{"id":1819,"date":"2009-10-14T22:52:47","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T22:52:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1819"},"modified":"2009-10-14T22:52:47","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T22:52:47","slug":"more_items_for_my_neverending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2009\/10\/14\/more_items_for_my_neverending\/","title":{"rendered":"More Items for My Never-Ending Shopping List"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember that DVD-on-demand service I mentioned<\/a> a few months ago, the Warner Archive<\/a>? You may recall that I was very stoked by the idea of made-to-order obscurities, and couldn’t wait to try it out. Well, as it happens, I apparently could<\/i> wait, because I never got around to ordering anything from the Archive. The truth is, none of the titles made available to date have been “must-have” enough for me to pull the trigger. But that situation has finally changed. The TV Shows on DVD<\/a> blog is reporting that Warner just added to the line-up three made-for-the-boob-tube movies from the early ’70s: Genesis II<\/i>, Planet Earth<\/i>, and Man from Atlantis<\/i>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first two are failed pilots written and produced by Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek<\/i> fame during the fallow years between that series’ cancellation in 1969 and its big-screen rebirth in 1979. Both are variants on the same familiar premise, in which a 20th-century man enters a state of suspended animation and awakens in a post-apocalyptic future where, had either of these pilots been picked up as a series, he would’ve spent each weekly episode exploring this “strange new world.” (TV Shows on DVD claims<\/a> that the idea was reworked yet again for the late-90s syndicated space-opera that bore Roddenberry’s name, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda<\/i><\/a>, but honestly, I don’t see that much of a correlation beyond the basic idea of a man out of time, and the recurring name of the protagonist, Dylan Hunt. In my view, Genesis II<\/i> and Planet Earth<\/i> are really much more similar to the Planet of the Apes<\/i> TV series from around the same time, or even to the Saturday-morning live-action children’s show Ark II<\/i><\/a>. As I said, a familiar premise, at least for anyone who was a sci-fi-loving kid in the early ’70s.)<\/p>\n

The third addition to the Warner Archive, Man from Atlantis<\/i>, starred a pre-Dallas<\/i> Patrick Duffy as a mysterious man with gills and webbed fingers but no memory of who he is or where he comes from. According to TV Shows on DVD<\/a>, this was the first of four successful TV movies, which led to a short-lived weekly series.<\/p>\n

(If I may digress for a moment, these “movie series” were fairly common in the ’70s. I know that Columbo<\/i> and The Six Million Dollar Man<\/i> both started as occasional movies-of-the-week before becoming one-hour weekly series, and that was the original intention for Battlestar Galactica<\/i> as well. It’s no coincidence that the strongest episodes of the original BSG were the two-hour ones, because they were written well in advance of the show going into production, whereas the weaker hour-long episodes were essentially filler that was thrown together on the fly. The aborted Star Trek: Phase II<\/i> was also planned as a cycle of movies that would’ve aired every couple of months; Phase II<\/i> was shelved, of course, when the first of those tele-movies was repurposed to become Star Trek: The Motion Picture<\/i>. Personally, I think it’d be kind of interesting to go back to this format. Certainly it’d be easier for me these days to keep up with the occasional TV movie instead of a weekly series!)<\/p>\n

Of the three, I’ve seen the Roddenberry films the most recently; they used to turn up on late-night TV fairly often, and it seems like I remember catching them last when I was in college, or shortly thereafter. I don’t think I’ve seen Man from Atlantis<\/i> since it originally aired; nevertheless, I have vivid memories of playing with an empty shampoo bottle in the bathtub, pretending it was the high-tech submersible that Duffy’s friends worked in.<\/p>\n

Properties like these are exactly what I hoped would eventually turn up in the Warner Archive, half-remembered detritus of a near-forgotten epoch that has been bumping around in my subconscious for decades, some of them no more substantial to me than dreams, films and television I want to see again simply to prove to myself that I didn’t imagine the damn things. I intend to place my order tonight for Genesis II<\/i> and Planet Earth<\/i> (the Archive is currently running a special, both movies at a discounted price). I’ll report back on the quality and experience of the manufactured-on-demand discs after I receive them.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember that DVD-on-demand service I mentioned a few months ago, the Warner Archive? You may recall that I was very stoked by the idea of made-to-order obscurities, and couldn’t wait to try it out. Well, as it happens, I apparently could wait, because I never got around to ordering anything from the Archive. The truth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-glass-teat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}