This week sees the newest incarnation of Kung Fu, the 1972 action-adventure series that starred David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, a wandering Shaolin monk in the Old West who used martial arts to solve problems. As befits a 21st century take, the CW reboot stars a person of actual Asian descent—Olivia Liang as protagonist Nicky Shen. But the disco era has a bunch of other shows that deserve modern takes that would surely find some new fandoms on Netflix, HBO Max, or Hulu. Here are some of our picks.
The Starlost
Created by legendary sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison, this 1973 Canadian production was aired in syndication in the US. It followed the travails of the crew and passengers of the 200-mile-long Earthship Ark, dispatched from our dying world to find a new home for humanity. A century into the journey, an accident causes the ship’s individual biospheres to seal off from each other, and then 400 years after that, a resident of one of them discovers that his world is much bigger than he ever imagined when the doors open back up. Production issues derailed this cool concept, but we could see it doing well with a bigger budget.
Highcliffe Manor
This 1979 sitcom punched way above its weight class and was cancelled after just four episodes, but it was delightfully bonkers and deserves another shot. The titular house was located on a windswept New England isle and housed the Blacke Foundation, a group of scientists working on nefarious plans to clone and replace world leaders. Hijinks ensued as proprietor Helen Black worked to keep the place standing among the ridiculous occupants, including a bionic man and a giant, mute body-snatcher.
Night Gallery
Rod Serling made his legend with The Twilight Zone, but his under-appreciated 1970 series Night Gallery was just different enough to not be a knock-off. While Zone emanated from a more science-fiction background, Gallery used pure horror and the supernatural, adapting stories by authors like H.P. Lovecraft to the small screen. Obviously the horror anthology format is big business now with shows like Them and American Horror Story, so why not bring back the O.G. for another run?
Sword Of Justice
Starring the brilliantly named Dack Rambo, this 1978 series followed Jack Martin Cole, an ex-con who served a sentence for a crime he didn’t commit and used the skills he learned in prison to get revenge on white-collar criminals and other evildoers who considered themselves above the law. With a Justice Department attorney as his unwitting aide, he traveled the world hunting down the powerful and the unscrupulous. Sure, it’s just another vigilante drama on the surface, but the class war aspect remains extremely relevant.
Get Christie Love!
The 70s was the decade that the Blaxploitation boom cast African-American stars in gritty crime dramas. Some of them were stone cold classics, while others were embarrassingly exploitative. 1974’s Get Christie Love was ABC’s jump on the bandwagon, starring Teresa Graves as only the second Black female lead in TV drama history. Unlike the other shows on this list, we’d love to see a new version of this still set in the 1970s, with the benefit of hindsight letting the writers explore issues of representation and stereotype that the original could only hint at.
The Immortal
This dimly remembered 1970 series seems insanely relevant in the modern age. Test driver Ben Richards has never been sick a day in his life, and he finds out why after he gives his boss a blood transfusion and doctors discover his O-negative juice has every known antibody in it, making him immune to all known diseases and drastically slowing the aging process. Now he’s on the run from unscrupulous oligarchs who want to imprison him as their personal blood banks. A modern take with today’s technology would be a ripping thriller.
Blake’s 7
Let’s hop across the pond for a BBC cult classic that definitely deserves a modern refreshing. Debuting in 1978, Blake’s 7 was a remarkably complex series despite its microscopic budget. The titular Ro Blake was the leader of a motley crew of freedom fighters and criminals working to overthrow a totalitarian universal government. Packed with twists and surprises, it has built a cult following over the intervening decades. Fans have clamored for a revival for decades, but nothing has ever gotten off the ground. Surely some streaming service has a few million lying around that they could spend on it?
Longstreet
Blind protagonists have a long and storied history in fiction, and this 1971 series that starred James Franciscus as an insurance investigator who lost his sight in the same explosion that killed his wife is a fine example. Accompanied by a snow-white German shepherd, he used his keen sense of observation to expose evildoers in New Orleans. In the original show, Bruce Lee played a supporting role as his martial arts instructor, because blind guys doing Jeet Kune Do is always awesome.
Toma
This only ran for a single season before star Tony Musante left because he didn’t want to play the same character for too long. Toma was based on the real-life exploits of New Jersey police detective Dave Toma, who became a heroic figure after taking on undercover assignments to dismantle drug gangs. The show was notorious for its unflinching look at violence from both criminals and cops, and it definitely deserved better than it got. Dave Toma is still alive and kicking and we’re sure he’d be happy to consult on a reboot.
Logan’s Run
Based on the successful 1976 film, CBS’s spin-off series took the same premise—when you turn 30 inside the dome, your jewel turns black and you’re put to death in Carousel—and expanded upon it with new adventures of Logan and Jessica searching the post-apocalyptic ruins for Sanctuary. The youth-obsessed world of today is absolutely primed for a Logan’s Run reboot, especially one that changes Carousel day to 21 as in the original novel. For our money, it would work better as a series than a one-off movie. People have been trying to get a remake off the ground for over a decade, but we’re still hopeful.
Kung Fu debuts on April 7, 2021 on the CW.
