There is special Farscape anniversary programming beginning at 2pm today, March 19th. Head to the bottom of the article for links and details.

On March 19, 1999, viewers were introduced to the world of Farscape, a science fiction series inhabited by strange aliens on the other side of the universe. Produced by The Henson Company, Farscape continued the company’s celebrated history of creating a magical world peopled with both humans and puppets. Ahead of its time, the series challenged the norms of ’90s television by introducing more serialized storytelling and upended many of the common tropes of the time. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, Farscape’s impact can be found across science fiction storytelling, with a notable impact on massive blockbusters like the Guardians of the Galaxy series.

Set in the uncharted territories, Farscape begins on Earth with John Crichton (Ben Browder) in the middle of an experiment when an anomaly thrusts his spacecraft through a wormhole. He finds himself flung to the other side of the universe, where he’s thrust into the middle of a battle between an intergalactic private military force known as the Peacekeepers and a group of escaped prisoners. Pulled onto Moya, the biologically ‘living’ ship the prisoners are on, Crichton finds himself among aliens for the first time, unable to get back to Earth. There he’ll build connections and find love with a found family that includes strange creatures, all while fighting for his life in a place he never imagined.

Though Dune and the Marvel Cinematic Universe now reign supreme at the box office, there was a time when science fiction was looked down upon so completely that a show like Lost never promoted itself as a sci-fi series, lest it be ignored by much of the audience. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Farscape’s release, MovieWeb spoke with creator Rockne S. O’Bannon and cast member Gigi Edgley about the landscape of science fiction storytelling in 1999, and the impact of Farscape.

Creating the Weird and Wonderful World of Farscape
Farscape Release Date March 19, 1999 Cast Ben Browder , Claudia Black , Virginia Hey , Anthony Simcoe , Gigi Edgley , Paul Goddard , Lani Tupu , Wayne Pygram , Jonathan Hardy , Tammy MacIntosh , Raelee Hill , Melissa Jaffer , David Franklin , Rebecca Riggs Main Genre Sci-Fi

In the world of the 2020s, it means nothing for HBO to put millions of dollars into a Game of Thrones prequel just to toss it out and go back to the drawing board, but the landscape of the 1990s was a very different territory that was gunshy when it came to shows that required so much investment upfront. Even with a name like Brian Henson and The Henson Company behind the project, it took nearly a decade for Farscape to move from idea to reality. “We originally developed the show for the Fox network,” begins O’Bannon, who added:

[W]e wrote the pilot script, they liked it, but this is early in the Fox network era. So they weren’t buying multiple episodes of the show. We needed multiple episodes to amortize the cost of creating a pilot. So we crunched the numbers; we needed like 11 episodes, which Fox, understandably at the time, just wasn’t prepared to do that.

O’Bannon and Henson then spent years pitching the series to various networks, carrying around maquettes of the aliens who would people the show, before Farscape finally found its home in a fledgling network dedicated to science fiction storytelling. “[W]e would go around pitching it and waiting to find somebody to kind of tap into this, obviously even then, very unusual show,” continued O’Bannon.

“[T]hen along came, in the late 1990s, the very thing we needed, which was a network dedicated to science fiction television, and that was the Sci-Fi (Now Syfy) Channel. So we went in, and we got the scripts to the head of the Sci-Fi Channel, [they] read them [and] loved them. And they were looking for a flagship series of their own to kind of put their stamp on the genre. And so they embraced us and gave us a full season order, and we were off to the races.”

Related: Farscape’s Ben Browder Discusses a Sequel and Remembers Sci-Fi Before ‘It Went Completely Mainstream’

‘It’s Wild, and It’s Untamed, and It’s Organic

Even all that didn’t guarantee the series would be allowed to be the strange and beautiful show it became. However, circumstances at the new network meant that it would cycle through multiple CEOs during Farscape’s creation process, allowing it to develop without much of the studio interference that can at times kill true creativity. “The thing that kind of let Farscape become Farscape was we sold the show to the Sci-Fi Channel to one network president who ordered the series, and then he moved on shortly thereafter, and someone else came in briefly as the president, and that person thought it was a kids show.” O’Bannon added:

And then when they saw the cast, the models we had, he called me in and just kind of dismissively said, ‘Just make it as weird as you can.’ Right. Well, you know, I’m not the right person to say that to. Or maybe I was, but off I went, and it kind of gave me carte blanche.

“It’s not like any other sci-fi,” explains Gigi Edgley, who joined the series in what was meant to be a one-episode cameo in the 15th episode of the first series, but quickly became a series regular who would survive through the conclusion of the series in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. “It’s wild and it’s untamed, and it’s organic, and I know there’s something really compelling about it.”

