crash-landing there. After recovering from the landing, the crew prepares to leave the Quest and search for survivors. The team has a psi-sensitive woman among their number named Alluma (Erin Moran). Both she and the surface team have significant problems with the team leader, who is pushy and arrogant and totally unimpressed by Alluma’s inability to detect any life signs whatsoever.
Making their way across the landscape of the planet, they eventually reach the other ship. Entering, they find evidence of a massacre that took place. The rescue teams split into two and explore the craft. They find further evidence of something catastrophic having happened and, after disposing of the rest, take one victim back for analysis. The highly strung youngest member of the team, despite being reassured by his seniors, becomes increasingly terrified by being on the ship and, a short time later, he is killed by a mutant creature.
The crew discovers that something from the planet pulled them down, and in order to escape, they must investigate. After some exploration, they discover a massive pyramid-shaped structure, which Alluma describes as “empty” and “dead”. Their explorations of the pyramid lead to a serious of exceedingly violent and deadly encounters in which a malevolent force causes several crew members to be dismembered, burned, consumed, raped or crushed to death by monsters created out of each person’s personal fears.
Eventually, only two members of the team, Ranger (Robert Englund) and Cabrin (Edward Albert), remain alive. Deep inside the pyramid, Cabrin encounters the Master (Ray Walston), who has been masquerading as the cook onboard the Quest. The Master explains that the pyramid is actually an ancient toy for the children of a long-extinct race, built-in order to test their ability to control fear. Cabrin kills the Master for allowing his crew to die, but himself becomes the new Master.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_of_Terror
Science Fiction mirrors the hopes and aspirations of society at any one time. Here is a list of 10 films and television shows with their view of what the future would be like:-
The twist is that it is made from humans harvested from the streets and processed into food, a way of population control as well.
Although its depiction of Video Editing humans in the show is still beyond present day technology.
The idea of replicants (human clones) is pure fantasy due to the fact that at present we can hardly clone sheep without killing them, and as for the idea of off-world colonies the less said the better.
Man has not been back to the Moon since the last Apollo mission (Apollo 17) in 1972.
It was made in 1979 and set in 1987 when in reality the shuttles were grounded due to the Challenger disaster of the previous year. The fashions of this future world seem to favour Lycra.
When the Presidents plane is hijacked and crashes into Manhattan a veteran of the Siberian war, Snake Plissken, is forced to enter the prison to rescue him. As an incentive he is injected with microscopic explosives in his carotid artery which will explode after 24 hours. In an eerie foretaste of 9/11 the wreckage of the President’s plane is found near the World Trade Center. Films such as this assumed that the crime rate will rise, whereas in fact crime has been steadily falling in the U.S. since the early 1980s.
Blake manages to escape with four other convicts and takes the ship. They rename the ship ‘Liberator’ and begin to fight back. This series portrays the Earth authorities as a version of the Nazis having conquered and subjugating vast swathes of the Galaxy. This proves my theory that humans are the most vicious life forms in the Universe. If we persecute our own kind, what chance do alien life forms have?All images in this post are under UK law Fair Dealings rules.
sci-fi and fantasy 