Weekly Blog Update (April 30th, 2020)

Hey guys. How's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Thursday morning. Sorry this post is later in the week than I had planned, but the weather was really nice out yesterday and on Tuesday, so I chose to go outside instead of working on the blog. I also got distracted with YouTube videos. So I don't have a whole lot to tell you this week, but I thought I'd do this post anyway since it's become a staple of this new version of The Review Basement.

Last week I announced that I was starting an entire series of reviews on VHS tapes. I decided to still do it, but I've narrowed it down to just three series of tapes. I've eliminated the Walt Disney Classics line and the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection line and will focus just on The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, Barney and the Backyard Gang, and Disney Sing-Along Songs. This way there won't be any repeats and I can actually talk about the episode or show that's on the tape without going through five or six different iterations of a movie before I get to the actual movie. So I'm going to just incorporate the movies from the Walt Disney Classics and Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection into my movie reviews since I have access to most, if not all of the movies thanks to Disney+. I'll be starting with the Teddy Ruxpin VHS tapes that Vincent sent me the digitized copies of next week, on either Monday or Tuesday, depending on when I feel like watching the first tape.

As you may have noticed I went off brand with my comic book review this week and reviewed Batman #501 from the Batman: Knightquest trade paperback. I have so many comic books that I want to talk about from all eras that I didn't think it was fair to pigeonhole myself into just reviewing the comic books that I had as a child and teenager. However, I'm going to reviewing single issues only, whether I have them in floppies (the single issues themselves), or in collected editions. With the older comics that I have facsimile editions or reprint editions of, I'm going to use the original cover image for rather than the reprint or facsimile edition of.

For my movie review this week I'm going to be watching Dick Tracy (1990). Unlike The Rocketeer, which I reviewed last week, I may or may not have seen Dick Tracy when I was a kid. It's possible I at least saw bits and pieces of it at the hospital, but I don't remember watching it and I don't remember seeing the whole movie. So hopefully I'll enjoy it when I sit down to watch it on VHS tomorrow night.

I think that's all I wanted to tell you guys this week. I'll be back on Saturday with my review of Dick Tracy and then I'll be back on Monday with my review of The World of Teddy Ruxpin Volume 1: The Treasure of Grundo, the first tape in the original Teddy Ruxpin VHS series. So until then have a great rest of the day and I will talk to you all later.

Batman (1940) #501 Comic Book Review

Batman #501 is a classic Batman story that you might find in a comic from the '70s, except it stars Jean Paul Valley as Batman and his relationship with Commissioner Gordon is much more tense than it was back then. Following his defeat of Bane in Batman #500, the new Batman is looking for a new challenge and decides to take on Gotham City's crime families. But they've banded together and hired an assassin to take out Batman instead. You know, the standard mob stuff you'd see in movies in the '40s.

I think it would've been a lot cooler if the crime families/crime bosses were ones we were familiar with. Like the Falcones, or Rupert Thorne or someone like that. Instead we just got generic bosses that don't do anything in terms of realizing that Batman has changed since Bane nearly killed him back in Batman #497. Which is one of the things that I enjoy about the Jean Paul Valley era of Batman comics. The big villains like the Joker and Catwoman realizing that this isn't the same Batman they're used to facing. That's not something you get with the small time crooks or the new supervillains like the Trigger Twins or the Tally Man.

I love the scene between Batman and Gordon. This is where Gordon slowly begins to realize that this isn't the Batman he's worked alongside of for several years. Though he isn't sure whether it's not the same man in general, not knowing Batman's secret identity, or if he is the same man, but changed after his encounters with Bane. The reason I love this scene is because Gordon, the only person to know Batman really well without knowing his secret identity, tells Batman that he knows how to make a tight case against the criminals he takes down and that he also knows how to blow a case when there's not enough evidence for the cops to take the bad guys in. Which has no effect on the new Batman, because, well as he admits in narration, he hates detective work, which has always been at the core of how Batman operates. Which Gordon knows very well and one of the reasons he trusts Batman so much.

