Theme Song of the Week # 38: G.I. Joe (1985-1986)

COLLECTIBLE OF THE WEEK: Star Trek Communicator (Hallmark; 2008)

Look what beamed down to my home office...

Just in time for Christmas (or my belated birthday...) arrives this new Hallmark Star Trek "keepsake" tree ornament for Stardate 2008. My mother-in-law in Richmond, VA, sent this gift to me yesterday, and Joel and I have been playing with it since. (So much for keeping it in mint condition...).

From the back of the box:

If you had to invent a futuristic communications device, what would it look like? Decades before flip phones became commonplace, the visionary prop artists of STAR TREK created this convincing, portable, and highly desirable method for 23rd century Starfleet crew members to keep in touch with each other."

When you open the communicator's golden grill, this ornament makes the trademark "clicking" sound from the original series.

Then, when you press the lower-left-hand button on the small device, you activate an array of Capt. Kirk (Shatner) quotes, including: "Bridge, this is the captain," "As you can see, we have another problem," "Kirk to Enterprise." "We're beaming up. Notify transporter room," "Standby, no one is to leave the ship," and a classic from "The Doomsday Machine:" "Never mind about me, protect my ship!!!"

The button on the right-hand side activates remarks from other Enterprise crew members. Mr. Spock says: "Captain, shall I beam down an armed party?," "Spock here, are you all right, Captain?" "Getting strange readings from the planet surface, Captain," and "Your signal is very weak. Can you turn up your gain?

Scotty declares: "We're putting everything but the kitchen sink into the impulse power, sir," "Enterprise to Captain Kirk," "Condition Red! Condition Red! and "We can't make transporter contact, sir!"

Uhura also hails Captain Kirk, "Enterprise to Captain Kirk, come in captain..."

You know, I'd swear she;s hailing me, personally....

Frank Black Speaks...

Over at Back To Frank Black, a blog dedicated to the resurrection of Millennium (1996-1999) in movie format, there's a new, in-depth interview posted with Lance Henriksen, star of the much-missed Chris Carter series.

The first part of the interview covers everything from the real-life basis for the character of Frank Black, to the radical changes in Millennium's second season, to the debate about whether Frank Black's gift is psychic in origin, or something else entirely.

After the holidays, I'll be returning to the fascinating world of Millennium with some in-depth posts on several of my favorite episodes (from all three seasons...), so this interview is a good primer to help understand the series protagonist and where he comes from. Good stuff.

The Weekend The Box Office Stood Still?

The re-imaginaton of The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is playing in theatres around the country right now, so it seems an opportune time to remember (at least in brief) the landmark original Robert Wise production.

Here's saucer movie scholar and reference book author Paul Meehan with a good brief on the 1951 version:

"The Day The Earth Stood Still is a modern day passion play, with Klaatu playing Christ and Gort (read: God) playing angry Jehovah of the Old Testament. Klaatu dies and is reborn to save the world from the wrath of God with his compassion, after which he ascends into the heavens...

...A feeling of genuine religious awe pervades the film, a sense of apocalyptic miracles in the age of science...

...Politically the film reflects director Wise's liberal concerns about nuclear disarmament, but many critics have pointed out the notion of a society policed and controlled by inhuman robots seems alarmingly fascist."

- Saucer Movies: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 1998), pages 46-47.

RETRO TOY FLASHBACK #82: McDonalds' Space Raiders (Diener Ind.; 1979-1980)

Waaaay back In the late 1970s, Diener Ind. and McDonalds teamed up for the occasion of the newly released Happy Meal feature at the restaurant.

In particular, in 1979-1980, Diener produced a variety of two-inch figures that would be sold in the cardboard H.M. boxes along with the burgers and fries.

A variety of figurine sets from Deiner were produced. There were McDonalds figures (like Mayor McCheese and Ronald McDonald...), Space Creatures (which included a Ymir, an Outer Limits alien and the alien from I Married a Monster From Outer Space [1958]...), not to mention sets of both jungle and undersea animals.

But as a kid, I collected the "Space Raiders" line obsessively.

In particular, I remember collecting these figurines during a family cross-country van trip from New Jersey to California (and back...) when I was nine years old.

