So tonight, Flash Gordon returns to TV (on the SciFi Channel). The chances of it sucking are reasonably high, but I still have to see for myself. The fact that it seems to be using the old Queen ‘anthem’ alone makes its prospects quite grim.
But SciFi does have a knack of making mediocre tv shows that I still enjoy watching. I’m thinking of Eureka and Stargate:Atlantis. I can’t call either of them great TV, but I still get a kick out of them, and in both cases I think its about casting and the ‘family of character’ aspects.
And of course, SciFi has Battlestar. I was *extremely* dubious about BSG before it started to air, and look how amazing that turned out.
So we’ll see.
Using the Queen music in the promos was a mistake, since this production was lifeless, drab, and moody when a Flash Gordon series demands to be cast in the larger-than-life mold. The whole thing was so bloodless, I wouldn’t be surprised if the show runner was secretly a vampire.
Yeah, you’re the first blog I hit in Technorati. 🙂
I spent most of the show trying to decide if they were going for camp and not quite hitting it, or going for drama and just being miles off the mark.
Been a long time since I saw the movie and I’m no expert, but the whole zapping back and forth between the other dimension/galaxy and this one was new, wasn’t it? Shades of Stargate.
And Ming was just so… meh.
Well the comments sort of answered my question. So it sucked???? 🙁
Yeah, pretty much. It certainly wasn’t very “Flash”-y, as EricW pointed out. Nor was it some dramatic re-imagining like the new Battlestar. And sometimes it was really ‘camp’ (there was a robot-alien thingie that was incredibly cheesy, and a futuristic gun that wouldn’t shoot straight) but not consistently enough so that it was funny. It was just a mish-mosh, really.