Review of TekWar

TekWar (1994 TV Movie)
10/10
I loved this show
28 January 2020
And I still do.

Now since this was originally released in 1994, there were no such things as "90s Clichés", D'OH, it was the 90s.

And back in 1994 my computer was running DOS 6.2 with Windows for Workgroups v3.1.1, so the technology represented in this reflected what people thought would happen in the future. We had Tek, we had Sims (mechanical reproductions of people), we had robots like Winger. We had an information super highway and police who traversed it, as well as fringe characters like Cowgirl (Stargate's Lexa Doig) and Wild Side (Richard Chevilleau). But the interesting thing is to see houses with secure entries, logins via hand print or retina scan, and we have these things today.

It was interesting that the main information highway that is shown in this series is called "The Matrix". And, the jeep that Jake Cardigan (Greg Evigan from my two dads) drives is electric.

There is a technology-based drug called "Tek", which apparently abuses virtual reality in some way to make the user unable to discern between the real world and a Tek VR.

This initial entry into this alternate universe is loosely based on the first Tech war book by William Shatner, which was ghost written by Canadian Sci Fi writer Ron Goulart- but he did in fact use William Shatner's concepts and storylines, so this is William Shatner's work as well as his. It's just that the excellent storytelling of the book was all Ron, and he has such an out rages way of telling a story. Fortunately, it did not transfer well to these TV movies.

No. When this show was produced, it wasn't produced to reflect the comedy and outrageousness of the original book. For example, Winger was made out of chrome he would always polish himself. But there are other funny things like Warbride, A woman who has married herself to war, played by the lovely Sheena Easton. I don't know if she had acted in anything but she does all right she's believable. And kind of funny.

And we are familiar with the actress who plays Beth Kittredge, if we were ever a fan of Stargate Atlantis. Tory Higginson.

Von Flores who plays Sonny Hokori was also in the Gene Roddenberry based "Earth: final conflict".

Which was another Canadian production. But this show, it was produced and distributed under Alex Beaton's "Universal Action Pack" which was responsible for shows like Vanishing Son, and it was also where the beginnings of "Hercules the legendary journeys" came from, they had about five feature-length Hercules "films"- you can't really call any of these productions "films", they were released for TV, and they are formatted 4:3, even when later released for DVD. So the "first season" of tech war was released as for feature-length movies, this is the first one, to be followed by Teklords.

But the coolest thing about this show was Warren Zevon singing the song at the end, "Are you real or not"

By standards of today, the show is rather primitive, maybe boring, maybe camp even. But in 1994, these four TV movies were extremely popular. As was the book and there was also a Marvel comics series. But it was an attempt to bring a book that was extremely popular to life, and for the most part, it worked. They got a lot of the details from the book absolutely right.
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