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| 'Woah. Space is cool. Alien chicks are hot.'
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One can only hope that Hercules fans don't mind science-fiction and that science-fiction fans don't mind Kevin Sorbo. Hunky dude that he is, we just have a difficult time imagining him blasting off into the future and exploring space. In fact, we have a hard time imagining him doing any quality acting, but then that's not a requirement for a Gene Roddenberry project, now is it?
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is officially ending, Renaissance Pictures confirmed today. The fifth and final season will conclude filming in July.
Darling Kevin is moving on to bigger and better things.
"I guess you could say I'm trading the past for the future," Kevin joked recently. Oh ouch, the laughter, it's hurting us. Good thing he's not trading in his studded leather wrist cuffs for a career in stand-up comedy.
Instead, he'll be working on Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda and Gene Roddenberry's Starship. He'll be developing both shows but will only star in one - although which one he'll be in is unknown. Both series will probably launch in the fall of 2000.
Sorbo revealed his less macho side when the announcement was made. "Since my pre-teen days," he said, "I have been a fan of Mr. Roddenberry and the worlds he created in Star Trek." Well, if nothing else, at least he'll help dispel the notion that all sci-fi fans are pencil neck geeks who can't get laid to save their lives.
What we want to know is this: Why does Sorbo get to be the lucky one? Apparently, when Roddenberry died in 1991, he left a great deal of paperwork with his widow. In fact, the recent series, Earth: Final Conflict, which aired in 1997-98, was created using some of Roddenberry's notes. The same will happen with these two new series. So we have to kind of wonder, you know, if maybe Majel Barrett Roddenberry (Gene's widow and Nurse Chapel from the original Star Trek) is a closet Herc fan. How else would he get to do the project? She'll also be working on the new shows.
Andromeda will be about a doctoral student who gets sent 500 years into the future during a war and goes out to find his friends and family. Since we can't imagine Kevin as a doctoral student, we can't imagine he'll star in this one. Starship, on the other hand, is about a crew of nice people and aliens who wander around the universe helping out other civilizations and so on. The ship has a captain, of course, called Captain Hunt. Hmm, that sounds more like it.
All you Herc fans, take heart. There are still eight more episodes which have to be filmed under Kevin's contract before he conquers the sci-fi world. The season finale will be shown in December, and according to Kevin, "they're writing a great finale."
If anyone out there can write a sentence we can actually agree with using the words Hercules, Kevin, and great, we'd love to hear it.
