Sci Fi Trifles: Useless but essential pop culture tidbits and trivia from the worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror that once you have read them you don’t know how you have lived so long without knowing them.
A few nuggets from the worlds of science fiction and fantasy television:
The original name planned for The Outer Limits was “Please Stand By”, but ABC rejected that title and series creator Leslie Stevens then came up with the moniker we know it by today. Much better choice!
Though cancelled after half a season and only having amassed fourteen episodes, Firefly received a DVD release that would go on to break records. First coming out at the end of 2003, the set had sold more than five hundred thousand copies by 2005. The strong DVD sales helped Joss Whedon get the greenlight for the big screen follow-up to the series, Serenity, and also proved that a market exists in home video for short-lived television shows and now days almost every television series, no matter how short its tenure, gets a DVD release.
The Sci Fi Channel (as it was called back when they still knew how to spell) abruptly decided to cancel Farscape after its fourth season because of its cost of production and declining ratings. This prompted a huge fan response and Bill Amend got his comic strip Fox Trot involved as uber-geek character Jason Fox started up a campaign to save the show. This resulted in fans inundating Amend with Emails and causing him to remark “I had no idea that so many people owned computers, even I shudder to think what the mail boxes at the Sci-Fi Channel must be like these days.”
Lost in Space and Star Trek both aired on television from the mid to late 60’s with the former debuting on CBS in 1965 and the latter having its bow on NBC a year later. But did you know that Gene Roddenberry first pitched his series to CBS? The network executives listened to his proposal but then politely told him that they were not interested because they already had what they considered to be a similar show in development. That of course was Lost in Space which would go on to be recognized as a camp classic of early genre television while Star Trek set the standard for science fiction shows for years after it went off the air (and was also later revived in movies and on television).
On The Incredible Hulk series which ran for five seasons on CBS, the lead character was named Dr. David Banner instead of Bruce Banner as he was known in the comics. Allegedly this was to distance the television show from its comic book origins, but Lou Ferrigno (who played the Hulk) claimed that CBS decided to change the name because they thought Bruce sounded “too gay-ish”. The actor commented that he thought it was “the most absurd, ridiculous thing I’d ever heard”.
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