Films and Shows for Distant Culture Geeks?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Could anyone recommend any films or TV shows for someone who likes to geek out on "distant" cultures? By distant, I mean ones quite different from our own today. The cultures don't have to be real; they could be entirely fictional. All they have to be is very fleshed out with the nature of the distant culture being a major focus of the film/show.

Major bonus points if the writers focus a lot on what might normally be more mundane aspects of a culture (as opposed to something that might be more conventionally exciting to some like their military capabilities) like what foods they eat, the language they speak and how it relates to their cultural outlook, their political system, how they select leaders, their mating and courtship rituals, their clothing and sense of fashion, their arts, their religion, etc.

Star Trek: TNG is the motherlode for me but some other examples of what I have in mind include Kingdom of Heaven, the better seasons of Game of Thrones, Rome (TV series), The Name of the Rose, The Black Death, The Reckoning, Ravenous, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (my favorite of the trilogy), VVitch, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the Sea, Amadeus, The 13th Warrior, Crimes of the Future, The Emerald Forest, Where The River Runs Black, etc.

Or Shaka Zulu (1986 TV series), maybe one of my all-time favorites this way besides Star Trek: TNG.

Updates

2 mo

The Woman King is another one I really liked that I forgot to include. Some people seemed turned off by the historical revisionism but I still really enjoyed that one for its focus (albeit very revisionist) of the Dahomey culture. Anything that paints a very interesting depiction of such a distant culture, fictional or not, is really interesting to me.

Updates

2 mo

Also the new TV show, Silo. I really like that one this way.

[FunkyMonkee]

Robinson Crusoe On Mars, The Prisoner (`67 t. v. series), Stargate, Caligula, The Outer Limits episode, "A Feasibility Study", although several episodes deal with alien life: The Zanti Misfits, Architects Of Fear, The Visitor, The Belero Shield, The Probe, Nightmare, The Invisibles, The Man Who Was Never Born, The Mice, Demon With The Glass Hand, ZZZZZ, The Chameleon, Behold Eck, The Games and several others I don't recall the titles of. I'm not as familiar with the new Outer Limits series but there's one called, "The Sand Kings".

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I'll have to check a lot of these out! I enjoyed Caligula and Stargate a lot. I love Outer Limits and think I've seen all of it (both new and original) but I might have to revisit some of these episodes.

On the new one, I always found "Lithia" a guilty pleasure. It's about a futuristic colony where only women are able to survive since a virus kills all male offspring, and they're only able to reproduce through artificial insemination. They all live a very primitive lifestyle since they have no idea how to repair things like this:



Then they discover a cryogenically frozen man and revive him and he starts seducing and banging all the women and repairing their machinery and building up their military capabilities. I don't want to spoil the rest but I always found it kind of funny. 😂

[FunkyMonkee]

Seems to me, I've either seen that or something like it.
I've got every episode of both Outer Limits series.
There was an animated sci-fi movie I saw back in the `80's but I didn't like it and never finished watching it. I think it was called, "The Lost Planet". It's about this race of people that are hundreds of feet tall and, somehow, a human type person gets up there and finds out he can "drive" them around by getting inside of some kind of bubble that floats up to their head and gets into their brain but, as I said, I didn't like it so, I might be wrong. That's just what I got from it
There was a t. v. show here in the `60's that was sort of like "Gilligan's Is;land', made by the same guy, about two astronauts that, somehow, landed back on Earth a few thousand years ago and they got stuck there and had to try to figure a way to get back while also trying to teach the cavemen about more modern ways of thinking. It was called, "It's About Time". It only ran for one season. I've only been able to find 6 episodes on YT.
This might not be akin to what you're looking for but, it's a mostly animated movie called, "Twice Upon A Time". It's about these two characters, Ralph the all-purpose animal (if someone says the name of an animal, he changes into one) and his human sidekick, Mumford that kinda resembles Charlie Chaplin and they have to try to stop Heronymus Bosch from dropping his nightmare bombs on the world to keep everyone on the planet living in a constant nightmare. His accomplices are scads and scads of figs.
How about the Tony Curtis movie, "The Great Race". It takes place back in 1910;