Farscape found its home in Australia before the rest of the world discovered the benefits of filming down under, and the series thrived in a landscape so completely removed from the Hollywood machine. The home of the Mad Max series, Australia made its impact on the show by giving everyone the ability to relish its wacky and wild side. “At the time, I was 22,” says Edgley, who continues:

“So it was mind-blowing to me, because all the people that I’ve watched on television growing up that were my idols were begging to be on
Farscape,
like it was an honor to be part of that set. Australia had never seen anything like it. So I think when actors and crew came on set, they knew that, and they didn’t have any qualms about holding back. And I really feel like we pressed each other’s buttons and I feel like we really pushed each other to make something miraculous.”

“It’s hard to describe it because it has amazing animatronics and prosthetics and beautiful painted creatures and phenomenal sets,” adds Edgley. “Like, how do you even put that into words? It’s a Henson production. It was top sci-fi. It’s hard, people say, ‘What’s it like?’ and I can’t even compare it to anything.”

Related: Ben Browder Gets Poetic About John and Aeryn’s ‘Effervescent’ Love Story in Farscape

Time for a Farscape Sequel?

Though Farscape built an intense and passionate fanbase, the series struggled to build the audience numbers it needed to survive. After years of being on the brink of cancellation, the series finally came to a dramatic end with a major cliffhanger as its fourth season ended in 2003. After fan outrage, the series was allowed to wrap up in a television movie entitled Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars.

In the years since, efforts have been made by The Henson Company to renew the series, with little success. The story of Moya and her found family has continued instead on the page in a comic series from BOOM! Studios, with a recent Kickstarter to bring these stories to a two-part collectors’ edition absolutely demolishing its original goal. It shows there is still demand for stories with this strange and unusual cast of characters, in any iteration. So could Farscape make a return in a landscape that is much more willing to accept science fiction, perhaps something similar to the recent Audible drama that returned fans to the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

“Look, the uncharted territories where the show takes place, it’s just an outrageously expansive place, and over the course of the four years of this series, we discovered a lot of species, and then I did do a comic book series some few years ago,” says O’Bannon. “That was a continuation of the story. Because it was in comic book form, [it] allowed me to kind of introduce some of the bigger concepts and go to places that we just could not afford to in the TV series. That was very freeing to do it in the comic book form.” He adds:

So we’ve been talking to Brian Henson, a lot and have been over the years about bringing back
Farscape
and kind of how best to do that. And yeah, we’re very aware of what
Buffy
has been doing. I would love to get another television series on, right? But that’s always kind of fraught, particularly now.

O’Bannon concludes with a lament about the current state of the industry and the common complaint that most of the programming coming from Hollywood today is a rehash of familiar titles. “Nobody seems to know what they want,” he says. “They’re always kind of like fishing around. They tend to go with incredibly well-known IP, because they feel if there’s a built-in awareness of it, then it’s something they can build off of. It’s kind of sad that it doesn’t allow for as many original things. All those IP that they’re going back to were fresh and new at some point, and arguably when we first fell in love with them.”

“So yeah, [I’d] do it for TV, as a series again, I would love to do that. But I’m just excited about continuing the story, and trying to get more stories out there. And I think what [is] pretty much to our advantage is that in the intervening 25 years since the show premiered, the audience has been growing. People are just discovering [
Farscape
] all the time. I’m always gratified when people come up and say, ‘I just discovered it, or ‘We knew it back in the day, and I’ve introduced my kids to it,’ and that sort of thing.”

“And it’s currently airing on Shout! TV. So, it’s great because there’s a further opportunity for people to discover it there, and I think they just put out a 25th anniversary DVD set, and that’s an opportunity for people to either find the show or refind the show,” concludes O’Bannon. “And all that helps serve the notion of finding ways to present new stories and more stories to the audience.”

Happy Anniversary, Farscape!

Fans can celebrate the 25th anniversary of Farscape with a marathon airing on March 19 on Shout! Factory TV and the 24/7 Farscape Channel beginning at 11am PT / 2 pm ET. The marathon will feature an exclusive introduction from executive producer Brian Henson and include all-new interview segments with Farscape stars Ben Browder and Gigi Edgley (Chiana). The marathon will air classic and fan-favorite episodes of the series curated by Ben Browder and Gigi Edgley.

Fans new and old can also watch the entire series, including the Emmy-nominated miniseries Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, on-demand on Shout! Factory TV and streaming 24/7 on the Farscape FAST channel. Also available from Shout! is Farscape: The Complete Series (25th Anniversary Edition) Blu-ray collection.