View From the Phlipside - Syfy movies

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

The essence of story telling is the question of “What if...?”.  And no genre of story telling dives deeper into that question than science fiction.  What if robots were real and looked like people?  What if aliens looked like giant bugs and liked the taste of human flesh?  What if you could control the basic power of the universe and your father was a bad, bad man?

How about this one?  What if a cable television

network decided to let it’s viewers make the decisions on what movies to make for the network?  Syfy, the science fiction network with the dumb way of spelling its name, has decided to do just that.  They’ve created a web site in partnership with entertainment site IGN called “B Movie Mogul”.  Fans will be given the ability to choose everything from the basic concept to character’s final words.  Those decisions will form the basis for a made for TV movie to air next year on the network.

Surfing over to the website provides some interesting reading.  Our first choice is on basic premise and we are given three.  The movie will be about A: The Bermuda Triangle, B: The Roswell crash or C: 2012 and the alleged end of the world.  Nothing real exciting or new there but then the website IS called B-Movie Mogul.  Which is a fun choice all by itself.  Clearly these movies aren’t going to take themselves too seriously.  With any luck at all they’ll capture some of the old Roger Corman B movie magic again.  With titles like “Sharktopus” and “Mansquito” I’d say they’re headed in the right direction.

Got to admit I enjoyed reading the section on “Rejected Syfy Movies” too.  How can you not love concepts like “Lobster Swarm” which involves flying killer lobsters, “TaMantula” your basic science screw up movie, and because you always need a good monster battle film how about “Uber Whale vs. Jumbo Shrimp”?  There’s several more titles most of which are at least slightly disturbing so I’ll spare you them.   

It’ll be fascinating to see just what the fans at Syfy come up with for the movie.  They might even create a new classic.  What if?

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010