Back in those days, a visit to McDonalds was a big (and rare...) treat, and my older sister and I would beg my parents to let us stop there so we could get Happy Meals...and collect these figures. More often than not, our parents indulged us.

These little toys were of paramount importance to me as a youngster that summer, because I had very few toys with me on the cross-country trip. As I said, we were traveling by van, and space was at a premium. Which meant -- for me -- very few action figures and almost no spaceships. These Space Raiders toys offered a whole new world of adventure, and they were small and compact.

The 2-inch Space Raiders figurines came in orange, pink, yellow, blue, green and brown. There was a whole array of characters and ships in the set. They were all made of a very soft but relatively durable rubber (and they could double as erasers, actually, should you get mad at them).

The characters in the line were ZAMA (a robot who resembles a cross between the Lost In Space B9 robot and R2-D2), BRAK (a creature who looks like the Metalunan Mutant from This Island Earth), DARD (a Darth Vader knock-off), and the angry-appearing HORTA.

Going back to my childhood, we had all of these characters, but I played with a blue ZAMA and my sister adopted a pink HORTA. Our brown DARD was sort of the universal bad guy, and I can't remember how BRAK fit in the mix.

Of the ships, there was a Forbidden Planet-style flying saucer called LYRA-4. We had a green one, I recall, and at some point, needed a replacement for it because the first one developed a fracture. But there were other spaceships too, including the rocketship ALTAIR.

Not pictured here -- though I recall that we had them -- were the KRYGO-5 (a sort of space shuttle design) and another ship...which I don't remember at all except it was shaped like a cigar and featured a dorsal booster.

As a kid in the seventies, I got a lot of mileage out of these figurines. Today I wonder how many other Generation X'ers remember looking forward to new Space Raiders inside McDonalds Happy Meals.

For more information on the Diener Ind.'s 1970s Space Raiders collection, check out Light Years to Yesteryear.

Reminder: Muir on Destinies at 11:30 pm Tonight

Don't forget! I'm on Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction tonight with ace interviewer and program host Dr. Howard Margolin to discuss the second edition of my award-winning reference book, The Encyclopedia Of Superheroes On Film And Television

I'll be discussing my lists for best and worst (and most influential) superhero films and television programs of the last fifty-seven years, so it's going to be great fun. This is my tenth appearance on Destinies since the year 2001, and it's always a great pleasure to be there.

The live interview airs at 11:30 pm, for all you night owls. You can listen in right here.

Join us, won't you?

I Still Believe A Man Can Fly: Superman: The Movie Thirty Years Later

Thirty years ago this very weekend, Superman: The Movie (1978) premiered in movie theaters around the United States. And by my reckoning, this Richard Donner effort (starring the late, great Christopher Reeve) remains the finest superhero movie ever produced.

Hold the brickbats....

I realize that the intervening three decades have brought us Batman (1989), X-Men (2000), Spider-Man (2002), Batman Begins (2005), Iron Man (2008), and even the world-wide box office and critical phenomenon, The Dark Knight (2008).

Yet I still select Superman: The Movie as tops.

And I do so with my eyes wide open.

Superman: The Movie is a film of extraordinary heart, terrific special effects and soaring characterizations. Thanks to a unique three-part narrative structure, it boasts an epic sweep unmatched in the genre. And -- perhaps most rewarding of all -- it is confident enough in its own virtues (and the Man of Steel's virtues...) that it need not prove itself by being humorless, mean, loud, angry or relentlessly cynical and downcast.

So many modern superhero films compulsively (and pathologically) express the need to be "dark" for no other reason than because it is "cool" and "hip" with modern audiences. Superman: The Movie doesn't succumb to that trend.

Instead, Superman: The Movie lyrically captures the mythic, spiritual nature of the long-lived Superman legend. To re-cap: Jor-El (Marlon Brando), an Elder God-figure, sends his only son (a Jesus Christ surrogate...) to Earth to walk (and fly...) amongst humanity. Immaculate white and gleaming, Krypton is a visualization of an extra-terrestrial "Heaven," a world far in advance of our own. But just as Heaven faced an insurrection in the form of Lucifer, so does Krypton quell an insurrectionist named Zod...one who is cast to a Hell-like dimension (The Phantom Zone) for his crimes. This religious-seeming pre-amble sets up the battle between Zod and Jor-El's heir -- a Biblical Armageddon of sorts -- in Superman II (1981). In that film, Superman is "even" tempted (like Christ) by human love for a time...

