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[Hobbestetrician]

Wait for Season 5

You could tell the budget for Season 5 was like $100/episode because they got a lot of use out of that hotel lobby set.

Crying Man 4 Life, though.

 

[espher]

I will never get over that one episode where

Spoiler

they actually get back to their original timeline, but the little gate in the yard doesn't creek anymore so they assume it's another parallel world. Then when they leave you find out that they just fixed the fucking gate.

That shit made me SO angry, even as a kid.

Hell, reading this legitimately caused me to grit my teeth.

That episode still stings. I think I only watched two or three more after it but I was so salty after that one I just couldn't keep watching.

 

[GungHo]

When Peckinpah was brought in, it was basically over.

Yeah, that guy sounds like cancer.

I stopped watching at some point, can't remember exactly when- but I do remember getting a pretty good laugh out of the acting of

Spoiler

Roger Daltrey. What the heck was the lead singer of The Who doing on Sliders?

I am not sure why you spoilered that. However, that kind of stunt casting was common in the mid-to-late 90s.

Spoiler

Daltrey was also on Highlander, along with folks like Joan Jett and Roland Gift (no shit). He started acting in the 80s after the Who stopped being a full-time gig.

 

[Lagamorph]

And the next time they get back to their Earth, what happens? Maggie suddenly can't breathe. She can breathe the air on literally every other Earth they go to, but not Earth Prime for absolutely no reason.
Fortunately, the next time she goes there she has a bit of trouble breathing at first then gets over it about 30 seconds later and is fine from there on.

 

[HomerSimpson-Man]

I think I only really watched the first 2, maybe 3 seasons? I forgot as I didn't have cable back then when it changed over as a kid. I forgot a lot of the show.

I didn't realize they wrote one of the main characters off to essentially be raped forever in the story-line!

That's some petty ass vindictive stuff, no wonder the show imploded on itself, these people couldn't get see their faces out of asses. This Peckinah fellow, talk about taking a dump on your own food....yikes!

 

[Koomaster]

Find this on Netflix and watch...

Modern day Sliders style show - but no one will fund a full series - so this extended pilot is all we got.

It is pretty good (second half is amazing!)

Okay well this was amazing! Thanks for posting.
I want more of this.

 

[The Lamonster]

Came in to defend White Castle.

yeah I gotta get some White Castle soon now

 

[Savitar]

Sliders, loved it when it was on. But yeah all the changes, always wondered what was going on. Eventually forgot about the show until I saw a thread about it here that covered all the behind the scenes going ons. Crazy stuff.

They even had a comic book in the day.

Not sure if it was any good or not.

 

[KarmaCow]

This thread both makes me want to watch Sliders again and bang my head against the wall until I forget any memory of watching the show in the 90s.

 

[silenttwn]

One of my college lecturers was a writer in the later days of Sliders. Good guy.

 

[LogicStep]

I thought this was about food. =\

 

[Rodney McKay]

I will never get over that one episode where

Spoiler

they actually get back to their original timeline, but the little gate in the yard doesn't creek anymore so they assume it's another parallel world. Then when they leave you find out that they just fixed the fucking gate.

That shit made me SO angry, even as a kid.

Yup, I was a kid when Sliders was on and I'm still angry about that part. I feel like shows do stuff like that all the time and mean it to be like a lighthearted joke, but they always come off as heartbreaking for me.

I don't think I ever saw much of that show past the first season or two, and I barely remember any of the episodes. Just that one where the gate wasn't squeeky and another one where they had a fruit that tasted like whatever you wanted it to taste like (I've always wanted a healthy food like that!).

 

[PHOENIXZERO]

Oh and yeah, Logan was interesting and IIRC was going to be brought back as a reoccurring villain but it never happened. Personally I was fine with the Kromaggs at first but then the show angled to heavily on it and turned it into something incredibly lame in the fourth season along with the whole plot about Quinn actually being from a different Earth than the one he grew up on and that non-sense, would've been forgiven had it turned out to be some mind game and Colin ended up being a Kromagg spy or something.

