As I've mentioned in a couple recent - blog posts, I've got the apartment to myself again for the week.
Once again, time to see what my TV viewing options are on Youtube.
Just like last time, my first instinct was to search for episodes of The Outer Limits. But this time, instead of the original TV show coming up, it's just episodes from the 1990s reboot that come up. (It looks like Youtube must have taken down all the full episodes from the original 1960s. If you look at my post from 8 months ago, the episodes I linked to are now unavailable.)
According to Wikipedia, the revival of the Outer Limits ran from 1995 to 2001. This was right during the prime of my life, but as far as I can remember, I think I was completely unaware of its existence at the time--despite being a fan of the original series.
I attribute my obliviousness to a few factors:
1) When I was in college, I was trying not to watch any TV. I had spent my high school years as a geek, but in college I was trying to atone for this by going out and socializing as much as possible.
2) According to Wikipedia, this show was airing on Showtime and SyFy, which I didn't have access to at that time.
3) Before the rise of the modern Internet, it was just a lot easier to be oblivious to stuff outside your radar.
Alright, well, let's give the rebooted Outer Limits a try and see if its watchable.
The first episode, which I chose just at random, was Lion's Den.
...the production values on this aren't great, but I think this was within the normal range for mediocre TV back in the 1990s.
Still, it's pretty cheesy.
Now, the original 1960s Outer Limits was also arguably pretty cheesy, but, for whatever reason, I really like the ambiance of those old 1960s sci-fi TV shows. I don't know why, maybe it's because when I was growing up there was so much nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s in the culture, and I just absorbed it, but I like the eerie black and white Outer Limits, even if I know it's low production quality.
But low-budget 1990s TV? It's pretty hard to romanticize that, because I remember this type of dreck all too well. (Not this show particularly, but certainly this type of show.)
That being said, Lion's Den is still largely watchable. I mean, if you just want to put something on the screen to entertain you while you eat dinner, it's mostly entertaining. It held my attention, at least for the first 2/3rds.
It lost me at the end, because I was starting to realize at that point that there was going to be no twist ending to this story. The story establishes itself in the first act, and then, it plays out incredibly predictably from there. The viewer is not rewarded for sticking to the end of this story. What happens at the end is exactly what you think will happen.
The one note of interest is that it stars Shawn Ashmore, who would later go on to play Iceman in the X-Men movies.
But, because I wanted something to watch over dinner the next night, I came back to this series one more time. I saw the title "Time to Time" and I thought: Time travel stories usually have a few twists in them. Maybe this one will be more interesting.
...remember I mentioned above that there was a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s in the culture when I was growing up?
Well, this is a classic example of the romanticization of the 1960s that was going on in the 1990s.
Now, as I've confessed on this blog a few times (e.g. here, here , here, etc), I totally got caught up in that romanticization myself. I was young and impressionable and I just got swept up in all the myth-making that my elders were engaging in.
To give some credit to myself, even while I was getting taken-in by the myth, I did at least have some cognizance of what was going on--that is, I did kind of recognize even at the time that there was romanticization of the period going on.
What I didn't realize at the time was how temporary this nostalgia was. That is, I assumed that romanticizaiton of the 1960s was now a permanent part of our culture--that in 2024 people would still be talking about the 1960s just as much as they were doing in the 1990s. I didn't realize that in the 1990s the myth of the 1960s was just a result of Baby-Boomers being at the point in their lives when they were at their peak economic influence, and that this state of affairs wouldn't last forever. I was too young to know how nostalgia cycles work. (The death of oldies radio stations (W) also took me by surprise. I had just assumed that pop songs from the 1950s and 60s were a permanent part of the cultural landscape, and never anticipated they would fade away with their target demographic.)
...anyway, all that is to say that Time to Time is a perfect example of the nostalgia for the 1960s that was being done in the 1990s. And as such, it's a great time piece. It's incredibly cheesy and cliched, but then most of the 1990s nostalgia for the 1960s was incredibly cheesy and cliched, so its a perfect example of its genre. (It's odd, but, for whatever reason, people in the 1990s couldn't write 1960s characters as believable human beings--they always resorted to writing 1960s characters as if they were walking billboards, incapable of normal emotions and always communicating in slogans.)
In terms of watchability, Time to Time rates a bit higher than Lion's Den, and at least has a couple of twists to keep you awake.
No comments:
Post a Comment