Welp, this should be interesting.
The Man of Bronze is headed to the small screen. Sony Pictures Television and Neal H. Moritz’s Sony-based Original Film have partnered with Condé Nast Entertainment to develop a scripted television series based on the Doc Savage pulp fiction franchise from the Street & Smith library. The project is part of the new three-year deal Original Film signed with the TV studio last summer.
The scripted series will chronicle his adventures, featuring rampaging dinosaurs, secret societies led by dastardly villains, fantastic gadgets and weapons, death-dealing traps, hair-raising escapes, and plots to rule the earth.
Via GeekTyrant. I asked my wife about this one; she’s the Doc Savage fan in the house. Her response was… that she was very interested to see how that all worked out. She think it’d work better as a purely formulaic series than as something Babylon 5-ish; but she and I both know that Bab5 casts a very long shadow in that regard.
Still, it might not suck.
Okay, I apologize if this sounds stupid, but I have to ask.
I know about Lester Dent’s Man of Bronze; I’m also familiar with his predecessor, Talbot Mundy’s Jimgrim. However, I have never seen an episode of Babylon 5.
So, what exactly do you mean when you say “Babylon5-ish”?
Hello, Moe’s Wife here:
Babylon 5 had an over-arching, five-season story arc. Up until then, sci-fi shows like Star Trek had a very episodic structure that played well in syndication. With the exception of the occasional two-part episode, it didn’t matter what order you saw the shows in. With Bab5, you had to see the shows in order for things to make sense.
Doc Savage was written more like Star Trek. Pick up any of the stories, and you’ll find all you need to know about Doc and the Fabulous Five. So if they stick to that structure, it’ll be more like the originals. If somebody decides that it needs to be Prestige TV, with a multi-season plot arc, it’s going to be a more extensive reworking of the ideas involved.
Thank you, Ma’am.