bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (05/07/84)
We all know the problems with V, but what bothers me so much is that the rest of it is not bad, and approaches high quality in places. I'm talking about things like the effects, editing, production values and that sort of thing. Even the writing is a good suspense story. No doubt done by highly trained, qualified cinematic technicians. What I don't get is why they never asked their engineers any questions about the plot. With all the money they spent, they could have easily hired one educated consultant. Anybody with any knowledge of science would say that the idea of aliens coming here to steal our water and eat us is really silly. Water the most precious substance around? Give me a break! People with biotechnology like that needing to steel our bodies for food, especially when they have to feed us? Come on. And lizards? Sure. (This one is the worst. I am fully prepared to believe human looking aliens with common ancesters to ours, but lizards in perfectly molded body suits? The point is that all these things have no reason behind them. It would make a far more intersting fascism story (which is the producers avowed intention) if they were our cousins. I am ready to go for imperialist aliens out to enslave us, but take our water and eat us? If they changed these things, V would be a fairly decent SF story, in fact one of the best ever made for television. And all they had to do was ask somebody. How can so much money be spent and nobody be asked?
kcarroll@utzoo.UUCP (Kieran A. Carroll) (05/08/84)
* concerning the sky-fie space opera V, Brad asks, "How can so much money be spent and nobody be asked?" how to write a good SF story? Easy: It was done in Hollywood! I'm sure that the people involved in V think that sci-fi starts and ends in hollywood, that all the BEM movies ever made are typical of the genre, that the only sf literature ever produced are novelizations of old movies. In other words, they don't know about Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Campbell, and all the others on the honor roll, they've never heard of Astounding or F&SF, and they likely think that they're the first ones to ever come up with the "Food of the Gods" concept. What can you expect from the industry that gave us "The Eye Creatures"? They're right, you know: sci-fi DID start in hollywood, and will hope- fully end there. Forry Ackerman lives out in that neck of the woods, I beleive, and he invented the term "sci-fi" (taken from "hi-fi") to label the type of stuff coming out in movies at the time: pseudo- science-fiction done by amateurs masquerading as film producers, who knew nothing of the vast body of work that they were ignoring. -Kieran A. Carroll ...decvax!utzoo!kcarroll
barry@ames-lm.UUCP (Kenn Barry) (05/08/84)
[]
"V" is a very sore subject with me. I looked forward to the showing
of the first "V" TV-movie, even though it was a network production. Not
expecting much, but hoping.
The very first episode was excellent. The secret of the aliens and
their nasty intent was not yet revealed, and I was hooked.
And then I saw the second half (of the first "V", remember - we're
not talking about the new one here). Friends, if someone had asked me to
make up the stupidist, most impossible 'explanation' for the mysteries, I
could not have topped the sheer incredible idiocy of what they came up
with. I was (am) more than disappointed, I was (am) genuinely angry about
"V", and have avoided the sequel in righteous indignation.
I, too, have wondered how such stupifying nonsense makes it to the
air waves. It's hard to believe that anyone could be so completely
ignorant of the laws of nature, but we're talking TV producers here, and
they are a breed apart, thank God. Not only do many of them think that
'physics' is what you take for constipation, they also frequently have
complete contempt for science fiction, and for the audience which
science fiction attracts. Frankly, when I see the high ratings which "V"
enjoyed, I start wondering if they're right.
By the way, I think there is more wrong with "V" than the science,
or the illogical plot. When I saw our heroes starting out to organize the
resistance movement, I nearly fell out of my chair from laughter. Even a
poorly-run tyranny would have had those comic-opera revolutionaries up
against the wall in a week.
Yes the production values were good. Big deal. Even "The Starlost"
(remember *that* turkey?) had some nice mattes and models. I'd still
rather watch a John Davidson telethon than see any more of "V".
