Quick Meme: Do the Blake’s 7 Reboot Rumors Excite or Depress You?
By Patrick Hester |
Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at
12:25 am
The rumor mill has churned out an interesting bit of news for fans of the low budget, late 70′s scifi show Blake’s 7.
Created by Terry Nation (of Doctor Who/Dalek fame), Blake’s 7 follows Roj Blake and his crew of renegades looking to foster rebellion against the totalitarian Terran Federation.
SyFy is said to have a script-to-series commitment, meaning it could greenlight the project as a 13-episode series.
Thoughts? Good News? Bad News? Don’t mess with your childhood? Just bring Firefly back?
Tagged with: blake's 7 • SyFy Channel • tv
Filed under: TV
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I’m optimistic. SyFy’s done some fantastic reboots, and this one seems like it could go more the way of Battlestar than Flash Gordon. Obviously, however the pilot looks will help with first impressions, but I’m looking forward to a new space show.
Will this be Battlestar Galactica or Flash Gordon, as Andrew alludes to above. That’s the question.
It doesn’t depress me. Even the worst reboot (see Flash Gordon) doesn’t take away from previous incarnations.
And, when they end the series, will they keep the one from the original? On the plus side, they won’t have to create a dark and grim version, it’s already dark and grim.
Even more so than Doctor Who from the same time, it suffered from a tiny budget and it showed. But the lead actors were compelling enough to pull it off.
If they can find as compelling and as complex actors as those who played Avon and their nemesis, Severalan, it could succeed.
Except that the story arc that I remember making this show so awesome has been done so many times since then. Original and shocking when I first watched it way back when the Terran empire was young (I did not see some of the character deaths coming – I mean, these were main cast, wth?!?), these days those kind of plot “twists” are so common we expect them. I’d worry that it would fail because it isn’t original any more, even though the original run defined some of that originality. (self referential logic ftw!)
All of that said, of course, any reboot by the SyFy channel will probably involve so many rewrites, reboots, and recasting of the original story, characters, and arcs that it will mostly be the same names in a different story with only a homage to the original series in a prop somewhere in scene 1 of the pilot episode. And I left out the hauntings, because that’s what the network excels at these days.
(wait until I get started! where was I…?)
Oh man, I love Blake’s 7. Pleeeeease don’t let them screw it up! *crossed fingers*
Also, I gotta say I hate the name “Syfy.” It sounds like someone’s pet name for a syphilis infection. “I’d like to go out with you tonight, but I gotta go to the clinic, old Syfy’s back in town!”
Would this be the same channel that killed SG-U because it cost too much to do a SFX-laden space show? The audience was not big enough? How can we trust them to support this show given their history with SG-U and other productions. Pass.
Considering the original program bored the crap out of me (and I tried more than once to get into it), maybe the reboot will trigger a positive response.
So inexpressibly ambivalent. Could be fabulous. Could be horrific. Maybe just not true.
I loved Blake 7 once–but not like I loved the Doctor, and I don’t find it holds up all that well. Which could mean it’s a perfect choice for a remix. Or…