Saturday, December 03, 2005

SATURDAY MORNING CULT TV BLOGGING: Space Academy: "Planet of Fire"

This week, on the cult kid-vid show from the 1970s, Space Academy, Tee-Gar Soom (Brian Tochi) experiments with a "cryotron," a device that will ultimately be able to "cool down hot planets." But Tee Gar is also due for a vacation, so he leaves the Academy and doesn't learn that his experimental cryotron device (which looks like a ray gun with a back pack... has a fatal flaw: the frozen objects become unstable and explode.

With Loki and Peepo, the oblivious Tee Gar heads to the asteroid of Daleus to do further tests on the cryotron, only to see the potential weapon stolen by a strange, solitary giant named Draymen. Draymen abducts freezes Peepo with the Cryotron, and then needs Tee Gar's help to restore the robot to normal. The only thing that can save the diminutive droid is -- wait for it -- moist heat. "Moist heat?" worries Laura, who catches up with Tee-Gar and Loki, alongside Chris, "where do we find that?" Fortunately, a hot spring on the planet surface gets the job done.

At the end of the day, Peepo is saved in the nick of time, and Draymen returns to the Academy as a new friend. Tee-Gar promises to continue work on his freezing device.

"All great men have suffered disappointment," advises Commander Gampu (Jonathan Harris), "from Galileo to the Wright Brothers..."

And that's the sermon for the day. There's also a lesson about friendship here. Draymen is confused that Peepo's buddies risked their lives to rescue him. "Maybe the way you act, you don't deserve them [friends]," Peepo suggests, and so Draymen reforms his nasty ways.

As usual Loki has the best line in the episode. "Robots have all the fun..." he complains. To which my wife replied, "that's true...because they don't have to watch episodes of Space Academy..."

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