Kenn Barry
NASA-Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA
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Electric Avenue: {dual,hao,menlo70,hplabs}!ames-lm!barrygds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) (05/09/84)
>What I don't get is why they never asked their engineers any questions >about the plot. With all the money they spent, they could have easily >hired one educated consultant. Anybody with any knowledge of science would >say that the idea of aliens coming here to steal our water and eat us >is really silly. Water the most precious substance around? Give me a >break! People with biotechnology like that needing to steel our bodies for >food, especially when they have to feed us? Come on. >And lizards? Sure. (This one is the worst. I am fully prepared to believe >human looking aliens with common ancesters to ours, but lizards in perfectly >molded body suits? I do not think it is silly. I didn't see the first episodes of V last year, so I don't know the background of their civilization or why they came to Earth in the first place. But consider: 1. There is a planet of amphibious(?) beings which is literally "drying" up, for any number of reasons. Since water is scarce, all primitive forms of life (they ate mice, for example) die out eventually, leaving the beings. They have an advanced technology enough to duplicate the epidermi of other species. Also, they are a warlike, fascist state, who feel no shame in taking from other worlds. 2. Earth is 70% water, and almost all life on Earth is mostly comprised of water. (we are, for example, as most primates I imagine would be, most mammals in general I suppose). These beings could certainly use us for food, assuming there are enough of us around. It wasn't as if they were going anywhere -- the world's population of humans and other life could keep their numbers alive for quite a few years. When they finally exhaust the supply of life on Earth, they can just move off to another planet. Water is a more precious substance than we Earthlings care to think of it as. Think about worldwide drought for a long period of time (one year, let's say) and the effects of it on world politics, health, the economy, etc. (Think of Soylent Green, also. We ate ourselves when it came down to it, why shouldn't a band of ruthless aliens do the same?) -- Be ye moby, for I am moby. Greg Skinner (gregbo) {decvax!genrad, eagle!mit-vax, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds You can't trust anyone around here with the su password these days.
kcarroll@utzoo.UUCP (Kieran A. Carroll) (05/10/84)
* Ahem. If any alien race wanted a vast quantity of water from our solar system, it'd be >much< easier to get it from the rings of Saturn, or the moons of Jupiter, than to descend deep into the earth's gravity well, suck up >liquid< water (rather than solid ice), and haul it all back up out of the gravity well. Don't you think? Finding flaws with "V" is like shooting fish in a barrel; it's too easy, and hence not much fun. -Kieran A. Carroll ...decvax!utzoo!kcarroll
markh@tekig1.UUCP (05/10/84)
<yum> Doesn't aynone else out there realize that there is Dark Sinister Purpose in this ostensible idiocy? What better way to lull our race to sleep than by telling us that the bad guys are so inanely Bad (and Stupid) that we (the sheep) come to reject the whole concept of Cosmic Bad Guys as ridiculous? It isn't that Hollywood is full of airheads, it's that we are on the verge of being in deep serious cosmic yoghurt. They aren't Coming, they're Already Here. But don't listen to me...I'm only kidding anyway. really.
urban@trwspp.UUCP (05/11/84)
The final battle was my effort to keep my dinner down when I saw how they "resolved" the story. So dumb I'm embarassed to admit I spent the time watching. In this morning's L.A. Times, they printed NBC's planned Fall schedule. "V" will be a regular series on Friday nights in the 8:00-9:00 slot. Some Hollywood special-effects lab will be kept in business for a while more, I guess. Mike
davidl@mako.UUCP (David Levine) (05/11/84)
I'm one of those folks who just loves to come up with rational
explanations for irrational Sky-Fy, so...
Obviously, the Visitors are a high-technology people. (Consider the
energy required to hold those motherships up...) A reasonable
assumption is that they have been civilized for a long time, and
probably spent several hundred years between their Industrial Age and
the development of interstellar travel. This is more than enough time
to mess up an ecology completely.
Suppose the Visitors, being exclusively carnivorous, managed to wipe
out all the non-domesticated edible species on their home planet in
that time. After a few hundred years of inbreeding, it is possible
that the domestic species could suddenly lose viability. This could
happen in any number of ways, but one likely problem is a plague to
which all the members of a given inbred species are susceptible (for
example, the Irish potato famine of the last century was caused by the
fact that most of the potatoes in Ireland were of the same strain, and
all succumbed at once to a potato blight).
