Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-syfy-channel"

From June 18—Dec. 16, 2000, I was a devoted watcher of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne on the SyFy Channel. I wasn’t alone. Should you stop by the show’s DVD listing at Amazon, other folks gave it a combined 4.9 rating. It was such an amazingly good show I remain astonished how short-lived it was and how little it’s talked about in sci fi circles.

Created by producer Gavin Scott in 1999, Secret Adventures was the first all-digitally produced television series ever made. Scott’s premise was that science fiction writer Jules Verne's classic tales were not created out of whole cloth from the writer's imagination, but were instead inspired by his own wild adventures as a youth, later fictionalized as stories.

Set in the 1860s, the young Bohemian writer Jules Verne (Chris Demetral) was drawn into the war against the League of Darkness, an aristocratic organization wishing to retain power for the rich and nobly born by stirring up wars because peace promotes democracy. Verne’s compatriots included the cynical gambler Phileas Fogg (Michael Praed), the son of Sir Boniface Fogg, the deceased creator of the British Secret Service. His cousin was Rebecca Fogg (Francesca Hunt), the very Emma Peel-like leather-clad first woman secret agent for the service. Rebecca idolized her late uncle, while Phileas remained angry his father sent his brother, Eurasmus, to his death on a secret mission. Phileas’ multi-talented manservant, Passeparcout (Michel Courtemanche), brought Verne’s scientific ideas to life in his lab on the fantastic airship, “Aurora.” Fogg won this dirigible in a Montreal card game rigged by the British government to have him involved in saving the Empire from various threats.

This group’s adventures included destroying a giant mole machine designed to assassinate Queen Victoria, defeating a madman’s attempt to take over the world with rocket-powered vampires, going back in time to reunite the Three Musketeers, helping the Union army during the Civil War, assisting a young Thomas Edison who’s invented a new tank, fighting Jesse James and his gang who’ve taken over the “Aurora,” and stopping the evil Count Gregory from stealing the Holy Grail in another dimension.

When production began, there were worries no American outlet would pick up the Montreal-based project until the 22 episodes were filmed and the SyFy channel took note. While the concept seemed unworkable on paper, the final product was fresh, unique in format and execution. Scott and his team created one of the world's largest production facilities to house the project called Angus Yards, a former train depot.
It was equipped with complete costume, prop and set design shops, computer graphics facilities, and the world's largest green screen. Costs were maintained by housing production and post-production in the same building, allowing for quick integration of special effects with live action.

While all involved with the series emphasized its science-fiction aspects, connections to the secret agent genre were evident on many levels. According to one producer, the show was “like The X-Files style of fantasy, where you believe it and it did really happen to those guys, only with the higher production values.” One connection to The Wild Wild West was the recurring adversary, Count Gregory (Rick Overton), the armor-clad, half-metal leader of an ageless cult. He evoked similar villains of WWW’s television and movie incarnations while representing the dark side of the 19th century Industrial Age.

Francesca Hunt’s Rebecca Fogg evoked The Avengers spirit as she alternated between coy demurness and aggressive fighting, being the central action figure in the series. Also like The Avengers, according to Hunt, a key element of the series was the ironic British sense of humor. She noted the difficulty of modern action adventure acting with new special-effects, claiming it takes a special ability to gawk at and speak to rockets or people that aren't there until the digital experts work with the film. Like honor Blackman, whose judo skills from her Avengers days made her the leading candidate to play Pussy Galore, Hunt performed her own stunts and employed her four years of training in dancing and swordplay, the latter a skill she never expected to use in her career.

Notable guest stars included Patrick Duffy, John Rhys-Davies, Michael Moriarty, Margot Kidder, Polly Draper, and David Warner. While plans were underway to film a second season, the project was dropped. While a DVD set is listed at Amazon, the site says it has no copies and doesn’t know when it will be available again. However, the show is listed for $24.95 at:

www.timesforgottendvd.com/secret-adve...