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Crashed out on a pile of purple cushions in her trailer, the Woman of the Future does not look as though she could clean your clock. Yet as Max, the bioengineered heroine of Dark Angel, the dystopian sci-fi drama from Titanic's James Cameron, Jessica Alba sports skintight bodysuits and leather as, swaggering lean and feline (literally: Max has cat DNA), she dives through windows and KO's tough guys twice her size. Now, barefoot and swaddled in a massive black turtleneck and baggy jeans, it's as if she has been shrunk within her clothes...
...save for the occasional Uhura (Star Trek) or Lando Calrissian (Star Wars), sci-fi has tended to look as white as space is black. Dark Angel is an exception. Cameron and his co-creator, Charles Eglee, have created a year 2020 that is intriguing (economic depression, lawlessness and authoritarianism set in after terrorists sabotage America's computers). "We said, 'Let's take our optimistic runaway prosperity and just drop-kick it,'" says Cameron. But just as captivating is the show's mix of black, brown, white and yellow faces. It was a conscious decision, says Eglee, to reflect the diversity...
SOUND AND FURRY Staid and serious chipmaker Intel has branched out into frivolity with a line of high-tech toys called Intel Play. The latest is the Computer Sound Morpher ($49), which looks a lot like a personal communicator from a '50s sci-fi flick. Armed with Intel's Morpher, kids can record voices and other sounds and then edit, distort, remix and generally transmogrify them on their PCs. Warning: parental commands may lose some authority when played back in "chipmunk" mode...
Next up for the Lampoon is The RollerWar Chronicles, a sci-fi/fantasy parody set to be released in the spring...
...season does have its innovations. James Cameron's sleek sci-fi thriller, Dark Angel (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m., starts Oct. 3), introduces buzz magnet Jessica Alba. On NBC's endearingly oddball Ed (Sundays, 8 p.m., begins Oct. 8), a lawyer moves back to his hometown, buys a bowling alley and courts his high school crush. And teen-TV satire Grosse Pointe (The WB, Fridays, 8:30 p.m., bows Sept. 22) looks like nasty fun. Are sitcoms and dramas back? Well, at least until Survivor returns, with its clones, to vote them off the island...