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Looking into some of them! I'm having a bit of difficulty locating "The Lost Planet" one but it kind of peaked my interest since I'm a big fan of 80s Western animation. Like Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. The story in that one is generic and not so interesting but I love the animation (really think cel animation peaked in the 80s):
https://youtu.be/x8UZ2WfLG70

[FunkyMonkee]

I think it was called, Forbidden Planet. I can't find it, either. There's one from `83 that I've found but that's not at ALL what I was talking about. The one I saw was completely cartoon. But, to me, the story just dragged on too long and I just lost interest. I saw it on "Night Flight" or "Up all Night" once. I just looked it up on IMDb and they can't find it, either but, claim there's another movie of that name in development. Maybe an internet search of "Forbidden Planet" (animated film) will get something.
Just thought of another one! "The Gods Must Be Crazy'.
Back in the `90's, there were a number of albums being mmade using African tribes people, mmaybe you'd be into some of those, too. Deep Forest used afrrican eople on their first album, I think Polish people on their second and I forget who they had on their third. Art Of Noise's 4th or 5th album "Below The Waste" used some African people on it, too. and there was a band from Africa that had a minor hit called, "Scatterlings'. The band was lead by Johnny Clegg, the son (grandson?) of an African chieften. The band was called, Juluka.
https://youtu.be/2X-o7Kfqbuw?si=CBgsEVU6vOrsyuDD
In the early `70's, we got this from S. America. https://youtu.be/mp-NIC6X0GQ?si=CynhgmLWEXkhpuMC
I thought cel animation peaked in the `40's and early `50's.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

40s/50s cel animation is amazing to me as well. The thing about the 80s for me besides the bias of spending my childhood in it is that it's the final decade in which cel animation was really popular. By mid-late 90s, almost all animation studios started converting entirely to digital in ways I always found disappointing, not just because of the loss of the hand-drawn quality, but also because it allowed them to get away with less planning in the preproduction and solve more problems on the fly digitally in ways that always seemed to come at some cost to the storytelling and planning.

On African-themed music, I enjoy and remember those. I tend to like folk or folk-ish music in general from the widest variety of cultures. I don't particularly like African cultures any more than any other distant cultures, but what I love so much about the Shaka Zulu mini-series is that they put so much attention to the details of Zulu culture with a pseudo-documentary approach, but also with the fantastical elements of fiction and even mythology.

I forgot The Gods Must Be Crazy! I love that one and it's a most perfect example of what I'm seeking where we examine a culture in such depth but with the bonus of seeing the most epic case of culture clash between two radically different cultures.

A lot of my interest in this is that, while I now work in computer graphics research as a software engineer and scientist, I originally started as an indie game developer designing my own games. I also have goals to return to indie gamedev once I retire. So this type of media that really paints interesting and remote cultures (whether fiction or actual) in great detail and in a very exciting -- not dry -- way always helped me to create and present more interesting fictional cultures of my own for my video games.

[FunkyMonkee]

It's been snowing here all day so, until iit warms up in a couple days, I'm gonna sty here and, instead oof going to my storage unit (2 miles away) to get my DVD collections of, "The Avengers" and "The Man From U. N. C. L. E.", I found some of the missing Warner Brothers cartoons (that are not on that Gold Collection DVD set) on YT and decided to DL those and watch them in release order. I just started a few hours ago and finished with 1930 and am doing the stuff from `31, now. I suppose I'll get into `32 before the night's over.
I kinda stopped watching t. v. in the early `80's so, I don't know TOO terribly much about what was on from then onwards. About the only ones I watched in the late `90's and early `00's were, "Heroes", "Roswell", "Chuck", "The Journeyman", "American dreams" and there was one where aliens had supposedly begun to take over part of the Louisiana swamp lands.
"Heroes" was great for the first couple seasons. By the 5th, they sorta wanked out a little.
"Chuck" was great at least the first 3 seasons and not really bad for the last two.
"The Journeyman" only lasted maybe half a season before they dropped it.
"Roswell" was the best of the bunch and I've seen it at least 3 or 4 times, so far.
"American Dreams" was pretty cool the first half a season but, it just got too boring after that and I dropped it. Same goes for that swamp opera! I stuck with it for half a season and realized, they're in episode13 or 14 and we STILL haven't seen a single alien and it's taken them THIS LONG to get past the 2nd or 3rd day in the telling of the story!! I didn't have any ludes to take to continue watching the rest of it so, again, I quit.
How about a couple Martians landing on Earth and trying to figure out what a phone is?
https://youtu.be/KTc3PsW5ghQ?si=i4Zo1W8Dw2Pd33YW

