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Senior Trip (1981 TV Movie) 96 min | Comedy, Drama. 4.5. Rate this. The adventures of Midwestern high-school students visiting New York City to celebrate their impending graduation. Director: Kenneth Johnson | Stars: Scott Baio, Faye Grant, Randy Brooks, Peter Coffield.
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- Creator Kenneth Johnson looks back at the highs and lows of the sci-fi mega-hit.
- V: The Miniseries - A Tale of Invaders, Rebels, and Collaborators
- Best Sci-Fi Movies On Netflix
- V: The ‘Bittersweet and Frustrating’ Sequels
By Zaki Hasan
Updated: May 6, 2023 12:51 am
Posted: May 2, 2023 2:35 pm
Forty years ago, a fleet of 50 massive saucer-shaped ships arrived on Earth from deep in outer space, carrying within them legions of red-clad alien Visitors. Claiming to come from a dying planet, they initially promised friendship and advanced technology in exchange for desperately needed supplies. But their presence would turn out to be the basis for a compelling parable about fascism, collaboration, and resistance.
The project was V, a miniseries created by writer-director Kenneth Johnson, which aired for two nights on NBC beginning on May 1, 1983. Armed with a massive-for-television $13 million budget, the production had all the polish of a rip-roaring adventure epic with laser blasts and dogfights aplenty (arriving mere weeks before Return of the Jedi hit theaters, no doubt helping to rope in the Star Wars crowd), along with some impressively gruesome makeup effects which showed off the reptilian features underneath the Visitors’ human-like masks.
Four decades later, V (it stands for “Victory”) is both a beloved artifact of a specific era and a timeless commentary on human nature. Indeed, talk to anyone who saw the show during its initial airing (or at an impressionable age) and they’ll doubtless relate their creeping dread at seeing the alien masks come off, watching Jane Badler’s alien commander Diana swallow a guinea pig whole, or learning the real reasons the aliens had come to our planet (they want our water, and also have a hankering for the tangy taste of human flesh).
“I had read Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here,” Johnson explains during a telephone interview. “And it was about a rise of fascism happening in America the way that it was happening in Italy and Germany at that time in the thirties. And I thought, ‘Wow, that's really an interesting concept.’”
Having created TV’s The Incredible Hulk and The Bionic Woman, Johnson was by then a veteran of thoughtful, introspective science fiction which always had a bit of action sprinkled in. He was also ready to leave the genre behind, and his initial intention for V was to do something more grounded. “It didn't have any aliens or spacecraft or anything in it like that to begin with at all,” he says. Nonetheless, when pitching the project to NBC and Warner Bros., Johnson soon realized that turning his Nazi analogues into space aliens might very well mean the difference between a swift pass and a greenlight.
As it turns out, using sci-fi trappings as a metaphor for the story he wanted to tell — up to and including a swastika-esque alien logo — made the concept even more broadly accessible. “It's a picture about occupation,” says Johnson. “It's a picture about not being able to trust the person you're sleeping with or your child because of the dangers and suspense and tensions that an occupation creates."
V had an expansive cast to go with its super-sized budget, but most prominent among the characters is news cameraman Mike Donovan (Marc Singer). While Donovan’s large, shoulder-mounted camera is probably one of the most dated aspects of the entire production, his determination to bring the unvarnished truth to the public is especially timely in our current age of “alternative facts” and the like proliferating on social media.
All these years later, the sequence when Donovan captures footage of the Visitors’ true faces after sneaking aboard the Los Angeles mothership has lost none of its tension (it’s certainly helped along by Joe Harnell’s unnerving musical score. Just as nerve-wracking is the sequence immediately afterwards, where the aliens commandeer the television broadcasts before his video can be shared. The notion of a lone videotape carrying the key to humanity feels hopelessly analog in this day and age, but the central message still hits hard.
'It's a picture about not being able to trust the person you're sleeping with or your child because of the dangers and suspense and tensions that an occupation creates.' -Kenneth Johnson
“It was pointed out to me too recently, and I hadn't really realized it, that V is the highest-rated work of science fiction in the history of television,” says Johnson. “Certainly Star Trek and things like that had longer runs … but nobody comes close to V in terms of the initial impact and the initial ratings, which is pretty cool.”
Johnson always hoped to continue the story in serialized form, and both NBC and home studio Warner Bros. were excited to keep the V train going following the miniseries’ stellar success. This would manifest with V: The Final Battle, a six-hour sequel which aired the following year. But while that too would prove successful in the ratings, it was a project that proved bittersweet and frustrating for the man who originated the concept.
“I sat down in the summer of '83 with [TV writers] Craig Buck and Peggy Goldman and Diane Frolov,” he says. “And the four of us crafted a script that was, in many ways, I think better than my original four-hour had been, or at least took it into different places than I had been able to. And it was a really, really, really cool script. But Warners was concerned that I wouldn't do it, this is a quote, ‘As quick and cheap and dirty’ as they wanted it.”
Realizing the studio was actively undercutting the sequel for the sake of saving a few dollars, Johnson chose to walk away, with his screenplay pseudonymously credited to “Lillian Weezer,” and the eventual production helmed by Richard T. Heffron. The result was something bigger, but also dumber. It had more breathing room but less to say (though the birth of Robin’s human-alien hybrid baby remains memorably cheesy), and it culminated in a mystical deus ex machina ending that sure felt like anathema to everything Johnson had been attempting with the earlier installment.
“I know there were still a lot of fans who enjoyed it,” says Johnson, “and certainly it did well in the ratings –– not as well as ours did –– but as far as the critics were concerned, oh my goodness. It just got lambasted. It was sad to see and very hard to do.”
Even without the V creator’s very notable literary touch, V: The Final Battle gave the storyline some degree of closure, culminating in the deployment of a “red dust” biological weapon deadly to the Visitors that led to their eventual defeat. The sequel also introduced a fan favorite new character in the form of Michael Ironside’s tough-as-nails mercenary Ham Tyler as a mismatched partner of sorts for Marc Singer’s Donovan. The adage about quitting while one is ahead comes to mind, but consecutive successes just made Warners and NBC hungry for more.
Thus, just five months after The Final Battle aired, V: The Series began a primetime run on NBC in fall of 1984 –– and promptly face-planted. Singer and Grant returned, as did Badler, Ironside, Englund and a few others, but the weekly show had neither the budget nor singular creative focus of the miniseries (the Nazi metaphor having long since been left by the wayside along with the Visitors’ distinctive echoing vocal flourish –– no longer deemed financially viable).
- Zaki Hasan
May 23, 2023 · The writer, producer, and director Kenneth Johnson has never stopped getting fan mail about the miniseries he created back in 1983, which rattled America with its depiction of cold-blooded...
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V is a science fiction franchise created by American writer, producer and director Kenneth Johnson about a genocidal invading alien race known as the "Visitors"—reptilian humanoids disguised as human beings—trying to take over Earth, and the human reaction to this, including the Resistance group attempting to stop them, while others ...
Dana Kenneth Johnson Productions, Gowen, Michigan. 53 likes · 1 talking about this. Dana Kenneth Johnson Productions is an educational media company that produces history presentations on Michigan's...
Kenneth Johnson, Writer/Director/Executive Producer. Credits: Bride of the Incredible Hulk. The Liberators. Shadow Chasers. See All. Links: Facebook. Submission Policy: No unsolicited...