Superman: The Movie opens with several majestic scenes on otherworldly Krypton and then shifts tonally and visually when it arrives in Kansas. Here, the film transitions to a Norman Rockwell-like glimpse of American Midwestern life in the gentler, simpler 1950s.

Geoffrey Unsworth's stately camera artfully captures many remarkable natural vistas, focusing on sprawling wheat fields, traditional farmhouses and those wide-open American skies of radiant blue. These scenes purposefully contrast with those set on Krypton (which represented cold intellect as opposed to warm human heart...). This is important because the Kryptonians ultimately lost their world because of intellectual arrogance. Clark cannot let the same fate befall his adopted home world.

These moments set in picturesque Smallville also capture the virtues and wonders of Americana, ushering in quiet, family moments that most superhero films eschew in favor of action, violence and vengeance. Witness, for instance, the moment when Clark must say goodbye to his widowed mother. No bells and whistles here...just real human emotions.

And these scenes serve another important purpose: they reveal Clark Kent's training and instruction in the "American way." He is an immigrant, after all, and this is where his cultural assimilation occurs...in the wheat fields of Smallville. The values he learns here he ultimately takes to urban Metropolis.

From Smallville, Superman: The Movie shifts to the fast-moving, morally-relative post-Watergate world of the 1970s, There it very quickly becomes a satirical commentary on then-contemporary America. For instance, when interviewed for the Daily Planet, Superman declares to Lois Lane (Margot Kidder): "I'll never lie to you."

That's a direct quote from then-President Jimmy Carter, who spoke identical words to a scandal-weary American populace in 1976. As a nation, we were disappointed with our elected leadership and were searching for a "new hope." As a people, we no longer believed that a man could fly, metaphorically-speaking. Hell, we didn't even believe that our leaders were "good" or "honest." The public faith was broken. But Superman was the real deal...the genuine article. Not only was he good...he brought out the best in the people around him.

Lois Lane, as portrayed by Margot Kidder, proves a perfect sparring partner for Superman and Clark in Superman: The Movie because she is so deliberately "of" this fast-moving, cynical culture in a way he is not and can never be. And yet...importantly...Lois is still absolutely taken with Superman. Because, I believe, all of us - no matter how jaded - still want to believe in "truth, justice and the American way."

Christopher Reeves' Superman is the ultimate fish-out-of-water: a principled man living in an unprincipled time. Yet despite this fact, he commits himself to being the savior of this tough, cynical world. A world that some might say doesn't even deserve Superman. This Man of Steel also reveals that it is not a weakness to be gentle; not a character flaw to be kind or honest. A real hero doesn't need to swagger or be a misanthropic "loner."

Instead, this is a visitor who is amused and puzzled by mankind. He can be strong and idealistic. He can be sincere without being a wimp. Accordingly the crises featured in Superman: The Movie are authentically human rather than special effects spectaculars. Over the course of the film, Clark loses two fathers (Jor-El and Jonathan Kent), bids farewell to his Mother, searches for the purpose of his life in the Fortress of Solitude, falls in love with a flawed "modern" human being (Lois) and embraces the stated traditional principles of his adopted country. When he violates Jor-El's "non-interference" directive during the film's climax and turns back time to rescue Lois, Superman proves he is no longer a child of cold, emotionless Krypton ...but a real child of America; of Earth. It's a great character-arc.

I should also note that this Superman isn't "darkly" obsessed with the death of his parents, nor motivated entirely by ugly emotions like "revenge." He is not a vigilante who believes the ends justify the means. Because of these qualities, this Superman represents true heroism...something for everyone to aim for; not something merely to settle for because the world happens to be an ugly place.

