Axiom’s Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

This is the second to last week with new categories for the Hulu Awards.  And finally we get past the Reality show drivel and on to some good stuff.

Round 3 Nominations:

Best Science Fiction/Fantasy TV Series:
Finally, after ten weeks, we get to the category most closely associated with the main focus of this site.  We have waded through such extremely off-topic (and at times intolerable) categories as Best Competitive Reality Show, Best Celebrity-Driven Reality Show, and Best Travel and Leisure Show.  Still, among the other categories and I managed to find some gems of genre interest and we really have been able to demonstrate the vast offerings of Hulu.com.

My selections in this category came quite easily.  The first three were right off my Best-of list (in fact, the first two are in my Top 10), and the fourth is destined for the Best-of list.

1. Babylon 5 – J. Michael Stracynzski’s epic television series represents a high point for Science Fiction and Fantasy television as it gives us an over-arching storyline that unfolds across five seasons, highlighted by some of the best science fiction and dramatic stories ever seen on the small screen.  Unfortunately, Hulu only has the first two seasons available at the current time, but that still represents some of the show’s best moments (especially Season 2).  Highlighted episodes:  “Deathwalker”, “Babylon Squared”, “The Coming of Shadows”, “Confessions and Lamentations” (the latter being one the best episodes of any television series).
2. Firefly – Joss Whedon’s space western only made it through fourteen episodes (and a subsequent big-screen sequel), but what an amazing handful of episodes he gave us!  FOX’s cancellation of this show is one of the greatest injustices in the history of television and it truncated what could have been the next major Science Fiction franchise.  Even if you’ve seen the entire series already, it’s worth watching it all over again.  Highlighted episodes:  all of them.
3. Battlestar Galactica (New) – No cute kids or cuddly robot dogs in this re-imagining of the 1978 iconic series.  And if there were, they would probably meet with a grisly demise in short order.  This series takes its viewers on a rollercoaster ride and presents some pretty hard-hitting drama.  Unfortunately, Hulu only has the most recent episodes available, but that provides a good chance to get caught up before the final ten episodes air (which already began on January 16th).
4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer – I’ve been slammed by a few for not including Joss Whedon’s seminal work on my Best-of list, and I admit to the deficiency.  Mostly its because I stopped following the series after its first season (no particular reason really) and I never encountered some of its better episodes.  Hulu has Season 2, so it has given me the chance to pick up where I left off, so expect to see this one find its way to my Best-of list before too long.

Honorable Mention: Eureka – I wish we had five or six choices in this category because I could fill up that and more.  The Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka made Science Fiction fun again.  It’s an enjoyable little series that will make you laugh out loud at times while also challenging your noggin from time to time.  If you’ve never watched it, here’s your chance to go back to the beginning.

Not as Bad as You Might Think: Tremors – Seems like way too much of a stretch to make a series from a movie franchise already exhausted creatively by what seems like a never-ending run sequels.  But this odd mix of horror/monster movies and government conspiracy actually was not too bad (genre mainstay Christopher Lloyd even made frequent appearances as a recurring character).  It failed to live beyond its first season more because Sci Fi replaced the hugely popular Farscape with this (much cheaper) attempt to kick off a new franchise and viewers refused to tune in out of protest.  Check out a few episodes, you might be pleasantly surprised.

As Bad as You Might Think: Cleopatra 2525 – Bad acting, bad directing, bad scripts, bad special effects, bad dialogue (“Hey, do you want a kidney or not?”), bad idea.  Even worse, the one thing it should have going for it, the eye-candy factor, falls flat.  Sorry, but I just don’t consider these women too hot (sorry Gina, but at least I loved you in Firefly).  Doesn’t even contain any real camp value.  Just plain awful, and I have no idea how it ever made it to a second season.

Best Science Fiction Movie:
Like all of the movie categories for the Hulu Awards, “Best” is a relative term because the site does not yet have a good representation of big-screen fare.  Still, they do have enough decent choices.  We will assume that the entry for the movie Heroes starring Henry Winkler and Sally Field made it here because of a categorization error on the part of Hulu.  And please, let’s assume the same thing with Xanadu.

