A motley crew of galaxy-hopping heroes attempt to restore civilization in the syndicated TV series ‘Andromeda’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 30, 2020

One of the things I’ve been doing to pass the time during my Covid-19 quarantine is streaming Andromeda, the syndicated science-fiction series that aired 110 episodes from October 2000 through May 2005. I watched the 22nd and final installment of the first season last night.

The show centers on Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo), a member of the High Guard, a military service that patrols three galaxies united under the banner of the peaceful Systems Commonwealth. Near the beginning of the pilot episode, Hunt’s starship, Andromeda Ascendant, stumbles upon a covert rebel fleet that’s about to launch a surprise attack. Hunt orders his hopelessly outnumbered crew to abandon ship but stays at the helm in an effort to save his damaged vessel by maneuvering around the edge of a black hole.

Hunt’s gambit fails because he’s forced to confront a traitorous officer. Because of Einsteinian time dilation, three centuries pass in the rest of the galaxy during the second that it takes the battered captain to blink his eyes.

Considering why the original ‘Star Wars’ was such a hit and why the animated ‘Lord of the Rings’ was not

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Oct. 7, 2015

As I wrote earlier today:

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a fantasy-adventure trilogy first printed in 1954–55, was a seminal publication. Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, an animated feature based on Tolkien’s work that was released in 1978, is an obscurity.

By contrast, I saw the original Star Wars during an extended first run in 1977, and I immediately fell in love with the movie: I instantly wanted to buy all of the Kenner toys based on George Lucas’s movie. For years, I bought and devoutly studied novelizations of the original trilogy of movies as well as original Star Wars novels. (In the latter category, Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Brian Daley’s trilogy of Han Solo adventures held prized places on my bookshelf and in my heart.)

So why did I cotton to Star Wars so thoroughly while The Lord of the Rings left me cold? Part of it was the quality of Bakshi’s movie — as discussed earlier, I generally found it to be adequate, whereas I thought Star Wars was out-and-out thrilling. But there are also major differences between the narratives woven by Tolkien and Lucas, and I wanted to explore those.