Buck Rogers (Forked Thread: Lorraine Williams did... what?)

Forked from: Lorraine Williams did... what?

JohnRTroy said:

Actually, there IS renewed interest in the property, since the whole reason that site is up there is because there's a new comic coming out and Frank Miller is doing a Buck Rogers movie. (Although good luck with that, after the Spirit has flopped I don't believe Miller's take on old properties should be followed, assuming Flint's looking at doing a "Sin City" type file).

However, you are correct about the property's current state. Buck Rogers is sort of a relic from the past. Since it came from the pulp-era and also was showing the future as imagined then, it comes off as dated. Science Fiction from the past tends to not age well. I think the 1970s series was the last successful attempt at this. I think the Dille family is pushing it as "retro-future".

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I actually read some of the Buck Rogers XXVC books TSR put out. They sucked. There were a number of reasons for this. 1) Buck Rogers was the most interesting character in the series. 2) He was hardly in the book. 3) They kept referencing computer terminology that was obsolete by the time the ink was dry on the page. 4) All characters in the series were 2D, cardboard cut-outs.

I actually felt betrayed reading the books. The first book, Arrival, is a collection of short stories, the first concerns Buck Rogers as a principal character. It's been years sense I read the book, but I believe he's only in one other short story, and even then it's very minor.

The next is The Martian Wars Trilogy. Again, Buck's presence is a cameo. An important cameo, but a cameo none the less. It just gets worse from there. Latter books de-emphasized the Buck Rogers names, and still later books removed the name altogether, leaving it just XXVC.

The main problem of XXVC was that it couldn´t decide what genre it was. You had the pulpy roots in fighting an evil empire in the steaming jungles of Venus, moving cities, rocket ships, men with names like Killer Kang... and loads of talk about how biotechnology works, big corporations, things that simply grated with the old-school Buck stuff.

The TV series avoided more of these mistakes, but the novels and the RPG were really bad in that regard. In other words: either rip the concept out of old-school and create a Buck-Rogers-new-school-SF-mix, with consistent aesthetics. Or try to channel the old school as much as you can.

Oddly, the Battle for the XXVth Century battle game is probably the best game of its type ever created, better than Axis & Allies.

pawsplay said:

Oddly, the Battle for the XXVth Century battle game is probably the best game of its type ever created, better than Axis & Allies.

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What's the game like? Is if faster than Axis & Allies?

Pinnacle Entertainment produced a Buck Rogers-style setting for Savage Worlds:

Slipstream

Personally I'll always choose dated sci-fi that focuses on heroism and daring and adventure over the melodrama and caution and speculation of the sci-fi we get today.

fanboy2000 said:

What's the game like? Is if faster than Axis & Allies?

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Hell, actual WWII was faster than a game of Axis & Allies.

fanboy2000 said:

What's the game like? Is if faster than Axis & Allies?

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Yes. Also, more fun. And it came with a zillion really fun little plastic toys.

fanboy2000 said:

Forked from: Lorraine Williams did... what?



I actually read some of the Buck Rogers XXVC books TSR put out. They sucked. There were a number of reasons for this. 1) Buck Rogers was the most interesting character in the series. 2) He was hardly in the book. 3) They kept referencing computer terminology that was obsolete by the time the ink was dry on the page. 4) All characters in the series were 2D, cardboard cut-outs.

I actually felt betrayed reading the books. The first book, Arrival, is a collection of short stories, the first concerns Buck Rogers as a principal character. It's been years sense I read the book, but I believe he's only in one other short story, and even then it's very minor.

The next is The Martian Wars Trilogy. Again, Buck's presence is a cameo. An important cameo, but a cameo none the less. It just gets worse from there. Latter books de-emphasized the Buck Rogers names, and still later books removed the name altogether, leaving it just XXVC.

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Makes you wonder if Lorraine Williams actually have greater influence in the Dille Estate with regards to the use of the IP.

The TV series avoided more of these mistakes, but the novels and the RPG were really bad in that regard. In other words: either rip the concept out of old-school and create a Buck-Rogers-new-school-SF-mix, with consistent aesthetics. Or try to channel the old school as much as you can.

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Well, from what I could tell, the TV show had a lot of problems as well. If you watch it today, there are a lot of flaws. (One thing disturbing me was the amount of use of chemicals for interrogation and capture, sort of a "date rape" acceptance. Maybe that came from the 70s.). And of course the show hasn't aged very well--the movie handled a lot better than the TV show. (Let's not even start on the "reboot" that came in the second season.) Buck Rogers the TV show was one of the things that gave JMS the statement "no cute kids or robots" when he decided on Babylon 5.

Earlier science fiction has a hard time adapting as much as science-fantasy or fantasy genre's, partly because science changes over time. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Lensmen, etc., all tend to suffer as changes in technology and culture come to the fore. Heck, even the competition can make existing entiries seem stale and dated--as Star Wars ended up doing to virtually every SF movie when it came out. The Sci-Fi channel recently tried to do a Flash Gordon reboot, and it was not very successful.

The point I need to make is, not all franchises can handle a "reboot", nor should all older properties be "re-imagined". Some should just be celebrated as the classics they are. I'd rather see creative energy go into creating new stuff like the next Babylon 5 or Farscape than trying to resurrect once-popular items.

JohnRTroy said:

The point I need to make is, not all franchises can handle a "reboot", nor should all older properties be "re-imagined". Some should just be celebrated as the classics they are. I'd rather see creative energy go into creating new stuff like the next Babylon 5 or Farscape than trying to resurrect once-popular items.

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I don't think the franchise itself has anything to do with it -- rather, it is the talent of the creator and their ability to extract the core concepts, and the commitment of the producers to keep the quality of the stories high.

Ron Moore's take on Battlestar Galactica is based on the general premise of the original, but it focuses on the human drama inherent to the circumstances rather than degenerating into the original's space battle of the week (with weak writing). The technology even in the current show is ridiculous -- OMG, the cylons can take over computer that are connected! That concept makes no sense on many levels, but it is irrelevant to the success of the series.

The NextGen reboot of Star Trek was filled with technobabble, slightly adjusted based on IRL tech advances. It, however, captured the adventure premise of the original and cast a trained and skilled thespian in the central role of captain. Not all of the scripts were stellar, but they were above average quality for speculative fiction.

On the other hand, the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still failed to capture the level of moral and ethical clarity of the original. The story became muddled, and that, more than any rethinking of the alien technology as nanotech, etc., is what made it an inferior film.

Buck Rogers is a pulp fiction story. It is a single man facing impossible odds in an exotic environment. It is Indiana Jones in space, and there is no reason why it couldn't work under the right hand.