Now we have a planet full of civilized, spacefaring carnivores who find
their food supply in deadly peril. Perhaps they can hold out for a
while on the remaining species of edible domestic animals, but they
know that they're in trouble. The cure to inbred, vulnerable strains
is fresh breeding stock.
So, off they go to other worlds for more breeding stock. However, the
chance of the new stock being able to interbreed with the native life
is remote at best (OK, sometimes you get lucky, but you can't count on
it). Therefore, the breeding population they bring back has to be
large enough to avoid genetic degradation for as long as possible...
millions of individuals at least, possibly billions. Those individuals
also have to be as genetically diverse as possible.
The strategy is obvious. Large ships and many of them are sent to each
likely world. Those ships take on native life from geographically
diverse areas to assure a genetic mix. On civilized worlds, they
settle over cities to reduce the distance the native life must be
transported.
Why take an intelligent species? I think it's because intelligent food
animals would require less effort to care for once they were properly
domesticated. In our case, we simply proved too intractible and the
Visitors left quickly, to cover their losses. Note that they did get
away with 50 motherships full of uncounted millions of frozen humans.
Why sneak about in plastic bodysuits? I think it's just to make it
easier for them to gather as many of us as possible as easily as
possible. After all, we don't slaughter cattle in the field and drag
them to the butcher; we make them walk to the slaughterhouse under
their own power. Dragging a hostile native population in from the
hills is an expensive proposition, since they'll be fighting a geurilla
action on their own home territory. If wearing an uncomfortable
bodymask and lying through your pointed teeth for a few years is the
alternative to decades of geurilla war, it starts to look attractive.
Why steal water? This one's simple. Water is too easy to manufacture
from common elements for it to be in short supply for a spacefaring
race. However, if your ships require water for fusion fuel (or
cooling, or whatever) and you're already going down into a gravity well
for supplies, there's no reason not to pick up a few million gallons
while you're there. ("John, honey, would you mind getting gas while
you're going to Earth? The tank was three-quarters empty last night.")
However, not even I can explain the ending. I think that "Elizardbeth"
(not original with me) reached across the universes and through time
and space to tap into the energy generated at the end of "Star Trek -
the Motionless Picture I"...
Another modern Just-So Story from
David D. Levine (...decvax!tektronix!tekecs!davidl) [UUCP]
(...tekecs!davidl.tektronix@rand-relay) [ARPA]
(By the way, I can't resist mentioning that every time they showed the
aliens' headquarters in Los Angeles I thought of it as the "LA
convention and Visitors' bureau.")hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison) (05/11/84)
<just LOOK at them snappers!> Well, I guess I will be the bearer of dismal news. "V - The Final Battle" is, as expected, nothing less than a pilot for NBC's NEW FALL SERIES "V" FRIDAY NIGHTS AT 8:00 YUCKA Oh well. Can't be much worse than Lost in Space. Or can it? Hutch <I used to LIKE watching tv!>
gds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) (05/12/84)
>> "V" will be a regular series on Friday nights in the 8:00-9:00 slot.
I seem to recall that Galactica came on in the 8:00-9:00 slot also.
(Fate!! We will be watching "V" reruns 2 years from now.)
I doubt "V" will outdraw Benson/Webster. It might stand a chance
against The Dukes of Hazzard.
--
Be ye moby,
for I am moby.
Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, eagle!mit-vax, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds
Joy is in the ears that hear.mp@whuxle.UUCP (Mark Plotnick) (05/13/84)
None of the aliens I know ever came to earth JUST to get water. The ones in ``V'' also wanted to raise human cattle to ship back to their local fast-food places, and in general their junket to earth provided an excuse to wield power over a less-advanced race. In ``The Man Who Fell To Earth'', David Bowie came here not only to get water, but to watch TV as well. This subject is getting rather dry (sorry). Do yourself a favor and don't analyze these movies' scientific facts so critically. Not to say that V was good. There were so many ripoffs from Star Wars, Star Trek, War of the Worlds and other movies that I expected to see Robbie The Robot or a computer that could talk and read lips. You know, with a little more effort, V could have been turned into a reasonably humorous 2-hour parody of famous sf films. Mark
cbspt002@abnjh.UUCP (Marc E. Kenig @ ATT-IS Piscataway NJ) (05/14/84)
Much has been said about the enema that V gave to physics, how about the screw that the writers get in on biology/anthropology? To wit: - In the first mini-series, Willy rescues a worker from a vat of liquid nitrogen or the like. I thought that lizard-likes lose big when the temp drops. Likewise why did the resistance ever fight the aliens during the day? Lizards don't function well at night - which is why our evolutionary ancestors prevailed. - A human being impregnated by another species? Did Russia have have satyr princes as a result of Catherine the Great's fetishes? Come on now... - The bird and marsupial population of the Earth is so much greater than that of homo-sapiens, why did the visitors bother with us? Obviously they prefer birds and mice (Diana munches on budgies - not ladyfingers/ The teen Visitor prefered mouse-ies to the wino, etc.) more than humans. Granted we might be easier to catch... - The Visitors dropping like flies from inhaling a bacteria? Most of their skin was covered - why not just break out the bio-hazard gas-masks? - Julie is pretty active for someone with a congenital heart defect. We are told about this during her Disco brainwashing. Speaking of which, why bother at all with brainwashing. Why not just mold a body suit for a Visitor of correct height and build in the image of the influential person? - Did you catch a glimpse at Visitor writing? Not english like at all...why did they use what looked like QWERTY kybds? (Remember the PC that Diana was using to teach Elizabeth. Looked like an IBM-PCjr...). V: The Final Crusade - The father goes back to the Visitor's home planet and converts them all. They come back wearing Jimmy Swaggart masks........ M Kenig ATT-IS (last word on V for a while - I promise) Piscataway NJ ..!abjnh!cbspt002
jsq@ut-sally.UUCP (John Quarterman) (05/15/84)
There's a story called ``Proxima Centauri'' by Murray Leinster that has
huge, self contained star ships, and invading, ravenous, people-eating
aliens. It is at least representative of that sort of thing, and can
be found in The Road to Science Fiction #2, edited by James Gunn. The
story was originally published in 1935, from which we can infer that
popular sf on television has advanced to the state of pulp stf of the
30s. That's at least as good as the movies, I suppose, seeing as the
Star Wars saga is equivalent to E.E. "Doc" Smith space opera of the
same vintage. (2001 and The Lathe of Heaven are not representative,
and neither had the same kind of popularity.)
But, then, Leinster was more creative even back then (his aliens were
carnivorous plants), knew something about science (he used relativity
correctly), and went on to better things (``First Contact,'' written in
1945, is still the classic story of its kind). I doubt we can expect
the same of the perpretrators of V.
What really annoyed me was the blatant lift of the beginning of ``Space
Nazis'' from Childhood's End. In service of the drivel that followed.
I hope Arthur C. Clark sues them for plagiarism, not to mention fraud.
--
John Quarterman, CS Dept., University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712 USA
jsq@ut-sally.ARPA, jsq@ut-sally.UUCP, {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!jsqgds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) (05/20/84)
<danger! danger!>
> Oh well. Can't be much worse than Lost in Space. Or can it?
It is ridiculous to compare Lost in Space and Invasion of the Space
Nazis. Lost in Space was adventure/comedy and was not to be taken
seriously. Obviously, V was meant to be taken seriously, as proof of
this, many netters have attempted to defend some of the scientific
aspects of the show. :-)
Speaking as a Lost in Space fan for life
--
Be ye moby,
for I am moby.
Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, eagle!mit-vax, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds
Joy is in the ears that hear.