The assassin the crime bosses hire is super generic. His design makes him look like a generic robot from a comic published by Image Comics in the '90s or by Marvel Comics in the same decade. Even the new Batman's Batsuit is more inspired by Spawn and Deadpool than any other character being published in 1993. I think DC was trying to make a point with their killing off of Superman, their replacing Bruce Wayne with Jean-Paul Valley as Batman, and their leading Hal Jordan into madness, that there's a reason that the traditional superheroes like Batman, Superman and Green Lantern are still around and that not everybody likes the '90s "superheroes" that were appearing in books published by Image and Marvel at the time. Oddly enough that case is still being made today. Not just in the comics, but in the movies and on TV too.

The artwork in this issue is pretty good. Mike Manley is the artist on this book and I like his work. I think the first time I ever saw his work was when I got Batman #506 back in 1994. I'll be talking about that issue in the near future.

Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall Batman #501 is a pretty good issue for it's time. The artwork is great. However the generic bad guys and Jean-Paul Valley himself aren't the greatest characters, and I found myself comparing Jean-Paul's Batman to Bruce Wayne's the entire time I was reading this issue. As I do any time I read an issue from the Knightquest: The Crusade era of Batman comics. Oh and it's also part 1 of a two part story that continues in Batman #502. I'm going to give this issue a 7/10.

The Rocketeer (1991) Movie Review

The Rocketeer is another movie for me that I had never seen before I popped it into the VCR to watch for this review, but was legendary. It came out in 1991 and at the time I was four and a half years old. We never rented it, we never owned it on any home video format, and I never saw it at the hospital. Yet I vaguely remember seeing a clip of Cliff Secord, played by Bill Campbell, in full costume at some point in the '90s. I don't know if it was in an opening for The Wonderful World of Disney or if it was an actual commercial for the movie that played on TV.

I talked to my buddy, Aaron, last night after I finished watching the movie and when I asked him if it was blasphemy to think that The Rocketeer is a better movie than The Dark Knight (2008) or any of the MCU films and he said no it's not. Which is good because I honestly do believe that The Rocketeer is a better movie than The Dark Knight at least in terms of my sensibilities. The tone is perfect where it's not too dark and serious, but it also isn't too over the top and goofy to the point where it undermines the seriousness of the situation that Cliff and Jenny, played by Jennifer Connelly, find themselves in. It feels like a movie. It's fun, it's exciting and I never felt bored while I was watching it.

The cast in this movie is phenomenal. Jennifer Connelly and Timothy Dalton were big names at this time as Dalton had just come off of playing James Bond in the successful The Living Daylights (1987) and the more controversial Licence to Kill (1989). And of course Jennifer Connelly had starred in numerous film genres ranging from Horror to Comedy to Fantasy. The rest of the cast is like a who's who of Star Trek cast members or soon to be Star Trek cast members. Bill Campbell played Captain Okona in the Star Trek: The Next Generation season 2 episode, "The Outrageous Okona", Max Grodenchik would go on to play Rom on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Tiny Ron Taylor would go on to play the Grand Nagus's servant on DS9 as well as a Hirogen commander on Star Trek: Voyager, both Terry O'Quinn and Paul Sorvino would appear in season 7 of TNG, O'Quinn as Admiral Pressman in "The Pegasus" and Sorvino as Worf's step brother, Nikolai Rozhenko in "Homeward", Clint Howard of course appeared as Balok in season 1 of TOS in the episode "The Corbomite Maneuver", and Ed Lauter appeared in season 5 of TNG as Cadet Joshua Albert's father in the episode "The First Duty". So you have a lot of Star Trek cast members or soon to be Star Trek cast members in this movie, which is pretty cool.

One of the things that Aaron warned me about before I watched the movie was that Cliff's girlfriend in the comics was named Betty, was a nude model and was inspired by Betty Page, an actress and pin-up model. That knowledge wasn't even on my mind as I was watching the movie, because Jenny, Cliff's girlfriend in the movie, is pretty great and Jennifer Connelly plays her extremely well. Unlike Vicky Vale, Kim Basinger's character in Batman (1989), Jenny isn't a completely useless damsel in distress. Which is pretty cool for a movie made in 1990 and released in 1991. Plus it's an adaptation of the comics, not a direct translation from one medium to another, and so changes are to be expected. Especially since Disney was involved and Jeffrey Katzenberg was in charge of the Walt Disney Studios at the time, so of course things are going to get changed as the movie was being released through Walt Disney Pictures, rather than Touchstone Pictures. So while other people don't like that Betty replaced with Jenny, it's not something that I have a problem with within the scope of the movie that was made, and the studio that produced and released it.