Perhaps this description sounds ultra-corny to a generation weaned in "The Dark Age" of superhero epics, but so be it. The three-part structure of Superman: The Movie renders it something much greater than your average superhero origin tale; something more profound than a clash with a brutish villain (Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor). Instead, Superman: The Movie is the epic life story of a hero, one as apt to focus on what a man will do in the name of love as what he will do in the name of hate.

These values may not represent the dominant values of today. Either culturally or cinematically. I'm entirely aware of that. But if they are still your values, Superman: The Movie remains a glorious production, a supreme entertainment, the cream of the superhero crop.

I'll be discussing Superman: The Movie's thirtieth anniversary, as well as the second edition of my award-winning book, The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television, on Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction tonight at 11:30 pm. You can tune in here.

As always, I have a lot to say on this subject...

CULT TV-MOVIE REVIEW: The Questor Tapes (1974)

"I have seen much to criticize in mankind, but I believe there's even more to admire..."

-Questor (Robert Foxworth) in The Questor Tapes, by Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon.

May I introduce you to Lt. Data's father?

This Hugo Award-nominated TV pilot, which first aired on American television on January 23, 1974, represents another Gene Roddenberry attempt to craft a successful science fiction TV series after Star Trek (and following the failure of pilots including Genesis II and Planet Earth).

In The Questor Tapes, however, Roddenberry abandoned the "future world scenario" of Star Trek and both PAX TV movies and instead focused on the idea of an artificial man -- an android -- who, with great benevolence, would guide the human race through his troubled "infancy" in the twentieth century.

Thirteen episodes of the series were actually written, and NBC green lit The Questor Tapes, even officially granting it a time-slot: Friday nights at 10:00 pm. However, before the series could air, various behind-the-scenes factions fought a fatal tug-of-war, attempting to skew the fledgling series in a new direction, making it more like The Fugitive (1964-1968) or The Six-Million Dollar Man (1973-1978).

Roddenberry stuck to his guns...and walked away. His series was never produced. However, the pilot was novelized by D.C. Fontana in a book based on the script by Gene Coon and Gene Roddenberry. And even today, many fans fondly remember The Questor Tapes.

The Questor Tapes opens at "Project Questor," inside a highly-advanced surgical operating theatre on a college campus, where Dr. Jerry Robinson (Mike Farrell) and a team of scientists (including Majel Barrett Roddenberry) attempt to bring an android -- Questor -- to full consciousness.

This is a more difficult task than it sounds, however, because Questor's actual creator, Dr. Vaslovik (Lew Ayres) is missing and "presumed dead." The mystery man disappeared three years ago, without a trace. Questor, Vaslovik's child, is not well-understood by either the high-IQ Robinson or the other international scientists (James Shigeta, Fred Sadoff). Project Leader Darrow (John Vernon), fears that Questor is a "billion dollar pile of junk."
Questor rejects all programming tapes except the one created specifically by Vaslovik. Vaslovik's programming includes a background in "logic, law" and forensic medicine, among other things. Questor also boasts knowledge of "international laws and procedures."
Even after successful programming, Questor does not appear to operate normally. This vexes Robinson, who considers himself a "puzzle solver" and "gifted mechanic." A disappointed Darrow immediately seizes on the idea of selling Questor's valuable parts (like his stomach -- an amazing "nuclear furnace") to international bidders.

While unguarded and unsupervised, Questor (Robert Foxworth) activates himself, modifies himself to appear human (replete with skin imperfections), and leaves the facility. His overriding purpose is to locate his "creator," Vaslovik. Unfortunately, Vaslovik's programming tape was corrupted and now Questor does not possess human emotions, a fact he laments. "Is it possible, I was meant to feel?" He wonders.

Without programming to help him understand emotions and experience a sense of morality, Questor abducts Jerry Robinson and demands that the human being become his "guide" in such matters. Robinson isn't sure at first about befriending a "an ambulatory computer device," but soon realizes he has a responsibility to help the Questor "child" discover his creator, and find an "explanation" for himself.

Alas, Questor has limited time to complete his mission. If he does not locate the missing Vaslovik in three days, he will self-destruct...literally becoming a nuclear bomb.

