Conventional Wisdom: Hey, remember The Sci-Fi Channel? (Patreon)

I was trying to come up with some new blog ideas that WEREN’T music related, and hit upon a totally unique and original topic that’s entirely fresh and hasn’t in any way been beaten to death on The Internet already: Didn’t The Sci-Fi Channel used to be great?

Don’t worry, I’m not gonna go on a rant about what a disgrace the “Syfy” rebranding was and how they never should have canceled that one show and blah blah blah wrestling and whatever. The more time passes, the more I see that whole Network decay thing as a symptom of broadcast TV’s decreasing relevance as a whole. Let’s face it, the day DVDs made buying box sets practical for normal people, the entire concept of big, themed, genre-specific networks became outdated. No giant cable channel trying to appeal to a nation-wide audience will ever be able to appeal to a niche contingent of fans to the same degree as those fans’ own, personally-curated collections. So no complaining about that. Instead, I just want to spend a little time rolling around in a big bed of nostalgia for the channel’s prime, reminiscing over my favorite memories and how they shaped my current interests. Come on, let’s all get depressed at the realization that this was three decades ago!

I can’t remember when I first became aware of The Sci-Fi Channel being a thing, although I’m fairly certain my family got cable before it premiered, so I probably saw commercials for it in early ’92. I’ve mentioned several times how much I was raised on a steady diet of classic science fiction (literally one of my earliest memories is sitting on the couch with my parents watching first run episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation) so there was never a time when entire TV channel devoted to scifi wouldn’t have interested me.  In fact, part of me wonders if I might have seen the pre-launch teaser videos they did. You know that loop of Video Toaster effects that aired as a placeholder before The Sci-Fi Channel officially debuted? Those clips have always seemed really familiar to me, beyond the basic “this is what we thought good effects were in 1992” kind of nostalgia, to the point that I think one of my cousins might actually have shown me the thing while it was airing. Then again, my cousins showed me a whole lot of geeky things for the first time (I’m 98% sure I played video games for the first time at their house) so my brain could just be mashing one of those half-remembered “Dude, check this out” moments together with the early days of the channel. After all, the place-holder videos have enough of a similarity with the actual early bumpers the channel used that I’d still have warm fuzzies watching them either way… but we’ll get into that more later.

First off, we gotta talk about the shows, because MAN The Sci-Fi Channel had a good programing lineup back in the day. Star Trek being my first taste of science fiction, you’d of course expect me to focus on that, but I have surprisingly little memory of watching Star Trek on Sci-Fi. The one thing I clearly remember was when they made a huge deal about airing the The Original Series in its complete, not-edited-for-syndication form… which ended up just meaning twenty extra minutes of commercials and filler fluff trivia to pad out five or six extra minutes of episode (because Lord knows they weren’t about to just show LESS commercials). Our local Blockbuster already had the entire series on VHS without any of that nonsense, so sitting through it on Sci-Fi just never seemed worth it. What I DO remember was seeing a few episodes of The Animated Series, which never failed to confuse the heck out of me. Captain Kirk’s not supposed to look like a character out of He-Man! Actually, I wouldn’t have even known to make that joke, since I never watched He-Man, I just knew the idea of a Star Trek cartoon felt really REALLY fever dream weird to Young Me. (insert withering jab at Lower Decks here)