Anyway, ever seen the Doorways pilot George R.R. Martin wrote back in the early 90s? It was rumored that Tracy Torme ripped off the concept of Sliders from it and IIRC GRRM claimed that Torme through his agent applied to be a writer for the show. He's denied it though and they weren't really that alike. George of course to this day thinks what he did was better than Sliders which just from the pilots is kind of laughable, there's a two year difference from when they were made out but looking at them it looks more like a 20 year difference in terms of production. I mean on one hand I get it and looking at what he said again, he did admit his bias but on the other... It wasn't that good. Helped me realize that he's more than a bit full of himself.

You almost made a show with the same premise as Sliders, and then Sliders came out a year later. Do you ever watch Sliders, and what do you think of it?

Doorways, which was my [unaired] show, was basically the same idea, but it was better-written, better-cast, better in every regard. The only episode of Sliders I ever saw was the pilot. I did watch the pilot, and I thought it terrible. But that’s prejudice, I recognize my prejudice. Put that in if you’re going to write about Sliders here, all right? I realize I don’t have an objective consideration of this because I worked on that show for over a year.

But I do know a little of the subsequent history of Sliders, and it occurs to me that I may have dodged a bullet with Doorways. Because I don’t think I would have been able to do as good a show as I wanted to do. The conception of Doorways was this alternate-world show, where they would have gone through, and every week they would have gone to a different world and had an adventure there. So we would have seen all of these wonderful alternate worlds. I developed like 40 ideas for worlds, and we had six backup scripts written.

But to really do it right, you have to create a whole world. If you’re in the world where the Roman Empire never fell, which was one of our [ideas], it’s still 1993. It’s not a time-travel show. So you have to think about it about it, you have to think of the whole look for the show. That’s very demanding for the set designers and the costume designers. Okay, it’s 1993 — how much has technology progressed from the Roman Empire? Did they have an Industrial Revolution? What are they wearing now? Are they still wearing togas, like they wore in 44 BC? You know, but they’re not dressed like modern 20th Century Americans, either, they’re dressed in some toga-equivalent as it would be 2,000 years later. You have to think about every issue like that.

But what are they driving? Well, they’re not driving Buicks and Chevrolets. They’re driving – do they have cars? Do they have cars based on chariots? You know, the cars would be different, the trains would be different. You know, so it requires a lot of work. But then you have to build that. And at the point where I thought Doorways was gonna go, when I was going to be showrunner, I was looking at pattern budgets, and I was having a horrible feeling that weren't going to be able to do this on that budget. We were going to have a budget equivalent to any other show on television at that time, a million and a half per episode. You can't built a whole world for that amount.

And of course, that's what happened to Sliders. They didn't go to a world where the Roman empire never fell, or any of these worlds — they went to a lot of worlds where, "Gosh, it's just like our world, except that Pete Best is still in the Beatles." So the costumes were the same and the cars were the same. I know they had a big thing — in one world, the traffic lights were different, [so] red means go and green means stop. And that was the big difference.

And, you know, I sneer at that, because it's bad science fiction and it's stupid. You don't want to do an alternate-world show, if that's the best you can do. But we might have been forced to do the exact same thing, simply because of budgetary reasons. And then I would have had this show, that would have been a bad show, on my resume. So maybe I dodged a bullet there, by not having it picked up.

That being said, we had a terrific cast. I think our writing would have been better. Our characters were very much better. But we still would have faced the same limits of budget and storytelling. What I was trying to do at that time was say to the network, "We have to do arcs. That's the only way we can make this work. They have to go to Roman world, and they have to stay there for six episodes. You can't do a world a week. They have to stay, because then we can amortize the costumes and the architecture." You have to build sets and have Greek architecture for Roman world, or Arabian Nights world, or whatever world they're going to. But the networks don't like to do arcs, especially back in the 90s. Now they're more open to them. But back then, they wanted strictly episodic shows, where you could run them in any order. You always return to the original [status at the end of each episode].

http://io9.com/george-r-r-martin-answers-our-toughest-song-of-ice-and-886133300

Nobody in Doorways, even if you put them all together, was better than John Rhys-Davies by himself.

 

[Funky Papa]

Haha, yeah.

They uh, they pulled a "SeaQuest DSV."

Spoiler

Enjoyable scifi show goes to shit right in front of your eyes

I'm sorry, but SeaQuest got several orders of mangnitude better as soon as the show dwelved into geopolitics and stopped being about talking dolphins and saving the seas.

 

[Thornton Reed]

i came in here expecting to see pictures of burgers