The director of the movie is Joe Johnston, who directed a lot of movies that I've seen over the years. He directed Willow (1988), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), The Pagemaster (1994), Jumanji (1995), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and he worked on other movies such as the Star Wars Trilogy, the first two Indiana Jones movies, and Howard the Duck (1986) in the visual effects department. So I thought he was the perfect person to direct this movie.

Also the movie's score is pretty great too. James Horner did the score for this movie and so the music during the action scenes and the end credits is very similar to the music he composed for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Which was an interesting choice, but again it's a choice that worked for the movie because of it's reverence for the old movie serials of the '30s and '40s.

Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall The Rocketeer is a very underrated movie that harkens back to a time when movies were made purely for entertainment purposes, not for quick cash grabs like so many movies are made for today. The cast is excellent, the action is stellar and even the special effects hold up pretty well despite them being early '90s effects. There was no CGI used in this movie at all. And I love this movie. I'm giving The Rocketeer 10/10.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102803/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures (1988) #34 Comic Book Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #34 is a confusing story. It's also the first Ninja Turtles comic I ever owned. The story being confusing probably stems from the fact that this issue continues a story that began in issue #33, one that I've never had in my collection and have never been able to track down a copy of. Because of that I'm actually missing half the story.

The Turtles, Master Splinter and a new character named Ninjara are in Tibet so that Splinter could visit his old friend, the Charlie Llama, only to find out that he's missing. Also there's a pregnant woman named Jang La who goes into labour as the Turtles are about to go rescue the Charlie Llama, who also happens to be a midwife. Yeah, this is a weird comic with way too many coincidences. Oh and all of this is linked to a petty Tibetan dictator.

Honestly, when I got this comic as a kid, I obviously didn't care about whether the story was good or not. I was just excited to have a Ninja Turtles comic. The early '90s was a weird time for the Turtles. The 1987 cartoon was starting to come down from it's height of popularity, but the Turtles were still hugely popular because of the live action movies that came out in 1990, 1991, and 1993. So while I missed the initial wave of Turtlemania, I still ended up having a few of the action figures, and saw the cartoon a few times though it wasn't something that I watched with any regular frequency like some of my classmates did.

One of the things that I like about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures is that they weren't afraid to create characters for the book, which never appeared in the regular book being published by Mirage Studios and didn't show up in the cartoon. They were there for the book and that's it. Which is something that The Batman Adventures, which started publication around this time, never did, as they used characters that were created for Batman: The Animated Series, like Harley Quinn, or had been created by DC Comics for the Bat family of comics. With the exception of characters like Jean Paul Valley (Azrael) and Tim Drake (Robin). Regardless, TMNT Adventures was great at being separate from the cartoon it was based on, after issue #7 or so, maybe a little bit later than that. To the point where Shredder and Krang hardly show up. They still show up occasionally, but the writers find plenty of ways for the Turtles to face adversity instead of just pitting them against Shredder, Krang and the Foot Clan constantly. It's almost as if Archie Comics didn't want to just do an adaptation of the cartoon. They wanted to make a Ninja Turtles comic book that could stand next to what Eastman, Laird and the guys at Mirage were doing with the main Turtles book. And while this particular issue isn't great, the decision that the guys at Archie Comics made definitely puts TMNT Adventures above other comic book adaptations of cartoons.

Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall this isn't a great issue. The pacing is super weird and it actually feels like this was supposed to be a single issue story, but the writer ran out of pages last issue and so they had to end the story in this issue. I've never read TMNT Adventures #33 so I don't actually know how much of their story they managed to tell in it. All I know is is that there wasn't much of a fight in this issue and nothing actually came of the Tibetan dictator. I'm giving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #34 a 6/10 simply because it was the first Ninja Turtles comic I ever got and the artwork is actually pretty solid.

Announcement and Weekly Blog Update (April 19th, 2020)

Hey guys! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm on Day 6 of my antibiotics and things are slowly starting to get back to being what I like to call "pandemic normal", as in the status quo that was in place for me before I ended up in the hospital last weekend. Right now I wanted to come on and talk to you because I have an announcement to make.