The shows I ACTUALLY remember watching the most on The Sci-Fi Channel were Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and Space: 1999.  There’s an awful lot about Far Out There that makes WAY more sense when you know these were the kind of shows that were shaping my young brain. Yeah, I watched a lot of movies (and I’ll get into that later), and there was always The Twilight Zone, but those three space shows are what immediately leaps to mind when I think of old school Sci-Fi Channel programming. There’s a place down in the deepest, darkest foundations of my mind that still thinks garish, colorful 60s/70s aesthetics are what “real” science fiction is supposed to look like, and everything else is just “that other stuff.” It also serves to illustrate the flip side of that little rant I made about there not being as much of a need for niche channels anymore. Sure, in our age of box sets and on-demand streaming, anybody can curate the exact viewing experience they want NOW, but back in The Day things weren’t so easy. That bit about me being able to just go to Blockbuster and get every episode of Star Trek was very much the exception rather than the rule. The bulk of their scifi section was movies, not TV shows, and Star Trek was absolutely the only one they had in its entirety. I think our Blockbuster’s entire Battlestar Galactica library consisted of the theatrical cut of the pilot movie and, like, one single episode. That’s it. I’m not sure if they had any Space: 1999 (some of these video stores blur together) but if they did, it was only one or two “movies” edited together out of multiple episodes. And I know for a fact they didn’t have any Buck Rogers episodes. Heck, they didn’t even have any full seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They had an entire aisle dedicated to The Original Series, but the TNG collection only got six to eight episodes in before they lost interest (I guess somebody there was a huge Tasha Yar fan). The point is, there really was once a time when less-than-mainstream entertainment was rather challenging to find, so finally having a whole channel dedicated to showcasing it was a big deal at the time. Times changed, as they always do, but for a while it was extremely important.

That makes me think of another show that was on The Sci-Fi Channel back in the early days: The Prisoner. It may not have spaceships in it, but the psychedelic paranoia of Patrick McGoohan’s televised emotional breakdown was still right up my street aesthetically. And come on, it’s a fairly legendary show, so having it on the early roster surely did a lot to boost the young Sci-Fi Channel’s cult credibility. The thing that always struck me as strange, though, was HOW they aired The Prisoner. For at least as far as I can remember, The Prisoner aired five days a week, like any normal syndicated show. Except The Prisoner only ran for 17 episodes. That’s just barely over three weeks of material. Isn’t that, um, kind of a terrible idea? I mean, I seem to recall The Prisoner’s timeslot being something really inconvenient for me, so I couldn’t watch it regularly, but it seems like anybody who could see it on the reg would’ve gotten REALLY sick of the show starting over more than once in the space of a single month. I mean, sure, Battlestar Galactica only had 24 episodes, plus 10 more if you count Galactica 1980 (which YOU ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT) but that’s still enough to stretch things out for longer than one month before restarting. The same goes for Buck Rogers and its 37 episodes, and Space: 1999 had a whopping 48 episodes to burn through before starting over. It just always seemed weird to me that Sci-Fi wouldn’t air The Prisoner once a week to spread it out and avoid viewer burnout, especially in retrospect, since burnout is one of the bigger problems channels like The Sci-Fi Channel faced in general. The sooner viewers get tired of watching the same crop of old shows, the greater the temptation to create new ones, and the higher the probability of one of those new projects going horribly wrong (or being wrestling for some reason).

The whole Prisoner thing probably felt even odder to Young Me because of The Sci-Fi Series Collection, an honestly pretty awesome idea for a scheduling block which aired a rotating collection of short run miniseries or prematurely canceled shows that just couldn’t be aired in regular syndication. This was a perfect example of why an entity like The Sci-Fi Channel was important in its era (as nobody else would bother to re-air shows like these) but also completely dated in the next (once you could buy the whole show on a single DVD set, why watch it on TV?). Lord knows it’s the only reason why I ever saw little curios like the live action Planet of the Apes or Spider Man shows, or experienced a MASSIVE headtrip the first time I saw MST3k’s "Riding With Death" episode and realized I’d already seen it as Gemini Man. It also introduced me to Automan and his amazing almost-but-not-quite-Tron special effects, and my life is unquestionably better for that. Admittedly, my initial belief that The Prisoner could have just been aired as part of the Series Collection seems a bit misguided in retrospect. 17 episodes may be too short for repeated five-days-a-week airings, but most of the Series Collection entries were even shorter, often as little as 8 episodes. Obviously, these shows that can only barely make it past a WEEK before starting over need a lot more help in the scheduling department than The Prisoner did. But on the OTHER hand, the Series Collection also aired shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Magician, which both had full seasons of 20+ episodes to their name, so it wouldn’t have been THAT out of place. In fact, in going back and researching what was on Sci-Fi back in the day, one of the biggest forgotten memories to hit me anew was just now frickin’ annoyed Young Me would get that they were showing The Magician AGAIN. I mean, I liked the show fine; I’d seen The Incredible Hulk so I knew Bill Bixby, and the whole “he’s actually performing these illusion himself” gimmick isn’t a bad one to build a show around.  Still, in a block that normally switched shows ever two weeks or so, The Magician taking up an entire MONTH of the schedule just felt like an eternity.

