TNT is once again airing Ultra 7 weekly on Saturday overnight/Sunday morning in the 5:00am to 6:00am EST timeslot. Airtimes may vary due to sports and other events, so make sure you set your VCR appropriately to compensate! Meanwhile, TNT's finally put up an Ultra 7 website which you can see here. Check it out and continue to support the show!
Pittsburgh's public television station WQED-13/WQEX-16 has brought 2 favorite British sci-fi series back to the airwaves in the Steel City. Red Dwarf and Doctor Who can now be seen every Saturday night between the hours of 11:00pm and midnight. Currently, the station is airing episodes of Doctor Who starring both Tom Baker and William Hartnell as the mysterious, intrepid Time Lord. If you haven't already, be sure to check the shows out and make sure you let WQED/WQEX know that you appreciate them airing the series - and hope they will continue add other like shows to their line up!
LOST DOCTOR WHO EPISODE FINALLY FOUND!!!! Word has come down that the first episode of the 1965 William Hartnell historical Doctor Who adventure "The Crusade" was recently discovered in New Zealand, of all places! Click here to read the full story from the BBC's official web site!
On Sunday, September 21, 1997 One Trek Mind Productions brought their Star Trek and Babylon 5 Expo to the Marriott City Center in Pittsburgh. As was the case with last February’s Creation Con, visitors got the chance to meet other fans, check out the merchandise in the dealer room (my personal favorite activity!) and meet stars from both the Trek and B5 universes.
There seems to be a recurring theme in the Pittsburgh conventions this year as, for the second time, a scheduled guest was regrettably replaced. Nana Visitor, Deep Space Nine’s Major Kira Nerys had to bow out of the convention appearance at the last moment (no surprise there since she’s developing a reputation for such things) but her husband of a just a few months, Alexander Siddig (Doctor Julian Bashir) stepped in to ‘pinch hit’.
Having just made an appearance at an Ohio convention the day before, Sid was showing obivous signs of fatigue (not helped by the night of ‘pub-crawling’ he’d spent with the con’s other guest) but nonetheless gave the audience an appearance that they won’t soon forget. When asked why he had changed his name (which used to be Siddig El Fadil), Sid explained that there were 2 reasons: 1.) his English mother always wanted him to have an English name such as that and 2.) people seemed to have a hard time pronouncing his name correctly! (Boy, can I ever relate to that!)
Little known fact about Sid: his uncle is none other than British film legend Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) who was actually encouraged by Sid to take the part of the infamous Doctor Tolian Soren in Star Trek: Generations.
The ‘other guest’ of the Con mentioned earlier was Jason Carter, Marcus Cole of Babylon 5. Jason actually spent much of the day signing autographs and talking with fans in the dealer room, where he was selling a collection of his bawdy poetry and stories called Two-Dimensional Bollocks. Jason’s onstage session with the fans consisted of everything from some of those Bollocks poems to his love of science fiction.
When he first appeared on Babylon 5, the reaction was mixed. Suprisingly, many fans of the show first thought that he was an American actor using a very bad British accent! (He isn’t, by the way - he’s 100% Brit)! Jason talked about his appearance on the FOX summer series Roar and did a rendition of “The Major General Song” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (which he sang in a B5 installment earlier in the year).
Jason’s Secret Ambition: In a recent poll conducted by Sci Fi Universe magazine, Jason was voted the “Actor People Would Most Like To See Play Doctor Who”. Jason seems very enthusiatic about the ideal and said that it would be “very cool” to play The Doctor in the future.
There are still no new conventions scheduled for the Pittsburgh area in the coming months.