Thanks to YouTube and Vincent Conroy, the webmaster for the Grundo Gazette, a Teddy Ruxpin fan site, I've decided to begin a series of reviews on specific series of VHS releases. There are five series I'm going to tackle. They are: The World of Teddy Ruxpin, Disney Sing-Along Songs, Barney & The Backyard Gang, Walt Disney Classics, and Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection. The Teddy Ruxpin tapes are just the episodes of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin TV series. Vincent provided me with digitized copies of the series, so I can watch the tapes I had as a kid and watch the ones I didn't have for the first time. So thanks definitely goes out to him for providing me with those.

YouTube has the Disney Sing-Along Songs and Barney & The Backyard Gang tapes as well as the openings for all of the movies in both the Walt Disney Classics line and the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection so that's where I'll be watching them.

For the Walt Disney Classics and Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection I'm going to watch the openings for the tapes I don't have and and don't have the movie on any other format and the full tapes for the ones I do. However several movies overlap between the two lines so for the ones I have the VHS tapes for, I'll watch those regardless of which line they're in and review that movie when I get to that point in the line. If I don't have that movie on VHS I'll review the movie and include the full movie review with the earliest release in that line. For example, for Robin Hood, I only have it on Blu-ray, so I'll review the movie when I talk about the first VHS release it had in the Walt Disney Classics line, which happens to be the first movie released in that line, so Robin Hood will be my first Disney movie review on the new blog.

I'll also be starting with the series that started getting released first. As the Walt Disney Classics line began coming out in 1984, that's the series I'll be starting with and then I'll finish with the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection sometime next year as this will be a weekly series, rather than a daily one. This series is going to be in addition to my regular movie reviews. I just figured it was a good way to slide the kids stuff in there without long breaks in between them or without just doing them without any other movie review around it. So that will be starting next week.

This week I'll be playing catch up and reviewing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #34 and The Rocketeer. Both reviews were supposed to be up over the Easter weekend but as you know, I ended up in the hospital and things just kind of went south from there. So they'll be going up this week instead. I think that's all I wanted to tell you about this evening. Have a great week and I will be back later in the week with my review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #34. Later. 

Animorphs (1998) TV Show Overview

Animorphs is another show that is of it's time and could never be made in this day and age the way it was made 22 years ago. While it shares the name and characters of the book series created by K.A. Applegate, Animorphs has more in common with Power Rangers than it does the book series it's adapted from. Five teenagers gain special powers from an alien to protect the planet from evil aliens, the evil aliens are incompetent fools, the teens go through daily struggles all the while not addressing whether their parents are concerned about their children's behaviour, and a sixth member joins the team at some point during the series.

Many fans have criticized this show for not being faithful to the books. While I can see where they're coming from realistically a more faithful adaptation of the book series simply wasn't possible back in 1998. Not just because it didn't have the budget. When looking at Animorphs you also have to look at the period surrounding it's airing as well as the network it was on at the time.

Animorphs first aired in 1998 and ended it's run in 2000. At the time the superhero movie was just starting to become popular and successful with movies like Blade (1998) and X-Men (2000) but the landscape of superhero movies was extremely small back then. Superheroes on TV was another story entirely. The most successful superhero property on TV in 1998 was Power Rangers. At least in live action. In animation Bruce Timm and Warner Bros. Animation were having a string of successes with Batman: The Animated Series (1992), Superman: The Animated Series (1996) and The New Batman Adventures (1997). While Marvel was having a string of successes with cartoons based on Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four. Sailor Moon was also pretty popular on the Anime side. So superheroes were dominating in animation.

As I said, in live action, it was only Power Rangers that we really had by 1998 as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman had ended and nothing else was on the horizon from DC or Marvel. And with the Animorphs book series starting out as a superhero series, with the more horrifying war elements not entering into the series until the books reached book #30 or so, Nickelodeon was going to play it safe and take more influences from Power Rangers than from the books themselves. Which is ironic considering that Nickelodeon has been airing Power Rangers for the last ten years.

