Word: sci-fi
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This you're-not-my-real-dad reaction isn't surprising among contentious sci-fi fans (ask Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew). But The X-Files isn't the only series of a certain age adding a prominent new face and taking a prominent risk. After losing nice guy Michael J. Fox, who's fighting Parkinson's disease, ABC's city-hall sitcom Spin City added bad boy Charlie Sheen. On NBC's Law & Order, Dianne Wiest takes over from Steven Hill, who was the show's savvy, world-weary district attorney for 10 years. Law & Order, driven more...
Crashed out on a pile of purple cushions in her trailer, the Woman of the Future does not look as though she could clean your clock. Yet as Max, the bioengineered heroine of Dark Angel, the dystopian sci-fi drama from Titanic's James Cameron, Jessica Alba sports skintight bodysuits and leather as, swaggering lean and feline (literally: Max has cat DNA), she dives through windows and KO's tough guys twice her size. Now, barefoot and swaddled in a massive black turtleneck and baggy jeans, it's as if she has been shrunk within her clothes...
...save for the occasional Uhura (Star Trek) or Lando Calrissian (Star Wars), sci-fi has tended to look as white as space is black. Dark Angel is an exception. Cameron and his co-creator, Charles Eglee, have created a year 2020 that is intriguing (economic depression, lawlessness and authoritarianism set in after terrorists sabotage America's computers). "We said, 'Let's take our optimistic runaway prosperity and just drop-kick it,'" says Cameron. But just as captivating is the show's mix of black, brown, white and yellow faces. It was a conscious decision, says Eglee, to reflect the diversity...
SOUND AND FURRY Staid and serious chipmaker Intel has branched out into frivolity with a line of high-tech toys called Intel Play. The latest is the Computer Sound Morpher ($49), which looks a lot like a personal communicator from a '50s sci-fi flick. Armed with Intel's Morpher, kids can record voices and other sounds and then edit, distort, remix and generally transmogrify them on their PCs. Warning: parental commands may lose some authority when played back in "chipmunk" mode...
Next up for the Lampoon is The RollerWar Chronicles, a sci-fi/fantasy parody set to be released in the spring...