I feel like the animated version filled in gaps I hadn't even realized were there in the old one that just had the voice overs.
If you like classic who, Adams, or both, and haven't seen it buy the blu-ray!
https://whospecialfeatures.fandom.com/wiki/Shada_(2017_Anima...
If you've seen the old VHS version of Shada where Tom Baker narrates the missing pieces, you'll probably enjoy the animated version replacements more.
https://www.primevideo.com/region/na/detail/0RNSB5JYFHDMUJ0U...
Shada | FULL EPISODE with BONUS Animation | Doctor Who: Classic - https://youtu.be/Qt7JdpWXmtE
The channel is https://www.youtube.com/@ClassicDoctorWho
I've been enjoying going through the Tom Baker series... you never forget your first Doctor.
Star Trek is in far worse shape these days. According to Riker, this is the first time in decades where there is no TV or movie even in the planning phase.
The ancillary stuff is a lot better however. I hear good things about Star Wars Visions but I haven't seen it.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor was also highly enjoyable.
The big films have been sad except for Rogue One.
But there is some Star Wars stuff that is out there and is really good.
"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."
https://www.darkhorizons.com/next-star-trek-film-tackles-cor...
But once you have nothing to draw on but nostalgia I think it's time to move on. I liked the Doctor better when they were just an outlaw Time Lord in a stolen car doing good and getting into adventures, and not the eldritch abomination they've become, whose mere name causes the galaxy to shiver in terror. I liked Star Trek better when the humans weren't the most powerful force in the galaxy, one-shotting Borg cubes, but they were an upstart species getting a foothold in a universe bigger, stranger and far more dangerous than they imagine. In both cases, nostalgia leads to a sort of narrative power creep.
Star Wars has the same problem. Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
There's no wonder left to any of it. No mystery, no awe. No sense that the universe is bigger than you can imagine. God forbid something take a risk with the fucking franchise. Maybe we should just let it all die.
This isn't anything to do with "media literacy" - that as a criticism is quite vague, I think. The actual reason is because the two directors were fighting to undo each others' work, and spend hundreds of millions to do so.
But yes, the moon suddenly reappearing in between shots, perfectly fine and identical to before, was very silly
Capaldi was a great actor and it was nice that he got some good scripts (I really liked the one where he was in Doctor Prison, great concept), but his run felt to me like a show running out of ideas.
I didn't watch the Whittaker doctor. Heard it was awful and wasn't surprised. I eventually saw the pilot and it was indeed, awful.
Also implying that the wheels weren't kinda getting loose when 10ant said his final farewell at that (otherwise fairly underrated IMO) episode where the Master was hungry.
Much like the show in the latter years of its first run it collapsed under the weight of its own canon, and writers/showrunners that enthusiastically embraced that canon and alienated the casual audience.
IMO they should never have brought back the Time Lords. That was the genius stroke of the 2005 reboot. Just make the Doctor an intergalactic oddball, let the adventures run from there. What's weird is that Russell Davies was the one who understood this... then when he came back to the show he shoveled nostalgia on top of nostalgia and sank the thing.
I never even watched the Chibnall era so I'm not fully informed but from reading about the Timeless Child arc it just sounds like a show disappearing up its own arse. It's supposed to be a family show, younger kids don't care about that kind of stuff. Just make it fun.
I liked the regular season that followed too. It had good and bad episodes, just like the last time RTD was showrunner, but the good ones were very good.
(I haven't watched the most recent season yet, but that's less because I'm unexcited and more because I want to save it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shada_(Doctor_Who)
The tie in between Shada and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective agency is worth noting.
There was also a partial BBC attempt in late 80s/90s that was released on VHS with Tom Baker narrating the missing scenes.
The writers justify the change by saying (correctly) that the message is important and that right now is the most important time to say the message. The message became more important than the vehicle that it travelled in so poor story writing is acceptable.
It's like Christian rock music, it's okay and if you are Christian you might enjoy it both for the message and the music but if you just want good music you are likely not going to enjoy it as much as regular "secular" rock.
But there's also rock music that everyone can enjoys which contains (not sure the word to describe it) non obvious but religious-adjacent themes.
People complain about it when it seems to be used as an excuse for a lack other aspects of the show, or it makes everything seem unrealistic because they were more keen on putting it in than actually caring about whether it was realistic or at least made things feel realistic to the viewer.
The OG Jurassic Park had lots of politics and lots of CGI. No-one complained about it, because it was well done. If they had a jerkily animated raptor judo flipping a t-rex for no other reason than the director thought it would be cool to include then people would be saying the CGI was awful.
Is this a joke?
To me both CGI and politics have the same issue which is aging poorly. Nobody thinks The Phantom Menace looks better than A New Hope.
Even ignoring that history loves to repeat itself, plenty of politics in all forms of media has aged excellently, and plenty of politics that haven't aged well are still insightful into the period of the piece.
The stance of "everything is political" itself is extremely tone deaf.
"Everything is political" is the classic motte-and-bailey fallacy beloved by the most obnoxious politics pushers. The fact that it's impossible to remove all traces of politics from fiction does not excuse subjugating art to ideology. When people complain about "political" works they're complaining about works where the author appears to care more about how you vote than the story.
its usually not good though. If it was good they would not market it as Christian. Lots of bands have Christian lyrics without Christian marketing - U2 for example. I suppose that is the equivalent of the SF story with the disguised message.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
"Uhura" comes from the Swahili word uhuru, meaning "freedom"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyota_Uhura
On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.
She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind.
And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.
Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?
Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?
How about the one with the Nazi planet?
Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?
Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?
No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.
Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.
Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.
Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.
Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
It wasn't. Neither NBC nor the producers expressed any concerns over interspecies kisses.
Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.
Because apolitical they were not. Like, emphatically. Sometimes they were subtle, other times they were pretty heavy-handed.
Sci-fi has never, ever, been apolitical.
Frankenstein: Political AF. Asimov: So fucking political. Dick: It's nothing BUT politics. Anything in the cyberpunk genre: Why do you still need me to spell this out?
As for current stuff? The Martian has some politics w/ NASA and the cooperation with China, but it's certainly not what the book is about.
And I think you're not engaging with the actual complaint: poor, overly preachy writing is a terrible way to communicate a political point, much less persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
So you're not actually complaining about politics in sci-fi. You're complaining about bad writing in sci-fi.
Can you give an example of the old, subtle (that's the word you were looking for, it's a subtle reference/theme) sci-fi show that was a "story with a disguised message" instead of the current "message with a disguised story"? I'm just trying to level set here.
The way the message is being told has changed because the message is incredibly important.
As someone else pointed out: you’re complaining that some media is poorly written and other media is well written.
There are past and current examples of overtly opinionated shows that people love and message-less media that nobody cared about.
Star Trek exists because Gene Roddenberry's military drama was cut for making political statements[0], so he moved the political statements to be in space in the future.
[0] https://collider.com/gene-roddenberry-the-lieutenant-series/
The fan-animated remake is better than the commercially released animated remake, and the guy who did it also redid part of it with early gen AI and that's pretty great, too.
The best part of Shada is how awesome Victoria Burgoyne looked in it. Her career went nowhere, but at least she's here.