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Post by scubasteve on Aug 29, 2010 2:26:49 GMT -5
At the end of P5, Reggie goes through the gate after the Tall Man to help save Mike's life and as we know, there are pretty much an infinite number of gates that the Tall Man has created (as Mike sees in the desert).
So I think there is a potential that there could be a series with Reggie trying to catch up with the Tall Man, through various dimensions/periods in history and helping various people along the way.
It would almost be a Sliders/Quantum Leap combo with a Phantasm twist. With the creation of series like the Sarah Connor Chronicles, how would you all feel about a spin off series rather than another movie (given that it was written well)?
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Post by DustinM on Aug 29, 2010 13:30:27 GMT -5
I think you mean P4, ScubaSteve.
A series with Reggie and the Tall Man doesn't interest me at all, even though this has been very seriously discussed behind the scenes of the franchise (remember that leaked secret project photo?). As I see it, Reggie is a sidekick whose two main functions are to kill monsters and chase tail.
A series with Mike/Jody and the Tall Man? Now you've got my attention. Those are characters that can actually advance the story, that have story arcs and depth to them. I would watch that series in a heartbeat.
I hear that Supernatural is very Phantasm-esque and I've been meaning to try out that show just to see what it's like.
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Post by gopher in heat on Aug 29, 2010 15:13:22 GMT -5
I can't agree more with Dustin.
While I love Reggie (and who here doesn't?), the series has always been about Mike and Jody. Focusing on Reggie just doesn't make all that much sense to me.
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vitaman2007
Sentinel Sphere
"Be de be de be de...f#@ you Buck!"
Posts: 698
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Post by vitaman2007 on Aug 29, 2010 16:07:30 GMT -5
I have to agree with that view also.
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Post by scubasteve on Aug 30, 2010 7:14:07 GMT -5
Thanks Dustin, yes I do mean P4, I really didn't proof read that before posting The thought was based on purely the ending with Reggie going off and Mike lying on the floor near death. Had it ended in a slightly different fashion with Mike being a bit more mobile I would have to agree hands down. I'm a stickler for continuity in series (TV or film), so there would have to be a good reason for me to have that occur. A series without Reggie would feel like it had something missing for me personally. I agree that he is at the moment there to kill monsters and chase tail, I feel that he could become a much more dynamic charachter with a huge potential to change just as much as the others. In P1, he's not like that until his family get blown up by the Tall Man later in the series. The (platonic) love between Reg, Mike and Jody is very real and in the absence of Mike's family, steps in as father/brother role for Mike and would have the same potential as Jody does. Hell, I'd watch anything involving Phantasm. If it were to be the way Dustin describes I think it would have to be after P2 or 3 I think, and wouldn't be any less watchable.
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Post by krakenslayer on Nov 30, 2010 19:02:24 GMT -5
I came up with a cool idea for an existential Phantasm TV show after re-watching Phantasm 4 and later reading some comments made by Reggie Bannister in an interview (specifically those regarding his theories on the true nature of space gates).
The series would start with an entirely new set of characters (bear with me here), who fill pretty much the same roles as the principles in the original movie, albeit with some of their attributes flipped around slightly. They discover that there are some strange goings-on at the local funeral parlour and the opening episode would essentially be a re-make of the events of the first movie. However, this is not a remake, it follows on from the film series; but we don't immediately find out about the connection...
The Tall Man is spreading like a plague across the Earth. His minions are appearing in town after town, carrying out his gruesome works hidden behind veils of superstition and disbelief. Only this time, he takes a different appearance, both young and infinitely old, in a form that we might recognise as having belonged to MIKE. The two main characters, we'll call them Sam and Bob for the sake of giving them names, wander across the wastes, episode after episode, encountering the Tall Man's minions at every step. They are driven not only by a desire to stop the Tall Man, but by bizarre visions, memories of events that have not occurred in their lifetimes, and nightly dreams of a heroic figure, a "sleeping god", who has forgotten his true nature but might just be their only chance of killing the Tall Man once and for all.
