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Scenes We'd Like To See: Alternate Movies, Television & Other Pop Culture Miscellanea

Heavy said:
No love for seaQuest DSV, huh? :whistle:

But seriously, I think 52 Pick-Up is a pretty worthwhile movie. It's either based on an Elmore Leonard novel or he wrote the screenplay or both.

He's also in The Russia House, a film I remember enjoying a lot (definitely one of the best Connery was in during his late-career revival as a leading man in the 90s), but I can't actually remember the characters other than Connery and Michelle Pfeifer.
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seaQuest DSV falls into a category of programmes I like to define as "no, there's no possibility such a show exists".
 
RyanF said:
seaQuest DSV falls into a category of programmes I like to define as "no, there's no possibility such a show exists".
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I have all three seasons on dvd. The third season (the reboot - seaQuest 2032) is a Region 4 dvd I bought off some bloke in Australia on eBay because it was never officially released here.
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Here's the rundown:

Season 1: a fairly good science-fiction show set in the near-future of 2018; Roy Scheider is Captain Nathan Bridger, a scientist and commander of the experimental deep-sea-vehicle seaQuest; every episode ended with a clip of a real-life marine biologist or oceanographer (I forget which) explaining the underwater phenomena the crew had dealt with that week.

Season 2: a completely fucking insane attempt to retool the show as Star Trek: The Next Generation BUT UNDER THE SEA!!!!; Scheider is now visibly pissed off by how much he hates being on the show in most of his scenes; the season opens with a community of genetically-engineered super-soldiers attempting to stage a rebellion; Michael DeLuise plays a crook who's been genetically-modified with gills; Stephanie Beacham leaves the show and is replaced as ship's doctor by a woman with psychic powers; one episode features a guest appearance from Mark Hamill playing a blind astronomer who is actually an alien fugitive hiding on Earth; and then the final episode of the season ends with the submarine being transported thousands of lightyears to an ocean planet in the middle of an alien civil war.

Season 3: retooled as seaQuest 2032, the crew is returned to Earth in the year 2032; Roy Scheider by now has lost all interest in the show and quit, though he appears in a couple of episodes as a very obviously bored out of his skull special guest; he is replaced as captain by MICHAEL IRONSIDE, who insisted in interviews that he intended to interact with Darwin the talking dolphin as little as possible; the show now tries to be this underwater military science-fiction show where the new seaQuest goes up against the world's newest superpower, the Federated States of Macronesia, whose president is Michael York and have all this weird Orientalist stuff around them; I literally can't remember how the series ends but I presume it is disappointing.

Fun fact: the show was created by Rockne S. O'Bannon, who subsequently created FarScape and other shows. Steven Spielberg was a producer in the first season (I think it was an Amblin production) because this was toward the end of the period (he co-created E.R. with Crichton only a year later) when he was really interested in television production.

seaQuest DSV featured in the Turtledove Award-winning timeline The Doctor Is Who? by @Heat.
 
Heavy said:
a fairly good science-fiction show set in the near-future of 2018; Roy Scheider is Captain Nathan Bridger, a scientist and commander of the experimental deep-sea-vehicle seaQuest; every episode ended with a clip of a real-life marine biologist or oceanographer (I forget which) explaining the underwater phenomena the crew had dealt with that week.
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It was an interesting show with an interesting concept, and I do like it. I wonder what it would have been like if it had gotten more than one season.
 
I've been thinking about alternate Doctors Who again. Specifically, I've been thinking about that Buzzfeed (?) article on "What if Doctor Who but AMERICAN?" It goes for who's well-known rather than who's most likely in a few cases, but it starts really well with Burgess Meredith, Dick Van Dyke and Vincent Price at least.

I have been entertaining some thoughts about who'd be good American Doctors who, in my opinion, would be more "realistic", accounting for the clearer split you had between movie actors and TV actors in Hollywood at that time (i.e. you started in movies and stayed there or you started in TV, graduated to movies and stayed there).

Might post some thoughts later on.
 
Heavy said:
I've been thinking about alternate Doctors Who again. Specifically, I've been thinking about that Buzzfeed (?) article on "What if Doctor Who but AMERICAN?" It goes for who's well-known rather than who's most likely in a few cases, but it starts really well with Burgess Meredith, Dick Van Dyke and Vincent Price at least.

