Wednesday January 28, 2009 12:03 PM

TOP 25 Countdown!

The Top 25 Sci-Fi Movies and TV Shows from the past 25 years

 25. V: THE MINISERIES (1983)
Created by Kenneth Johnson

Giant fascist lizards from outer space — it sounds like something you'd see on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But this parable of tolerance is far more complex and frightening than it seems. While the ''Visitors'' say they ''come in peace,'' they really want to drain Earth's water supply. Just in case you still don't get the point, their insignia looks suspiciously like a swastika.

POP CULTURE LEGACY Besides spawning an equally engaging sequel — 1984's V: The Final Battle — V gave Robert Englund (a.k.a. Freddy Krueger) his big break.

THE BEST BIT In one of the best TV reveals ever, lizard queen Diana (Jane Badler) — still disguised as a sultry brunet human — unhinges her jaw and stuffs an entire guinea pig in her hideously elongated pie hole. —Kristen Baldwin

24. GALAXY QUEST (1999)
Directed by Dean Parisot

In this pitch-perfect parody, the cast of a canceled cult TV show much like Star Trek — featuring an egocentric commander (Tim Allen), his alien sidekick (Alan Rickman), and a buxom lieutenant (Sigourney Weaver) — gets enlisted to help save an alien race, who, thanks to intercepted broadcasts, think the actors are real space-faring heroes.

POP CULTURE LEGACY It seamlessly stitched together sci-fi clichés with adventure and nostalgia (not mockery).

THE BEST BIT Sam Rockwell's cocky ''red shirt,'' killed in his first and only episode of the TV show, who spends most of the film fretting over whether he'll get bumped off for real. —Erin Richter

23. DOCTOR WHO (1963-Present)
Developed by Sydney Newman

The BBC's timeless Doctor Who is a 44-year argument for proper sci-fi priorities: (1) an ecstatically tangled, infinitely renewable story line and (2) an understanding that all science fiction, however time- and space-spanning, is local. (Top-flight special effects? Not, as it turns out, crucial.) The Doctor, a Time Lord, powerful but dispossessed, hops worlds and epochs like subway stops, but in spirit he never really leaves London.

POP CULTURE LEGACY With its playful yet sincere commitment to social allegory, Doctor Who has always been a post-empire fantasy — unerringly progressive, but wary, dark, and full of doubts about human goodness.

THE BEST BIT Check out the first season of the newest incarnation, featuring Heroes' Christopher Eccleston as the ninth Doctor (the best ever — apologies to Tom Baker) and the piercing, poignant wit of writer Russell T. Davies. —Scott Brown

22. QUANTUM LEAP (1989-1993)
Created by Donald P. Bellisario

A stirring drama touching on issues such as race, feminism, and homophobia, Leap cloaked its social commentary in the guise of time-travelly goodness. The premise was uncomplicated: An experiment gone awry sends scientist Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) bouncing through time, inhabiting the lives, and bodies, of folks from the last 60 years. Only by saving the downtrodden, with the aid of holographic pal Al (Dean Stockwell), can the good doc leap into the next adventure and, maybe, leap home. Bakula was a wonder portraying everyone from an elderly African-American man to a pregnant teenage girl to Elvis Presley, but much credit goes to creator Don Bellisario, who reminded us with each nuanced episode that the human condition — and the comic appeal of cross-dressing — is timeless.

POP CULTURE LEGACY The show was regular-folk friendly: A lack of high-tech gizmos, technobabble, and aliens helped ease sci-fi back into the mainstream after an extended drought in prime-time television.

THE BEST BIT Season 2's ''Catch a Falling Star'' let Bakula flaunt his Broadway background, as Sam leaped into an actor playing Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. —Paul Katz

21. FUTURAMA (1999-2003)
Created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen

The Simpsons plus sci-fi? This combo is more alluring to a geek than watching a Twilight Zone marathon on whippets. With the adventures of Fry, a 20th-century nitwit thawed out of a deep freeze in 2999, Groening's writers married sharp Simpsonian gags with denser story lines, dazzling animated visuals, and knowing nerd humor. (A voice cameo by Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax and jokes written in BASIC computer language? Talk about downloading right into your pleasure center!) But for all the hilarity of Fry's misanthropic robot pal Bender, the creativity on display was no joke: Futurama created a fantastically complete and unique world that rivals anything else in the 30th century.

POP CULTURE LEGACY While Fox constantly moved the show (and sometimes dropped it from the schedule for long periods), the low-rated comedy finally got the passionate fan base it deserved when reruns began appearing on Cartoon Network in 2003. Groening and Co. are now working on four Futurama DVD movies, which may be broken into episodes and aired on Comedy Central in 2008.

THE BEST BIT The zippy third season. One highlight: Cyclops warrior Leela falls for Fry after ''intelligent worms'' infest his body, making him smarter and stronger. —Josh Wolk

20. STAR WARS: CLONE WARS (2003-2005)
Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky

The most painful thing about confining this list to the last 25 years was that we couldn't include either Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back, both of which were too old. And that left Return of the Jedi and the prequel trilogy — which no one in our Brain Trust could work up any enthusiasm for. But then we remembered Star Wars: Clone Wars, the series of animated shorts that aired on Cartoon Network. The creation of animator Genndy Tartakovsky (The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack), Clone Wars fills in the story gap between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and fleshes out how Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker battled against the separatist forces of evil.

POP CULTURE LEGACY There's an abundance of style and storytelling economy here that was, sadly, absent from the George Lucas-directed prequels. Sometimes, if you let the talented kids into the sandbox without telling them exactly how to play, the results can be surprising.

