This week at Flashbak, I remembered one of my favorite years in cult-TV history: 1973.
This was the season that saw the return of Star Trek to television...but as an animated Saturday morning series.
Despite the time slot and "cartoon" milieu, the series proved to be brilliantly done, and featured some truly imaginative and worthwhile stories. I believe many installments of Filmation's Trek stand by side with the best of the franchise. Titles like "Yesteryear," "The Survivor," "The Magicks of Megas-Tu," and "Jihad' remain classics.
Meanwhile, in the live action venue, The Starlost premiered. The series originally had the involvement of genre greats Harlan Ellison, Douglas Trumball and Ben Bova. If a few things had just gone right -- instead of going colossally, disastrously wrong -- we might today remember this 1973 series as one of the venue's all-time classics.
Of course, that didn't happen, and The Starlost is today widely considered a disaster. I consider it a fascinating series, boasting remarkable (and largely unrealized) potential. Still, this series endlessly intrigues me.
Finally, 1973 brought us the syndicated horror anthology, The Evil Touch. Perhaps only a handful of people (of my generation) remember this series at all...and that's a shame. For The Evil Touch was pure, low-budget genius, featuring some of the creepiest and most bizarre narratives of the TV anthology format.
I was a very young boy in 1973. I always watched Star Trek:TAS every Saturday morning because it captured what makes Star Trek great. It was the final two years of Star Trek:TOS five year mission and is a direct sequel. I watched Starlost too and found it entertaining with production values of the 1970's Tom Baker Doctor Who.
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