It got better! Maya rocked!
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I loved the show when it was airing and even got the large ship sometime around '75 or '76. Then in the 90’s I saw the show at the video store and rented a box set of the entire series. I talked up how great it was to my roommate. She and I quickly realized it had not held up well and I don’t think we made it through many episodes.
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In the US, Hill Street Blues was one of the first shows to have multi-episode story arcs. And those were usually just for a few episodes and would only involve a few of the characters.
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Too bad Kickstarter wasn’t around in 1999, cuz you could have had a campaign to fund building enough explosives to knock the moon out of orbit on the date that it did in the show.
It would probably have some disastrous environmental impacts not having tides anymore, but it would have been a nice commemoration by the fans.
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Well, other than soap operas, yep.
While the trend eventually caught on, it was still rare enough that after Hill Street Blues went off the air that it was listed as a major feature of LA Law (one that either made people love or hate it). Even into the 1990s it was common for shows to just reset at the end of every episode. I’m not enough of a TV watcher/historian to say when it became more common to feature episode to episode change then to have a big reset each time. It is clearly the case now though.
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Yea, but it was all just in Tommy Westphall’s imagination.
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The theme music was fantastic… the guitar part especially. Well done.
Speaking of great themes… (the models and music really felt like a Gerry Anderson effort but turns out he wasn’t involved). Can you say dramatic opening?
A Crack In The World
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The title sequence for that season was vastly inferior, though.
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I’m old enough to have seen Crack in the World in the theater, on a ginormous screen. The best thing about it was that the scientists did not manage to miraculously stave off disaster and save the world, which was quite a rarity in Sci Fi cinema up until the 70s.
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Gerry Anderson (who did the model work in that series) produced several children’s puppeteering shows in the 60s which are still a hoot to watch today - Watch the intros to Supercar, Fireball XL-5, and Thunderbirds Are Go for some campy goodness!
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Don’t forget Captain Scarlet! Who, naturally, had a kick-ass theme complete with vocoder effects.
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Those of you interested in the history and purpose of the “narrative reset button” may enjoy Umberto Eco’s essay – from 1976! – about the challenges of commercial, serialized narrative, “The Semiotics of Superman.”
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I assume your unspoken inference was that Space:1999 was born out of the aborted second season of UFO, taking many of the stories written for that season, so they are thus related.
Like Space:1999, UFO really doesn’t stand up to a modern rewatching (again outside the style and the awesome intro). There are, however, three really good episodes that rise out of the mire, and they all have the same thing in common - they are about marriages falling apart. “Confetti Check A-O.K.” is flashback to Straker’s marriage and divorce, “A Question Of Priorities” has Straker decide between his son’s life and his job, and “The Square Triangle” is about a SHADO operation intersecting with an adulterous wife and her murderous lover with an ending that is mindblowing and shocking yet extremely subtle.
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I’ve been watching this on Shout Factory lately. I’d forgotten how weird this show was.
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“What about Commander Gorsky?”
“He was relieved about an hour ago.”
I’ll bet he was.
(@2m15s or so)
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I enjoyed Mission:Impossible, in which Landau and Bain played a lot of different interesting characters while on a mission (but dull bland people while plotting the mission, which was fine because it gave contrast). Despite looking forward to Space:1999, I found them dull and bland all the time.
The plots were lousy. The main idea (explosion pushing moon away) was ridiculous; any explosion capable of doing that would blow the moon apart, causing a ring while bombarding the earth to the point of a world-wide magma ocean. And even if it did work, how did they manage to get to other solar systems in the space of a couple episodes???
But the worst was the zipper on the sleeve.
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Yes, in the days before streaming (or even being able to watch previous episodes on VHS) you had to write TV with the assumption that a lot of viewers were coming in without any prior knowledge of the show. So, either extensive recaps at the beginning of each episode or stand-alone plots.
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Which is why Kubrick was (as I finally came to realize) wise in having all 2001 props destroyed after end of filming.
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With the big ‘world coming apart’ buildup throughout the film, it would have been a spit in the audiences’ eyes to not give them the big payoff.
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I thought it was established that every show is in Tommy Westphall’s imagination…
