SCI
FI (originally The Sci-Fi Channel, sometimes rendered
SCI FI Channel) is an American cable television
channel, launched in early 1992, that specializes
in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal
programming. It is part of the entertainment conglomerate
NBC Universal.
History
The
channel was launched in early 1992 as a joint
venture between Paramount Pictures (then self-owned,
was purchased by Viacom in 1994) and Universal
Pictures (then part of MCA). In that time, network
programming included the old television series
Dark Shadows, the film serial Flash Gordon, and
other science fiction movies and series.
The
channel was seen as a natural fit with classic
film and television series that both studios had
in their vaults, including Rod Serling's Night
Gallery (from Universal TV) and Paramount's Star
Trek and classic Universal horror films such as
Dracula and Frankenstein. Star Trek creator Gene
Roddenberry and author Isaac Asimov were among
those on the advisory board. In 1997, Seagram,
which bought MCA in 1995, purchased Viacom's interest
in USA and Sci Fi, and sold the networks to Barry
Diller in 1998 to form USA Networks, Inc. Diller
later sold USA's non-shopping (film and TV) assets,
including Sci-Fi, to Universal's then-parent Vivendi
Universal in 2002. Vivendi's film, television,
and cable TV assets were then merged with General
Electric's NBC to form NBC Universal in 2004.
A high definition version of the channel launched
on October 3, 2007 on DIRECTV.
Sci
Fi programming
See
Sci Fi original programming for the full list.
Sci
Fi's programming includes original television
movies, miniseries, and series.
Series
The
channel's most prominent series include Battlestar
Galactica, Farscape, and Stargate SG-1, (picked
up from the cable network Showtime after five
seasons, and eventually becoming American television's
longest running science-fiction series), and its
spin-off Stargate Atlantis. Its 2006 series, Eureka
was the channel's highest-rated series premiere.
In addition to Stargate SG-1, Sci Fi also picked
up the cancelled Comedy Central series Mystery
Science Theater 3000, running three additional
seasons of that show. In January 2007, it introduced
The Dresden Files alongside Battlestar Galactica
on Sunday evenings. It's also the US home of the
revived Doctor Who series. In 2007 SciFi also
picked up the World Wrestling Entertainment wrestling
show (and brand) ECW. Sci-Fi has also commissioned
a pilot from the comic series The Stranded (comic)
it co-produces with comics publisher Virgin
Comics.
Sci-Fi
Friday
One
of the channel's most successful nights is a two-
to three-hour lineup of series on Friday nights,
under the banner "Sci Fi Friday". These
have included various combinations of Heroes,
Farscape, Sliders, The Invisible Man, First Wave,
Lexx, Doctor Who, Flash Gordon, Tremors, Stargate
SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica,
Painkiller Jane and Chuck.
Second run programming
The
channel runs many cult classic science fiction
TV shows that have been cancelled in recent years
such as The Incredible Hulk, Lost in Space, Land
of the Giants, Max Headroom, Land of the Lost,
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Batman, Space:
1999, My Secret Identity, The Time Tunnel, Buck
Rogers in the 25th Century, Surface, John Doe,
Firefly, Dark Angel, Tru Calling, and the dark
comedy Dead Like Me. It also shows reruns of popular
shows such as The X-Files, The Twilight Zone,
Tales from the Darkside, Ripley's Believe It or
Not. For a very long time, the channel was the
home of reruns of the 1960s gothic soap opera
Dark Shadows. The series aired on Sci-Fi from
1992-1997, and 1999-2003. This channel was also
the first to air Star Trek: The Original Series,
and Star Trek: Enterprise on cable. It also ran
the UPN cancelled series, Jake 2.0. On June 1,
2007, SCI FI aired the UPN series Level 9. The
series ran once and was then pulled from the channel's
schedule. The channel aired the entire series
Kindred: The Embraced on October 17, 2007 and
most of the series Wolf Lake on October 18, 2007.
Sci
Fi Channel and G4 have purchased the rights to
broadcast reruns of Lost beginning fall 2008.
Anime
Briefly
in the early 1990s, Sci Fi showed anime movies,
although they were often edited in order to fit
the market pressures often placed on basic cable.
