"Sci-Fi "Goofs" People Need to Get Over" - Forbidden Planet

Forbidden Planet - Sci-Fi Books & Films!

For the Discerning Sci-Fi Fan!

Sound in Space

Probably the biggest. Without the growls and hisses of starship engines and thrusters, the karrangs of phaser & blaster-type weapons, and the shockwaves of big explosions you can literally feel thanks to sound systems such as THX no space movie would be worth watching. Of course sound doesn't travel through space, but how would you feel about every scene in the vacuum being completely silent, think of every epic space battle in Star Wars, every time the Enterprise enters combat with a villain of the week, the massive fleet in Starship Troopers being shot out of the sky. Now imagine them with out the ominous grumble of a star destroyer, the wisping of a tie-fighter's engines being followed by the plop of a x-wing's blasters, the creaking of metal falling apart on a battle damaged ship and the crescendo every ship in every sci-fi flick makes before making that impressive jump to light speed or warp power. Sorry, I'll keep my unrealistic sounds because in the end none of my favorites would be that great without it.

Humanoid Aliens

Another gripe that generally can be the difference between a movie or TV episode that looks good and one that looks cheesy are how the aliens look. Let's face it, the only practical way to get an alien to be totally un-humanoid looking is to do CGI or use puppets. No matter how expensive, CG aliens look mostly like crap. See: Non-ROTJ Jabba, Enterprise Tholians, special edition dewbacks, new trilogy Yoda (and Christopher Lee for that matter ;-) ) and those aliens that had a number for a name in voyager. Puppets, also almost always look like puppets, such as the original Yoda and that thing that laughed alot in Jabba's Palace. For me the only really good representation of a non-humanoid alien has been the original humungo puppet of Jabba. When you get down to it, it is more cost effective, which allows for a diverse universe of aliens to just throw some funny makeup and clothes on some actors and call them aliens. Both Star Wars and Star Trek have attributed this to a majority of all aliens home planets being seeded by a master race or something, but let's cut to the cheddar, cheesy makeup on some dude looks a hell of a lot better than cheesy muppets and CGI creatures.

Everyone Speaks English

This goes somewhat hand-in-hand with the 1st one. How much would a movie full of lazer sword fights, blaster stand-offs and space combat be slowed to a crawl if every time our heroes met a new alien they had to figure out how to communicate with them? Well.... watch a good amount of Enterprise episodes and you will find out, even their attempts to make it creative, or to add a tense to the situation generally do not work; with few exceptions. The 1st act of the episode with the Ferengi comes to mind. Other than that the idea of a universal translator in most shows is not just a tool of necessity to the characters, but also to the writers who care more about having an entertaining story than worrying about the intricacies of inter-species communication. I especially like the use of "Basic" as English is called in Star Wars as a primitive language most species throughout the galaxy at least understand. When you think about it everyone in Star Wars is an alien to us, even the humans since I don't think Earth is in a galaxy far, far away.

Faster Than Light Travel is Most-Likely Impossible

I think you can see what this list is based around. Science fact, or at least likely theories that would be completely boring in science-fiction. Warp speed, light speed, hyperspace, whatever you want to call it is simply a plot device that allows a story to take place across great regions of space. The concept of generational ships is pretty neat, at least to me anyway, and one of my favorite Star Wars books revolves around one, but a ship leaving Earth hundreds or thousands of people, never to return because it has to travel for hundreds of years before it even finds a hospitable planet to colonize is not as fun as a fleet of star ships that can travel from one end of the galaxy to another at whatever speed fits the timeliness of the story for the crews next adventure or space battle or princess rescue. I know there are lots of jibber-jabber nerdy explanations for how (insert franchise here)'s faster than light travel works. Folding space, traveling through different dimensions, creating wormholes. Whatever. It's a pretty good chance mankind will not leave the solar system in the blink of an eye, but in a movie or TV show it is a necessity to keep things interesting and the most plausible way our interstellar travel will occur probably isn't at some huge factor of the speed of light.

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Nice list, I think Battlestar Gallactica is the only show I've seen that manages to get around the first three common problems, as there are no aliens to communicate with, and I think the use of sound outside the ships themselves is extremely subdued. Not that its not present at all, but its very quiet.

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Excellent points, all -- I do agree that the 'science purists' need to remember that this is Fiction. Your comment on Generation Ships struck a spark of memory for me -- there was a series of stories set inside a Generation Ship way back in the 1960's, serialized in "Boy's Life" magazine. I wish I had saved those old issues, because the stories were really good, and I now want to know who wrote them and to read them again...

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Screaming tie fighter FTW!!!!!!!!! Great list.

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Very funny list. I'm especially thankful the THX people decided that space ships need a thundering subwoofer soundtrack :)

imahsome August 19, 2010

Definitely. The 1st scene of star wars really defined what a space ship should sound like, especially after being remastered.

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Thanks guys, ya you probably could just write down everything that happens in a sci-fi movie, like lasers travel at the speed of light and would probably not have visible beams, inter-species erotica, etc. These were mostly just the things where people that try to act too smart during a movie and go like "meh, you wouldn't really be able to hear that space fight" bug the hell out of me. It's just a movie. It's not like they added sound effects to a real space walk for the news or something. There's some other stuff I was going to put on a different list that I don't particularly think are goofs, but things that are incredibly convenient in space.

Scotman August 18, 2010

True. That's a great list idea (your last sentence).

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Super list and fun to read, thanks. I'm sure that there even a few more that you could have listed (Scotman hit on Time Travel and then there is the artificial gravity on spacecraft and gravity being the same on most habitable planets that are visited) but I think you covered the biggies quite well. 2 thumbs up!

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Thanks for reminding us of things that we already know but never think about. I remember a Flash Gordon episode where he located a bomb inside his space ship in outer space and just opened the window and tossed it out!