Obscure Tv Scifi

[xolta]

Last night while trying to Sleep i watched some thing called Gerry Andersons lost worlds winch was a collection of pilots for tv shows, in it was a segment called space police. I was taken back by how impressive this cheap tv pilot effects were. This got me thinking about old school scifi made for tv the more obscure the better.  As some one who loves star trek but is also kinda tired of the direction modern trek is taking this weird obscure pilot got me to finale put into words what I want.  I want to talk about obscure science fiction TV.  The more off the beaten path the better. 

Recomendations are welcome. Live action, anime, cartoons, tokusatsu, puppets, and weird one off pilots any thing is welcomed here. Heck remember Sea quest. I do. 

[Nova]

Farscape?
One of my friends has been watching it and they highly recommend it.

[xolta]

Farscape?
One of my friends has been watching it and they highly recommend it.

Oh man I need to finish Farscape.

[Melooon]

Farscape

I really enjoyed Farscape! I don't think it was the best show ever and it fell down in a lot of places and some of the world building was a bit weak, but the core theme and Jim Hensson-ness was great

Anyway my recommendation is Button Moon (its a mid 80s animated kids show about life on a moon)

Also Ulysses 31 is great (though its one of those where the first ep is the best)

I dunno if its that obscure, but I really enjoyed Buck Rogers in the 25th Century 

[Semper]

Captain Star is a fairly short animated show of 13 half hour episodes from the late 90s that I grew up watching. It's a bit of a riff on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's kinda weird, sad, desolate, and darkly humorous.

The Wikipedia article about it.

A more recent and arguably obscure sci-fi that I LOVE LOVE LOVE, is Scavengers Reign. It is more for a mature audience, since it has a lot of gore and some nudity. It is also very short, with only twelve 23-27 minute episodes and was set up for a 2nd season before being cancelled (but it also watches fine as a complete series imo). It was built off of a short film titled "Scavengers," which was made by the same team.

The Wikipedia article about it

[xolta]

I really enjoyed Farscape! I don't think it was the best show ever and it fell down in a lot of places and some of the world building was a bit weak, but the core theme and Jim Hensson-ness was great

Anyway my recommendation is Button Moon (its a mid 80s animated kids show about life on a moon)

Also Ulysses 31 is great (though its one of those where the first ep is the best)

I dunno if its that obscure, but I really enjoyed Buck Rogers in the 25th Century 

 

I heard decent things about  Ulysses 31  and that the series is way bigger in other nations then it is here in the usa.

[alienhospital]

Oh this topic was made for me! My favorite scifi show ever is Babylon 5. I've also heard of Earth 2, Mercy Point, Space Island One, and Sapphire & Steel, I really want to watch those. Old scifi really had such an impact on TV today; Babylon 5 was the first entirely-planned-in-advance-for-5-years TV show, I thinK? It's great, I really recommend it. Also seconding Farscape, which I loved.

For newer stuff, I really like Doom Patrol the show, Second Best Hospital if you can watch it on somewhere besides the dreaded site, and Resident Alien.

[xolta]

Dose the movie dark city count as scifi or is that more of mystery neo noir blending into scifi? As I just re-watched that.

[Zero Kirby]

So The Lost Room is a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series from the mid-oughts that I love to death. It stars a detective named Joe Miller who gets caught up in a secret underground war being waged for the possession of Objects, a variety of just random things with bizarre powers, like The Pencil, which makes a penny every time you tap it on a surface, or The Nail File, which can knock someone unconscious if you reflect light off of it into their eyes. Joe winds up in possession of The Key, which can open any tumbler-lock swing-open door, turning it into a portal that leads to The Room, a seemingly random 60s-era motel room. If you close the door while inside it and still holding The Key, you can then exit to any tumbler-lock swing-open door you can picture in your mind. But The Room resets every time it's closed and re-opened, including vanishing anything inside that "doesn't belong." Joe's daughter Anna ends up getting trapped in The Room without The Key, resulting in her vanishing. This is in the middle of a big custody battle for her between Joe and his ex-wife, so it's not a good look for him. So he's gotta figure out how to get her back while evading the law as well as the many people who are out to take The Key for themselves.

It was only three two-hour episodes long and every attempt at a continuation has stalled and it makes me so sad because seriously, I love this show so much I add references to it in my own stuff all the time, from names to dates and whatnot.

[pencilz]

If you're into anime there's Galaxy Express 999, about a boy who travels on a space train to get a robot body.



I also like older sci-fi anthology shows like the Twilight Zone (not obscure but hey it's good), Tales from the Darkside, and The Outer Limits. I know there's a few even more obscure ones but I can't remember them off the top of my head. Sometimes they tread into more horror than sci-fi but it depends on the episode.

[xolta]

Recently saw the Tezuka tv special, one million-year trip bander book.  Some of the references and how tezuka's star system method made me wish I knew more about black jack. It feels like several  pulp sci-fi anime stapled toghter with two count them two rescue the space princess plots.   Strangely prescient about how governments/the powerfull would want to use ai and computers for some thing made in the 70s.

[MediocreMetastasis]

Red Dwarf is pretty good. It's a sci-fi comedy tv show. The show is about how there was a radiation leak on the ship leaving everyone but the main character Dave, he was frozen for 3 million years and now he is isolated on the ship with a hologram of someone he hates and a evolved descendant of a cat he brought on the ship. Even know it's a comedy I love the world building and how epic some of the shots are. I will say that I didn't like last season before the reboot.