It was the first to show the movies Robot Carnival
and Akira in their original Streamline Pictures
English dubs, as well as showing Central Park
Media's Dominion Tank Police, Gall Force, and
Project A-ko.
Anime
was most frequently aired on Saturday mornings
in a roughly two-hour-long block entitled "Saturday
Morning Anime". Each week, the network would
air a different anime feature in this timeslot.
During the late summer, Sci Fi used one week of
its weeknight primetime slots to feature an anime
theme week.
On
August 26, 1996, Sci Fi aired the heavily promoted
U.S. television premiere of Tenchi Muyo in Love,
the first movie of the popular anime series Tenchi
Muyo!.
Although
most of Sci Fi's anime programming was composed
of feature-length films, a few, such as Dominion
Tank Police, were OVAs cut together to fit into
the feature timeslot. One regular feature of the
Saturday Anime rotation was composed of the first
three episodes of the 1990 fantasy OVA series
Record of Lodoss War; however, the third episode
ends on a cliffhanger and Sci Fi never aired further
episodes.
In
May 2007, it was announced that anime would be
once again returning to Sci Fi Channel. On June
11, Sci Fi aired the first weekly "Ani-Monday"
block from 11:00 pm ET to 1:00 am ET, though it
ran till 1:30 am for the first airing, because
of the length of the feature. The online schedule
lists all following features for the rest of June
and all of July as going to the standard 1:00
am. Content for the new block is provided by Manga
Entertainment.
The
first airing of the block was the world premier
of the English version of Ghost in the Shell:
Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society. Sci Fi
Channel's airing was June 11 and the DVD for the
movie was released on July 3, 2007.
Any
nudity in an anime program is blurred or cropped
out by the network censors. This was seen most
prevalently in the concert scenes in Macross Plus.
The
current anime line-up consists of Tactics and
Noein, and past aired shows include Macross Plus,
Tokko, Virus Buster Serge, and Street Fighter
II V. Aired movies include Ghost in the Shell:
Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society, Highlander:
The Search for Vengeance, Ghost in the Shell,
Karas the Revelation, and Read or Die. The network
has also introduced a weekly two-hour late-night
block of anime for Tuesday evenings for the month
of February.
Miniseries
Sci-Fi
original programming gained national prominence
in 2003 with the airing of Steven Spielberg Presents:
Taken, which won the Emmy Award that year for
best miniseries. A two-night updating of the 1970s
series Battlestar Galactica ran later that year.
Sci Fi miniseries for the 2006-2007 season included
The Triangle, Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King and
The Lost Room. Previous miniseries include Frank
Herbert's Dune (2000), Frank Herbert's Children
of Dune (2003) and Five Days to Midnight (2004).
In
2004, the channel aired the fantasy miniseries
Earthsea, based on Ursula K. Le Guin's series
of young-reader novels. Le Guin wrote in the webzine
Slate that despite promises by the production
company Hallmark Entertainment and the office
of executive producer Robert Halmi, Sr., that
"the producers had no understanding of what
the books are about and no interest in finding
out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea,
and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic
McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on
sex and violence." Le Guin noted in particular
how her people of color protagonists, who were
a dusky skin tone evocative of Native Americans
and a conscious alternative to the almost universally
white heroes of much fantasy fiction, were cast
with white actors except for one, Danny Glover,
who is African-American.
The
channel's latest miniseries is Tin Man, a re-imagining
of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was aired early
in December 2007.
Sci Fi Pictures original films
Main
article: Sci Fi Pictures original films
Typically
independently-made B movie-quality movies with
total budgets of $1 to 2 million, they usually
air on Saturday nights. In April 2005, the network
announced that it would air 28 original movies
on Saturday nights through 2006.
Bumpers
In
some of Sci Fi Channel's modern-day bumpers, people
and animals are fascinated by fantastical and
futuristic occurrences. The bumps themselves are
original and inspired vignettes of science-fiction/fantasy
(e.g., a car which turns into a cube that goes
into a woman's purse, a woman getting pricked
by a rose and the woman dissolving into water,
etc.) in contrast to the programming content of
the network itself, with the preponderance of
the programming including such films as: 'Supergator',
'The Snake King', 'Chupacabra: Dark Seas', 'Dead
and Deader' and so on. The bumpers end with its
slogan, "iF", which are two of the letters
found in Sci Fi. The channel's current logo debuted
during the airing of the first installment of
Steven Spielberg Presents Taken in December 2002.
