Hacker Cinema
Space: Above and Beyond
1995 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Glen Morgan, James Wong
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventureDrama
Set in the years 2063–2064, the show focuses on the "Wildcards", members of the United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry, 58th Squadron. They are stationed on the space carrier USS Saratoga, and act as infantry and pilots of SA-43 Endo/Exo-Atmospheric Attack Jet fighters.
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5 comments on Hacker News
I agree with you. Star Trek TOS only had two good seasons. Season 3 was widely panned. And it still spawned a massive franchise.
Plus there have been dozens of one-series sci-fi shows (Almost Human, Terra Nova, Space:Above and Beyond, etc.) and none have the same pull as Firefly.
It’s quite impressive how good xfiles looks today when you compare it to other shows around the same period.
Space above and beyond in comparison looks pretty terrible from what I have seen. It’s not even wide screen.
I think X files was shot on film perhaps?
I’m not sure if what we have now on say Disney plus for example is a remastered version but certainly it holds up very well.
We had a viewing party for the premiere. To be honest, we were more looking forward to Bruce Campbell’s “Adventures of Brisco County, Jr”, which premiered just before the “X-Files” (and is now sadly forgotten).
The “X-Files” hooked us right from the start. The only show that even came close to that first episode was “Lost” many years later. Most first season episodes were strong, with some downright classics, and the show was captivating from the beginning. Helps that the two leads were well cast and the writing was way better than the typical genre series.
(Two of the X-Files writers went off to showrun the criminally underrated “Space: Above and Beyond”, too. Without the success of X-Files, we wouldn’t have gotten that.)
Reminds me of an unusual and short-lived sci-fi series called Space Above and Beyond; it predates the current trend significantly.
“The series featured a very dark and desaturated color grading, apparently inherited from the cinematography of series such as The X-Files and Millennium, co-produced by the same team, but taken to a greater extreme. The strength of desaturation employed in many scenes reaches the level that makes them almost black and white (quantitatively, the saturation in CIE xy color subspace of a typical scene in Space: Above and Beyond is in the range 0.03–0.15, approximately 1/4 of a typical contemporary film or television program).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_and_Beyond
Yes, B5 was an aggressive adopter of digital technology. The driver was costs. Models were expensive, and if they could be replaced by CGI, the cost of making the show could be dramatically reduced. B5 was being produced for the syndication market, which was a different animal than the usual networks, and doing it cheaper while retaining quality was a major goal. Short lived competitor "Space: Above and Beyond (which lasted one season) used models, with production costs over $1,000,000 per episode, and that was a major reason they only lasted a season. B5 did use Amiga and Video Toaster in the beginning, though I believe they transitioned to other equipment later. J. Michael Straczynski's partner Doug Netter had a company called Netter Digital that did the work. JMS commented that when he did pitch meetings with possible networks that would air the show, it was him and a 5 minute clip of their CGI renderings. When I saw the first episode opening, with the Vorlon craft emerging from hyperspace to dock at Babylon 5, I sat back open mouthed going "Whoa". I'm a computer guy, and had some notion of what it took to do that