Check this out Shizzle, it has an easy to read breakdown of the references. http://www.moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

I like the Dune books generally.

I did get really hooked on Babylon 5 - but only really appreciated it when I watched thru the whole series, since they had such a great story arc which was difficult to follow just catching individual episodes. I expected BSG to be similar, but gave up on season 1. I admit there can be a problem, once I pick up on a number of aspects of a series which annoy me, I tend to be sensitized to those things and keep getting progressively pissed-off every time I get a hint of them in subsequent episodes, even if they are better integrated into the story arc than initially.

As I commented previously, my own perception of BSG, probably based on a too-limited sampling, left me with very much the impression of a very 'formulaic' series, the whole Cylon thing just did not work for me at all, along with the impression of so much tedious political intrigue - I wanted to watch an SF series, not a lame version of West Wing with some space-ships thrown in. Probably a very unfair judgement overall, but that was one of the impressions I was left with. IMHO the parallels with current issues and politics and religions were far too close, it was so unlikely that so far in the future that the details of politics and religions would be so similar to current ones. Whereas in all the SG-1 religions clearly were very different to current ones in many details, so I was easier to focus on the broader problems of religions in general. The idea I picked up from early episodes of BSG that Christianity and its doctrines would persist so recognisably over such a span of time and changes in setting, from Earth to a space-faring environment, was totally unbelievable to me.

There were some grossly silly science behind some of the plot lines - there was something about a search for water in one episode which made no sense to me in the light of where we find water/ice in and around star-systems which further damaged my feeling about the series.

Maybe I should give BSG another chance sometime in the future, considering how many people who I share some tastes and ideas with like it so much.

SG-1 did have quite a number of somewhat ho-hum episodes, low periods, not unexpected over 10 seasons, and I can see how someone less tuned into the characters and themes could give up on it, much as I gave up on BSG. It did have good story arcs, but many episodes did not add much to them. At its best, it used the setup to explore the implications of a whole range of different ways of organizing societies, and the motivations to power and control, especially involving the way religious beliefs and doctrine could lead to very harmful effects on societies.

Farscape is good, I hope my video rental service sorts out their mis-numbering of season two DVDs so I can get back to it and get the actual episodes I want in the right sequence... Cool that it was shot here in Australia too.

I meant Star Wars was basically a martial arts movie with a SF background.

As for BSG, I guess I can understand your fault finding in season 1, I had to drag myself through Babylon 5 season 1 because I had heard it didn't get good until the second season. The Christianity thread in BSG really isn't overtly stated at all. Its Cylon-Monotheism versus Human-Polytheist Greek/Roman inspired Gods. You have to wait till the final season to get more messianic overtones, but different strokes for different folks I suppose. I wrote a thread about the BSG religion wars and there was also some thread about TNG's Captain Picard and BSG's Admiral Adama and who was the best atheist leader. It is cool to have a sci fi show where the central character is a skeptical atheist. I guess thats one of the reasons I watch the Stargate shows, because Science and logic are relied on to solve problems. Plus, the main characters are scientists, which is cool, even if Dr. Rodney McKay is a wet blanket, he is still a genius.

I prefer Throne of Blood/Spider's Web Castle myself.  Toshiro had bigger balls than any actor in history, including Jackie Chan, when he agreed to let Kurosawa have archers shoot dozens of arrows at him, about a tenth of which actually struck his (admittedly well-armored) torso.  If those things were sharp enough to embed themselves in the boards under his clothes, they were definitely sharp enough to pierce his throat.  Greatest action scene of all time.

And as regards montages, well shit.  You gotta have a montage...

Montage!  (Montage!) You gotta have a Montaaaage!  (Montage!)

I was going to quote the song, but I just wanted to see if loyal Team America fans would oblige me unsolicited. America....Fuck Yeah! Lick My Ass and suck on my balls!