After a jaunt to London in which Questor and Jerry meet Lady Helena (Dayna Winter), Vaslovik's courtesan, they proceed by jet to remote Turkey...to the very mountains where Noah's Ark is believed to have crashed. There, in a deep mountain cavern, Questor finally meets his creator, Vaslovik, and learns of both his origin and purpose.

Vaslovik and Questor are both androids of extra-terrestrial design. These androids (who build their own replacements before they expire...) have been protecting and guiding the human race in secret for 200 millennia. Questor is the last android of the line, because after his span (a duration of 200 years...), mankind will have outgrown a turbulent childhood and will no longer require safeguarding.

Unfortunately, Vaslovik can not provide Questor what the android desires most: human emotions. Although he would "trade anything to feel; to be human," Questor will have to continue to rely on his friend, Robinson, for an understanding of the human equation...

Had there been a Questor series, it would have picked up there: with Jerry and Questor "guiding" but not interfering with man as he broached international crises and problems that could threaten the human race.

In the pilot, we are introduced to what would have been an important set: Vaslovik's Information Center, a control room hidden in Lady Helena's wine cellar. From that location, Questor can monitor important locations worldwide (including the U.S. Congress), as well as private locations...like, uh, bedrooms...

The Questor Tapes is an almost perfect representation of the Gene Roddenberry aesthetic. There is (gentle...) criticism of 20th century industrial/technological mankind here, his "squalor...ugliness...greed...struggles." 

Yet this damning view is balanced and tempered by an essential optimism about intrinsic human nature. Our "greatest accomplishment," declares Questor is "our ability to love one another."

Questor is a character much like Mr. Spock or Lt. Data -- an outsider who is nonetheless fascinated by mankind. The perspective as "outsider" permits Questor, Data or Spock to be both critical and positive about the human race, without any of it seeming personal, political or petty. Like Spock, Questor is dedicated to logic, and uses that word (logic) frequently. "Logic indicates the simplest plan is often the best," etc. And also like Spock, Questor is peaceful. He is not programmed to kill, yet he can incapacitate enemies with the equivalent of a "nerve pinch."

But if Questor is a child of Spock, he is also the father of Data. There can be little doubt of that. Questor desires to be human, just like Data, and wants to understand humor. "Humor is a quality which seems to elude me," he tells Jerry at one point. 

Also, like Data, Questor is a sexual being, and this facet of his personality also conforms to an essential quality of all Roddenberry productions: kinkiness.
To get information out of Lady Helena Trimble, Questor -- an android -- makes love to her. Beforehand, he tells her that he is...um..."fully functional." Next Generation fans will recognize that particular turn of phrase from Data's seduction of Tasha Yar in the first season episode "The Naked Now."

In another scene from The Questor Tapes, Jerry and =Questor visit a European casino and Questor learns that the House is cheating, utilizing fake dice. The android is able to beat the cheaters by adjusting the balance of the dice. In the second season episode of The Next Generation titled "The Royale," Data does precisely the same thing.

The Questor Tapes has aged poorly in a few, minor ways...all mostly visual. For instance, a close-up glimpse of Questor's high-tech interior reveals a rotary telephone cord. And the very idea that "tapes" would carry an android's programming? Well, that is passe, of course too. Even Vaslovik's Information Center is obviously pre-world-wide-web.

Yet none of that matters in the slightest. 

What matters here, and what grants The Questor Tapes a real "heart" is the relationship at the forefront of the production: the friendship between a human (Jerry) and a machine (Questor). There's funny banter and quiet affection there, and the relationship will remind you (in a positive, not derivative...) way of the long-lived Kirk/Spock friendship. It's different in that Jerry has no authority over Questor: he's a teacher in the subject of humanity, not a commanding officer. Despite the difference, there's definitely charm here.

I also appreciate the real and deep sense of compassion that Roddenberry and Coon bring to all their characters in The Questor Tapes. Lady Helena (Wynter), who is scandalously introduced as an aristocratic courtesan, is actually a woman of tremendous depth, intelligence and loyalty. And even the TV movie's villain, Darrow, is treated with compassion. When Darrow realizes that the military is going to discover Questor and dis-assemble him, Vernon sacrifices himself. He takes a tracer, flies Questor's jet...and dies when the air force blows it up.

