21 Years, 21 TV Shows: Sliders
I recently turned 21 years old, and I meant to do a bunch of lists about TV shows, and movies, and music…and whatever else I could think of to celebrate the momentous occasion. I never got around to doing it before the milestone birthday, but now that I am actually 21, I’m going to start this ball rolling. A certain .gif that I just saw might have really kickstarted this. You’ll see at the end of this post.
Now these “21″ lists aren’t meant to be any sort of definitive list of the greatest works in their respective categories. These are pretty much completely self-indulgent exercises where I get to write about the pieces of entertainment that most influenced my life, or just plain rocked my face, and probably still do.
Sliders aired on FOX starting in 1995, a sci-fi show no doubt riding the coattails of The X-Files. It actually got canceled after its first season, but due to outcry, it returned the next year (I bet many, including myself, wish the same happened with another sci-fi show on FOX – Firefly). It revolved around a guy, Quinn Mallory (played by Jerry O’Connell) who created a device that allowed people to travel between alternate dimensions. He called this “sliding” and in his first slide, he took his best friend Wade Welles and his professor Dr. Arturo. In order to add a minority to the cast, a black singer named Rembrandt Brown is pulled into the unstable vortex as he drives by the house.
When they arrive at the new dimension, they’re smack-dab middle of an Ice Age, yet there’s a tornado coming. Since they didn’t want to die, they had to slide to another dimension, extinguishing almost all hope for getting back home. The rest of the show has them trying to reach their original dimension. I didn’t even watch the show until the end, so I can’t even remember what happened. Wikipedia has some info, but I don’t care enough to read through it all. I did remember their being two different hot chicks on the show, the cast changing a lot throughout the show, and the show moving to the Sci-Fi Channel at some point. Wikipedia confirmed all this.
The two chicks: Sabrina Lloyd (Wade Welles) and Kari Wuhrer (joined the cast later)
Probably spurred me to watch the show a little bit.
But the real reason why I have this show on the list is because it motivated my young self to look into this type of science. The whole idea of there being infinite alternate universes was such an awesome concept to me as a kid, and I have never got over it. The fact there was a dimension for every possible outcome of an decision or event was just mindblowing. I’d sit in class thinking about it. Sliders, not the X-Files, was the first sci-fi that I ever got into, and as a result I was never that big into aliens and weird occurrences, but the more interesting science behind the happenings of life and the universe. The cosmos are just such a cool thing and from the starting point provided by Sliders, I just got more and more interested in the workings of the universe. I recently read “The Elegant Universe” and I’ve been meaning to read more astrophysics books. Superstring theory, dark matter, faster-than-light travel – it’s all so damn cool.
And now I end this by going back to why I was originally inspired to begin this list with Sliders, of all shows.
Sliders + goatse = Hilarious.
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