Oh, and before I move on, Internet Law requires every retrospective look at old TV to include at least one “this totally traumatized me” story, so I need to add that the promos for Something Is Out There scared the CRAP out of me as a kid. I went looking on YouTube for any recordings of the promos Sci-Fi used, but the only ones I can find are from the original 1988 airings and focus on the generic Cop Show side of things. Sci-Fi knew what its audience really wanted, though, and filled THEIR promos full of shots of people getting killed by the show’s killer alien. I’m sure I’m remembering the effects as being much more convincing than they actually were, but the shots of spiny alien claws tearing out of people from within REALLY spooked me as a child. There. Mandatory airing of emotional baggage accomplished. You have permission to find me relatable now.

Anyway, now let’s talk movies. As much as The Sci-Fi Channel might have used regular episodic TV as its backbone, there’s no getting around the fact that Science Fiction tends to be better represented in feature length form than a weekly series, at least from a special effects standpoint. I’ve read that the first official programming to air on Sci-Fi was the original Star Wars, and while I didn’t see that particular broadcast, Star Wars and The Sci-Fi channel are nevertheless closely connected in my memory. Back in the summer of ’93, they aired a marathon of all three movies hosted by Carrie Fisher, and since we couldn’t afford to just go out and BUY movies whenever we wanted like rock stars or something, our tapes of that marathon were the only copies of the original trilogy I had access to for YEARS. I mentioned this back in that one Christmas blog, but my memories of A New Hope will always be shaped by the various recording artifacts and missed commercial breaks on that tape. To this day, I can’t see Grand Moff Tarkin promising to crush The Rebellion with one swift stroke without expecting it to immediately cut to some models in the desert drinking ice tea. It was especially funny because whatever brand this was had a jingle that kicked off with a big, relaxing “AAAAAAAaaaaaahhhh” sigh. I had no ideas beautiful yuppies inexplicably in a desert somewhere were so pleased at the thought of The Empire blowing up planets. That, or they just really enjoyed listening to Peter Cushing talk… which I can totally get behind, to be honest.

Other than the Star Wars connection, I’m having a surprisingly hard time coming up with all that many interesting memories of watching movies on Sci-Fi. I mean, I know that I did, but I between the necessary time investment and the lack of repetition, most of those movies don’t seem to have imprinted on my memory as hard as the shows. I know there used to be themed scheduling blocks for movies, like “Radiation Theater” and “Suspense Theater,” but for the most part I don’t recall going out of my way to watch anything on them. The major exception is, of course, their backlog of Japanese films. A quick spoiler: I’m not going to talk about Sci-Fi’s airing of anime, because I’ve already covered that in an earlier blog. (Long story short: I saw Robot Carnival and Lenseman on the first Adventures in Japanese Animation and it blew my mind, but I never saw any of the other stuff they aired on Saturday Mornings) However, I think the original anime specials were part of a regular “global showcase” block on the schedule where they’d air a lot of Japanese films. I remember this was the first place I saw lots of 90s-era Toho stuff like the Mothra movies, other contemporary films like Zeiram, as well as older Kaiju flicks like Legend of Dinosaurs & Monster Birds. That mismatched soundtrack really stuck with me, lemme tell ya.

