OT: Dr. Who

[Brian K. White]

On 7/26/2010 7:05 PM, Fairlight wrote:
> The honourable and venerable John Esak spoke thus:
>> Just another stupid question. Has there been the equivalent of the little
>> robot dog?  Was it R5 or Astro or something like that? No, wait, that was
>> George Jetson's dog!, Ruh Roh...  :-)
>
> Astro was the Jetsons, yeah.
>
> K9 actually makes several appearances, notably in series 2 and 4.  And
> likely in the spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures (which is more a kids'
> programme, although I'm tempted to get it anyway).
>
>> Dr Who was as good at character generation as Star Trek was. I still
>> think the Holographic doctor in Voyager is the best idea of that whole
>> series. except, of course, Data is an Asimov positronic robot from way
>
> I'd agree with the holographic doctor practically carrying Voyager, yeah.
> People really knock Voyager far more than is deserved.
>
>> back when and you can't do much better than that for 40 or 50 years
>> hanging around, until you get miraculously brought to life in an entirely
>> different medium. Asimov must be slowly spinning around in his grave with
>> a contented smile on his face.  He once wrote a story about a positronic
>> car named Sally that could drive you around and such.  Just recently I
>> sat in a Lexus that parallel parked itself.  Sally isn't far off. :-)
>
> I read about a car in the last few years that would essentially just roll
> sideways into a parking space, rather than conventional parallel parking.
>
> Supposedly Asimov was supposed to be spinning in his grave over the Will
> Smith movie of "I, Robot".  I can't really join in the bashing, as I've
> never read the original, and I liked the movie.

I read all the originals long ago and LOVED them. The movie takes a tiny 
window of time from the earliest instants of the book series and cherry 
picks some things from other books that take place thousands of years 
and lightyears apart, and invents some things which were barely hinted 
at in the books. There was no great robot uprising in the books, but for 
some reason Earth hates robots so possibly it is because there was such 
an almost-uprising in their past.

This all makes the movie pretty much a new thing that is not in any 
sense "I, Robot" since that particular book was a series of unconnected 
short stories that posed various interesting ideas, most of which don't 
even slightly appear in the movie. (Where is the solar power satellite 
populated by robots who do a spectacular job but punchline is it's for 
the unsuspected reason that they essentially worship the gauges and 
dials as a religion?)

But none of that is really reason to dislike the movie as far as I'm 
concerned. I liked the movie. I don't mind that the movie is titled "I, 
Robot" because in my opinion that is both a great great title and fits 
this movie just fine as well.

I think of it like the various incarnations of Hitchhikers Guide. The 
old radio shows do not exactly agree with the old tv shows do not agree 
exactly with the books. The latest movie agrees pretty well after 
allowing for unavoidable differences imposed by the medium (All movies 
are a fraction of their respective books). But all are good. Perhaps 
it's because they weren't corrupted and abused by other writers but were 
mostly done by Adams himself. But the point is I don't have a problem 
with variations on a theme just because they are variations, only if 
they actually suck.

I thought I Am Legend was pretty good too. Refreshingly un-ID4-like.

-- 
bkw