I have been entertaining some thoughts about who'd be good American Doctors who, in my opinion, would be more "realistic", accounting for the clearer split you had between movie actors and TV actors in Hollywood at that time (i.e. you started in movies and stayed there or you started in TV, graduated to movies and stayed there).

Might post some thoughts later on.
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I've thought along similar lines myself on and off again, Burgess Meredith is one who always appears. Think in the past I've been pretty set on Ronald Reagan being the first Doctor but I was young and idealistic.

Jack Cassidy and Christopher Lloyd are two others I really like as American Doctors.
 
RyanF said:
I've thought along similar lines myself on and off again, Burgess Meredith is one who always appears. Think in the past I've been pretty set on Ronald Reagan being the first Doctor but I was young and idealistic.

Jack Cassidy and Christopher Lloyd are two others I really like as American Doctors.
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Burgess Meredith is just such a perfect idea for an American First Doctor I'm not sure who else you could have.

Spitballing:

1. Burgess Meredith (1963-1968)
2. Raymond Burr (1969-1971)
3. Buddy Ebsen (1972-1974)
4. Michael Douglas (1975-1978)
5. William Conrad (1979-1980)
6. Richard Dean Anderson (1980-1985)
7. Edward Woodward (1985-1989)
8. Dana Delaney (1990-1994)
9. ????

(The joke would be that Woodward is the most controversial because he's British.)
 
RyanF said:
Why am I now picturing the Doctor Who opening credits being accompanied by Cheyenne's letimotif from Once Upon a Time in the West?
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That reminds me of the guy on youtube who does alternate Doctor Who themes. For example, we all know that the best episodes are the siege episodes, so what if every episode was a siege episode? With a horrifying alien which can disguise itself as you. And sometimes there's a bunch of fishermen seeking vengeance. But they're in a car that's also seeking vengeance. And your brother is, wait, Donald Pleasence might do a decent job as well...


​
 
I was literally just going to say William Conrad for the American Doctor Who thing and then I scroll up and see Heavy had already mentioned him. Fuck's sake.

I have a list of at least three alternate Doctors that nobody has done before and one alternate Master no one has, which I'm just keeping around purely so I can add pop cultural colour to something but I've never got a chance to use them yet.
 
Elektronaut said:
I was literally just going to say William Conrad for the American Doctor Who thing and then I scroll up and see Heavy had already mentioned him. Fuck's sake.
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I was trying to think of the stars of detective shows, which is probably too limiting. That's why I picked Michael Douglas, who you'd initially suppose is too much of a big movie star, because his breakthrough role was on television opposite Karl Malden on Streets of San Francisco, one of the Quinn Martin shows.

Of course I had Conrad in my mind because of Cannon but I was actually thinking of that NBC version of Nero Wolfe where Conrad plays Wolfe as a balding guy with a full beard, which freaked me out the first time I saw it because Nero Wolfe doesn't have a beard.

Buddy Ebsen would be my chief alternative to Burgess Meredith as the American First Doctor, though. If I was ever going to do a Doctor Who BUT AMERICAN story, I'd use Buddy Ebsen as the First Doctor.

Telly Savalas should have been in there, though. I made a mistake not putting him in. Cleavon Little also would have been an entertaining equivalent to Doctor as Peter Davison played him.

Elektronaut said:
I have a list of at least three alternate Doctors that nobody has done before and one alternate Master no one has, which I'm just keeping around purely so I can add pop cultural colour to something but I've never got a chance to use them yet.
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Oh, go on, give me a clue. Even in a PM if you like. Let me see if I can guess. :whistle:
 
An all too brief glimpse of Bruce Lee as a cool charismatic villain makes me wish we not only had seen more of him in film and television, but also more of him as an anti-hero, the main antagonist and morally ambiguous roles in general. Before he died, he did write about his desire to play "grey" characters but that Hong Kong cinema lacked the nuance for such roles and couldn't accept an actor who played both heroes and villains. He complained about typecasting that Chinese actors faced. Perhaps if I get around to writing my "Bruce Lee Lives" TL, I'll make that happen. :)

 
Who's producer Jane Tranter mused about Judi Dench as the Doctor - THAT would be an interesting Tenth Doc. A bunch of the Tennant run's schticks can't be done when it's a middle-aged woman, the 2008 series has to be filmed around her Bond commitments, you get a whole new angle for Sarah Jane and Captain Jack's reaction to meeting 10, all of the upfront "PHWOAR DOCTOR EH" plots are turned into a semi-subtle innuendo and RTD testing the boundaries, and you also have the first female Doctor happening when the show is still newly back & unformed and What New Who Is hasn't yet been set in stone.
 
