Space Rangers

There are some great bones for this but the cinematography and editing are awful. Every few seconds the frame rate slows just slightly in an apparent attempt to be dramatic but it just makes it look like the film was dragging. And the deliberate camera shake is nauseating.

Props are meh and graphics are meg but not unduly so for the year and tech at the time. It's just the lighting and cinematography that makes it nearly unwatchable.

There are some great actors along side some awful ones. And blast it, I know Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is not that bad of an actor but man is he bad in this. I can only hope it was poor direction and script for him.

This show about a screw up company of space cops was brilliant semi-satire. It took the nuclear family dynamic of the ultra serious "Waltons" mixed it with the sarcastic "Ice Pirates" crews' family weirdness, added space adventure, and voila--Instant Cult Hit! It brings to my mind a tiny film about a loving family type crew of a "renegade" ship that acquires a 8 yr old kid as a stowaway. Both films have a similar technology level, costuming, and dynamic(inner reality) I LOVE Space Rangers for its' internal consistency, irascibility, excellently built characters, sarcastic/witty dialogue, and great cast(their acting ability is unquestionably awesomely great)

Beowolf666 is thinking of Firefly (http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=serenity), a truly great show and subsequent movie, Serenity.

I do see where Beowolf666 may have gotten the two confused, some characters sound to be very similar, especially the missionary, female second in command, and engineer.

There is also a similarity in the Banshies of Space Rangers and the Reavers of the Firefly universe. After reading the plot summary for Space Rangers, one gets the feeling that Joss Whedon may have been a fan of Space Rangers, or at least the basic idea, which was then refined for Firefly.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen Space Rangers yet, or I'd leave a comment about it. I just wanted to make sure the nice comments Beowolf666 left were attributed to the correct series.

"MAD"'s spoof of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" ended with the space station being under threat from "Babylon 5," "Time Trax" and "Space Rangers." As it turned out, it outlasted all of them; "Space Rangers" was the first to get the chop. Not that it was such a great loss, but it wasn't totally useless.

This action-based show was pretty much a live-action cartoon focusing on our peace-keeping heroes, breaking the rules and irritating their superior (Linda Hunt - a long way from "The Year of Living Dangerously"), and with no story arcs anywhere in sight... or any thoughtful writing or strong acting, admittedly (star Jeff Kaake was last heard of on the even less successful "The D.R.E.A.M. Team" alongside Angie Everhart, Traci Bingham, Caprice and Roger Moore). But when a show has even ONE moment that hangs around in your mind for years - in the first episode's teaser an underground creature that pulls down its prey with tentacles and eats it alive snatches one of the villain's men and later on nearly gets Space Ranger Jojo (Marjorie Monaghan) - it has to have done something right.

Not too bad.

My cousin is a set designer. He made a lot of the stuff on the show including the ship that they used and he even wrote an alien language for the show that was posted on signs and walls around the base that the rangers live and work out of. I have seen every episode of the show including the ones that never aired. I have even read the scripts for episodes that were never filmed. It is a shame that the show got canceled, it was about to get really good. I really don't know what else to say, IMDb says that my post must have at least ten lines of text, but I read posts all the time that have a lot less. I really don't understand why I have to post at least ten lines here. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.