In the year 2525, there will be sexy, sexy Morlocks.
So all this past semester, everyone in my comm arts class (”Rhetoric and the Intarwebs”–okay, the official title was slightly different) kept raving about hulu.com, where you can stream all kinds of random television with the usual intermittent ads from Visa and shit. There’s some current stuff–The Daily Show, for instance–but also a lot of OLD stuff, like Knight Rider and McHale’s Navy. I kept telling myself that I was too busy to go near such a colossally perfect timesuck, but then it was summer, and I finished the IRB application for my research and I have no official job,* and so I started nosing around the site.
I have no recollection of how I first stumbled upon Cleopatra 2525. I have vague memories of having heard of it in the past, but I had assumed it was some kind of Ancient Egyptian steampunk deal. It is not. “Cleopatra” is the title character, a cryogenically frozen 21st century exotic dancer who awakens in the 26th century when Earth has been conquered by the machines and is taken in by two scantily clad resistance fighters, one of whom is played by Gina Torres, who I had no idea had come up quite THAT much in the world when she got on Firefly.
The show appears to have been produced in someone’s basement with costumes by the Frederick’s of Hollywood clearance grab bag.** It is mostly bare midriffs and laser blasts. As my friend Leanna commented, I cannot believe it is not still on the air, with millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise and some kind of theme park. Consider this theme song:
(Spoken)
Five hundred years into the future
She will enter a world where machines rule the Earth
Mankind has been driven underground
And Cleopatra is about to discover
There’s no place like home!(Sung, with awesome drama)
In the year 2525
There are women with the will to survive
Fighting for a brand new day
Nothing’s gonna get in their way
In the year 2525
Three women keep hope alive
Joining forces to reclaim the Earth
Looking ahead to humankind’s rebirth!
Dude. Hot girls with lasers in the post-apocalypse. If this had been around when I was a kid, it might partially explain how I turned out this way.
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*I’m enrolled in three credits of “directed reading” in order to continue to live off the government. It’s not the solution I would have preferred, but it does free up my time to work on my dissertation proposal. Assuming I can stop watching hulu at some point.
**This is a real thing, or it used to be. You tell them your size, you get a random dress and pair of shoes. My dad got a Halloween costume out of it once.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Dude. The thing that made it best of all was that it came on some late late timeslot, well after critical thinking was impossible. Maybe sometime after Xena. In my head, it lives with that Kevin Sorbo post-Hercules space opera thing which I am failing to come up with name for. It was full of pretty pretty beefcake, which was balanced by the hot tight girl abs.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Once again you prove yourself to be the girl Jason. :p
June 10th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Cabell, I love that show. Mostly because I love Victoria Pratt and Gina Torres; I love them so much I bought that show sight unseen and yet it is still one of my favorite things in the world. Hot women! Shooting things! And being all lusty and angsty and kick ass together. Hel and Sarge were so totally doing it until Cleo came along. They were women! Fighting for another day! Keeping hope alive!
Cleopatra 2525.
I can’t believe it has taken you this long to watch it. Had I known that, I would have brought my copy with me to Wiscon 30 and forced you to watch it with me. Because it is awesome.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I have never heard of this, but it sounds like the sort of thing I would happily watch if I had the flu. (Which is pretty much the only time I have time to watch random TV.) And it has a theme tune with a talky bit. Wow.
Apropos of nothing very much, on one of my favourite webcomics, one of the characters appears to have gone Atomic Pink today.