I totally forgot about Miles Teg from Heretics.  Motherfucker decapitated a dude with a karate chop.  That shit should have been in The Matrix.

also an excellent film, with a lot of kabuki elements.  still, not what i would call a martial arts film.  a martial arts film is one in which a hero's skills at fighting are critical to the plot.  there are basically two major types of asian martial arts films: hong kong kung fu films and japanese chambara films.  i love kung fu movies but they all have basically the same plot (revenge) and the fighting is often completely unrealistic.  chambara films have much more depth, much more variety of plot, and much more realistic (though not completely realistic) depictions of fighting, usually kendo and iaido.  neither "hidden fortress" nor "throne of blood" are chambara films.  the most famous chambara films are probably "yojimbo," "sanjuro," the "samurai" trilogy, and the zatoichi and lone wolf and cub series (both of which involved the great shintaro katsu and, in their later installments, clearly borrowed from kung fu films).

Oh yeah, it was definitely the montage that made Attack of the Clones suck.  

Oh, and Kevin, we're all missing the good stuff.

since fantasy has creeped in a little bit and since we're mentioning bad writers, i would just like to say i fucking hate raymond e. feist.  i've never read any of his books.  no, i hate him for lending his name and franchise to quite possibly the shittiest pc game i ever owned as a kid, "betrayal at krondor."  anybody else get duped into that suckfest?  also, i knew a guy in high school who was obsessed with raymond e. feist and robert jordan, and he was a world-class asshole.

Saying that Salvatore is a good fantasy writer is a lot like saying that C.S. Lewis was a pretty good apologist.  Apologists, by definition, are using bad logic to reach a bad conclusion.  In the same way, any fantasy book based even loosely on Dungeons and Dragons is using a bad format to produce a mediocre book at best.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not opposed to D&D.  I played it as a kid, and even a little bit as an adult when it got really popular about a decade ago.  It's pretty fun, and engages the creative thinking parts of the brain a lot more than watching TV or playing a video game.  I think it would be neat if more kids played this kind of game.  However, the nature of the game is such that any attempts to immortalize it in novel form produce an exercise in cliche, melodrama, and formula.  Gary Gygax is a very bad man for inventing the D&D novel.

Ed Greenwood, Gary Gygax, R.A. Salvatore, and pretty much anyone else with their name on the same cover as "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" should be avoided at all costs.

Nope.  Not what I meant to say.  I see that I was unclear.  Let me rephrase.

Gygax, et al, should be avoided at all costs when the potential encounter involves reading a book authored by any one of them that has "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" on the front.

Put simply, Gygax invented a great game.  He's a shitty author.  All books in the AD&D genre are shitty.  Nobody should ever waste their life reading one of them.  Just play the game instead if you like magic and spells and fireballs.

If we must duel over the merit of AD&D books, then so be it.  I stand resolute.

False alarm about the hat.  Nothing to see here, folks... move along.  Move along.  I thought for a minute I'd won myself a friendly wager.  Turns out I was mistaken.

Back in the day, I probably read fifty D&D novels.  To be honest, they all run together like a Kung Fu Movie marathon in my head.  Off the top of my head, I can't really recall which Gygax I read.  To me, Gygax would have made a half decent horror author.  His descriptions of gore and carnage were more fitting for a slasher novel than fantasy.  His books were just so damn formula... Then again, the whole genre is formula.

Hi guys. I've wanted to quote about a million other people here, and reply directly to some points raised, but I felt I had to finish the thread first, and so, now I'll just chime in with some more general 2 cents.

Firstly, I like Star Wars. I grew up with it, and have a sort of emotional attachment to the franchise. That said, like Hamby said about the D&D author-guys, being good at one thing, doesn't make you good at everything, and George Lucas may have an eye for design, and be good at executive producing, but he's a shitty director, and even shitty'er screen writer: the stories are okay, if rather banal, but the dialogue (when he writes it himself, as in the prequels), is absolutely terrible. I can see that, regardless of whatever childhood affections I may hold for SW.

