I’ve blogged before about the disturbing children’s television that you don’t see much of any more, probably because the makers would get sued. Shows like The Owl Service and Timeslip. But there are other examples, and one that was pretty surreal at the time was The Singing Ringing Tree. This was an East German movie of a fairy tale that was …
Talking to a friend some time ago, I was reminded of some really disturbing kid’s TV shows I watched as a child which have stayed with me all these years. The show we were talking about was based on a novel called Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. My friend remembered the 1988 movie Paperhouse but I remembered the earlier …
Someone on Facebook was bemoaning the robotic slavery inherent in the Star Wars movies recently, which got me thinking: is C3PO a tool or a slave? When I watched Star Wars in late 1977, I wasn’t aware of the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Although ‘robot’ comes from the Czech word for ‘forced labour’, the robots of the popular …
The 1972 film Silent Running imagines a future where Earth is so polluted that the last forests have been blasted into space in environmental domes to preserve them. Freeman Lowell, played by Bruce Dern, is forced to kill his fellow crew members to save the forests when the order comes through to destroy the domes and …
I’m not talking about Ultraviolet, the decidedly B-grade movie with Milla Jovovich, which is currently sitting at 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the rather excellent UK TV series from 1998. Here’s the teaser: CJD. AIDS. Global warming. For the first time in history, mankind has the ability to destroy itself. So now vampires need to …