Eventually they encounter a strange homeless woman who claims to have known the Sleeping God in another time, in another space, and has travelled across dimensions to find him. She says he is needed back in the universe from where he originally came. They learn that he has deliberately forgotten who he is, because it is only his ignorance of the events around him, and his unassuming life as a simple, humble family man living in a rural (and so-far unaffected) town, that has allowed him to remain hidden from the eyes of the Tall Man for so long. For the Tall Man, it seems, wants to reach this Sleeping God too, and in fact, wants him more than anything else in the world.
The characters find him, living with his wife and daughters, in a town where everyone is blissful and the season is forever springtime. He is REGGIE! At first he doesn't believe them, doesn't remember anything, and thinks they are insane when they intimate that he is their Sleeping God. Then the mystical woman speaks to him, introduces herself as ROCKY, and begins to talk of their adventures in another dimension. At once his past comes rushing back to him. After running through that gate at the end of P4, Reggie found that the Tall Man had taken Mike's form and showed him glimpses of a future devoid of all life. He ran, blinded by grief and horror, back through the space gate and found himself here, in a world where his wife and daughters were inexplicably still alive and everything was peaceful. He does not understand how this world can exist, or how he could be considered a god in any case. He does however, possess a strange trinket that during his years of forgetting, without knowing why, he would sometimes turn to when things troubled him: a small black ball that could tremble and chirrup mechanically all by itself, like a living magic eightball: JODY.
He asks it to lead them to the answer. It takes them to the town mortuary. Reggie realises that the town never had a mortuary until he remembered who he was, and then it was suddenly just there: a huge, towering Gothic structure. The Tall Man is assembling his forces. There is a huge battle with Reggie, Bob, Sam, Rocky and the townspeople on one side, and the minions of the Tall Man on the other. At great loss of life, they manage to destroy one iteration of the Tall Man and take the mortuary and its spacegate. Reggie seems strangely weakened by the battle, and cannot continue through the gate, where the Jody ball wants to lead them.
Bob and Sam continue on alone. They go to the Red Planet and enter a huge pyramid, where a vast insectoid alien beast hangs from the ceiling, being tended by millions of spheres. Its vulva churns out an endless line of disgusting purple egg sacs containing embryonic Tall Men that are nurtured and suckled by the dwarves. The sphere leads them to the top of the pyramid, where the alien's brain is connected to another spacegate. They dive through and find themselves in an endless prison, similar to the one we saw in P3, where they meet Jebediah Morningside and the original Mike. They are being kept alive here while the creature sucks their life force to create armies of Tall Men in their image and possessing their intellect. Jebediah has almost worn away to nothing, and Mike has centuries of hopeless imprisonment to look forward to before succumbing to the fate that will soon take Jebediah.
They explain that it takes a special kind of person to become a Tall Man template like themselves, but it takes an even rarer ability to create an entire world with your mind... which, it seems, Reggie has somehow managed to do. You see, a strong will has the power to guide a spacegate to send the traveller wherever they most want to go. Reggie, through the sheer force of his anger and grief at seeing Mike as the Tall Man after P4, forced the spacegate to take him to a place where he could be safe and he could be happy again; such a place did not exist in the universe, so a world was created from his own subconscious, without him even knowing it. Therefore Bob, Sam and everything in their universe are parts of Reggie. Reg is, quite literally, god of his own world. This throws the main characters into an existential crisis - they are merely dreams, SOMEONE ELSE'S dreams at that. Nevertheless, they set about the tasks of trying to rescue Mike and Jebediah, getting back to their world, getting Reggie back to HIS world, and stopping the Tall Man and his Mother-Thing.
But that raises the question, what happens to the denizens of a universe when its God decides to go home...?
Okay, it's very Lost-esque. But I think something like that could really work, and would be a good way to get around the problem of how to pull in new viewers while remaining true to the complex, pre-established story of the series up to now.
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