The DVD box set of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures was released this week. A spin-off from Doctor Who, the show was developed for the BBC’s children’s channel, CBBC, and features a band of teenagers teaming up with former traveling Companion of the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, to defeat various alien threats (which is also the basic formula for the much more adult Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood.) Sarah Jane Smith first appeared in 1973, and she is one of the most beloved characters in the Doctor Who universe, played by Elisabeth Sladen (you can read yesterday’s Science Not Fiction interview with Sladen here).
So, what are The Sarah Jane Adventures like?
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Sarah Jane Smith is one of the most enduring figures in the Doctor Who universe, appearing as a regular companion to two incarnations of the Doctor (Jon Pertee’s third Doctor and Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor) between 1973 and ‘76 and occasionally popping up ever since. The character currently has her own spin-off show, The Sarah Jane Adventures that is nominally intended for children. BBC America has just released the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures on DVD (look for Science Not Fiction’s review tomorrow), and so I got to talk to the woman behind Sarah Jane, actress Elisabeth Sladen, about playing such a popular character and other things Who.
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This year’s New York Musical Theater festival included I Come For Love, a musical comedy inspired by classic science-fiction B-movies. Claiming to be the real story of what happened at Roswell in 1947, the tongue-in-cheek plot revolves around a female alien (dubbed “Nine-Oh”) who has landed in her UFO in a bid to find out just what is this Earth thing called love.
An enjoyable romp, I Come For Love juxtaposis the “dissection’s too good for ‘em” sensibility of the classic 1950’s B-movies with the “save the innocent alien” ethos that came along in later decades. Nine-Oh and a hard-bitten reporter called (what else?) Scoop end up falling in love and must overcome diverse obstacles, viz, the U.S. Army and a mob of local townsfolk.
Which leads me to two questions: a) why are shows like I Come For Love so rare, i.e., why is there so little science fiction on the stage? and b) could humans and aliens ever interbreed?
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Sculptor Christopher Conte combines his artwork and his experience making prosthetics to create mechanical, science fiction–inspired work with a touch of the dark side.
Amanda Tapping is tall, which was a surprise to me, even though I’ve been watching her performance as Samantha Carter on the Stargate franchise for years. I suspect the kind of framing that has enabled Tom Cruise to gaze down at his various female leads. I got the chance to discover the truth about Tapping’s height last night at a preview screening for her new show, Sanctuary, which airs tonight at 9/8c on the Sci Fi channel.
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The new Knight Rider series may have flaws, but at least it owns its 80s-era roots. Last night’s episode had all the trappings of the David Hasselhoff original: well-endowed women strolling around in bikinis, a car suffering a fender bender that causes it to explode, and an early-episode use of Turbo Boost, which is pretty much the Knight Rider equivalent of chanting “By the Power of Greyskull!” or “Form Blazing Sword!”
And as in the original show, KITT is conveniently loaded up with whatever gadgetry Michael Knight will need to solve the case. In a throwaway scene in the middle of this episode, Knight and Sarah Graiman (as the resident Babe Mechanic/Scientist that NBC feels we all should have in our lives) are sitting in KITT, pondering how best to steal a car from one of the bad guys. Stealing the car would be much easier if they had the key to the car, so KITT obliges them by by figuring out what key would be needed to open the car and making a software image of it. Then Graiman orders KITT to bust out his 3-D Duplicator. A little box located somewhere in the space that would be occupied by a backseat in a normal car springs to life, a laser starts cutting some kind of material, and voila, Knight gets the key he needs. He even looks suitably impressed at the technology.
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Okay, if you’re not caught up on your BSG, stop reading now! I’ll pause for a moment in case your eyes are like mine and tend to skip ahead for a few words anyway…. So, for those of you who have seen the mid season finale, there is a rumor swirling around about the Battlestar Galactica series finale, which boils down to the idea that the radioactive wasteland the cast was bitterly strolling around on was not in fact Earth, i.e. the ball of rock you and I live in, but a different planet that got smashed up in an earlier war. Humans left this Earth Mark I to settle on Earth Mark II, which is as yet unseen in Battlestar, and which is the rock we live on, you and I. Upon hearing this, I just had to get my nerd on.
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