Ark II - Saturday Morning Apocalypse!

I found for very cheap a boxed set of some Filmation live-action series, specifically Jason of Star Command, Space Academy, andArk II. The latter is a 1976 series about a trio of young multi-ethnic scientists who along with their super-intelligent chimp joyride across the bleak landscape of 2500 A.D. helping humans who live in an arid world wrought by overpopulation and especially pollution.

It's really pretty heady stuff for Saturday morning when you think about it. The world is demolished and mankind is scraping a hunter-gatherer existence from the remains. If this were animation okay, but making it live action gives it a potency it might lack otherwise. I'm not objecting to it, but just noting that this is pretty serious stuff for a kid's entertainment.

The Ark II is a giant truck really that looks like the space shuttle on wheels, and it is a rolling laboratory from which Jonah, Ruth, Samuel, and Adam (the talking chimp) perform experiments and missions to assist mankind on the brink. They are pretty sleek looking in their mostly red, white, and blue outfits, and contrast mightily with the rabble left on the Earth who wear mostly rags if not skins.


Filmmation prodded by the success of Captain Marvel wanted another live-action show and this was it. It's got some sound effects from Star Trek and Robby the Robot shows up in an episode. One character who shows up twice is a rascal named Fagan played by Jonathan Harris. There are some pretty interesting actors on this thing, attracted it's noted by the chance to play something their kids might actually see. The show was shot in one summer mostly in and around the Fox ranch which also saw production of The Planet of the Apes movies, and a few of those sets show up.

There is a lot of outdoors material here, a really rugged look by and large. And most of the stories are actually pretty good, with sharp sci-fi twists, though alls well in the end and a moral ends each episode. That's okay, it feels like Star Trek lite in the beginning, but by the end with episodes that feature "Robin Hood" and "Don Quixote" the show has more of a Lost in Space quality, which isn't an improvement.

I rather found I enjoyed this show, not remembering it at all from the 70's. I might've seen one, but it's certainly nothing I recollect. But I found them to be pretty entertaining, smart and creative with a tiny budget. The need to shoot exclusively in the daytime really gave the show a special tone, the actors looking rather beaten in the sun. Terry Lester who played the lead Jonah could be very odd looking in the sun with his unusually bright blond hair, almost giving him a beastial or alien effect. Contrasted with the gorgeous Jean Marie Hon who played Ruth, a much darker toned woman, really made for a compelling visual image when the two stood close together.

One neat thing is the rocket pack, which is used pretty much every episode. It's real apparently as Filmation hired a real guy with a rocket pack to fly around in brief three-minute flights for one day, and shot him from dozens of angles. These shots are used throughout the series, and I have to confess don't really get all that static. It's a neat thing when you realize this is for real.

The DVD comes with a few commentaries and an obligatory documentary, which are okay, but a bit too chatty and not really rich with information. The disk claims to have pdf versions of the scripts, but I haven't checked those out yet. Those could be good fun to read actually.

I got mine for small money, so it's been large entertainment for a very nice price. I'd recommend regardless. Here's a website dedicated to the show, though it seems not to have been updated in quite some time.

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