Roddenberry watchers will also recognize other recurring themes here. The idea of an alien race peacefully guiding humanity out of his adolescence is straight out of Star Trek's "Assignment Earth" (story by Roddenberry; teleplay by Art Wallace.)

And the idea of a robot/android searching for his "creator" has been the core idea of original Star Trek episodes ("The Changeling" by John Meredyth Lucas) movies (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and Next Generation installments ("Datalore," "Brothers," etc.)

What I enjoyed most about the "search for creator" subplot in Questor was this notion that it is a metaphor for man's search for his creator...for our God (a plot point that forecasts Prometheus [2012]). At one point in the pilot, Questor must grapple with the notion that his creator (Vaslovik) is insane. This possibility is suggested by Jerry. Interestingly, Questor turns the concept around on Robinson and asks him: what if our creator (God...) is insane too? Robinson doesn't have an answer for that.

Roddenberry might have gotten away with that subtle swipe at religion in 1974, but I wonder if Questor could get it by censors today. In fact, it is rumored that one of the reasons that The Questor Tapes never materialized as a series is that NBC executives were uncomfortable with the concept - stated here - that aliens, not a Christian God, were overseeing mankind's development. The network was apparently afraid that Questor would be deemed the "Anti-Christ" by some viewers.

In recent years, there has been some movement (after Roddenberry's death in 1991) to revive The Questor Tapes concept as a series. I'd still love to see it happen. Today, more than ever, I think mankind could use Questor's help.

Hulk Smash Trading Cards!

Theme Song of the Week # 37: Kindred: The Embraced (1996)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Day After Tomorrow (1975)

NBC aired this obscure genre pilot in prime time as a so-called “Special Treat” in November of 1975, even as Year One of the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson TV series Space:1999 (1975-1977) was being broadcast in syndication around the country.

Today, it’s easy to tag The Day After Tomorrow (or Into Infinity, an alternate title) as an Anderson production circa the mid-1970s. The special effects by Brian Johnson are top-notch for the era, the camera-work (by veteran Frank Watts) is nothing short of stunning, and the script by the late poet Johnny Byrne captures the mystery and awe of outer space (not to mention the human experience...) in a powerful, even lyrical fashion.

However, The Day After Tomorrow also serves as a rather interesting production “bridge” between Year One and Year Two of Space:1999. The hard-hitting, hard-driving musical score is from the late Derek Wadsworth, who contributed the themes for Year Two. And overall the production is a little more colorful (less minimalist…) in color and costume than 1999’s sterling Year One.

Some props, miniatures and sets also look familiar from Space:1999 Year One. Namely the “bridge” of the main ship, Altares, closely resembles like the bridge of the Ultra Probe from the episode entitled “Dragon’s Domain.” Other props -- the colorful computer panels, for instance -- appear to have been utilized extensively during Year Two. Even the sound effects are familiar to those who know 1999 well.

So what we have in the 60-minute pilot The Day After Tomorrow is essentially a hybrid: a Year One style “awe and mystery of space” narrative, but one conveyed in the more colorful-looking/sounding Year Two fashion, if that makes sense.

The Day After Tomorrow commences in the near future at Space Station Delta (a re-dressed Darian space ark from the 1999 episode “Mission of the Darians.”) Delta serves as a “jumping off point” for destinations beyond Earth’s solar system.

A UN shuttle docks with the station, one carrying the crew of the first “light ship,” Altares to their new berth. The Altares crew consists of Captain Harry Masters (1999’s Nick Tate), chief scientist Tom Bowen (Brian Blessed), and his wife Anna, the ship’s doctor (Joanna Dunham).

Uniquely, Harry’s teenage daughter Jane (Katherine Levy) and the pre-adolescent Bowen boy, David (Martin Lev) are also full-blown crew-members on Altares. This is because of Einstein’s “time dilation” theory.

Since the Altares’ main engine has harnessed the “power of the photon,” it can travel at light speed., meaning that time will pass normally for the crew, even as decades – nay centuries – pass for people living back on Earth. In such an environment, parents would be younger than their children on the event of a return trip. Which would be weird...

The family that explores space together, stays together.

