rusty0101 writes, Haven’t seen anything of this series, localy showing up on the secondary ABC channel in Minneapolis, MN (chan 45) is the series Starhunter. 6:00 pm Sundays. Currently they are showing re-runs from earlier this year. For people tired of wasting space on their TiVo for Enterprise, you may want to give this a try.
Homepage for the series is http://www.starhuntertv.com/ they do have a listing of stations in the US, and apparently elsewhere, carrying the series.
Production quality and writing are not the best possible, but the concept is interesting to me at least.
-Rusty I know that it’s carried by A Channel in western Canada and Space across Canada, but I’ve never watched it.
One I saw was decent enough.
I saw episode nine a while back. Not amazing, and it showed its lack of budget. But yes, decent enough, especially compared with Andromeda, Mutant X, Enterprise and Lexx.
yes
It’s really quite good, considering how low budget it is. If you’re sick of andromeda, star trek, and the rest of the fluff, you’ll want to catch it. I don’t think the writing is bad, it’s just that their budget doesn’t allow them to really put that much effort into making it work properly. It’s certainly much better than the above.
Re: yes
Star Hunter is pretty good for the budget, it is not as good as Enterprise, FarScape, Babylon 5, Futurama, or the 1st 2 seasons of Andromeda, or even Red Dwarf but it is beter than a the current episodes of Andromeda, Voyager, or Fire Fly or any of the Star Wars movies. It’s biggest weakness is it’s kind of drab but it’s far less dopey than a lot of the other options.
Re: yes
I’m going to hope that you’re referring to Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones and not the original trilogy. I’ve watched about three episodes of Starhunter, and right now it’s sitting with Andromeda on a list that says “I’ll watch it if I’ve got absolutely nothing else to do”. It reminds me of a SciFi show that was on back in the early nineties – I don’t remember the name of it, but it had a crew that consisted of the ass-kicking captain, an older engineer with a lot of bionic parts and enemies called “Banshees” that decimated ships.
Oh, and Voyager is off the air. It ended, what, two years ago now?
Re: yes
I’m going to hope that you’re referring to Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones and not the original trilogy. —- SciFi show that was on back in the early nineties – I don’t remember the name of it, but it had a crew that consisted of the ass-kicking captain, an older engineer with a lot of bionic parts and enemies called “Banshees” that decimated ships.
Oh, and Voyager is off the air. It ended, what, two years ago now?
And Babylon 5 ended even longer ago, personally I didn’t like any of the Star Wars movies all that much, but I found Episode 4 and 6 to be OK, I hated episode 5 (I found all that Yoda stuff anoying), I don’t see what all the hype was about for them. Andromeda has gone downhill fast this season it’s pretty bad now, it’s sad because it was off to a good start. — I remember that old show from the 90’s your talking about, and not so long ago I was trying to figure out what it was called, I’m still wondering what it was called.
Re: yes
I believe it was called “Space Rangers”, airing briefly during 1993 and starring:
Jeff Kaake as Capt. John Boon
Marjorie Monaghan as Jojo Thorson
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Zylyn
Jack McGee as ‘Doc’ Kruger
Clint Howard as Mimmer
Danny Quinn (I) as Daniel Kincaid
Space Rangers!
Thank You! That has been bothering me on and off for close to four years, and now I have one less thing to blame on speech aphasia (and another useful piece of trivia).
Re: yes
You’re the first person I’ve ever encountered who didn’t like The Empire Strikes Back or Yoda. Seriously – there’s so much to like (Snowspeeders, Lando, the Asteroids, Boba Fett, the fight in Bespin, all the dark foreshadowing that was ripped off by Ep.2 in a lame attempt to not suck) an all the great (mis)quotes come from it (“Luke, I am your Father” vs “Search your feelings…”). I’m just going to put it down to your tastes being much different than mine, and leave it at that.
I also kind of feel bad that Andromeda isn’t doing that well, as I agree that it started out with a lot of promise (the old episodes have been airing on Global up here recently, so I got to re-watch them). There’s also the fact that I went to school with one of the people on it – Laura Bertram – so I have to root for her to do well.
Story Concept…
Just a synopsis of the primary story lines.
Farmer Dante Montana (yes, they named a character Montana, get over it.) is away from the farm when some Raiders attack, take his son, kill his wife, and his niece’s parents, leaving his niece Percy in his custody. In an atempt to get his son back, he becomes a bounty hunter for Rudolpho. The ship he does his work in is managed by an AI named Carvagio. Along the way he picks up a security officer named Lucritia (Luke for short) who’s dad, Darius, heads up an undergound organization called the Orchard.
The ship was at one time a luxury liner that was converted to a troop ship when whatever passes for an earth gov went to war against the Raiders who at the time had taken over Mars. The Raiders were driven back, and earth colonization continued out to the jovian sattelites. (Where Dante was raising a family.)
Raiders are unable to reproduce, so to continue their existence they take children in raids. See notes above.
The Orchard is following a set of discoveries about a sequence of some 4 cromasomes that are discovered in the human genome that have no precidence for anything else on earth. These cromasomes apparently add several psi abilities, that can be accessed with some training. Based upon what I have seen in the series, some of the powers include giving the possesor super speed, abilities to read minds, cause explosions (generally killing the possor of the ability as well) and others.
Along the way it appears that the entire human race is going to be affected by a “conversion” in the “near future”, as a result of these genes.
Dante and Percey are not concerned with the same things that the Orchard is concerned about except in as far as the people already affected become targets for their bounty hunting job, or as they discover they are related to Raiders they encounter while looking for Dante’s son.
Percey is the ships engineer, and ostensibly knows more about the ships mechanicals than anyone since the designers and builders. Possibly including them. If it were not for the fact that this series started at about the same time as Firefly, I would suspect that she was a copy of Kaylee from that series.
Production values. The sets are reminicent of Battle Star Galactica, or even a dark version of ST:TOS. Special Effects generally appear to be very minimal. The primary FX that show up are gunfire, and the occasional image of ships in space around one or another massive body. In other words, mostly model shots and the like.
Writing is well done for what they appear to be willing to spend on writing. I happen to think that there are a few holes in the writing. Examples include quotes such as “living/working at the high end of the speed of light” while working within the solar system seems a bit unlikely. Granted it’s about the only way to go from sitting inside of the orbit of Mercury, to collecting fugitives on Pluto, within a season, but it still seems far fetched.
Then again that’s just what I see at this time. The Legal system that allows Rudolpho to send Dante out on bounty hunting missions where there are other bounty hunting teams who don’t work for Rudolpho, seems unlikely. But that may be the way things are done elsewhere.
-Rusty