Beyond 2000

Beyond 2000 was easily my favourite TV show of the late 80's, it had a very cool intro sequence but most importantly great reporting of science and technology developments worldwide from a team of talented reporters. I had a chance to re-watch most of them several years ago when channel seven screened these at late night (otherwise the memories would be too faded), it still held up well and it was interesting to see how developments had panned out down the track 15 years later.

Watching them in a compressed timeframe, it was clear what happened to Beyond 2000: the show's budget got cut further and further until it was just a few reporters without a studio stuck doing Australian-only stories that had to be stretched out to fill an hour. Little wonder why the show lost viewers and got cancelled. It was unsuccessfully revived at least twice in the 90's in a low-budget format, with only two presenters. Beyond's penny pinching was again evident with Beyond Tomorrow, the heralded return of prime-time science/tech news reporting, to Mystbusters' watchers disbelief they filled in the last segment of each show with a re-edited Mythbusters segment.

Unfortunately I never seem to get around to regularly watching Beyond 2000's true successor, Catalyst on the ABC (Beyond 2000 was originally an ABC show).

I am lucky enough to have one of the shows that I recorded on a tape back in 1988. This show was prophetic. Notably it featured the first MRI machine which was only large enough for someone to put their leg into. They said that there were plans to build larger versions of the machine in the 1990's that a whole person could fit into. It also featured the enormous liquid-cooled Cray II supercomputer with a whopping 2 gigabytes of RAM memory. Another neat thing was a commercial for CompuServe on the tape. It was a pre-World Wide Web dial-up service that featured the largest bulletin board. And here is the kicker; they ONLY charged ten cents a minute to connect.

I wish that this show could be downloaded off the Web. I find it interesting to look at technological predictions that came true or didn't.

It was so great to watch this show. It introduced forward thinking like Star Trek except it was about real things being worked on or already a reality. Sure would like to see this come up on Amazon or Netflix!

I used to watch this show religiously as a kid. I loved the opening sequence and theme music. But a loved the futuristic technologies and smart reporting better. It's a shame that Beyond International let this gem degrade into what is now Beyond Tomorrow. That show is barely a shadow of the original Beyond 2000. With commonplace technologies flooding its show, and a bastard child of Mythbusters squeezed in, Beyond Tomorrow is a joke of a program only available on The Science Channel in the US which is a channel difficult to get and has low ratings.Look for the Online petition to bring back a more worthy successor at ipetitions.com!

Does anyone else even remember this show? I was addicted. Along with Max Headroom: 20 Minutes in the Future, it was the epitome of TV futuristic cool in the mid 80s. Every show featured weird stuff that was supposed to be commonplace in the near future (but 2000 sure seemed a long ways off even then, huh?). I'm not sure, but it must have had "cool" graphics and music to get me to be so into it. They probably made everything sound really mysterious and cool. I haven't seen this since the late 80s, I'm sure. I'm surprised to see that it ran as long as this entry says it did. It would be neat to see it rerun on TechTV or something.