Non-science-fiction programming
In
2006, Sci Fi began showing some non-sci-fi programming.
These have included:
In
the past, the network has also aired films, such
as Braveheart, Cape Fear, and Jaws which do not
contain elements of science-fiction, fantasy,
or horror. Also, during Cartoon Quest, the animated
series Rambo and the Forces of Freedom, based
on the Sylvester Stallone action series about
a Vietnam War veteran, aired.
ECW
became the most popular program on the network
by the summer of 2007. Sci Fi has additionally
aired the WWE flagship show Monday Night Raw when
the program's usual broadcaster USA Network broadcast
the U.S. Open tennis tournament over its usual
Monday night timeslot.
SciFi.com
SCIFI.COM
is the SCI FI Channel's website, launched in 1995
under the name "The Dominion" (which
it dropped in 2000). It was one of the first large-scale,
publicly available, well-advertised, and non-portal
based Web sites). In addition to information on
the channel's programming, it covers science fiction
in general, primarily through its semi-autonomous
Science Fiction Weekly webzine, edited by Scott
Edelman, and SciFi Wire newswire.
The
site has won a Webby Award and a Flash Forward
Award. From 2000-2005, it published original science
fiction short stories in a section called SciFiction,
edited by Ellen Datlow, who won a 2005 Hugo Award
for her work there. The stories themselves won
a World Fantasy Award; the first Theodore Sturgeon
Award for online fiction (for Lucius Shepard's
novella "Over Yonder"), and four of
the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula
Awards, including the first for original online
fiction (for Linda Nagata's novella "Goddesses").
SCIFIpedia
is a commercial wiki special interest encyclopedia
owned by the SCI FI Channel as part of its SCIFI.COM
web site. Launched on April 22, 2006, SCIFIpedia's
topics include anime, comics, science fiction,
fantasy, horror, fandom, games and toys, UFOs,
genre-related art and audio, and the paranormal.
(Credit:
Wikipedia).
Sci
Fi Channel Australia is the an Australian subscription
television channel specialising in science fiction
programming. It is owned and run by the TV1 General
Entertainment Partnership.
The
channel began broadcasting on Foxtel, Optus &
Austar pay-TV networks on 1 December 2006. The
channel is available to Foxtel Digital subscribers
on the "My Escape" package tier, "Living"
tier for Optus TV and "Fun" tier for
Austar Digital.
Sci
Fi uses the same branding and packaging as the
US channel of the same name, but has its own schedule
and programming. It airs popular shows such as
The X-Files, Buffy, Medium and the Star Trek and
Stargate franchise.
Citroën
is the main network sponsor.
Media
and Press coverage
The
Adelaide Advertiser on November 22, 2006 reported
about the demand of a sci-fi channel in Australia.
The
official launch party of the Sci Fi Channel was
held on November 16, 2006 at the Australian Museum
in Sydney. Guests included Jacqueline McKenzie
(from The 4400), Gigi Edgley and Matthew Newton
(from Farscape).
Sci
Fi Channel programming
(Listing
as per the Sci Fi Australia website)
* Afterworld
* Angel
* Babylon 5
* Battlestar Galactica (1978 TV series)
* Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series, commenced
airing with season 1)
* Buffy the Vampire Slayer
* Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons
* Charmed
* Cleopatra 2525
* Earth 2
* Earth: Final Conflict
* Farscape
* Firefly
* Galactica 1980
* Heroes
* Jake 2.0
* Lexx
* Medium
* Mysterious Ways
* Odyssey 5
* Quantum Leap
* Samurai X
* Sea of Souls
* seaQuest DSV (later retitled seaQuest 2032)
* Sliders
* Surface
* The 4400
* The Dead Zone
* The Outer Limits
* The Sentinel
* The Thunderbirds
* The X-Files
* V
* Who Wants to Be a Superhero?
* Xena: Warrior Princess
Stargate
* Stargate SG-1 (commenced airing with season
8)
* Stargate Atlantis
Star Trek
* Star Trek
* Star Trek: The Next Generation
* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
* Star Trek: Voyager
* Star Trek: Enterprise (Credit:
Wikipedia).
