Add John Carter of Mars (although, I’m one of those weird people that liked the movie) and Tarzan to that list.
It was beedi beedi beedi BAD!
Or they could pull it off like The Wizard of Oz… where the 1930s are in b&w and the 25th Century is in color
Great show when I was 4 and 5 years old….but trying to get through it now is extremely difficult. Remember, this was post-Star Trek by a decade so there was really no excuse for the low-grade schlock put out by NBC in this show:
It's not the writers that are at fault, it's the studio heads/producers that are the ones that aren't reading. And even then I wouldn't say that they're not necessarily reading so much as over-risk averse. The major movie & TV studios are not looking at creating art or putting things on screen because it's something that they desperately want to see on screen, they are looking at making money, and movies and TV shows have gotten stupidly expensive these days. Because of that, they're less inclined to take risks and instead stick to what they think is tried and true. And this has been this way for quite some time and is hardly a new phenomenon. I'm old enough to remember when disaster movies were all the rage back in the '70s and it seemed like every movie studio was cranking out disaster movie after disaster movie. Before that, you had tons of war movies about WWII, and then Westerns were all the rage and Hollywood was cranking as many cowboy movies as they could.
There is something to be said regarding the writing “talent” (or lack thereof) they are also bringing in.
Both BSG and Buck Rogers aired their 2 hour series premiers as theatrical releases, with some minor changes (Baltar's execution, etc.) While I remember seeing BSG in theaters, not BR. For shlock, you REALLY can not beat the THEATRICAL opening to the Buck Rogers movie, with lyrics!
I'm not sure that producers are hiring bad writers so much as the writers are doing the best they can with mandates from above. While I'm sure some writers out there are pretty talentless and/or fully onboard with trying to bring their socio-political ideologies to the forefront of their writing, I also believe that many of these writers are quite talented and are trying to do their best under whatever directions the showrunner(s) are giving them. After all, unless the writers are the showrunners, they're writing for a showrunner who also answers to studio execs who have a certain vision for this show or movie they're writing for. And if a showrunner and/or studio exec says that they want X in the script, regardless of whether it's a really good idea or not, you write X into the script or risk starving while you try to find another production to write for or another line of work entirely.
