Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Space: 1999!


I was a big fan of Space:1999 when it aired on broadcast television in the mid 70's. It was a smart if dour science fiction show offered up when a fan had to seek out Saturday morning cartoons to get a hit of the good stuff. Science fiction is so common today that is easy to forget that finding a choice nugget like Space:1999 on a weekly basis was treasure indeed. The show began life as the second season of UFO from the Gerry Anderson outfit. But the vagaries of network decision making made that impossible, but only after the Anderson folks had invested no small amount of money into props for the second season. So those props, a Moon base mostly, was retooled a smidge and a plot dreamed up which caused the Moon to slip out of Earth's grasp and begin a peripatetic journey across space began. 


The show is famous for its stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, a powerhouse Hollywood married duo who had become famous on Mission Impossible. The stories of how the two were wooed were gleefully described by Anderson in his several discussions of the show. To make a long story short, they were demanding. And according to Sylvia Anderson the pair were terrors on the set. But what a set it was, immense and artfully designed. My favorite character from the first season was Barry Morse as Victor Bergman, an older and wiser advisor to the commander of Moonbase Alpha. 


The first season of the show is very quiet, with thoughtful reflective stories being the order of the day. With the second season came an American story editor and a brisker approach to storytelling. There's no doubt that the first season is the one which made the show's reputation with its somber slowly developed storytelling, but there are things in the second which are attractive. Not the least of these is Mara, a shape-changing alien who joins the wayward Earthlings and helps them when she can. It's a fun show, a solid sci-fi effort when such things were rare in a pre-Star Wars universe. 


Charlton Comics got the license to produce the comics in the United States. I fell in love with these as much, if not more than the TV show. The art of Charlton tyros like Joe Staton and John Byrne made the color series a more than solid entertainment on the spinner racks of the day. There was also a black and white magazine, this was run by Gray Morrow's outfit and again, is extraordinarily handsome. Below are the covers for both series.
















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10 comments:

  1. Space 1999 was one of my favourite 1970s TV shows, a slow burner but the stories built well as the episodes progressed, losing its way a bit at the end possibly for me, as there was no real ending. I was surprised at the time to read that Landau and Bain were "difficult". Despite loving the TV show I never bought a Space 1999 comic but if I had know Gray Morrow was involved I certainly would have . Nice covers as well.

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    1. It was a wonderful synthesis, my favorite comic company at the time, using my favorite artists to work on one of the relatively rare sci-fi shows on the TV. Charlton did something similar with the Six Million Dollar Man, having two sets of creators work on the comic and magazine.

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  2. I caught this show in the late eighties in syndication when I was a child - and even then scifi on TV was a rare event, and I loved it. Especially the miniature spaceships etc.

    This an Tom Baker Dr.Who episodes were my jam back then - even though the broadcast schedules were all over the place.

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    1. I'd have to disagree that sci-fi was rare in the 80's. Thanks to Star Wars there was a downright glut at times, though the quality was often suspect. Tom Baker is the Dr. Who I first cut my teeth on, but Pertwee is my favorite.

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    2. well, for me in Canada with only 13 channels on cable and 2 of them in French in the 80's it was rare pickins' :)

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    3. But that seeming rarity makes the enjoyment all the sweeter. I grew up with three channels as boy, so thirteen seems lush. By the 80's though there was a pretty decent menu of channels thanks to cable. I can only imagine what youngsters today feel about the cornucopia of stuff available to them.

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  3. I'm surprised they haven't tried to do a remake of this. Change it from the moon being blasted out of orbit to something like a warp drive experiment teleporting the moon around and it would work.

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    1. As long as the Moon's movement was out of the control of the humans any gimmick would work. That was the aspect of the show I admired most this time through, the lack of control the humans had over their destiny.

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  4. I rewatched the series a few years ago during lockdown. I found that I love the pseudo-"2001: A Space Odessey" gravitas of the first year, but I also really enjoy the "Lost in Space" insanity of the second year.

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    1. Nice comparisons. I got that Space Odessey vibe from the first season. I'd say the second was a blend of LoS and Star Trek.

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