I've been giving some further thought to my previous "American Doctor Who" scenario.

I have this idea that someone - maybe Burgess Meredith, maybe Vincent Price, maybe Buddy Ebsen, somebody - plays the First Doctor for four years, from 1964 to 1967. They get a reasonably high-rated show and it's its network's only really reliable hit that manages to pull in all the demographics its board is interested in, enough so that when the lead decides to leave at the end of the 1967 season, they want to keep it going and come up with the idea of regeneration.

The Second Doctor is arguably the most important in the show's history: the decision is made to cast the character younger, to try and reinvigorate the show; they manage to poach a star who had been earmarked by CBS as the prospective lead of a new police drama, but Jack Lord only comes in on the condition that he is given a piece of the show and allowed to serve as an executive producer. Because the network is determined to keep it going, they agree to his terms. Lord proves a huge hit and his action-packed style propels the series to new heights of popularity and success. However, he suffers an on-set injury which curtails his ability to continue in the role physically and has to resign at the end of his sixth season in 1973. Nonetheless, Lord retains his producer credit and continues to influence the series to varying degrees until his death in 1998. I have this idea that his co-star would be Marlo Thomas.

I'd have some thoughts about where to take it next; probably William Conrad (@Elektronaut), though he'd have been on Cannon in 1974. I thought that would be a different direction to take it, where one star is so dominant like that, as Lord was on Hawaii Five-O (he essentially became owner of the show halfway through its run when its creator died, and became somewhat infamous for minutely managing production and getting into fights with his network executives).
 
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Terry Nation moved to America to get work and is there when Star Trek: The Next Generation (and he apparently loathed Trek) is out. Thus: Terry Nation sells an American studio on remaking Blakes 7, giving them a competitor Trek with some cult cred (which has just started airing on some US channels already) and about derring-do freedom fighter types.

Reusing his old plans for a revival - for Terry loves to recycle - he has a team of rebels and fugitives seeking out the legendary rebel Blake, exiled like Napoleon on Elba, led by idealistic ex-soldier Del Tarrant. Darrow returns as a reboot Avon, while Denise Crosby is cast as the new Jenna as a way of pissing on TNG's chips.
 
Going to go off-topic a bit and talk about a music PoD:
In early 2001, the Chicago-based band Wilco, by then an alt-country band that had almost completed its genre motion into alt-rock, was near its breaking point. As can be seen in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, the relationship between multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett and lead singer and guitarist Jeff Tweedy had reached its breaking point, largely due to creative differences - by June 2001, Bennett had been fired from the band. That would have been bad enough - between Tweedy’s debilitating migraines, a scrap over the firing of drummer Ken Coomer, and a scuffle over copyrighted audio samples from The Conet Project, the album was already well past the level of “troubled production” by the time their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally made its way to Reprise Records.
In 2001, AOL merged with Time Warner, the owner of Reprise Records. Reprise’s new corporate masters ordered hundreds of firings that led to massive shakeups - and one of the people fired, Reprise president Howie Klein, had been a massive advocate for Wilco. Complicating the matter was the experimental nature of the album - songs like I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, the album opener, combined poetic but cryptic lyrics and noisy multilayered production to make the album into something that sounded like pretty much nothing else in the business, certainly nothing Wilco had put out before. So when the album made its way to Reprise, arriving literally the day after Klein had left, new management passed on the album.
The record was a masterpiece, in my opinion. Even outside my opinion, it strongly influenced the alt-rock scene moving forward, with direct effects on everything from Mavis Staples to Billy Bragg. And it had other, more direct, effects. The long saga of its production - in which Warner eventually ended up paying twice for the album, after Nonesuch Records, another Warner subsidiary, bought the rights - led to other labels making stronger commitments to other alt-rock bands like The Flaming Lips, concluding that putting bands like Wilco through the wringer didn’t make good business sense. But there’s another effect - in mid-September of 2001, once it has become clear that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot wasn’t going to be released on schedule, Wilco put the album up on their website for free - and when the album was released physically on Nonesuch, it was still able to turn a profit, becoming Wilco’s best-selling album.
In short, if Howie Klein leaves Reprise Records one day later (or Wilco sends the album to Reprise one day earlier), Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is released about seven months earlier, relations between alternative bands and record labels are rougher, and a key proof of concept for free online music is prevented.
 
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