Barba-Hell-No: Seven Movies That Should Be TV Shows Before Barbarella

A Barbarella TV show? Really? Make one of these instead.

By David Wharton | Updated 5 months ago

A Boy and His Dog
Dipping even deeper into obscurity than Buckaroo, we come to the 1974 film A Boy and His Dog, starring a young Don Johnson and directed by L.Q. Jones. If the title sounds like a harmless family film, take note that it’s based on a series of stories by Harlan Ellison. Harlan even wrote a script for a proposed TV series in the late ’70s, but it never made it to air. A Boy and His Dog is set in an alternate history where two more World Wars have left the Earth a scorched wasteland. A young man named Vic scrapes out a meager existence among the ruins with the help of a telepathic mutt named Blood. Vic helps protect Blood, and Blood uses his enhanced senses to help Vic forage.

Shows such as AMC’s The Walking Dead and NBC’s upcoming Revolution have already proved that the apocalypse is rich fodder for drama, but A Boy and His Dog offers a unique twist on the old clichés thanks to the relationship between Vic and Blood, with Vic often serving as a mentor and the two constantly bickering as old friends do. The source material doesn’t shy away from the bleak nature of the post-apocalyptic world, and a network like HBO would allow the show to present the more horrific elements through the eyes and dark humor of a pair of unlikely survivors.