The single wildest memory I have, though, comes from seeing Message from Space the first time. Now, just seeing Message from Space at ALL is a bit of a trip, but it hit me personally in a way just about nobody else would ever be able to understand. See, our little local arcade had most of the usual cheap plastic trinkets for you to spend your hard-earned tickets on, and one of the options was a bin of little plastic spaceships. Nothing fancy, just single-color plastic blobs, some of which had clearly been made in molds originally intended for erasers, since they still had the little pencil hole in the bottom. At the time, I figured they were just random generic space toys, until Message from Space came on and there they were! To this day, I’m not sure how our little Smyrna, Georgia arcade in the early ‘90s wound up with a stash of late ‘70s Japanese merchandizing, and I don’t think the post-Pokemon generation will ever be able to appreciate how utterly strange ANY Japanese toy sightings were at the time, let alone something that old. The best I can figure is that some factory in China found the molds from the original toys, figured the movie was old enough for nobody to care about the copyrights, and cranked out some bootlegs to sell abroad.  It’s not like our neighborhood Tilt location would have thought too hard about legality of their two-ticket plastic trinkets, after all. The point is, I was flabbergasted to realize I already owned something connected to one of those weird Japanese movies Sci-Fi showed on Saturday afternoon, and it still makes me a bit sad that I can’t find any of those little ships now. I can’t even track down a picture of the things on Google these days.

But in a weird way, I think the thing I miss the most about The Sci-Fi Channel of the old days, and possibly ‘90s-era cable channels in general, isn’t any of the programing. It’s the bumpers, the branding, the overall sense of identity that early Sci-Fi established for itself. Now, before anybody thinks I don’t realize, I am FULLY aware that most of those early bumpers are cheesy as all get out. Just look back at those pre-debut videos again, the mess of Video Toaster effects and bad early CGI, the pretentious music and goofy narration, the overall cheapness of the whole thing, it’s corny as heck. And I don’t care, I love this stuff. Yes, there’s a boatload of nostalgia involved, but there’s also the fact that I just love relics of an era back when Science Fiction could afford to be a little more colorful and goofy. I mean, geez, just take a look at The Sci-Fi Channel’s “first original program” FTL Newsfeed. Not really a show unto itself but a series of 30-to-60 second news reports from the future that aired during commercial breaks. It had running storylines and recurring characters, to the extend that a “show” the length of a commercial could manage, but the best thing about FTL Newsfeed is the aesthetics of the thing. Few things are more instantly dated than visions the future, and FTL Newsfeed’s attempt to predict 150 years from now is one of the purest Early 90s time capsules you’ll ever see. (even more than those literal time capsule commercials they made around the same time) Whole tumblr blogs struggle to embody the daylow tackiness of that era as purely as a single 30 second installment of FTL. And that’s not even getting into wondrously CHEAP these things are. Obviously, a channel as young as Sci-Fi was at the time couldn’t splurge on a massive production here, but it really is a wonder to behold just how chintzy these shorts are. Between the goofy clothes and makeup, the completely green screen “sets,” the bargain basement actors, and the general “made on an Amiga” vibe of the whole thing, there are Sega CD FMV games from the era that are unironically better made than FTL Newsfeed. It’s glorious. It's a crying shame that only about half of the series is currently available online, especially since I’m pretty sure the whole thing could have easily been released on a single DVD back in the day.

But kitsch aside, I really do miss the general sense of atmosphere created by the Sci-Fi Channel. It feels like something we’re missing out on in our current age of bland menus and unobtrusive branding and general calming plainness, that sense of slipping into a new, unique environment when you turn on a specific channel. As much as I laugh about the cheese factor in stuff like FTL Newsfeed, Sci-Fi Channel branding at its best was some of the most iconic, atmospheric stuff I’d ever seen on TV. All those bumpers in that dark, metallic facility with the shafts of light pouring in, that one with the big steampunk clockwork contraption with the eyeball in the middle, all those spacestations floating in front of a giant sun that coalesced into the Sci-Fi logo when viewed from the proper angle, that stuff was just cool to look at. All the promos for shows were presented with such weird, trippy borders and video effects, and narrated by that deep spooky voice, that everything about The Sci-Fi Channel had an air of unique strangeness about it. Even all the plugs for the Sci-Fi Channel magazine and website put over the idea of this unique community, a separate little world that only existed within the confines if this one ringed planet logo. (As an aside, I also love that the original Sci-Fi Channel website was called “The Dominion” because, apparently, nobody had managed to secure “scifi-dot-com” ahead of time. The Internet was still new, folks.) And man, until I went and tit some fact checking, I’d totally forgotten all the “news” shows Sci-Fi used to do. There was edutainment shows like Inside Space, conspiracy fodder stuff like Mysteries From Beyond The Other Dominion, and general Science Fiction entertainment news like SF Vortex, The Anti-Gravity Room, and Sci-Fi Buzz. I didn’t go out of my way to watch any of these shows regularly when they were on, but they did slip plenty of short inserts in between other shows, and just their very existence help feed the notion of The Sci-Fi Channel being its own self-enclosed ecosystem of geekery.

