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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 18, 1982)
II3M pue 3Ai|e si iAOi|-MOU)| ueouaiuv VI QNOABQ ZS61 HBJLNIAA SCIENCE FICTION BY STEVEN BARNES I whisper to us of our tommorrows. I So why doesn't it work better on television? There are four basic areas which must be dealt with before we can truly put the fantastic on the small screen. 1) The Will 2) The Knowledge and Talent 3) The Correct Scope 4) The Taste and Discretion 1) The Will. Part of the clue to the lack of drive to produce fine science fic- A quick* look through your TV guide will turn up an interesting piece of in formation: out of sixty-three available hours of network programming, less than one twentieth of that time, or about ninety minutes, is taken up with shows which can be considered in the science-fiction or fantasy category. In the '80-'81 season, this meant Mork and Mindy and The Incredible Hulk standing alone against a tide of cops and robbers, ham-fisted P.I.s, poor little rich families and he-man transves tites. Literally hundreds of new shows have premiered over the past few dec ades, and only a handful of them have been anything but the standard televi sion fare. Not that fantasy shows, when done with even a smidgeon of imagi nation, are unpopular. Take a look at the most popular shows in syndication: Star Trek, Space: 1999, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Wonder Woman, Superman, and even (God help us) Batman. Here's an even more interesting thought: six of the top ten films of all time, with combined revenues topping the half billion dollar mark, are science fiction or fantasy oriented. Nearly a third of the top hundred box office champs are the same. With such an undeniably solid track record as this, why does television shy away, doling out its speculative fiction in such a mis erly fashion? First, let's define our terms, starting with fantasy. All fiction is fantasy, 'cause it ain't true, or it didn't happen quite that way. Some fantasy deals with the "real " world, and its only in vention is to simplify the actions and feelings of men and women to the point that they make sense within the closed confines of a story universe. In real life there are always loose ends and unexplained complexities. Fantasy liter ature deals with worlds of other when, usually where magic or differing natural laws create a situation different enough (or slyly similar ) from our own to be fascinating. Horror is a specialized branch of this, a subgenre dealing spe cifically with fear and death. Science Fiction deals with a fantasy world (sometimes just like ours, except that the actions and feelings of its charac ters are comprehensible) which has been, is being, or is about to be altered through the impact of technology, or the introduction of some form of scien tific speculation. It is a literature of ideas, of con sciousness expansion. It is fantasy tied to a logical premise, a game of What If whose aim can be trifling or deadly se rious. It can search the stars and the oceans, and the mind of man. It can do anything that any other branch of liter ature can do, with the inherent flexibil ity to go beyond the horizon, and ! 1 and going slightly crazy. I But there is no such thing as a I "low-budget" network show. Viewers in [ the tens of millions must tune in for a show to have a prayer of staying on. Innovation and experimentation are ruled almost completely out — what matters is that the product be tried and true. "Everyone wants to be first to be second" as one TV executive put it. [day? I Oh, sure, you can produce low-grade space epics "on the grind," but they I won't be science fiction. But aren't 1 blasters and rockets and weird aliens I from the Galactic Federation science I fiction? Not necessarily. They may be fantasy (Star Wars), or they may be drek (Cattle-1 car Galaxative). Some, j like Star [ A few fantasy/science fiction characters who made it to the small screen successfully: Lost in Space with Jonathan Harris, Angela Cartwright, Guy Williams, June Lockhart, Billy Mumy, Mark Goddard and Marta Kristen (back row); Star Trek's Shatner, Kelley and Nimoy (center); and two Anne Francises and one James Milhollin from a Twilight Zone episode tion and fantasy lies in the nature of the medium itself. Unlike books, theat rical film, or pay-TV, commercial televi sion does not exist by the direct support of its viewers. Indeed, the viewers are not even the customers; the advertisers are the customers, and the viewers are sold to them in great chunks arranged by age, income, education and ethnic background. Demographics are the only things that matter. A book can be successful if it sells 30,000 copies, a low budget film if it draws a million viewers. Thus, there is room for innovation, taking chances opera succeed and there'll be a dozen before the end of the year. In all fair ness, the same is true of movie studios, but not since the Forties has the movie industry been the same kind of pro grammer production-line as the televi sion industry is today. There must be sixty-three hours of material a week, and it must draw X tens of millions of viewers to break even. What happens is that the people who can deliver the numbers, and can deliver the work on schedule, get the jobs. Forget about originality — is it shootable and can we have it Wednes- Trek, can vary between science fiction ("The City on the Edge of Forever"), amusing fantasy ("The Trouble with Tribbles") and infuriatingly banal brain- rot ("The Omega Glory"). Clearly, television executives prefer to stay with worlds they live in, or can read about in history books, or worlds that have no apparent logic. Therefore, of the speculative shows which have appeared on television, better than se venty percent are pure fantasy. And even here, without the restraints of ex ternal consistency laid on science fic tion, Hollywood seems incapable of really doing the job. To my knowledge, there has never been a complete fantasy world pres ented in a television series. It's always Our Town with a single fantasy ele ment thrown in: a witch (Bewitched), a genie (I Dream of Genie), the ghouls next door (The Munsters), etcetera. The fantasy element, once established, is never truly explored, merely used to get the main characters into belly-laugh I situations. This inability to extrapolate creatively ! leads us to the second area of discus sion: 2) The Knowledge and Talent. Writer Larry Niven suggests that "Television executives don't understand science fic tion, because they have no grasp of technology. Only their technical crews — the special effects men — have any idea of science, which is why you find marvelous visuals propping up shoddy stories." With thousands of science fiction books, magazines, anthologies and what-not, why the dearth of creativity on the screen? Screenwriter David Ger- rold tells the story: "The film industry doesn't relate to books, except as source material — they just don't read. Usually only the writer they hire reads the actual material, and then he merely hands in a synopsis. What you get is a weird hodge-podge, where they're not really doing the material they decided to do — what they're doing is some thing that looks like something that ; was previously done. "The science means nothing to them, and whenever science gets in the way of the story they want to tell, guess what gets sacrificed ...?" What we have here is a combination of "Get it done quick" and the "art- by-committee" approach, where an idea is bounced from wall to wall until it is weak from exhaustion. Then, tame, safe and simple, it is ready for the boob tube. Perhaps the worst offender in this has been the Irwin Allen school of rubber-suit aliens. In the course of Voy age to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, Lost In Space, etc., science fic tion's most powerful tool, the What-lf, becomes "What if a submarine were attacked by a hundred-foot seaweed monster?" or, "What if our space pioneers are taken over by a swarm of tiny robots?" It may be fine and well for Mr. Allen to continue drawing flies with his con ception of science-fiction. It is only when one realizes that Mr. Allen has put more "Sci-Fi" on television than any other producer; and that none of his scripts would tax the mentality of a clever poodle, that the suspicion arises that something is wrong here. Where, amid the plastic dinosaurs, dueling lasers and lusting mutants, is a comment on the inherent limitations of intellect (2001: a Space Odyssey)? Where a sober warning of the need of (Continued on page 17) All photos courtesy of KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, one of many stations across the country that rerun the classics of the genre.