I rewatched a bunch of the show recently, and I'm okay with this. Not every superhero TV show has to be dark and gritty, even if it's based on something that is those things. Now that's not to say that every superhero TV show needs to be goofy and lighthearted either. But I felt at the time, and now going back and watching it as an adult, that Animorphs did very well at balancing the serious moments with the funnier ones. As much as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers did. Even if I can't take that show seriously anymore.

I don't remember if I started reading the books first or watching the show first, but I remember the first episode of Animorphs I ever saw was Episode 2, "My Name is Jake, Part 2". Here in Canada the show was on twice a week. On Sunday mornings on Global, right before Men in Black: The Animated Series and on either Thursday night or Friday night on YTV. I watched it both nights. I also remember taping the season 1 finale, "Face Off" and rewatching the scene where Tobias grabs the Andalite disk, gains his morphing powers back and morphs into his human form again. I realize now they only did that because season 2 had it's already low budget slashed and they couldn't afford to use the Hawk they were using for Tobias all the time anymore. But still, having Tobias back in his human form again was pretty cool (I hadn't read book #13 yet at this point).

I do wish we'd seen more of the Hork-Bajir and other alien races that were featured in the books. But with the budget that this show had I'm just glad we actually got to see Ax and Visser Three's Andalite forms, the one Hork-Bajir that we saw and the Yeerks outside of their host bodies that we saw. Not to mention we actually got to see the Animorphs morph.

The cast of this show is amazing. Though sadly, Shawn Ashmore (Jake) and Paul Costanzo (Ax) seem to be the only ones who are actually known for anything. Brooke Nevin (Rachel) has mostly been in independent films and smaller TV shows that don't garner much notice. Same goes with the rest of the cast pretty much. My favourite actor on this show is Christopher Ralph. The way he portrays Tobias is awesome. Tobias was always my favourite of the Animorphs with Ax coming in at a close second. I could always identify with Tobias and Ax more than I ever could Jake or Marco, or Cassie or Rachel. So to see an actor portray both characters really well on screen was awesome. Oh and Eugene Lipinski as Visser Three was amazing too. In fact when I first saw him on screen as Visser Three's human morph I recognized him from the 1996 movie Harriet the Spy. The last thing I saw him in was in three episodes of Arrow during that show's first two seasons as Oliver's contact with Bratva operations in Starling City.

I know fans of the books don't like this show and I understand why. Adaptation is a difficult line to walk, but honestly, I still love it. Not as much as I love the books, but it's still a fun show for me to watch. For years I've been watching crappy versions of the episodes on YouTube because there's no DVD release, only the four VHS releases. But the entire series is on iTunes now so I've bought a few episodes from there and watched the three episodes that are included on the first VHS release so far. It's still one of my favourite shows that aired on YTV in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Having said all that it would be interesting what a new TV adaptation of Animorphs would be like. Especially if the series was picked up by Netflix and given a much larger budget than the original TV show did. It could be more faithful to the books in terms of the direction the story went in the books. We could also see a much larger variety of animals that the kids could morph into. We could see more ships and open up the universe a lot more. I doubt it will ever happen though since as I said at the beginning of this post, Animorphs, both the book series and the TV show, is of it's time. It appeared long enough for people of my generation to latch onto it and then disappeared into the ether for us to remember fondly and revisit from time to time. Despite Science Fiction having a resurgence on TV right now and superheroes being popular, Animorphs doesn't have an appeal outside of the kids who read the books and watched the show in the mid-'90s to early 2000s. As was proven almost a decade ago when Scholastic tried to update and re-release the book series. Nobody bought it. At least we have 65 books to read and 26 episodes to watch. And that suits me just fine.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154147/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Andromeda (2000) TV Show Overview

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda or just Andromeda as it's commonly shortened to, is a show that I watched all the time. I was not quite fourteen years old when the show first aired and there was something about it that I latched onto. It wasn't Star Trek nor was it Star Wars. It was something else entirely. Aside from Kevin Sorbo, who I vaguely remembered as Hercules from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, I didn't know any of the cast though Laura Bertram (Trance Gemini) was one of two leads on the Canadian teen drama series Ready or Not from 1993 until 1997.

