This week at Flashbak, I initiated a new blog series that I will be writing there.
In particular, I'll be looking back obscure series from the a specific year or season. For the inaugural post, I remember three projects from 1979. In particular, I look at series including Supertrain, Cliffhangers, and Salvage 1. My upcoming entry will look back at forgotten sci-fi TV shows from 1982, and after that, I'll turn my attention to 1977, and so forth.
Here's a snippet and the url for the 1979 post (http://flashbak.com/sci-fi-1979-forgotten-cult-tv-series-ended-disco-decade-40976/)
"Just
a few years after Star Wars (1977) bowed to international acclaim, the major
American TV networks were still figuring out how to capitalize on the nation’s
thirst for genre entertainment.
Glen
Larson’s very expensive Battlestar Galactica came along in
1978 but was already canceled by the 1979-1980 season.
Mork
and Mindy
(1978-1981), however, survived. Although it had many genre elements,
the sitcom owed its success, perhaps, to series stars Robin Williams and Pam
Dawber. Project UFO (1978-1980) also endured, owing perhaps to its “just
the facts” type approach to flying saucer reports.
The
year 1979 brought such memorable new genre programming as Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century (1979-1981), but other expensive programs did not catch on, and
promptly fell out of the public consciousness.
Here
are three major prime time genre series from 1979 that fizzled out after great
fanfare, and before the dawn of 1980..."
I loved Cliffhangers.... as a child of the 70s, I was lucky enough to be part of the great nostalgia boom. So while I was absorbing lots of new stuff, I was also able to read pulp reprints, listen to old time radio shows, watch old movies and serials and cartoons on nearly every channel, and listen to much of the great music of the 30s and 40s.
ReplyDeleteSuch cultural (and temporal) pluralism would be unthinkable to young people today, but it was just as easy to be a Bela Lugosi fan in the 70s as it was to be a Star Wars buff.