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I posted this to dtm, but also I found an episode guide for "The Starlost" that includes Ursula K LeGuin stories ! Here's a PRO site: http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/star2.html here's a CON site. this guy is right, it was four years after Star Trek got cancelled, and people were DESPERATE for sci fi televison !! http://www.jumptheshark.com/s/starlost.htm the acting is wooden, the scripts (ironically by some fine writers like Ellison & LeGuin) are banal. The SFX (by Doug Trumbull!) are shoddy too, though the actual model of the huge Ark ship and interiors are kinda cool in a mid-70s, Logan's Run-sorta way. Oh .. the whole thing was produced ultra-cheap on videotape, giving it a "school play" quality that's hard to describe unless you've seen a few installments. All that said, THIS SHOW IS SO BAD, IT'S GREAT! SEEK IT OUT!! Sheesh, what a BORING show this was! The acting wasn't wooden or even leaden but virtually comatose -- they might as well have hired lithium addicts! What a ripoff piece of junk this was...bad writing, bad acting, bad sets, all brought to you on crappy videotape. As a Canadian, I am embarrassed to say that this big steaming pile of dung was made in Canada. The Starlost was a Canadian attempt at producing science fiction which unfortunately suffered the great Canadian TV flaw -- cheap ass budget. I remember watching this piece of crap as a child and wondering where the hell did they get that much Styrofoam for the sets? Subject: DTM: Generation Ships (and Canadian Sci-Fi) THE STARLOST: the incredible adventure of a giant spacecraft carrying the survivors of a dead planet Earth on the most critical mission ever launched by man: an endless journey across the Universe in search of a new world. Earthship ARK: hundreds of miles long... a huge grapelike cluster of metal domes, each a tiny world isolated from all the others. In the countless generations that have lived and died since the launching of the ARK, every- one has forgotten that the Earth ever existed... forgotten that they are streaking through space on a collision course with disaster. Forgotten... until one man stumbles on the truth: that they are THE STARLOST! the BBC has an article about generation ships. you get to the stars at much less than the speed of light by filling a big ship in which several generations of humans are born, live their lives, and die, in deep space, before the ship ever makes landfall. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/sci_tech/2002/boston_2002/newsid_1823000/1823822.stm as a kid I read a sci fi story about this. after a couple hundred years in space the shipboard society had collapsed and nobody knew about the outside "world" any more. and then they suddenly came up on their destination ! fun ensues. I wish I could remember the title. this link says they're making a movie on the idea ! http://www.upcomingmovies.com/generationship.html AND it recalls the Canadian sci fi TV series "The Starlost", which starred keir Dullea of "2001: A Space Odyssey" fame. (forget Battlestar Galactica. please.) it had the same idea: a generation ship goes to hell in a handcart. The Starlost: http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/star.html The Starlost premiered on television loosely based on a concept created by Harlan Ellison. Meticulously and lovingly devised by Ellison and brought to perfection by Scientific Advisor Ben Bova, the series promised to be a monumental step for SF television. Ellison had contracted great SF writers such as A.E. Van Vogt, Frank Herbert, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Alexei Panshin, Phillip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin to write storylines that would be scripted by the best Canadian writers available. Douglas Trumbull would be Executive Producer and create the special effects via the Magicam system. It looked good. It sounded good. It fell apart. The Starlost regressed into a low-budget, syndicated show with all the SFX being accomplished ineffectively through chroma-key, the method used in TV newscasts to put pictures behind the commentators. YUP, "The Starlost" redefined the word "low-budget" :-( And did not exactly put Canada on the sci fi map. I guess it toook David Cronenberg to do that ! ................................. To find out, what address you were using, when joining Commie Hardcore, send a message containing the command "who commie" (without the quotation marks) to the address [EMAIL PROTECTED] You'll receive the list of subscribers in the reply.