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Nice! I actually missed Sesame Street entirely growing up in Japan, but I remember seeing it on TV when I visited the US over vacations. Something about the show stressed me out though. It just seemed so colorful and loud to me compared to kids' shows in Japan. Also everything in the US in the 80s seemed very colorful and sometimes gross to me like those candies they had for kids that were supposed to look like boogers or mutant sludge or something to this effect.

One of my favorite TV series besides Star Trek: TNG and Shaka Zulu is Rome (2005-2007).
https://youtu.be/2s1RoX1OeC0

I absolutely love that one. Titus Pullo used to be my favorite character originally at the time when I was in my 20s at the more wild and barbaric character who just wanted to fight and have women and good times. Yet I've come to prefer Lucius Vorenus nowadays as the more Stoic and disciplined one. I think the contrast between those two characters is so interesting and often hilarious either way.
https://youtu.be/zMV-GdAeBpU

[FunkyMonkee]

That Martian bit was from the early `70's, back when Sesame Street was still cool. There was one animated bit they'd have on the show at least once per episode that featured music sung by Grace Slick. One of my friends in Jr, high told me about the show so, I checked it out and it had some pretty cool Muppets bits and comedy sketches and rockin' music and cartoon bits! I eventually got tired of it after a few years, either that or it just started getting a bit stupid. These days, it's all woke, now so, I wouldn't even bother with it, anymore.
The most colourful candy I ever ate was M&M's. I never got into that slime shit or Nerds or Skittles.
OUR beloved republic is in the hands of madmen, too!! Somebody left the asylum doors open and the psychos are in charge of the country!!
Anyway, I've never been into those historical shows. I don't even like westerns.
I take it this one's not on commercial TV. We can hardly get away with saying, "ass" or, "hell' on t. v. and this guy says, "cunt"?
I find it quite strange that we can say, "hole" on t. v. and finally can say, "ass" but, if someone says, "asshole", the "hole" part gets bleeped out!! What? Suddenly, "hole" is a dirty word? Because pf this bullshit PC and woke culture we have now, some of the shit they bleep out is utterly ridiculous!! You can no longer say, "killed" or "dead" you have to say, "unalived"! There are others, I just don't recall what they are, off the top of my head.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I never understood the point of bleeping like that because even kids know what they're saying when they say, "Motherfu*bleep*er!" And if they don't, now they're going to want to find out for sure! 😂

[FunkyMonkee]

Absolutely!! I've been saying that for decades!! It's the same as saying, "boobs", instead of "tits". We ALL know what they are so WHY do you have to hide one word with another? Especially one, like. "boobs" that refers to someone that's really stupid when tits are NOT (per se) stupid!
They can't say, "shit" but they can say, "poop'! I'm WAY MORE disgusted by hearing, "poop" than I am hearing, "shit" and, they both mean the exact same thing! If you say one, we KNOW what you're referring to so, why try to cover it up? Or, they'll say "f" instead of "fuck'. You say, "f", we KNOW you mean, "fuck' and even say it in our heads, even if WE never say the word!

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

That recommends of a very funny part of Louis CK's stand-up here (especially around 5:50):
https://youtu.be/Fny-FCL-nyE?t=352

[FunkyMonkee]

That EXACTLY what I was saying! I've never heard this or him before. Here's what I grew up with.
www.youtube.com/watch
And, his response.
https://youtu.be/5ssJtD08vCc?si=AK_ijrigSUQHKhIu