Many of the SW Lucasarts computergames I have enjoyed thoroughly (X-Wing Alliance, and The Jedi Knight series mostly). so some SW beyond the original trilogy is okay, as far as I'm concerned.

I too have shared Kevin's annoyance with the lack of good Sci Fi from time to time, but I think it's mostly because I'm such a genre-fan that I'd love for Holywood to produce 95% Sci Fi, and since that's not the case, it's no surprise that the really good movies (and TV shows for that matter) only come around once every 5 years or so. If you wanted more, alot would have to be produced, because movies and TV shows, like all art, is like everything else in life: 90% will always, always be shit.

On the subject of Roleplaying games (Hamby said something along the lines of; D&D = good, D&D novels = banal clichés). I've always felt that the beauty of RPG's was that they drew unashamed from every simple and banal cliché in story telling and imaginary world building. It allows you to emerge yourself into it "on the fly" as it were, and to quickly create fantasies for you and a group of friends that everyone can readily relate to. This is what stereotype and cliché does best: immediately give everyone the same mental image. So what makes RPG's good, often makes more "deep" medias, like novels, bad.

And finally, since the thread has turned to literature as well, I want to mention Iain M. Banks. I have long considered starting a thread were I give a rundown of why I like him so much, and why I think he would be very appealing to the Sci Fi fans here. He is one of the best authors of Sci Fi around, from my perspective. Look out for that thread, as I plan to put it up here soon. Just have to make a concise, short(ish) presentation of his work, without too many spoilers, and as I'm sure many of you have already noticed, short and concise posts is not my forté; I do tend to ramble on rather excessively... Sorry for that by the way.

Err... yes... back in the day...

*Glances over at the boba fett figurine on a nearby shelf*

You never out grow the Fett, man!

TIE fighter!  when i was a kid, no game could top TIE fighter!  i played the shit out of that game, completing all the secret missions and everything (my guy had the whole array of tatoos on his arm).  then i got x-wing (which actually came before TIE fighter) and thought it sucked the big one.

That's how I watched it, too. (I love you, my darling PS3.) My problem was, the first half was slow (which was OK), the characters were only half-well-drawn (they were presented as interesting, but never developed), and then it degenerated into a "crazy guy loose on the ship" cliche. The most intersting bit was when they were deciding whether or not to kill the crazy guy. Oh, and I wasn't drunk enough.

The special effects were interesting, even if the physics were worse than a Michael Bay movie. At least the bad physics were in service to a decent plot. Cillian Murphy is quickly becoming one of my favorite young actors, partly because of Batman Begins, and partly because of this movie.

My problem: I think it thought it was a better movie than it was. It was overly-pretentious, without the characters or character development I like from my pretentious movies (like Capote, a very good movie). It was predictable. (Who didn't see the captain snuffing it during the spacwalk? Raise your hands.)  The dialog wasn't really that good, though it was far better than most movies. Its attempts at misdirection were heavy-handed. (My wife noticed the second scalpel was missing.) And so on.

This is my problem with modern SF. We have the chance to make great movies. Yet we settle for mediocre, or worse.

Anyway, I kinda liked Sunshine, in spite of my earlier comments. I just thought it should've been far better, and far less predictable. I really liked Event Horizon, though, for the sheer sake of a bad movie. (Have you ever seen Deep Blue Sea? It is the foundation for my family's "bad movie night" tradition.)

Was Deep Blue Sea the one where Sam Jackson exploded into pixels after being grabbed by a giant hyperintelligent shark?

The movie is full of gems like that.

After a bad day, there's nothing like a six pack of good beer, some chilli cheese dogs, and two hours of fun-stupid fun.

That's bad movie night.

Psychomania works, too, if you can get it. Frog-worshipping undead bike-riding hoodlums!

Novels.

Beats tv anyway.