6. Buck Rogers In The 25th Century
This one is just screaming for a gritty reboot. We've already seen what could be done with Battlestar Galactica, so it seems like a lost opportunity that nobody has gone near this property and taken it far away from its last sparkly disco era incarnation. Captain William Anthony "Buck" Rogers is an astronaut with multiple missions under his belt when he volunteers for a ground breaking experiment in suspended animation to test the concept of sleeper ships. The mission is ambitious but the technology has been tested multiple times on the ground and now all that remains to be done is to finally test it in space. It all seems like something that will go off without a hitch for an experienced spacer like Captain Rogers. The ship Sandman One is to be launched on a return trajectory around Mars under automated guidance, the sole occupant in stasis. Upon approaching the red planet, disaster strikes as a routine engine burn goes wrong and Sandman One is sent hurtling into deep space. 450 years later, a salvage ship operating deep in the Kuiper Belt picks up anomalous readings from what at first appears to be yet another unremarkable piece of debris from the past half millennia of space exploration. It is very old, yet betrays a faint power signature and strangest of all, signs of life. It is the lost Sandman One, long passed into myth. Buck wakes up to find a solar system deeply embroiled in a long running civil war. Decades after he left Earth, conflicts over dwindling resources went nuclear. However, by this time in the early 22nd century human settlements had been established across the solar system and civilisation limped on largely confined to self-sufficient bases on the moon, Mars, throughout the asteroid belt and on several moons in the outer system. By the time our hero arrives on the scene the radiation from the nuclear holocaust has died down enough that our broken home is being slowly resettled. But humanity by the 25th century is a changed, strange and fragmented species, and all of whom lay claim to Earth. Thrill to the adventures of Buck Rogers as he struggles to adjust his new life as a man out of time. Can he learn to understand the future in time to escape his fate as a political football fought over by the various factions? Are his new friends and rescuers Wilma Deering and Doctor Huer all they seem to be or are they too manipulating him under orders of the mysterious sentient AI known as Theopolis? Buck may be the only man capable of uniting humanity across the planets before it tears itself apart once and for all.