Buffy and Angel veteran Tim Minear may be in talks to head a revival of Gene Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes, but don't expect it to be a Whedonesque re-do, according to the man responsible for the property, Rod Roddenberry.
Talking to Newsarama about the announced revival, Roddenberry said that he hopes that the new series will stay close to the original pilot:
I'm one of the people who hates it when they 'reinvent' a project and change it entirely. I'm very much against that, especially when it has to do with my father's work. Imagine gets that and Tim gets that. And Tim is a fan of my father's. He's a fan of Questor. It's sort of a struggle right now to figure out, if it doesn't work today for this reason, how can we change it to work? And what are the important parts? What is it that makes it Roddenberry? ...I love the original, I love the character. I can tell you for sure the last thing that should be changed that I think would kill it, is to drastically change the character Questor in any way. And by that I mean, what he is, his personality, the way he behaves, his motivational imperatives, so to speak. That would be the last thing I would change.
Roddenberry also talked about the origin of the robotic character:
if you look back at all of my father's works, pretty much all of them, for the most part, have a particular character, and I call it the Roddenberry character, which is, whether it's Spock, Data, the Hologram Doctor, Seven of Nine, whatever these characters are, they are always aliens. They come to us as the aliens, but they end up being the most human. Because they're always questioning humanity and what it's about. And searching for that humanity inside of them. And Q is another example. All of those characters are the Roddenberry characters, because they are the ones who sort of point it out to us, or the other characters on the show, what we take for granted and how beautiful it is to be a human. And that our mistakes are what make life worth living. That's how we learn and how we grow. Those are the characters that are so important. But Questor is essentially the first of those characters... I know my father really identified with that. And in some of his notes, he talks about how great it would be to sometimes be an android or be a Vulcan, and be void of emotions and be logical decisions only. Of course, he understood the value and importance of emotions, but he would just kind of chuckle about it.
According to Roddenberry, more news on the status of the Questor Tapes revamp is expected next month.
Roddenberry's Son Revives the QUESTOR [Newsarama]