That might be the thing I’m most nostalgic for, the notion of tuning into this self-contained alternate universe full of shows and movies I couldn’t find anyplace else and just letting myself get swept away in it all. Admittedly, I don’t watch regular television much in general any more, as I’m just as spoiled by box sets and streaming as anybody else, but when I DO find myself watching OG TV, nothing I see has anywhere near the sense of unique identity that The Sci-Fi Channel built for itself back in the day. And really, why WOULDN’T a channel all about visions of other worlds go out of its way to present itself as otherworldly? While I do think I’m too conditioned by the On-Demand era to ever go back to watching old TV, I do still miss that sense of tuning into a whole different realm for a few hours each day.

But, of course, all things must come to an end eventually. Again, I don’t want to dwell too much on the gradual decay of The Sci-Fi Channel of old, and I honestly can’t say all that much. When I was just hitting my teens, my family moved out to the middle of nowhere and didn’t have cable for a number of years, so I missed out on a lot of The Unpleasantness when it first set in. I can’t comment on the new bumpers getting less interesting than the old ones or the original productions getting worse or the show selection getting less scifi, because I had too much time away from the channel to really feel the change. By the time I actually did have cable again, Sci-Fi had already changed so much that I just sort of processed it as some other channel that happened to have the same as the one I’d watched as a kind. And then they decided to overdose on the letter “Y,” and it didn’t even HAVE the same name anymore. That made it pretty darn easy to just stop paying attention at all and move on with my life.

Again, I can’t get all that mad about the changing/dumbing down/ruining that happened to Sci-Fi/SyFy in retrospect, I think it was an unavoidable consequence of TV itself changing and being left behind. The science fiction audience in general has got to be one of the worst demographics to try and hold onto when a new medium is taking shape, since those nerds will be the first to jump ship to getting their entertainment via new means. And since I’m clearly one of those people by this point, I don’t really have any grounds on which to complain about The Old Days going away. Heck, I can’t even bring myself to complain about the one thing almost EVERYBODY brings up when complaining about the decay of The Sci-Fi Channel: wrestling. No, I don’t think airing ECW on Sci-Fi made a lick of sense, but I can’t bring myself to be mad about it… because I know that the rebooted ECW that aired on Sci-Fi was an even bigger insult to fans of the original ECW than its presence on the network was to Sci-Fi fans. Ya gotta pick and choose your battles, ya know?

Wow, when I started writing this, I was worried it wouldn’t be long enough to justify a whole blog post. Guess that wasn’t anything worth worrying about, huh? The point is, I watched some of SyFy’s Twilight Zone marathon on New Years, and the thought occurred to me that it was the first time I’d actually watched anything on SyFy since… probably the LAST time I watched a Twilight Zone marathon. That got me thinking about all the stuff that used to be a regular part of my life as a kid, and the next thing I knew this blog had started. I’m sure it’s all completely uninteresting to anyone who didn’t grow up with Sc-Fi back in the early ‘90s, or anyone who was hoping I’d have more to say about the anime they aired (I really TRIED to come up with something to say about the Ani-Monday block they had for a while, but I couldn’t even come up with anything other than how insultingly bad that not-Shonen-Knife theme song was.) Heck, I barely even remember watching the old Sci-Fi Cartoon Quest block, and I know they not only had stuff like Droids and Transformers but also anime like Ronin Warriors and even Robotech. How was I NOT watching that? Still, if even just ONE of you feels compelled to look up fuzzy VHS rips of old Sci-Fi Channel bumpers on YouTube after reading this, I’ll consider it a job well done.