THE BEST BIT Volume 2. Even though volume 1 is almost wall-to-wall action, the five shorts in volume 2 cover a lot more ground, and lead directly into Episode III. (Better yet, just get both. They're pretty cheap.) —Marc Bernardin

19. STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Easily the most love-it-or-hate-it film on this list, Starship Troopers is like one of those inkblots in a shrink's office. Do you see a dangerous slab of fascist propaganda? Or a deliciously campy parody of mindless jingoism? Plenty of critics thought it was the former — and they need to lighten up. Verhoeven turns Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel into a cheeky episode of Beverly Hills, 90210-in-space, as beefcake hero Casper Van Dien pitches woo to cheesecake heroine Denise Richards while intergalactic doughboys (and girls) reduce a race of giant alien insects to Day-Glo guts.

POP CULTURE LEGACY Like the anti-Communist sci-fi allegories of the '50s, Starship Troopers had more on its mind than squashing alien bugs. As he did in RoboCop, Verhoeven uses hammy TV clips and recruitment videos — ''Would you like to know more?'' — to show just how plausible this right-wing future is. But rather than endorsing it, he's satirizing it.

THE BEST BIT Doogie Howser (a.k.a. Neil Patrick Harris) in an SS trench coat reading the mind of the captured Brain Bug: ''It's afraid...it's afraid!'' —Chris Nashawaty

18. HEROES (2006-Present)
Created by Tim Kring

A living, breathing comic book about a collection of people whose genetic evolution has led to extraordinary powers, Heroes takes the supernatural and both rationalizes and humanizes it. Thus does the office drudge (Masi Oka) bend time and space, the politician (Adrian Pasdar) learn to fly, and the cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere) become indestructible. As their stories intersect and an apocalypse looms, the blurry line between good and evil comes down to a battle for self-control. Can't say you don't identify with that.

POP CULTURE LEGACY If the hallmark of serial sci-fi on TV is its frequent inability to finish what it starts, Heroes is groundbreaking for asking and answering compelling questions. And while it has yet to be determined whether saving the cheerleader will, in fact, save the world, it's certainly taken steps toward saving NBC.

THE BEST BIT The still-in-progress first season rolled out flashy effects, gory dismemberments, and doomsday visions, but Oka's gleeful cheer when he managed to teleport to Times Square trumps them all. It was the cry of a normal dude who just realized his entire world was forever changed...and it's that transformation that keeps us riveted. —Whitney Pastorek

17. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry

Sure, you could write this off as a postmodern love story, but anything that involves thought-control experiments administered via a giant silver brain scanner is most definitely science fiction. As Joel (Jim Carrey) struggles against his hasty decision to erase his memories of ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet), we're plunged into a fluid, shape-shifting universe that only enhances writer Charlie Kaufman's reputation as the King of the Mind-freaks.

POP CULTURE LEGACY After two similarly experimental movies — Adaptation and Being John Malkovich — Sunshine cemented ''Kaufman-esque'' as the new ''Tarantino-esque.'' More importantly, it carried on the best this-world-is-not-what- you-think-it-is sci-fi traditions while making them palatable to fan boys and their tissue-wielding girlfriends.

THE BEST BIT All credit to Gondry for using dazzling theatrical effects and the simplest of settings — like a frozen lake — to make Joel's memory erasure so powerful and poignant. The image that packs the most punch? Joel standing in the living room of an abandoned beach house, remembering the day he and Clem first met, as walls crumble and the ocean swirls around his feet. —Whitney Pastorek

16. TOTAL RECALL (1990)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

''If I'm not me, whodahell am I?'' Excellent question, Mr. Schwarzenegger. Science fiction has always been a genre steeped in pretzel-logic story lines, but this adaptation of Philip K. Dick's ''We Can Remember It for You Wholesale'' is so Escher-like in its twistiness, you'll have to watch it more than once for all the pieces to snap into place. Arnold plays a futuristic regular Joe who gets a memory implant to simulate a Mars vacation. But messing with his noggin triggers an unknown cloak-and-dagger past involving bullet-riddled double crosses, a three-breasted Martian prostitute, and a rebel leader named Kuato — a Yoda-ish homunculus growing out of some dude's chest. It makes sense...honest.

POP CULTURE LEGACY The mating of big-action heroics and heady philosophical musings in a movie that went on to make a fortune paved the way for other Thinking Man blockbusters like The Matrix.

THE BEST BIT It's tough to top Schwarzenegger mind-melding with the shriveled Kuato...but Arnold pulling a tracking device out of his skull — through his nose — comes close. —Chris Nashawaty

15. FIREFLY / SERENITY (2002/2005)
Created by Joss Whedon

In 2002, Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon attempted to reinvent the space opera with a rough-and- tumble vision of the future set in an Earth-colonized galaxy. Part Western, part sci-fi, wholly unique, Firefly starred Nathan Fillion as the captain of Serenity, one of those dumpy old ships that don't look like much but get the job done. The TV series tracked the misadventures of his morally ambiguous crew as they tried to make an occasionally honest living by hauling cargo, stealing stuff, and accidentally helping their fellow man. The show was smart, funny, and wonderfully human, and because this is Joss Whedon we're talking about, it also had a high kicking, superpowered wonder woman. Firefly was strange. Firefly shouldn't have worked. And it didn't. Firefly was canceled after 11 episodes...

POP CULTURE LEGACY...only to be revived in 2005 as the feature film Serenity (pictured), thanks to the tenacity of Whedon, the surprise success of Firefly on DVD, and a small army of Internet-based supporters.

THE BEST BIT Saddle up for the show, to see how it all started, and the movie, to see the ending. Then pray that someday, some studio exec will have the guts to make more. —Jeff Jensen

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