One of the things that I loved about Andromeda is that it blended the morals of Star Trek with the fun, simplistic action of Star Wars and presented us with something entirely new. That's because not only was the original story idea created by Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, but it was developed for TV by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who had been a writer on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Gene Roddenberry's widow, Majel Barrett, who also had been involved with every incarnation of Star Trek until her death in 2008.

Another thing that I liked about Andromeda is that it came at a time when Star Trek had started to die down following it's huge success in the late '80s and throughout the '90s with two TV shows on at any given time and a movie coming every two to three years. By this time both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had ended, the movies weren't doing quite as well at the box office as they had done in the '80s, and Voyager was just about to end. So Andromeda arrived at the perfect time to fill that void that the lack of Star Trek on TV was creating.

My favourite characters on the show were Tyr Anasazi, played by Keith Hamilton Cobb, the Nietzschean mercenary that joined Dylan's crew, and Trance Gemini, basically a Goddess. I've heard fans of the show say that Tyr's betrayal at the end of season 3 and his behaviour in season 4 were inconsistent with how he was written and portrayed in seasons 1 and 2. Honestly I very much thought that they were consistent with the character. Tyr always looked out for himself. He was about surviving and doing whatever it took to ensure HIS survival. Betraying Dylan and the crew of the Eureka Maru was something that he felt was necessary at the time. It goes all the way back to the second episode where he easily moved from the side of Gerentex, the Nightsider who had hired Beka and her crew to salvage the Andromeda from the black hole in the Hephaistos System in the pilot, to the side of Dylan and the crew of the Maru, despite the fact that Gerentex was paying Tyr and his group of mercenaries. It also goes back to the show's fifth episode "Double Helix" where Tyr seemingly had switched from the side of the Andromeda to the group of Nietzscheans, the Orca Pride, just as easily as he had switched to Dylan's only three episodes earlier.

The reason I liked Tyr so much is because you never knew what he was going to do next or how he was going to handle any given situation. I also liked that he was calculating and waited to act until the time was suitable for him to do so. He always thought about his actions before he did them and was never impulsive. Luckily for the first three seasons Tyr's goals matched Dylan's goals. Otherwise things might've gone south for Dylan a lot sooner.

The reason I liked Trance is because she was so mysterious. Right from her introduction in the pilot episode, she seemed like this simple, thoughtless, sheltered girl at first glance. However you quickly realize there is far more to her than meets the eye even though she kept quiet about where she was from and her past. It wasn't until midway through the second season when the original Purple Trance was replaced by future Gold Trance that she starts to become less of a mystery. At least to the audience. Even right up until the series finale at the end of the fifth season, Dylan and the crew aren't quite sure what to make of Trance. I also liked that she was generally a friendly person, but could get quite mean if you crossed her a certain way. Particularly after she became Gold Trance.

I've also heard people online talk about the shift in tone and change in storytelling direction midway through the second season when Robert Hewitt Wolfe left the show and Kevin Sorbo replaced him as showrunner. Successful or not, every show that is on long enough for there to be a change in showrunner and writing staff will have a tonal shift and/or shift in storytelling direction because every showrunner is different and have different storytelling sensibilities. Even Star Trek: The Next Generation had several shifts in storytelling direction between Gene Roddenberry, Maurice Hurley, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor. Arrow also had several showrunners during it's eight year run and each one tried to change the tone of the show from the darker tone set by Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Marc Guggenheim in season 1 to the weird tone set by Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle in season 4.

Personally I didn't really notice the change mid-season 2 as I always felt that Andromeda was never trying to be like Star Trek and so was never trying to be sophisticated like Star Trek was at the time. I think it was just trying to be lighthearted and entertaining. Which I appreciated since Star Trek was starting to get darker with Star Trek: Enterprise a year after Andromeda started.

Recently I bought a few episodes of Andromeda season 1 on iTunes and I watched them while I was in the hospital. They actually held up after almost 20 years. Which is pretty awesome. Oh sure they're cheesy as hell but they were cheesy when they aired almost twenty years ago so in that regard they hold up for sure.

Overall I still love Andromeda after 20 years. Only the first season is available on iTunes so I'll definitely be tracking down the DVD sets for this show once the COVID-19 stuff is all over and done with. I'm not rating the things I'm talking about over the next few days as they aren't really reviews, just discussions about certain TV shows that I want to talk about while I'm confined to my bedroom.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213327/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0