Space Opera Week: Others That You Should Read, Watch, or Play

As I said at the beginning of the week, there's a lot of great Space Opera out there. Restricting yourself to just what comes out of the New York-London Axis of Socjus Suckage (or their Big Two comic counterparts) is just going to ensure that you'll have a bad time. Go East! Go West! Don't neglect games! I'm going to list some that I found notable, and leave the rest up to you to follow-up.

• Valerian, the Franco-Belgian comic book from which the upcoming live-action adaptation comes from.
• The Fifth Element, another film showing a strong rooting in the European comic book scene.
• Babylon 5. Still the last, best hope for Space Opera in live-action Western television. (If you've seen the recent trailers for the new Trek series, or McFarlane's Trek parody, you know why.)
• Battlestar Galactica, specifically the original series from the late '70s being more true to the spirit than the 2003 remake (too Grimdark and cynical).
• Farscape. That show brought the memes.
• BattleTech, mixing Giant Robots and Dune in ways that The Five Star Stories did not.
• Space Opera, Star Frontiers, and Star Ace, bringing Star Wars to tabletop RPGs well before West End Games got the license to make an official one. (Traveller, of course, counts.)
• Destiny, its upcoming sequel, and the Halo franchise definitely count.
• Dairugger XV, better known to Westerners as the vehicle side of Voltron. This is another blend of Giant Robots (the super robot type, this time) with Space Opera.
• Ulysses 31, which is what you expect: Ulysses in SPACE!
• ExoSquad, the best homebrewed answer yet to Japan's domination in animation that isn't a DC property.

And that's hardly an exhaustive list. As the cite I'm pulling those links from shows, there's a lot out there, and I'm not adding things like Jason of Star Command (because I don't remember that being good, not even for the time). Space Opera is for all of us that yearn for adventure amongst the stars, and there's a world of material to enjoy out there, so have at it.