NEW VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, THE TIME TUNNEL and LAND OF THE GIANTS???

 

About Aviva Goldman's announcement about a new VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, LAND OF THE GIANTS, and TIME TUNNEL: a mixture of feelings about this: remorse, feeling that it's too late, knowing that the Godzilla movies are a mix of great and bad and meh, knowing he also screwed up the LOST IN SPACE movie, and yet a shared universe (does that mean crossovers?) might be an interesting thing but I have a feeling it will not be what it could have been in the 1970s, excitement that someone might do something good with these classic premises but also knowing how godawful bad these things can go.

If they do GIANTS where a huge crowd of canon fodder crashes and argue all the time and are sneaky unlikable awful people who get themselves killed and others killed on a regular basis ala WALKING DEAD and GAME OF THRONES, no thanks.

Additionally, ALLEN'S shows were all very eclectic, often balancing tones of comedy, action adventure, horror, space opera, family values, loyalty, love, current issues and liberal ideals, even religion (TIME TUNNEL). SO what will these shows focus on? What ONE Thing?

NETFLIX'S LOST IN SPACE was a rounding success and well worth watching (but those last two episodes were DISGUSTINGLY BAD in every way, mostly in logic and sequence) but it focused ONLY on the Robot storyline (admittedly with a few great giant monsters here and there but not enough) for the most part. The space hopping nature of season three was gone, the various alien life forms were mostly gone. Realistically, it was a more realistic show.

But when it comes to VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA: what do you focus on? Spy stuff? That would make it very NIGHT AGENT and THE RECRUIT, among others. Aliens and undersea monsters? DEEPSTAR SIX, VIRUS, THE ABYSS, NEPTUNE FACTOR, DEEP RISING, LEVIATHAN (!), and others have come and gone and left their mark. I'd say probably underwater exploration but that can get boring pretty quick.

TIME TUNNEL could go the route of OUTLANDER and stay in one time period for a bit and OUTLANDER made one feel they really were in another time--at least in season one.

GIANTS can be alien giants who feel and act alien and can't interact much or communicate much which is what originally the idea was but that changed before the pilot was to be aired and thank God: otherwise the slow moving, lumbering giants could not talk to our Earth people. And for GIANTS: you can do free feeling stories like COMEBACK and/or RESCUE, SHELL GAME, CHAMBER OF FEAR, and dozens of others that feel like the Earthers are in a democratic USA like country OR you can do communistic like tales of a tyrant gov't like Russia is and was.

I prefer the show the way it was: a mix of both. Yet, I can see them focusing on just one aspect of all of that and making it far too dark and nasty. OR you can do aliens AND time travelers visiting the planet, which I doubt will happen as in WILD JOURNEY, A PLACE CALLED EARTH, PAY THE PIPER and GRAVEYARD OF FOOLS. They also had MANY episodes with social issues involving the media, working together with different peoples, money, addiction to gambling and more.

As I see it, they will have their hands caught up in the writing and the problems each show will have making these tough choices....frankly doing it like STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS just like ORIGINAL TREK would be best. In order to do crossovers, I'd bet the makers of these shows will have their hands tied up in just keeping the shows right in tone and script and everything else to do a "shared Universe." BUT there's always fan fiction which has already traveled to all these place already.