Josh Kirby... Time Warrior: Planet of the Dino-Knights (1995)

I watched this series as an undergraduate student on the long summer holiday, with my father. It is an American children's programme that seems to have been made on a limited budget in the 90s (although it is rather lurid and 80s-looking). We started watching it for laughs assuming it would be a cheesy, naff, American show, but as it went on we actually began to enjoy it.The special effects are not very good. There's a character called 'Prism' that's supposed to be an alien creature or something of the sort. It looks like a Troll Doll. Other special effects are people or objects flailing on what I guess is a blue floor with the blue replaced with acid-trip colours. One of the other characters pronounces 'warrior' as 'woyer' and acts sword-fighting most unrealistically. The overall premise and setup is a pretty unremarkable blend of SF and fantasy -- the protagonist teams up with a time-traveller to save the world and discovers he is a 'time warrior' and has nondescript magical powers.Despite all of these hindrances, the series is inventive and fun, and has an ambition reminiscent of Doctor Who in its golden age, another low-budget series that often showcased poor acting. In order to explain its strongest point, however, I'm going to have to use a total spoiler: towards the end, the protagonist discovers that the time-traveller he met at the start and teamed up with, is in fact the main antagonist, and the assumed villain they have been trying to defeat is really the hero, and the protagonist has been aiding and abetting the villain and obstructing the hero in his efforts to save the world. When the real villain is finally defeated, it's revealed that he did wrong because he believed it would lead to a better world overall. This sort of nuance in children's programmes that are dominated by black-and-white, good-and-evil narratives, is really unusual, and what makes it more enjoyable is that hints are scattered throughout the preceding episodes (the most immediately obvious one being why in the 90s a good- looking black man would cast as a sinister baddie!).I think it is important for children to understand that there are two (or more) sides to every story, and this series explores this concept particularly well, and I recommend it for that, as well as being a silly and light-hearted bit of entertainment that doesn't take itself seriously, and which adults looking for something non- challenging might enjoy too.

I have seen all 6 episodes of the series, and while it is childish and rather cheesy (look at the special effects for Zoetrope 366's suit in the hypertime scenes) it still managed to offer a bit of fun.The story for this episode is that 25th-century scientist Irwin 1138 has invented the Nullifier, a machine capable of...well, something large scale. If it wasn't large-scale, he wouldn't bother scattering it all over time and space. Anyhow, this rival scientist called Zoetrope 366 (apparently a reference to George Lucas, just like Irwin 1138/THX 1138) steals the coordinates and Irwin is forced to pursue him through to 1994, where the first piece is kept.Here, young Josh Kirby enters the story. Until now, his only excitement has been racing his bicycle to school. But when he finds a glass bone in his dog's kennel, he suddenly ends up joining Irwin and magical creature Prism on a journey to ancient England, where he has to get the second Nullifier piece. Unfortunately, some weird disturbance has dinosaurs in England...Not TOO bad. This is probably the best one of the lot.

I watched this and was surprised to see the dinosaurs in it were stop-motion models, 70 years after the first major feature film used this method, The Lost World (1925). They look impressive, however.I quite enjoyed this movie and rate it 3 and a half stars out of five.

This film surprised me. The cheezy plotline and the really corny dialogue fit right in because the lines were pretty much out of a "how to write bad sci-fi" book. But since the lines were delivered in a very tongue-in-cheek style, it's clear it's a spoof on bad sci-fi. Weird storyline and the special effects are nothing to write home about, but it fits. I enjoyed it, but others might not. Still...it's fun, but you do have to watch all 6 or else it's no good because you don't get the full story.