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Immigrating to a new world can be a challenge for anyone;
you have to learn the language, customs and lifestyle of
the country you’re adopting as home. For aliens on the run
from the planet Tencton who have been slaves their whole
existence it’s even worse. They must face prejudice because
their decorative bald heads (which look like enlarged rice
puff cereal) sets them apart immediately. Add in their fondness
for sour milk (which is like alcohol to us) and adopting
odd sounding human names and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
Detective George Francisco (Eric Pierpoint) and his partner
Detective Matt Sikes(Gary Graham, “Enterprise”) help enforce
the law in Slagtown a ghetto in Los Angeles where most of
the “Newcomers” have settled. The Newcomers face exploitation
among themselves and humans. Sikes and Francisco plan on
stopping this from happening one day at a time. Actually
this show reminded me a lot of “The Streets of San Francisco”
with an alien instead of the young partner. ***
I never watched “Alien Nation” when it first aired
in 1989. I had seen the film written by Rockne S. O’Bannon
and figured the show would probably be a cheap knock off
similar to “War of the Worlds”. I did, however, catch by
accident one night on the Sci-Fi Channel and was impressed;
this is the type of Science Fiction storytelling that made
“Star Trek” and “The Outer Limits” so memorable; producer/writer/director
Kenneth Johnson took the premise from the movie and developed
a humorous adventure series that dealt with many issues
that we still face every day among ourselves. Johnson a
veteran writer and producer on “The Incredible Hulk” had
used the comic book character for much the same purpose
as “Alien Nation”. While the show could occasionally be
heavy handed much of the writing i this drama holds up amazingly
well.
Image & Sound:
Although I didn’t expect a stellar transfer I did expect
something slightly better than this from Fox. The image
quality varies quite a bit from episode to episode and there’s
quite a bit of analog debris in many episodes as well. Image
clarity is frequently on the soft side and colors vary quite
a bit with flesh tones being a particular problem for some
episodes. Still, the show looks worlds better than Paramount’s
transfer of “War of the Worlds” (which came out at roughly
the same time frame if I recall correctly). While the show
doesn’t look awful it could look better. Oh and the show
appears on the dreaded dual sided discs luckily these aren’t
the DVD18s that Universal has had so many problems with
but DVD10s. That means that there are two episodes on each
side of this six disc set. The last disc only has one episode
on side B. I’m a bit surprised at this but according to
Gor Lacey at tvshowsondvd.com he contacted Fox and found
out that the discs are less expensive for the studio. Still
I would bet that fans would have preferred to have this
on dual layered single sided discs AND been willing to pay
a bit more for them. Audio sounded fine throughout the set.
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