Life, Writing, Weirdness

Somehow, I got away from the idea of Science Fiction Saturday.

I’ve suggested more than once over my blogging years that I mostly can’t binge watch things like a lot of people seem to, unless it’s in extremely short bursts. I can do a six-episode season or series fairly quickly if I really want to, but even that I’d have to stretch out over two or three days, especially if it’s hour-long episodes. I’ve managed the successful binge-watch of a single standard season of a show once or twice, but it always leaves me disappointed and with fewer clear memories of good moments than if I did it normally.

I need variety, as in lots of new stories, which should be read as “new to me, but sometimes I’ll rewatch things for nostalgia purposes or because I really love them”.

The rotation right now isn’t not too different from when I posted it in late June last year because I am a university student in my mid-50s and work hard to do well, so there isn’t always time to pick up an episode of something during the day.

The list looks like this at the moment:

1. Alien Nation S01 (but I’m into the follow on movies, now)
2. Ark II S01 (getting near the end)
3. Doctor Who Classic S14
4. Eerie Indiana S02
5. Robotech S01 (Macross)
6. Space: 1999 S02
7. The Avengers S06
8. The Tick Animated S02
9. Time Bandits S01
10. Tripping The Rift S02

That’s basically things I’ve mostly gone out to find somewhere and bookmarked or actually own physical copies of. And, depending on academic workload, I’ll usually cycle through that 10-show list in 2-4 weeks. Watching on a TV screen instead of a computer screen is rarer, and progress is slow, but adds

1. Get Smart S02 (specifically with my oldest daughter)
2. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy S01
3. The Might Nein S01

Occasional pickups from the bookmarked list but not included in the “standard” rotation:

1. MacGyver S01
2. Percy Jackson S01
3. Shazam! S02
4. Secrets of Isis S01

And there are plenty of things on the backup list for the future or when I exhaust a current show.

Most of that is just for recap purposes. “Previously, on Science Fiction Saturday…”

To reintroduce the idea and expand it a bit, I’m going to very briefly note how most of the TV critic or classification sphere in North America puts things into buckets. Other English language jurisdictions will use different benchmarks that change the borders by a couple of years, and other languages might look at things completely differently. And even in North America, the borders are a bit fuzzy. I’m not going pick any particular benchmark shows like many sites seem to but generalize a bit. It goes:

• Pre-1960     The Golden Age
• 1960-1980  The Silver Age
• 1980-1995  The Bronze Age/Network Era
• 1995-2015  The Second Golden Age/The Prestige Era
• 2015-now    Peak TV/The Streaming Era

My classifications are a bit simpler, and purely age based. The borders aren’t fuzzy.

• Nostalgia     I watched it as a kid. (Probably Pre-1980 and certainly Pre-1985)
• Classic        Pre-2000 (that’s 25+ years ago now)
• Modern       2000-2020
• Current       2021+

Mostly not fuzzy. There is one fuzzy bit. I was a kid in the 1970s, and so a teenager in the 1980s. If I watched the show when I was young, by my own definitions it fits into the Classic era. But there’s a difference in my mind between a show like “The Secrets of Isis” which was first broadcast in 1975 and I enjoyed on Saturday mornings as a kid for several years after, and “Salvage 1” which first broadcast in 1979 and I might have a vague recollection of seeing one episode of but didn’t actually know about the series specifically until sometime into adulthood when I found the DVD set of the complete series for a ridiculously low price.

“The Secrets of Isis” gets classed as Nostalgia while “Salvage 1” is Classic television.

And the other piece of things is that I’m on a bit of a classic SF/F movie kick lately, picking out mostly B-movies that I didn’t see when they were produced in the 70s, 80s, or 90s but that I find tremendously entertaining now, if not usually in the way the producers might have intended. Alphabetically, there are five movies on that list that I’ve watched so far this year: Hell Comes to Frogtown, Soylent Green, Spacehunter, Starcrash, and The Beastmaster. There are many more on the list. Films aren’t grouped the same way as television, but I tend to look at things through a similar lens, so I’m likely to use the same basic classification system for movies.

So, what will it be next week, if I manage to squeeze a SFS blog post in? Movie or TV show? Good question. I’ll figure that out somewhere between now and then. But I’ve got lots of academic work to manage in the next week, too.

Be well, everyone.