From our Tell Us That Story Again desk come these headlines:
- Greatest American Hero is returning to TV under the direction of Rick Famuyiwa, Phil Lord & Chris Miller. Lord and Miller are the men behind The LEGO Movie and several other laudable efforts.
- Col. Steve Austin is returning to the screen in 2017 as The Six Billion Dollar Man. There’s a rumor he will have to deal with hundreds of angry cowboys before wrangling thousands of deadly aliens. And there may be ninjas too.
CBS is going to return to classic Star Trek and create new stories with familiar characters. Rumors say a recurring storyline will have the Enterprise crew wrangling a pesky cyborg on Earth.- And believing the public may be tiring of all this new stuff and have a hankering for the return of a classic favorite, the sci-fi/fantasy series Amazing Stories has been approved for a return. Furious D spells out how the show might work and some pitfalls to avoid. I’d love to see a series of individual episodes that touch on a larger story, which may eventually take over every episode, but if it’s truly an anthology series with different kinds of stories, then they may want to break it up a good bit.
I remember the first attempt at an Amazing Stories series very well. At the time I was selling stories to George Scithers at AS, and everyone thought the TV people would be mining the magazine for possible scripts. Everyone was wrong. Spielberg just wanted the Amazing name.
But returning to those stories could be a treasure trove for this new series. They’d have to update them like Sherlock does. At least, it’s possible they would.
It would be a wonderful idea (and I don’t mean my stories, which are probably the wrong genre). Which makes me certain they won’t do that.