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The Starlost: Difference between revisions
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[[File:starlost_9083.jpg|frame|Doesn't look 8000 miles long, does it?]]
{{quote|''The incredible adventure of a giant spacecraft carrying the survivors of a dead planet Earth on the most critical mission ever launched by man: an endless journey across the Universe in search of a new world. Earthship ARK: hundreds of miles long... a huge grapelike cluster of metal domes, each a tiny world isolated from all the others. In the countless generations that have lived and died since the launching of the ARK, everyone has forgotten that the Earth ever existed... forgotten that they are streaking through space on a collision course with disaster. Forgotten... until one man stumbles on the truth: that they are THE STARLOST!
|from the ''Starlost'' [[Universe Bible]] }}
One of the [[So Bad It's Horrible|legendarily bad]] television shows, broadcast on CTV in Canada and syndicated in the United States from 1973-1974.
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Originally an award-winning script for a miniseries by the late [[Harlan Ellison]], it was changed into a series and [[Executive Meddling|ruined by the producer]]. For the complete, unvarnished story of what happened to the series, see Ellison's forward to Edward Bryant's novelization of the original script, ''Phoenix Without Ashes''. For a hilarious fictionalized version, see [[Ben Bova]]'s novel ''The Starcrossed''.
Despite (or perhaps ''because of'') its legendary badness, a ''Starlost'' DVD box set was released in 2008.<ref>Amazingly, it's ''still available'' as of 2023.</ref>
And if you're morbidly curious about [[What Might Have Been]], a copy of the original [[Universe Bible]] can be found [http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Misc_Bibles/The_Starlost_Bible.pdf here] (as of mid-
{{tropelist}}
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* [[The Ark]]: Earthship ARK.
* [[Artificial Gravity]]
* [[Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage]]: As mentioned in the description, Rachel and Garth get one in the pilot and Devon takes it poorly. Once they're all outside their home biome, nobody is married to anybody.
* [[City in a Bottle]]/[[Country of Hats]]: The biospheres.
* [[Creator Backlash]]: Almost fifty years later, [[Harlan Ellison]] ''still'' castigated everyone who ruined the show.
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* [[Space Amish]]: The people of Cypress Corners. Literally. They are a Mennonite or pseudo-Mennonite culture.
* [[Space Is an Ocean]]: Implied by the design of the ARK model. There's no reason why the domes all needed to be only on one plane, "flat" relative to the rest of the ship; it would have been more practical (and realistic!) to have them radiating out from the central hull in all directions. (Like, for instance, the ''Valley Forge'' from ''[[Silent Running]]''.) The final design suggests that the modelmakers were unconsciously assuming gravity would always be "down", and that the domes all need to be pointing upward for a "sun" overhead -- and that the entire ARK would be floating on the surface of "space" like a raft.
* [[Time Dilation]]: Completely and utterly misunderstood by the writer of the episode "The Pisces". See ''No Immortal Inertia'', above.
* [[Tube Travel]]: "Bounce tubes" connected the different sections of the ''ARK'' -- enter one and you are immediately propelled all the way to the far end, as Devon discovers in the first episode.
* [[Universe Bible]]: Written at least in part by SF author [[Ben Bova]], who briefly served as technical adviser to the series, and who later wrote a comic novel about the entire disaster. Available [http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Misc_Bibles/The_Starlost_Bible.pdf here] (in mid-
* [[Writer Revolt]]: After watching the [[Executive Meddling]] get started, Ellison bailed on the project and forced the producers to use his "red flag" pseudonym "Cordwainer Bird" for all his credits.
* [[You Are Number Six]]: The "backup bridge crew" of immortal children in the episode "Children of Methuselah" don't have names, only numbers.
* [[You Fail Physics Forever]]: Just about every writer other than Ellison.
** In character, the crew of "The Pisces", who although they were part of the highly-trained crew of a relativistic spacecraft, were caught flatfooted by
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:TV Series]]
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