THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD

Wednesday, February 3, 2010




There are many, many reasons to hate the SyFy network.

They canceled Mystery Science Theater 3000.

They canceled Farscape.

They renewed Lexx for that last season. (At the time we thought they were doing us a favor with that one, but, oh, how very wrong we were.)

They screwed around with Ron Moore's plans for Battlestar Galactica, insisting on a lot of standalone episodes that weakened the show's storytelling, eroded the audience and arguably led to the show ending its run a couple of seasons early.

They fill the airwaves with endless wrestling crap, moronic ghost hunter shows and depressingly unimaginative TV movies about giant mosquitos, and comets smashing into cities that aren't supposed to be Vancouver, while decades of classic sci-fi movies and TV gather dust in a vault someplace.

They changed their name from the SCI FI Channel to freaking SyFy, a name that pratically begs you to make fun of it. (Within minutes of the new name being announced, six million geeks were already writing forum posts calling the network SyFylis.)

But of all SyFy's crimes, perhaps none are so unforgivable as commissioning a pilot for Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's The Amazing Screw-On Head, airing it once, and then never turning it into a series. That went beyond incompetence and into the realm of the actively sadistic. That's almost Fox network evil.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is a brilliant and absolutely crazy steampunk horror adventure parody cartoon, featuring Paul Giamatti as the voice of the Civil War-era cyborg superman and David Hyde Pierce as the sinister Doctor Zombie. I almost caution you against watching the pilot above (it's broken up into several parts) because when it's over you'll have a consuming need to see more... But there is no more to be had. For the next few years, every time you flip by SyFy and they're airing another "reality" show where people are wandering around in some abandoned factory and pretending they hear scary noises, you'll hurl your remote at the TV and then cry yourself to sleep.

Amazing Screw-On Head, where are you? Your nation needs you now, more than ever!



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2 comments:

Scott February 4, 2010 at 1:20 AM  

In defense of SyFy, if they hadn't picked up MST3K, it would have died sooner, because they only picked it up after Comedy Central dropped it.

As for the rest (and especially Screw-On Head), you're pretty dead on. Hell, I'm a wrestling fan and I can't stand the fact that they show wrestling. And when it was just Ghost Hunters once a week, fine, but they've killed that with overexposure (and it seems to me that the guys on the show are a lot more credulous than they used to be).

And I don't know if you've seen this, but SyFy is having a contest to name a new original movie. From the promos, it's clear that they're trying to project the image that they're in on the joke about how bad their movies are, and okay, fine (though you'd think they'd have figured that out when MST3K did one of their movies), but I'd rather see them put that effort into making a decent movie. They've shown they can do good series, and is 2 hours really harder than a full season?

Greg Stacy . February 4, 2010 at 5:21 AM  

I know MST3K had a good long run, but I blame SyFy anyhow because they stink so much. Back in the 1990s they were actually trying, and put on plenty of good stuff. But at some point this decade they basically gave up. For years BSG was just about the only thing I saw on their network, and for a science fiction fanatic like me that's just pathetic. Seriously, put on Buck Rogers reruns or that old Planet of the Apes cartoon, I will WATCH that crap!

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About This Blog

"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden

Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?

Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.

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