After a pre-launch countdown that includes a check for “human stress factors,” the Altares departs Space Station Delta bound for Alpha Centauri. Despite experiencing incredibly g-force stress during the voyage, the crew survives the acceleration to light speed (while noting such phenomena as meteorite showers and a Doppler shift).

The crew votes to continue forward into the great beyond after reaching Alpha Centauri. Upon re-activation, however, the photon engine breaks down, stranding the Altares in the gravitational pull of a Red Sun that is experiencing “an abnormal expansion rate.” In other words, it’s about to go supernova.

Over Jane’s objections, Harry undertakes a dangerous mission in the reactor room to repair the photon drive. He succeeds just in the nick of time, but soon after there is even more danger. The Altares is pulled into a rotating black hole and hurled into a “new universe.”

I’d like to report that there’s more to the story of the Altares than that, but there isn’t. It sure would have been nice to see a regular TV series pick up where the pilot leaves off (with the crew exploring a new solar system…) but alas, this was the last we heard of Captain Masters and his team. Maybe they ran into the crew of the Palomino?

All kidding aside, this straight-shooting Gerry Anderson pilot represents a sort of high-tech, science-minded update of the whole Lost in Space format: a ship lost in the interstellar sea, her crew…a family (or families), trying to survive and stick together.

Only here there’s no Dr. Smith or Robot (not even Brian the Brain...) around making trouble.

Even after thirty-three years, The Day After Tomorrow makes for a claustrophobic, action-packed hour, with almost all the action occurring inside the compact quarters of the Altares (think of a 1999 Eagle, basically…).

All of the incidents encountered by the crew have a solid basis in real science, per the network, because the program was intended to be “educational” and for children. But, in typical Anderson (and typical Byrne) fashion, matters tend still toward the mind-blowing, the trippy, the amazing.

For instance, the climactic trip through the black hole is a psychedelic, Kubrickian wonder, a montage dominated by double images, slow-motion photography and the use of a creepy distortion lens. Pretty powerful stuff for a kid’s show. As the script notes, “it’s a universe not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.”

The writing voice of humanitarian and historian Johnny Byrne is present here in other ways too. A voice-over narration (provided by UFO’s Ed Bishop), for instance, comments on what future Earth is like:

“They came from a world where natural resources have been squandered, where pollution and the haphazard destruction of the environment has put the future of humanity in jeopardy.”

Yet despite such a trouble-prone world, the characters in The Day After Tomorrow are still very human; and – as is the case in Space:1999 – there seems to be an underlying aura of Apollo-Age optimism about the future of man and the future of the space program.

In series' like Space:1999 and The Day After Tomorrow it goes without question that man will create spaceships and voyage to other worlds. Of course there will be trouble and accidents along the way, but the stars are always our destination.

The trained space-men of these productions don’ know what they’ll countenance in space, how to interpret it, or even how they’ll survive it, but they grit their teeth and get through it all without histrionics. “Nobody knows what it’s like to travel through a black hole…so don’t panic,” barks one astronaut in The Day After Tomorrow.

As a life-long admirer of Space:1999 (not to mention Anderson productions such as UFO and Journey to the Far Side of the Sun), I enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow for what it is: a time-capsule of once state-of-the--art science fiction. The whole production brought me right back to the mid-1970s. That was a time when we knew – we just knew – that interplanetary space travel was around the next corner.

Like Space:1999, The Day After Tomorrow makes that eventuality seem exciting, a bit scary and very, very believable.

In 1977, Star Wars introduced Wookies, Banthas, droids, laser swords and a swashbuckling, fairy tale sweep to the genre of space adventuring...for better or for worse. Focus on science evaporated and science fiction films and TV series’ went in a new, more fantasy-oriented direction. More action-packed/less mind-blowing. More thrilling/less psychedelic. More imaginative in one sense, perhaps…

…and ultimately less “real.”

But even today – every now and then – I miss the moog music, the unisex costumes, the intricate miniatures (and utilitarian, modular space craft design…) as well as the trippy sojourns into realms of Inner/Outer Space offered by productions like Space:1999 and The Day After Tomorrow.

I guess I’m just the Seventies Space Kid at heart.