1. John Carpenter’s The Thing – I gave it the nod for best Horror Movie, but this deserves consideration among Science Fiction movies as well.  Just a damn, well-made, engaging, and scary movie.
2. Men in Black – A good fun sci fi romp.  One of my all-time favorites.
3. The Fifth Element – A bit overhyped when it first came out, but this is still a pretty good Science Fiction entry.
4. Pitch Black – You might consider dinging this one because it opened the door for the dreadful The Chronicles of Riddick, but I will still give it the nod.  One of the best Alien clones.
5. Starship Troopers – Was Paul Verhoeven mocking or embracing the militarism of Robert A. Heinlein’s original novel?  You be the judge.  Either way, this was one of the best Sci Fi/Action movies of all-time.

Guilty Pleasure: The Toxic Avenger – This one is really pretty bad, but in all the right ways!

Worst Scripted TV Series:
Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh.  This one’s going to be fun.

You know, I love television.  I’ve watched a lot of it, I mean a whole lot of it.  And I probably let my kids watch too much of it as well.  Still, it can be entertaining, engaging, educational, and enlightening (I did not intentionally pick just words starting with “e”), but that is when it is hitting on all cylinders.  My Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television documents quite a number of these successes.  The ones that really pushed the medium to its limits and produced engaging, worthwhile entertainment.

Unfortunately, the best examples of the medium only represent a very small percentage of its total output.  Too often it tries to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and in the process, provides us with some pretty dismal fair.  Reality television probably best embodies the nadir of television output, but there are plenty of scripted shows that vie for top (bottom?) honors there as well.  Three of the following have already appeared on my Worst of Science Fiction and Fantasy list (and a couple will be joining it soon).

1. Galactica: 1980 – This ill-advised attempt to restart the Battlestar Galactica franchise came about when ABC execs suddenly changed their minds about cancelling the original series.  Unfortunately, most of the principals had already found work elsewhere, so they had to re-tool the concept and bring in a new cast.  Now geared more towards kids, it produced episodes (and only eight at that) hardly better than some of the worst Saturday morning fare.
2. Cleopatra 2525 – See my comments on this one under the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Television Show category above (hint: it didn’t make it t0 that list).
3. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century – In its first season, this series gave us a tongue-in-cheek Sci Fi romp.  It’s scripts were pretty bad, but at least it didn’t take itself too seriously.  But in its second season, the show did an about-face and tried to make statements with its episodes (a la Star Trek).  Lesson of the day: if you have bad scripts, it’s much better not to take yourself too seriously.
4. The Munsters Today – The original series provided a rather enjoyable visit with an eccentric though ghoulish family.  Some of the comic interchange between Fred Gwynne as Herman and Al Lewis as Grandpa ranks among the classic comedy moments of television.  But there was no excuse for this horrid attempt to revive the franchise.  I’m thinking this ones needs to find its way to my Worst-of list along with Cleopatra 2525 above.
5. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea – This series started out as a fairly standard action adventure show, but with Irwin Allen at the helm, it quickly descended into a creature-of-the-week debacle aimed mostly at children.  The crew of the Seaview encountered such absurdities as werewolves, evil leprechauns, lobster men, and killer toys, and they did it all with a straight face so it failed to even deliver any real camp appeal.
6. What’s Happening Now – The original What’s Happening was tolerable.  But there was just no excuse for this attempt to dredge up that franchise again.
7. Knight Rider – This is the recent revival of Knight Rider that bowed this past Fall on NBC.  Sad thing is that with a little bit of effort this could have been one of those good guilty pleasure shows.  Instead, it was only guilty of bad writing, bad acting, bad directing, and of wasting its exorbitant budget.
8. Team Knight Rider – Do we detect a trend here?  Did somebody say they were adding the original Knight Rider to Hulu as well . . .

Worst Movie:
There are some pretty bad movies out there (on Hulu and in general), but the problem with the selections in this category is that I do not feel strongly enough about too many of them to throw them onto a Worst-of list.  Oh sure, you could take some easy pot-shots at such B-Movie turkeys as The Giant Gila Monster or Frankenstein’s Daughter, but then those movies don’t really pretend to be something they’re not.  For that reason, I will focus on some of the more well-known and/or over-hyped properties that really fell flat.  And I sure wish the Austin Powers movies were on Hulu, because I never understood why people thought they were funny and would love to include them here.

1. Planet of the Apes – How on earth did one of the most talented and imaginative directors of all time, the person who produced literature on film with such tour de forces as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, and Big Fish, ever create such a mundane, uninspired, lackluster excuse for a film as this.  I guess when you reach such heights, you have to fall pretty low to create a proper balance in the universe.
2. The Nutty Professor II:  The Klumps – The first movie was okay.  The second should have provided sufficient cause for banning Eddie Murphy from ever making movies again with the exception of voice-overs in animated films.  Unfortunately he did make more movies which brought us such wonders as The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Dr. Doolittle, and Norbit.
3. Hercules in New York – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first film where his accent was so strong that they dubbed his lines.  This has to be seen to be believed.
4. Three Amigos – Three really great comedic talents and hardly a chuckle to be found among them.

Best Videogame Coverage:
Like Sam, I’m not much of a videogame person either.  Still I looked through the selections and found a few decent nominations.  I especially like the clip nature of each of these because then you can just search for the particular game that interests you.

1. Game Reviews – Good, concise, quick reviews covering a ton of games.  And for those of you interested in Cooking Mama: World Kitchen, you need to check out episode 3 of Comedy Gumbo to get a preview of Dishwashing Champion.
2. Videogame Specials – Information, previews, strategy tips and more.  I especially enjoyed the three part look at the early days of Atari’s game-developing group (hey, the Atari 2600 was big news when I was growing up).
3. X-Plays – Mostly more of what the previous two offered, but it has some good stuff as well.

Round 2 Nominations:

Best Web Original:
I’m really sorry that Comedy Gumbo didn’t make it through to the semi-finals, but as long as Dr. Horrible advanced, I’m okay.  Not too much else here of interest beyond Spacerip (and no, I do not see the Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show on this list, and if you do it’s just a hallucination), but like Mr. Christopher I’ll agree that you can’t go wrong with National Geographic.

1. Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog
2. Spacerip
3. National Geographic Animals
4. National Geographic Environment
5. National Geographic Travel

Worst Web Original:
See, you just got confused.  Here’s the list with the Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show.  It easily made it into the semi-finals on its way to winning this category by a landslide.

1. Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show – Uh . . . uh . . . huh, huh, huh, huh, this sucks! Give me the remote, dammit Beavis!
2. Dating Brad Garrett
3. ‘Sodes (er . . . uh . . . make that Funnysodes.  Or not.)
4. Retro Minute
5. Barely Political

Round 1 Nominations:

Best Travel/Leisure Show:
Uncorked – Decided to leapfrog this one over After hours with Daniel for the finals. Who do I send my resume to so that I can get on the next edition of this show?

Best Cooking/Food Show:
Good Eats – Food nerd Alton Brown takes the cake in this category.  Of course he also bakes it and breaks down the cooking process to its minutiae.

Worst Reality Series:
All of them.  No really, all of them.  Why do we have to narrow it down to one?  They’re all nothing but drivel and little more than a sorry excuse to scrap a few dollars from the waning popularity of these celebrities.  Okay, if I have to pick just one, I’ll stick with Living Lohan.

Best Classic Movie:
Night of the Living Dead – Is this really better than Some Like it Hot or Pride of the Yankees?  Just depends on your perspective.  I’m coming from the point of view of someone who writes on Science Fiction and Fantasy related media, so I will stick with my own particular idiom.  This one is a seminal piece of work and spawned its own sub-genre.

Best Action TV Series:
24 – This series embodies the “Action” genre and provides it with one of its best examples.  It definitely deserves top honors in the category.

(Editor’s Note: The general public can participate in the nominations as well. Go to the links above for any or all of the categories you are interested in and cast your vote for the shows you think should win. All of the general votes will be tallied up and count as one panelist in deciding the final winners. PSW)